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After over a thousand years, after its own empires and conquests
stretching around the world, after endless religious schools, reform
movements, theological debates and splinter groups, Islam is not able to
leave its gang roots behind. It is still at its core a gang religion. That is why
it appeals so well to convicts who recognize that they are interacting with
something far more ancient than Kingism. That is also why Islam, like most
street gangs, degenerates so readily into internecine violence. No matter
how much its devotees dream of conquering the decadent West and
planting the black flag of Islam everywhere, they can't help turning their
guns on each other, because gangs are naturally primed to fight amongst
themselves.
The gang code never suffices to settle disputes among men who live by
violence. They may fight to impose Islamic law on the world, but they can't
live by it. Syria is Islam at its most primal with gangs fighting over the
ruins of cities, small groups joining up, Shiite and Sunni militias killing
each other, Free Syrian Army and Al Nusra Front gangs fighting over
bakeries and pipelines, an endless stream of recruits from around the
world rushing to join up in a gang war that has claimed over 100,000 lives.
That is how Islam began. One man and his gang. That man may not be
depicted or the gangs of his followers will blow things up.
When they aren't blowing up each other. The gang spread around the
world. Its Caliphs and Emirs went from thugs and clan leaders to rulers of
nations. And then the whole thing collapsed again. Now the gang leaders
are trying to get the gang back together again. Islam was born in the
chaos of the implosion of two empires, Byzantium and Persia, tearing at
each other until they both gave way and were overrun by Islam. The
second coming of Islam took place during the climactic battle between two
new empires, America and the Soviet Union, who exhausted each other,
and may end up suffering the same fate as the Eastern Roman Empire and
the Sassanids. The common denominator is that the rise of Islam parallels
the collapse of other civilizations.
Like the jackal sniffing around the bones of empire, the gangs of Islam
step into a vacuum, but can never fill it. The second-hand knowledge that
they steal and pass off as their own never leads them anywhere. The
Golden Age built on the labor and creative ideas of others passes and there
is nothing left except bitter resentment at greatness lost and a future
denied. Islam always reverts back to the gang. It comes out of the desert
and returns to the desert. It begins with a handful of men raiding civilized
towns and cities. And no matter how much time must pass and how the
world turns, it always reverts back there.
It's an even worse answer to any larger social problem that doesn't
involve twenty men trying to divide the profits from one raid on an
abandoned university. But when a religion is based on gang violence and
because of that inevitably reverts to gang violence, it's an answer that
keeps coming up again and again. The answer of Islam is the answer of
violence. It's the answer of uniting the various gangs around killing nonMuslims. Sometimes that answer even works. Assad's Alawite neo-Shiites
were able to work together with the Muslim Brotherhood Salafist Sunnis of
Hamas and the Shiite Ayatollahs of Iran and the Super-Salafist Sunnis of Al
Qaeda as long as they had a common goal of killing Americans or Israelis
or somebody.
When that goal broke down, they began killing each other instead. Islam's
answer only works when there is a non-Muslim target within reach and
none of the Muslims have time to start envying the other's rifle, sunglasses
or country. But then the violence halts and the gang begins dividing up the
loot, knives are drawn and another bloody Arab Spring begins. Every fourth
gang hip-hop song is about how hard it is to leave the gang life. The other
three are about how everyone else out there is a pretender and not a real
gangsta. That is Islam in a nutshell.
Islamic civilization can't leave the gang life and insists that every other
civilization and even most other Muslims are pretenders and that only the
Salafiest of the Salafists are the real Gangstas. Syria, Kenya, September 11
is how they prove it. We don't have a foreign policy problem with Islam.
We have a global gang violence problem.