The Right Way, The Wrong Way and The Muslim Way

Imagine an anthill. The anthill has a name given to it by the Americans. It's called the Middle East.

It's not a very big anthill but it does have a lot of ants in it. The ants regularly spent a lot of time diving themselves up into clans and tribes and factions and constantly fighting each other. Then a particular ant named Mohammed, who had spent some time around Christians and Jews, borrowed fragments of their religion and decided to unify all the ants under a whole new religion called Islam. Of course along the way he would also do a lot of looting, killing and raping for himself and his followers.

The ants knew a good idea when they saw it. Even after Mohammed was dead, they kept on looting, raping and killing in his name. They swarmed across the Middle East. They pushed into Africa and Asia. They built up slave empires and menaced Europe. But of course they still weren't united and mostly the ants made war on each other.

Muslims split into Shiites and Sunnis. They split into rival kingdoms. Muslims made war on Muslims claiming the other Muslims weren't being devout enough. Mainly they just wanted an excuse to make war and they found it. Unity never came to Islam but tyrants did.

The day came when the anthills were kicked over and Arab Muslims found that they were backward people in a developing world. They grew very angry. They developed ideologies like Arab Socialism and Arab Nationalism and Islamism intended to set things right. The followers of these ideologies mostly blamed the West and Israel (people who had actually built successful working countries) for their backwardness and tried to kill them. They also spent a lot of time killing each other.

These Muslim anthills were contained only by tyrants who kept a right lid on things by preventing all the clans and factions and tribes from killing each other by way of a secret police, a military and by focusing all their hatred on America and Israel, rather than on the tyrant and his secret police. Every now and then a tyrant would be overthrown and replaced with another tyrant or another kind of tyranny, like the Mullahs. It never made much of a difference.

Some time in the beginning of the 21st century, a particularly furious Muslim ant who spent too much time reading Mohammed decided that the best way to set the anthill right was to really fight America. His name was Osama. He succeeded. After killing three thousand Americans, he sat back satisfied in his cave certain that victory for Islam was at hand as all the Muslims would join with him in a great Jihad.

America promptly responded by bombing two Muslim countries and then trying to bring democracy to them. Bringing democracy to Muslims meant lifting the lid on the ant farm and removing the leader who kept all the other ants in line and prevented them from killing each other. With him gone, the ants promptly went into a frenzy killing Americans and killing each other. This was Muslim democracy at its finest.

While the American government had in its compassion imagined that what Muslim ants wanted most of all was peace and prosperity, mainly what they wanted was to kill each other. Given democracy, they democratically chose to blow each other up and massacre each other, in a most democratic way.

Eventually the Americans would move on but the Muslim ants would continue the killing until a tyrant came along to keep them all in line. And the ants would fester and furiously plot to overthrow him so they could begin killing their enemies and one of those ants will eventually get the bright idea that the best way to change things is to attack America and the cycle will repeat itself all over again.

There's the right way. The wrong way. And the Muslim way.