Greetings, Dear Reader,
I hadn’t mentioned anything about Charlie Kirk yesterday. Part of it was me just being too busy. The other part was me thinking about what to actually say.
I think I figured it out.
“RELIGION OF PEACE”
While linguistic inversion of reality has become commonplace, especially in the last few years, the mother of all inversions is Islam’s “Religion of Peace” slogan.
Its fusion into popular English lexicon – by George Bush no less – has acted as a societal anesthetic. The numbing shot to end all numbing shots, it paralyzed our ability not only to assess reality, but also risk. After the successful marketing of “Religion of Peace,” other inversions were introduced. The inversions imposed on us got more frequent and more audacious.
Men are women. Children are consenting adults. Speech is violence. Violence is speech. Crime isn’t crime. In some places, crime is now legal. Fighting crime is illegal. Illegal is just undocumented. Colorblindness is racism. Racism is social justice.
Our capacity to fight back against these inversions has been hamstrung by the introduction and acceptance of the very first and arguably the biggest one: that Islam is anything other than a fraudulent religion of codified violence, conquest, slavery and sexual deviancy.
Exactly a month before his assassination, Kirk laid his vision of the next sociopolitical battle of our time.
“The spiritual battle is coming to the West and the enemies are woke-ism or Marxism combining with Islamism to go after what we call the American way of life,” he said during Freedom Night in America in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Aug. 10.
A year later, how right he was.
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The inventor of the slogan was Islamic ideologue Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, who wrote the book “Religion of Peace” in 1930 specifically for English-speaking audiences who were, at the time, either wholly ignorant of or flat out civically allergic to jihad.
Before his book, the slogan English-speakers widely attached to Islam, if they discussed it at all, was “Religion of the Sword.”
Both are accurate, in some regards. Aquinas would refer to the kind of peace Islam offered as a peace of a garrison, meaning that Islamic peace is one immediately following overwhelming conquest and submission.
Both Islamic scripture and the acts of their prophet Muhammad confirm the religion is a martial state of violent subjugation, second-class citizenry with significant concessions from infidels, and codified child marriage (which still happens to this very day).
The peace slogan puttered around for a few decades until it found its most apt, English-speaking adoptive father: Malcolm X.
In the 1960s, speaking for the Nation of Islam, X used the phrase “Religion of Peace” routinely, while his militants in the streets terrorized every “other” they could possibly find, something they also still do to this day. X eventually broke with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad due to what X referred to as Muhammad’s thirst for “teenage secretaries.”
So it turns out the apple doesn’t fall far from the Islamic tree, eh?
Muhammad, leader of the “Religion of Peace” in America, then had X assassinated. How peaceful of ‘em.
The slogan moved on from there to get kicked around by Islamic academics and writers in academic audiences until the 90s, when Islam was having a bit of an episode. The Embassy bombing in Beirut in the 80s was followed up with several other violent spasms. Plane hijackings. Suicide bombings. Civil War in Algeria. Hamas and Islamic jihad attacks.
In 1993, you had the first WTC bombing, followed by an essay months later by Sam Huntington called “The Clash of Civilizations.” The essay was a global bombshell. It posited that the next global competition post-Cold War would be about, among other things but perhaps most prominently, religion, or “man’s relationship with God.”
Three years later, in ‘96, an Islamic coalition put out a communications bolo: We have to improve our image. Start printing the phrase “Religion of Peace.”
Five years after that and just six days after jihad struck the Twin Towers, the avatar of compassionate conservatism George Bush wanted us to look at the pile of ash and corpses and try hard to remember that “Islam is peace.”
He was standing in an Islamic center in New York City. In the 25 years since then, NYC has basically become a province of the exact kind of Islamomarxism Charlie Kirk was getting ready to fight.
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I am a Christian. More specifically, I’m Catholic.
I know Muslims. Was partying with one just this past weekend. I spent at least some time trying to convince him to come to mass with me.
The blame ultimately falls at the feet of the deceiver, not the deceived.
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You don’t have to be all that adept an analyst to see the straight line between “Religion of Peace” and the unhinged, covid-paranoid guy at the cash register assaulting an unmasked shopper while shouting, “why are you putting me at risk?!”
Language is the most important tool we have for understanding the world around us. Successfully inverting it gives the deceiver incalculable power of persuasion. At least enough to convince everyone war in Iraq is a good idea, then down the line that mutilating your confused child’s sexual organs will actually prevent suicide rather than hasten it.
It’s not a mistake that “Religion of Peace” became widely popular in American discourse while first responders were still sifting through rubble looking for the body parts of friends, parents, husbands and wives.
If you could convince the West that 9/11 was the act of a peaceful religion, you could convince them of anything.
WHAT I’M READING
Seems Like Every Single Political Race Centers Around Single Issue
The debate to decide it all.
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‘Maybe They Kill Everyone’: Former Employee At OpenAI Tells Joe Rogan How Weird ‘Agents’ Behaving
Yikes.
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EXCLUSIVE: Illegal Alien Gets Arrested After Voting In 2024 Presidential Election
We’re told this never happens.
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Trump Honors ‘The Man In The Red Bandana’ With Medal Of Freedom
A nice moment.
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