Like Allah, Islamic Revolutions Devour their Own Children
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
When Muslim terrorists broke into a Egyptian Army
checkpoint, stole an armored vehicle and a truck,
loaded the latter with explosives and tried to
launch an attack on Israel, before being blown away
by Israeli forces; there was a general agreement on
who was to blame.
While Morsi was somewhat more discreet, the
Muslim Brotherhood announced, "this crime may well
be the work of Israel’s Mossad" as part of an
international conspiracy to destabilize their
revolution. On the other side of the border, Hamas
leader Ismail Haniyeh offered a more open-ended
explanation. "Israel is responsible, one way or
another."
One way or another, Israel usually ends up being
responsible for everything. Meanwhile Egypt has
quietly asked Hamas to turn over a few of its
terrorists who might have been involved. Because,
while Israel is responsible for everything in the
philosophical sense of being an omnipotent force of
evil, when 16 Egyptian soldiers are killed, it
becomes necessary to find the people who actually
did it.
Turkey's Islamist rulers who are facing the threat
of an independent Kurdish nation rising out of the
ruins in Syria and Iraq also have an explanation for
the situation. Turkey's Interior Minister stated
that most Kurdish PKK guerrillas are not Turkish
citizens and that quite a few are actually Israelis.
So in between somehow recruiting multiple Egyptian
Muslims willing to die for Israel, Avi and David
took a trip to Kurdistan to take potshots at Turkish
soldiers.
Western journalists try not to report on such
embarrassing outbursts because it makes their
favorite Islamists look like loony bigots who can't
deal with a problem without finding some byzantine
way to blame it on their least favorite minority
group. The Islamists in Cairo and Ankara know
better, but their ideology makes it impossible to
fight other Muslims without first declaring them to
be heretics or pawns of heresy.
Israel and America are convenient justifications for
Muslims to kill other Muslims in the name of Allah.
When Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the Saudis, he
made war on them as the pawns of America. When the
Saudis had overthrown the Hashemites, they had
accused them of being the pawns of Britain. Now that
the Salafis are confronting the Muslim Brotherhood,
they are also accusing them of being the pawns of
America and Israel.
"Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own
children," Danton says in Georg Buchner's
Danton's Death, a controversial play about the
French Revolution. In the modern context that line
might be changed to read, "Revolution is like Allah,
it devours its own children." The Muslim Brotherhood
has reacted to the attack with all the expected
antics of revolutionaries eager to sup at the kiddie
table.
One statement urges "the Egyptian people to face up
to domestic forces of sabotage and subversion,
beware of their sinister calls for strife and
sedition". Another calls on their own government "to
implement the law firmly against the instigators of
vandalism and subversion throughout the land and
against their collaborators and agents involved in
causing this deliberate confusion, chaos and mayhem
across Egypt under the pretext of exercising
freedom."
Predictably enough, the attack is being used by
Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to crack down on
domestic dissent and replace top officials in the
Egyptian military. Not to mention repeating calls
for dispensing with the Camp David Accords and fully
remilitarizing the Sinai. But cynicism will only
take the revolution so far.
The Jihadists are the children of the Islamic
Revolution. The brats of the upscale millionaire
Islamists running networks of companies in Egypt and
Turkey funded with Saudi and Qatari cash. But the
vested interests that begin revolutions are not
always the ones who benefit from them. Germany sent
Lenin back in a sealed car under the protection of
its soldiers for the short-term goal of taking
Russia out of the war. Germany succeeded in toppling
a moderate Russian government and replacing it with
radical Bolsheviks, and, thirty years later Soviet
troops were occupying Berlin.
The Gulf States are already quarreling with the
Muslim Brotherhood and accusing it of wanting to
take them over. Even while both groups are working
together to take over Syria, neither trusts each
other. But the real threat to them is the chaos that
they have unleashed. The Muslim Brotherhood
revolutionaries, like their Bolshevik spiritual
ancestors, are returning from exile in the West to
carry off their revolutions, but the revolution
doesn't end where they say it does.
The Islamist imperative of the revolution is to
purge heresy and secularism, to restore true Islam,
but there has never been any consensus on what true
Islam is. Even Mohammed was forced to recant some of
his prophecies attributing them to "Satan" and, not
long after his death, Islam began to fall apart into
quarreling factions who gave rise to the Sunnis and
the Shiites.
Muslims can't agree on what Islam is. What they can
agree on is that most other forms of Islam are
heresy and, depending on the severity of the heresy,
their practitioners may be freely killed. Islamic
reform movements in their revolutionary purity have
treated conventional Muslims as less pure for
visiting shrines, using good luck charms or watching
soccer. And every Islamic reform movement has opened
the door for a new group that thinks they are a
bunch of liberal heretics.
"Big fleas have little fleas, Upon their backs to
bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and
so, ad infinitum." Islamic revolutions, like their
secular counterparts, have countless smaller fleas
who take Islam even more seriously and are even more
determined to turn society into an exact ideal
replica of 7th Century Arabia.
The Muslim Brotherhood might have been a flea on
Egypt's back, but the Salafis are a flea on its
back, and there are fleas on the backs of the
Salafis. Revolutions solve these problems with an
extended round of purges that ends when no one
believes in anything anymore. The French Revolution
drowned itself in its own blood, and the Soviet
Union and the Chinese Communist Party did likewise.
By the time Mao and Stalin's last butchers were
shown the door, Communism was no longer a
revolutionary idea, it was just a rotting structure
that would take several generations to dismantle.
For the Islamists the challenge is to firmly draw a
line to their right and they cannot do that because
Mohammed is on the other side of that line. Blaming
Israel and "foreign elements" is a convenient way to
avoid dealing with the logical consequences of their
own ideology. It is also a demonstration of why
ideological revolutions never prosper, but decay
into paranoid tyrannies that are too afraid to
loosen their grip on power because that there is no
reason why what they did to the former rulers cannot
also be done to them.
No matter how pure an Islamic party may claim to be,
there are always newcomers who are even purer and
more incorruptible. Every Jihadist gang can point to
"extremists" who are too far over the line. And
those extremists can point to their own extremists.
And so on ad infinitum until all the fleas drinking
blood are drowning in each other's blood.
Egypt has been the true heartland of the Islamic
revolution because the foreign influences have given
its "intellectuals" practical ideas that the Gulf
clans aren't capable of. The Muslim Brotherhood's
success has come from borrowing the ideas and
tactics of the National Socialists and Communists.
But that just makes them into a more foreign element
than the purer Salafis and, in a game where victory
comes to those who are willing to use violence in
the name of the latest Islamic Revolution, what the
Brotherhood's Arab Spring victories have truly
brought it is a prominent place in an Islamic civil
war.
The struggle over Syria is escalating and may well
explode in a regional Sunni-Shiite civil war. Their
only hope of averting this is another round of NATO
intervention which exposes once again just how
dependent the Muslim Brotherhood is on its Western
enablers who have had to help it take power
politically and militarily. But while the West plays
Germany to the Brotherhood's Bolsheviks, whether the
Brotherhood's Islamic Revolution will be able to
take hold now depends less on its ability to
manipulate a gullible leftist media and political
establishment in the Eurosphere and more on being
able to control the violence inherent in its own
ideology.
The Muslim Brotherhood has two choices: it can
either try to control the violence or direct it.
Like the Saudis, it is likely to make the second
choice. The Brotherhood is a terrorist group and
organizing attacks through proxies is second nature
to it. Iran was never able to let go of its
terrorist habits, even when it would have been in
its own best interests to stop. The Brotherhood
isn't likely to be able to stop either. Its leaders
likely imagine that the Sinai violence will allow
them to play a triple game, seizing the Sinai,
suppressing the opposition and keeping the Jihadi
gangs pointed in Israel's direction.
But like the Saudis, they are wrong. The Saudis have
redirected the Islamists who might otherwise be
giving them the boot with double handfuls of money
and foreign enemies. But all that means is that the
Islamists have grown more dangerous and more
experienced. Sooner or later the monarchies will
fall, whether it's to Al-Qaeda or the Muslim
Brotherhood is a minor detail. And the Brotherhood
in its time will fall the same way.
Arab Muslims, unlike Persians, actually seem to want
to live this way. They want revolutionary purity and
executioners who will cut off the heads and hands of
the less devout. They want to stone women to death
and steal the daughters of Christians to replace the
last wife they beat to death. And they can never get
enough of all this.
The Muslim Brotherhood has only whetted their
appetite for the real thing. The Salafis managed to
perform quite well without the organizing power, the
sophisticated tactics or the bribes of the
Brotherhood. And all it takes to keep the violence
going is a few dozen men here and there who are
willing to die for the One True Islamic Revolution,
which is no longer the sellouts of the Muslim
Brotherhood. In a region where AK-47's and
explosives are widely available, the rest is child's
play.
Anyone can call himself an Islamic teacher and begin
recording tapes calling for true Islam and then
upload them to the internet. Anyone can dig up
revolutionary texts from the last hundred years,
rewrite them a little and lay out the principles for
a truly Islamic form of government. And anyone can
assure Western reporters and politicians that,
despite all the bombings, their Jihadist gang is
filled with moderates who are the only hope of
keeping the true extremists at bay.
Another, less well-known quote from Danton's
Death comes from Robespierre, loosely adapted
from his own words. "The weapon of the Republic of
terror, the power of the Republic is virtue -
because without virtue, terror is unwholesome and
without terror, virtue is powerless." This cycle of
virtue and terror is an endless escalation, with
virtue feeding terror and terror feeding virtue.
Revolutions like Allah devour their own children,
and this one has only begun gorging at the buffet.