Not all analogies of Islam to 20th century totalitarianism are false!

Bruce Thornton writing at California Republic has an intriguing and I think sound thesis: that the same rationalizations and apologetics by which leftists sought to undermine the West’s stand against Soviet Communism are also at work in the West’s confrontation with Islam. Not that Communism and Islam are the same, Thornton hastens to add, but that the excuses for Islam, the attribution of Islamic aggression to the West’s supposed provocations, and the tendency to explain the Islamic agenda in terms of various socio-psychological factors that supposedly bedevil the Muslims instead of in terms of the Islamic doctrinal reasons explicitly stated by the Muslims themselves (a syndrome I have discussed at length and called “Non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism”), were also at work in the left’s decades-long attempt to weaken the West’s position in the Cold War.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 11, 2006 08:49 PM | Send