Choosing Freedom over Islam, and the Story of Wafa Sultan

Today I attended a Q&A Wafa Sultan as part of a book signing for her new book, and I noticed that the common theme of virtually every question that was asked by the attendees could be summed up as, "What can we do to stop Islam?"

There is of course no simple answer. Communism, the closest parallel to the current threat we face, attacked us at a military, political and cultural level. Islam attacks us at a military, political, cultural and religious level-- making it a four part threat. And while the Soviet Union did finally collapse, looking at the state of freedom in America and Europe today, at a political environment that has dispensed with democracy in favor of judicial activism and class warfare politics that owe a good deal to the dictatorship of the proletariat-- the question of whether we defeated Communism, or Communism defeated us, remains open.

The Soviet Union proved unable to defeat us militarily, despite dedicating the bulk of its industrial capacity to building weapons, and successfully allying with much of the Third World to create an anti-Western world order in the U.N. But culturally and politically, Communism did a great deal of damage in the West. More so than most people understand. The American and European of the year 2009 lives in a system whose political premises resemble those of the USSR more than they do his own country of 1909. And this goes to show us that Communism accomplished far more through subversion and infiltration than nationalism and armed conquest. And the best proof of that is Eastern Europe, which was today is more honestly capitalistic than Western Europe which spent the last half century free of the Soviet boot.

Had Trotsky's way prevailed over that of his less visionary contemporaries, Communism might have triumphed as an international revolutionary movement, rather than failing as a Second World poorly industrialized armed camp. And that is a scaled down version of the threat that we face with Islam today, backed by oil money from otherwise backward countries, polished by the disingenuous lies of a merchant culture and driven by a fanaticism that even few Communists could aspire to. And we have no better answers to the problem of what to do about a movement that subverts our society from within, than we did back then.

In her talk Wafa Sultan emphasized the importance of being informed about the real nature of Islam. And certainly the first stage of defense against cultural, political and religious threats-- which circulate by way of ideas, is to be informed. But information itself is very much a subjective thing. It is possible to tell someone that Islam is currently involved in conflicts all over the world, that it is responsible for millions of deaths through acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. You can list all the objective facts about Islam, without in the least shaking his belief that Islam is all right based on episodes he's seen of Little Mosque on the Prairie or because Mohammed, the deli guy in the store under his office, is always friendly when he comes in for a sandwich.

For rational people the objective facts of the case may suffice, for most people they will not. We live in an age where objective reasoning has been destroyed in the First World through a process of careful cultural obliteration. To tell someone that a million are dead in Darfur is to give him a meaningless statistic that is "awful", but not relatable. By contrast, to chronicle the story of a single orphan does far more than listing the millions dead and raped.

The satirical Israeli comedy series Latma had an episode in which the UN Human Rights Council's bewigged Judge Goldstone mockingly tells the "news team" that what Israel did wrong was kill 1300 terrorists, instead of half a million. "Today everything is upside down. One dead man is a massacre, a thousand is a war crime and a half a million slaughtered is a mere tragedy... Because of the size of the television screen. One dead man is a drama, but a half million, what do you see?" In short, you can list all the reasons why Islam is evil and the full list of atrocities, and still come away with nothing. By contrast an individual story, a personal narrative, makes the subject meaningful in a way that little else can.

That is why Wafa Sultan's book, A God Who Hates, is valuable in both providing the personal narrative of an ex-Muslim and the cultural and psychological brew that goes into making and distilling the toxic poison of Islam into the human soul. Wafa Sultan provides an examination of Islam from the inside that few Western experts could contend with and a personal narrative of what life is like for an educated woman who is relegated to the status of a second class citizen under Islamic law. But Wafa Sultan's challenge is that she not only deals with what is wrong with Islam, but what is wrong with us for being so willing to sit idly by in the face of the Islamization of our countries.

We are all too eager to rush around looking for a moderate Islam, all too willing to embrace the path of least resistance, little realizing that the path of least resistance for us, is also the one that offers the least resistance to Islamofascism. If Islam represents an absolute and unforgiving sense of structure that purports to be the will of Allah, a god made in the image of the tribal traditions of fearful men afraid of death while all too eager to deal it out to others, the modern West is equally devoid of structure, and all too willing to embrace the alien rigidities of Islamic or Socialist codes that govern every aspect of human life and death.

But Islam in the abstract is despite all its horrors, different than the day to day reality of living under Islamic laws and mores, of existing in a culture in which there is no room for human values, only for Islamic ones. That is the story that Wafa Sultan's book tells in all its horror. It is also the story of leaving that world behind for a world in which human values matter more than the words of the Koran. A God Who Hates is a Koran as well, or rather an Anti-Koran, that recites not the legends and myths of Mohammed, but the facts of how life under Islam is actually lived.

And that is a story that the types of people who would not ordinarily be influenced by books about the growing Islamic threat need to read most of all, because it could be their story. It could be the story of any intelligent woman growing up in an Islamic world.

Throughout the Cold War, people in the free world often argued about whether Communism was good or bad, without actually understanding what life under Communism was like. Only now in 2009 with America and Europe drifting deep into the shoals of socialism, is there a growing understanding of what Communism was like. That is because understanding the bone deep truths of life in a religious or political culture requires that you actually live that life. Without that, the only way to convey those truths is through personal narrative. 

After WW2, Victor Kravchenko defected from the USSR and wrote one of the most famous books about life behind the Iron Curtain, entitled, "I Chose Freedom". Wafa Sultan's A God Who Hates may be as equally important a text for looking behind the sand curtain of Islam, as I Chose Freedom was for looking behind the iron curtain of Soviet Communism. Because Wafa Sultan chose freedom, just as Kravchenko did. And understanding why, is key to understanding the kind of intellectual resistance that will be important to inoculating a gullible population against the contagion of Islam.

We are not currently living under Islam. At worst we're getting a small taste of that. But given time that will change, and A God Who Hates is a compelling look at the society our children and grandchildren will be living in, if we do nothing. Today former Soviet dissidents living in the West point out bitterly that they escaped the USSR only to end up living under Communism anyway. We owe it to them, and to those who have escaped Islam, and to our own posterity, to build societies that are alternatives to Islam, that both reflect everything Islam can never be, while rejecting its attempt to creep in and draw tight a strangehold over us. Islam, like Communism, is a system of slaves and masters. And it is only a society that draws closer to slavery that can be drawn toward Islam. And it is only a society of free men and women that can resist it.

Let us consider this final warning from Kravchenko's I Chose Justice, which predicted the Communist takeover in China, fall of the Soviet Union, as well as the fall of the Soviet Union... and a Communist takeover of America.

It is not difficult to foresee what will happen, if we ask ourselves what would have happened after the last war if the United States had emerged from it in the condition in which it must inevitably emerge from the next one. The next war will make immense demands upon the strength and resources of the United States. It will call for immense sacrifices. This time she will not be remote from the field of battle, immune from the ravages of war upon her own territory...

Now supposed that had happened this time and that at the end of the war the United States had been left bankrupt... There can be little doubt that the misery and hardships which she would have been unable to relieve, would have turned the people toward Communism, which has always profited from these conditions to make its converts...

Thus the Soviet Union may be defeated as a military machine, but the Communist ideology, and this not Russia is the enemy, will remain free to attack democracy from the rear. Russia may be freed of Communism-- this will be easy... but the other countries which have not experienced it, perhaps even in the United States itself, it will remain a more formidable enemy than ever.

The solution is to choose freedom. The systems of Islam and Communism are greedy, ruthless and seductive. They excel at falsehoods and deception, but in order to be deceived, one must first be gullible. In order for slavery to seem appealing, one must find slavery appealing. To be free of Islam and Communism, we must first be free, not in the anarchistic sense, but in the intellectual and the political sense. For to be free is to bear the responsibility of your own actions and the ownership of your own thoughts. And Islam and Communism can have no power over the minds and destiny of a free society.