What the MOU Actually Says

The memorandum is best understood by looking at what happens first. Certain provisions take effect immediately upon signature and cannot be reversed. Only afterward do negotiations begin over everything else. Those immediate provisions are precisely what Tehran wanted.

The war ends. The naval blockade is lifted. The Strait of Hormuz reopens. Iranian oil returns to the market with Treasury approval. Frozen assets are released. A $300 billion reconstruction fund is promised on top of that. All of it happens now.

The issue Washington supposedly fought over, Iran’s nuclear program, is postponed to a future agreement governed by a 60-day negotiating period. Trump has already signaled that the deadline is largely meaningless, saying, “Just as long as they’re behaving, I really don’t care that much.” Iran receives concrete benefits immediately, while the United States receives a promise that the difficult questions will be addressed later.

Even the nuclear concession is structured more as a delay than a resolution. Iran agrees to dilute its enriched stockpile, but the material remains inside Iran, under Iranian control. Nothing leaves the country. Only the level of enrichment changes, and only for as long as Tehran decides. Trump himself dismissed the stockpile as “nuclear dust” and suggested it was not worth the effort to remove. Enrichment is not prohibited; it is simply moved into a future round of negotiations. What is being presented as a major Iranian concession is, in reality, a temporary arrangement.

This is a regime whose ideology treats the export of its revolution as a divine duty. For four decades it has built proxy forces precisely so it can avoid direct confrontation while retaining the ability to reignite conflict whenever it serves its interests. A government with that worldview may sign an agreement, but there is no reason to assume the agreement ends the struggle. Regimes driven by religious missions negotiate in order to regroup, not to surrender.

Peace at the Expense of America’s Allies

The last two years have been devastating for the minorities that looked to Washington for protection. In March 2025, more than 1,400 Alawites were killed on Syria’s coast. Gunmen moved from house to house asking whether families were Alawite or Sunni and killing based on the answer. Months later in Suwayda, thousands of Druze were killed, including documented executions of unarmed men. The government responsible has since been accepted by Washington, relieved of sanctions, and treated as a partner.

The Kurdish-led forces that helped defeat the Islamic State paid heavily for that victory. Their reward has been a plan for “integration,” folding their autonomy and their weapons into the same Damascus system that has spent the past year demonstrating how it treats vulnerable minorities. After what happened to the Alawites and Druze, asking the Kurds to disarm into the hands of the same state is not a small gamble.

Ordinary Iranians have been abandoned as well. Those who have spent years protesting the regime, losing family members to its prisons and security services, were given a promise by Trump that he will bring an end to the system that oppresses them. Every sanction lifted, every asset released, every barrel of oil returned to the market strengthens the very apparatus that persecutes them. The regime was at its weakest before Trump signed the MOU. This agreement restores its strength.

Versailles Revisited

The memorandum is being presented as a peace agreement, but it brings no peace, it settles nothing that brought Israel, whose security is the central question, into conflict with Iran in the first place. Iran’s missile program remains intact because, according to Trump: “why Iran can’t have some ballistic missiles when others have?” Iran’s regime remains in power, its ideology toward Israel remains unchanged.

Much like Versailles left Europe’s fundamental security dilemma unanswered, this deal leaves Israel facing the same strategic threat that existed before the war, only now with sanctions eased, assets released, and economic breathing room restored to the same death cult.

The men gathered at Versailles in 1919 did not believe they were laying the groundwork for another world war. They believed they had secured peace. The catastrophe came because they failed to resolve the forces that would produce the war just a few years later.

No one can know what form the next inevitable war with Iran will take, but the regime’s openly seeks regional hegemony, openly calls for Israel’s destruction, openly arms proxy forces across the Middle East. Restoring money, trade, and strategic breathing room to such a regime postpones the moment when that danger must be confronted again.

It wasn’t any of these that made me throw the Quran, literally, into the garbage in my parents’ house that night. It was something called the occasions of revelation. Islam has an entire science devoted to it, a respected branch of scholarship called asbāb al-nuzūl, the genre that helps Muslims understand the context in which each verse of the Quran was revealed. And thanks to generations of Muslims, those circumstances were preserved as carefully as the Quran itself.

By the end of this article you will understand why this is the most damning evidence against Islam there is. Honestly, I can’t fathom how anyone can read what follows and remain a Muslim.

Come on, menstruate already!

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The truce was a ten-year agreement. It lasted two. In those two years, the breathing room it bought was used exactly as a strategist would use it. Freed from confrontation with Mecca, Muhammad turned and conquered the Jewish stronghold of Khaybar, distributing its spoils. The community grew faster in those two years of “peace” than in all the years of open war before it. The truce was the most productive military and political instrument of his career, precisely because it was peace on paper and consolidation in fact.

When an allied tribe gave Muhammad a pretext, he declared the treaty void, marched on Mecca in 630, no longer with 1,400 men but with 10,000, and took the city. The ten-year truce had served its entire purpose in twenty-four months: it let the weaker party become the stronger party, after which the paper was torn up.

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The Pattern Across the Centuries

You might think a seventh-century episode has no bearing on a 2026 negotiation. The opposite is true. Hudaybiyyah is not remembered as a one-time event; it is enshrined as sunnah, the normative example every devout Muslim is taught to imitate. Surah 48 of the Quran, titled “The Victory,” was revealed about this very truce, recasting a humiliating compromise as a divine triumph. When scripture itself canonizes a tactical retreat as victory, the lesson is accept the weak terms now, call it a win, and wait.

This is why modern Muslim leaders cite Hudaybiyyah by name whenever they sign with an adversary. Yasser Arafat did it most famously. In May 1994, months after signing the Oslo Accords with Israel, he spoke in a mosque in Johannesburg and compared the accords directly to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, while calling for jihad to reclaim Jerusalem. He was telling his fellow Muslims that Oslo was exactly what Hudaybiyyah had been: a temporary arrangement with a stronger enemy, to be honored only as long as it served the cause. He said it again years later, declaring that he had chosen the “Peace of the Brave” out of faith in the Prophet’s conduct at Hudaybiyyah. The West heard “peace process.” His base heard “Hudaybiyyah,” and they understood exactly what he meant, that the handshake on the White House lawn was a tactic, not a reconciliation.

The pattern recurs across Islamic history wherever a Muslim power found itself temporarily outmatched. The early caliphates signed truces with Byzantium and broke them when the balance of forces shifted. In Islam the world is divided into the House of Islam and the House of War, and between them there can be no permanent peace, only the temporary suspension of hostilities. The jurists capped the hudna “truve” at ten years precisely because of the Hudaybiyyah precedent, a truce was understood as a finite, renewable tactical instrument, not a final settlement. Permanent peace with a non-Muslim sovereign was a theological impossibility, because it would mean conceding that some portion of the earth would remain permanently outside the rule of Allah.

The Ottoman Empire signed and broke treaties with European powers as the military balance dictated, treating each agreement as binding only while Istanbul was the weaker or the satisfied party. Closer to our time, the logic surfaces every time an Islamic movement enters a ceasefire while openly describing it as a pause. Hamas has used the word hudna explicitly and repeatedly, offering “truces” while stating plainly that the underlying objective never changes. The truce buys reconstruction, rearmament, the rebuilding of tunnels and rockets, and then it ends.

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What This Means for Friday

Look at what the Islamic Republic itself said today, on the very day of the announcement. Iran’s own deputy foreign minister, confirming the agreement, stated that it “does not signify trust in the enemy and was drafted in an atmosphere of continued distrust.” Their state television aired a banner declaring that the United States “was forced to sign an agreement to end the war.” This is not the language of a party seeking reconciliation. This is the language of a party that views the agreement as a tactical necessity extracted under pressure, which is to say, the language of Hudaybiyyah.

The blockade that was strangling them lifts immediately. The Strait of Hormuz reopens, and their oil flows again, refilling the treasury that funds Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the militias in Iraq. Sanctions relax. In exchange, The U.S. receives promises, an end to military operations, a pledge to abandon the nuclear weapon, assurances about nuclear waste to be verified later. You are giving them the tangible and immediate restoration of their strength. They are giving you the intangible and deferred promise of their restraint.

This is the exact shape of Hudaybiyyah. The weaker party, cornered, accepts terms that relieve the immediate pressure and restore its capacity to fight another day, while conceding nothing that cannot later be reclaimed. The regime that has chanted “Death to America” for forty-six years, that calls your nation the Great Satan as an article of faith, has not undergone a conversion this week. It has run out of room, and it is buying time.

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Mr. President,

Every concession you grant should be reversible and conditioned on sustained, verified performance over years, not gestures delivered before the ink dries. Front-load their obligations; back-load your relief. Do not hand over the permanent restoration of their economy in exchange for promises that can evaporate the moment you leave office.

Keep the pressure latent and instantly restorable. The only thing that makes a hudna hold is the certainty that the stronger party will re-impose the cost the instant the truce is violated.

Hudaybiyyah held for two years because Muhammad was not yet strong enough to break it; it broke the moment he was. Your deterrent must be structured so that the day they calculate they can resume is the day they also calculate they will lose. Peace with this regime will last exactly as long as their weakness lasts, and not one day longer, unless you make the weakness permanent and the cost of breaking faith unbearable.

The men signing in Switzerland on Friday know the story of Hudaybiyyah. It is in their scripture, their schools, their sermons. The question is whether the man signing across from them knows it too. Now you do.

The problem is that the men who commit these acts, and the men who issue these demands and calls, do not invent their justifications. They cite the Quran, the hadith, the biography of the Prophet, the centuries of jurisprudence built on all three, and they say, with textual precision, that what they are doing is divinely commanded. The “moderate” then steps forward to condemn the “Islamist” while pronouncing the very texts he quoted holy, perfect, and beyond revision.

The “moderate” is telling us that the source code is flawless and that everyone who reads it as a mandate for violence and Islamic hegemony has simply misread it, century after century, across every school and every continent. More than 60,000 Islamic terror attacks have taken place in the last few decades. At some point the claim that the text is innocent and only the readers are guilty must be rejected. When a document is read the same dangerous way by enough people for long enough, the problem is no longer confined to the readers.

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The same is true of Genghis Khan. Some see a brilliant empire-builder, others a butcher on horseback. Yet both camps describe the same brutal conqueror.

Even Jesus, perhaps the most disputed figure in history, produces a remarkably narrow range of disagreement. Christians worship him as God incarnate. Others regard him as a moral teacher, a prophet, a reformer, or a failed messianic claimant. But even the Jews who reject his divinity do not accuse him of cruelty, conquest, massacres, or personal corruption. The dispute is about who he was, not about what he did.

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That narrowness is how historical judgment works for Napoleon, for Caesar, for Stalin, for every consequential figure we argue about. However, When the Muslim and the critic describe Muhammad, they seem to be describing entirely different human beings. The range becomes very wide.

On one side stand more than a billion people for whom he is the perfect man, the mercy sent to all the worlds, the human being whose every gesture is the template for how a life should be lived, so beloved that his name cannot be spoken without a blessing, so exalted that to insult him is a capital crime. On the other side stand his critics, who draw their portrait not from hostile invention but from the Muslim sources themselves, the Quran, the sahih hadith, the sira that Muslims hold to be the most reliable records ever compiled, and from those same texts assemble a warlord and a blood-thirsty pedophile.

The Original Image

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Offensive jihad worked the same way. It was a standing duty of the Muslim state, not a personal duty of the Muslim man. And because it was the state’s war, it could be declared only by the state’s legitimate authority, the caliph, the imam, the holder of public power. An individual could not wake up and launch the expansion of Islam any more than a private citizen can declare war on a neighboring country.

The second category is defensive jihad: the war to repel an enemy who has invaded Muslim land. This the jurists classified as fard ayn, an individual obligation. When the unbeliever crosses into Muslim territory, the duty to fight falls personally on every able Muslim in the vicinity.

Defensive jihad, being a personal emergency like the duty to pray or to put out a fire in your house, requires no permission from anyone. No caliph need declare it or authorize it. The attack itself is the authorization.

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This same Abdel-Rahman was the man who, years earlier, issued the fatwa that declared Anwar Sadat an apostate for making peace with Israel, the religious ruling that sent Sadat to his death.

That young man was Adam Hamawy. This week, the Democratic Party of New Jersey made him their nominee for Congress, in a district so safe it has not elected a Republican since 1994. He is endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

Last year it was Mamdani. This year it is Hamawy in New Jersey and another candidate in Michigan. Each one fluent in the language of the West, civil rights, inclusion, social justice, the whole liberal vocabulary, and each one carried into power on the shoulders of the useful idiots.

In 2008, in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, federal prosecutors entered into evidence a 1991 internal memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. It described the Brotherhood’s work in America in its own words: a “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” to be carried out by the hands of Americans themselves, through their own institutions. Not by bombs. By patience, by infiltration, by the slow capture of the very freedoms the West offers, and by the useful idiots who hold the door open and call anyone who notices a bigot.

Below is the demographic model that explains how this works, stage by stage, as Muslim populations grow inside a non-Muslim society. I first published it some time ago. I’m sending it again now, hoping more people will open their eyes to what’s happening.

The Demographic Blueprint of Islamic Expansion

Dr. Peter Hammond, in his work Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat, outlined a demographic model that continues to resonate across Western societies grappling with the challenges of multiculturalism. His thesis is that the behavioral patterns of Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries change predictably based on their percentage of the total population, and these shifts are not incidental or cultural but theological and systemic. They mirror Islam’s built-in ideological programming, which moves from passive tolerance to assertive dominance as numbers increase.

0–2%

When Muslims constitute less than 2% of the population, they typically maintain a low profile. This is the stage of da’wah, Islamic proselytization, and reputation-building. Islam is presented to the host society as peaceful, rational, and ethical. The focus is on integration, tolerance, and charitable outreach. Criticism of Islam is dismissed as ignorance or Islamophobia, while the community builds its infrastructure, mosques, community centers, and Islamic schools.

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Both of these framings are available in the Western discourse on any given day, but stand at the angle of what the thing actually was and you will see the Nakba was a theological assault that failed. It was the attempt to extinguish a non-Muslim sovereignty newly declared on land that Islam regards as its own, an attempt prosecuted by five Arab armies that invaded the day after the state was born, lost the war they had started, and produced, in their losing, the refugees they have wept over ever since.

From high enough up, you see only the misery. You see a displaced people, hundreds of thousands of them, scattered across the Arab world. You see that some of them, eighty years later, still live in camps and even in tents, in Lebanon, where they are denied citizenship and barred by law from dozens of professions; in Jordan; in Syria. You see crowded alleys, statelessness, a grievance handed down like an heirloom from grandfather to grandson.

But to understand the misery, start from the 1880s onward, Jews returned to the land in waves, and for roughly forty years they were tolerated. They bought land and worked it. They drained the malarial swamps of the Jezreel and the Hula. They planted the orchards. They founded Tel Aviv in 1909 on the empty dunes north of Jaffa and watched it grow into a city. They built schools, hospitals, newspapers, a university, the institutions of a society.

The Arabs of the land had no problem with any of that. Arab migrants poured in from Egypt, Syria, the Hauran, and beyond, drawn by the wages and the work that Jewish development was generating, and it was acceptable to them, even attractive, for one reason: all of it was being built inside the house of Islam. The Jews were prospering under the sovereignty of the caliphate.

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Below two percent, the population is invisible and the host calls Islam peaceful. Between two and five, it begins to proselytize and recruit. Past five, it starts to bend institutions to its norms, food, dress, finance, the slow accommodation of demands presented as rights. Around ten, Hammond wrote, lawlessness rises as a form of complaint; he pointed, two decades ago, to car-burnings in Paris. After twenty percent jihad militia formations.

In this article I want to take up that twentieth-percentile line, because Hammond names the militia phase but does not anatomize it, and explain, step by step, the inevitable balkanization of Western Europe.

The Sequence Run to Completion

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The experiment was discontinued after nine months. The reason it was discontinued reversed every assumption the Kelloggs had begun with. Gua the chimpanzee did make some progress in imitating human behaviors, using a spoon, drinking from a cup, opening doors. But Donald the human child started doing something the Kelloggs had not anticipated. He started imitating Gua. Specifically, he started imitating Gua’s vocalizations rather than developing human speech. At nineteen months, when other children his age were forming sentences, Donald was making chimpanzee-like food barks. The Kelloggs ended the experiment because their son was failing to acquire language.

Language is the Mind.

For most of intellectual history, language was treated as a tool. The mind, on this view, had its thoughts, and language was the instrument by which the thoughts were communicated. You have an idea. You translate it into words. The words travel to me. I translate the words back into ideas. Language is a transparent medium between two minds that already exist.

The twentieth century dismantled this picture. The work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s and 1940s proved that the language we acquire as children shapes the categories of thought available to us. A speaker of one language does not just describe the world differently from a speaker of another. He sees the world differently. He carves it up into different categories. The colors he distinguishes, the time he experiences, the moral intuitions he treats as obvious, the social distinctions he registers without thinking, all of these are shaped, before he can choose otherwise, by the language his mother spoke to him before he could speak back.

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Danny Burmawi’s book on Israel and Islam argues that Islam itself is the actual cause of the many wars waged against Israel. The driver was never land, never the Palestinians, it was religion. Islam cannot be detached from the Arab-Israeli conflict in a…

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“Sharia is concerned with guiding individual, personal religious observance, not shaping national laws. Just as other belief systems guide the adherents of those faiths, Sharia guides Muslims in how to pray, dress, eat, or fast, and includes rules about marriage, divorce, and the raising of children.”

On May 13, 2026, in another hearing, with substantially identical language, Congresswomen women Pramila Jayapal said:

“Sharia is individual, personal religious observance, comparable to Christianity and Judaism.”

The Maryland office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a press release thanking the Democratic members of the subcommittee and explicitly reinforcing the same talking point: sharia primarily refers to personal religious practice and moral guidance, including prayer, fasting, charity, honesty, marriage, inheritance, business ethics, and caring for neighbors. Similar to Halacha in Judaism and Canon Law in Christianity.

This is a lie. It is not a partial truth or a contested interpretation. It is the specific kind of lie that takes a small true thing and uses it to conceal a much larger thing that is also true and that the audience needs to know about. The small true thing is that sharia includes provisions on personal devotion, when to pray, when to fast, how to perform ritual ablutions. The much larger thing being concealed is that sharia is a comprehensive legal and political system that prescribes specific content for criminal law, family law, financial law, the political authority of non-Muslims over Muslims, the status of religious minorities, and the obligation of jihad.

The personal devotional portion is one room in a building that has many other rooms. Scanlon, Jayapal, and CAIR are deceiving Americans.

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The 57 OIC nations together generate roughly 6 percent of the world’s scientific publications, against their 25 percent share of world population. They generate 1.6 percent of the world’s patents. They spend approximately 0.3 percent of gross national product on research and development, against a global average of 2.4 percent. Across the entire span of the Nobel Prize in the sciences, physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, the 1.9 billion-strong Muslim world has produced two laureates. One of them is the Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam won the Nobel in physics in 1979 for his work on electroweak unification, and his own country, Pakistan, subsequently passed legislation declaring his Ahmadi community to be non-Muslim, with the result that the Nobel laureate is no longer claimed by the nation that produced him.

By comparison, the world’s 15 million Jews have produced over two hundred Nobel laureates in the sciences across the same period. The differential is not 2 to 200. It is 2 to 200 on a population base ratio of 130 to 1 in the Muslim direction. The per-capita differential, when you do the arithmetic, is in the tens of thousands.

The late Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg said in his speech: for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. The 2003 United Nations Arab Human Development Report, written by Arab scholars and published under UN auspices, noted that Spain alone translates more books into Spanish in a single year than the entire Arab world has translated into Arabic in the last thousand years. The technological infrastructure of the Islamic world, the cars its citizens drive, the phones they carry, the medical equipment in their hospitals, the weapons their militaries fire, the software their governments use, the pharmaceuticals that keep their populations alive is imported. The Islamic world consumes. It does not produce.

The Reason?

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The mechanism is the Industry of Security. The pitch the regimes make to the West is the operative content of the industry:

“we are the only thing standing between you and the Jihadists. The populations we govern are hostile to your interests, hostile to Israel, hostile to liberal civilization, and only authoritarian rule by us prevents the hostility from translating into action. Pay us. Arm us. Tolerate our human rights record. Because the alternative is what would happen if the people we suppress were free to act on their own preferences. “

This pitch has been the foundation of Western policy toward several Arab states for fifty years. It has produced something close to a hundred billion dollars in cumulative aid. And it has produced a powerful structural incentive, inside the regimes themselves, to ensure that the populations remain exactly as hostile as the pitch requires.

The hostility the regimes capitalize on is not their invention. The hostility was produced by Islam. The regimes inherited it, found it useful, and built an industry on top of it. The industry refines and channels what Islam produced.

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What happened to the proletariat in the West, however, did not match Marx’s prediction. Across the twentieth century, the working class in the United States and Western Europe did not radicalize. It got richer. It bought houses. It sent its children to college. It joined the middle class. By the 1960s, the Western proletariat had stopped being the revolutionary subject Marx had identified, and Western Marxists faced a problem: the engine of their politics had defected.

The pivot they made was to relocate the position of the oppressed from the working class to a series of identity categories. African Americans became, in this remapping, the new proletariat, the permanently oppressed group. Women became another. Colonized peoples became a third. Sexual minorities became a fourth. By the 1970s, the academic and activist left had abandoned the working class as its constituency and built a coalition around identities defined by their relation to historical injustice.

Herbert Marcuse, an influential European Marxist wrote: “the new revolutionary subject was no longer the worker but “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors.” Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) had already made the analogous move for the colonized world. The Frankfurt School, the New Left, the second-wave feminists, the third-world liberation theorists, all of them were performing variations of the same operation. The proletariat had failed. New victims had to be found.

The Model

The West deserves enormous credit for being the first civilization in human history to abolish slavery. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, paying compensation that bankrupted the imperial treasury for decades. The American Civil War, fought primarily over the preservation and extension of slavery, cost six hundred thousand lives, a higher proportion of the population than any war the United States has fought before or since. The Western abolitionist movement, drawing on Christian moral reasoning, made the argument and won the political fight that ended an institution every other civilization in human history had practiced and were still practicing as the West was abolishing it. Not only that, but if it weren’t for the West, slavery companies could be listed on NASDAQ today.

Watch what the left has done with African Americans, one of its assigned constituencies. In every American classroom, every Hollywood film, every progressive news outlet, the West is framed as the unique villain in the story of slavery. America is read as the slave-owning nation, full stop, not as the nation that fought a brutal war to end it. The first Western civilization to abolish slavery is portrayed as the original and definitive sponsor of slavery, while the Muslim slave trade, which began in the seventh century, lasted into the twentieth, took an estimated seventeen million African captives, and routinely castrated the men so they would not reproduce, is barely mentioned in any American textbook.

The new Marxists’ model needs African Americans as permanent victims. If they are allowed to register that the country in which they live abolished slavery at enormous cost, that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded, that black Americans now have legal equality, voting rights, and access to every institution of American life, that they have produced the wealthiest and most influential black community in human history, then the moral capital the model extracts from their suffering begins to dissipate. So, the suffering must be kept in continuous circulation: every police killing must be read as a lynching, every disparity must be read as the persistence of slavery. The left does not want African Americans to thrive in a way that would close the wound. It wants the wound to remain open, because the wound is the capital.

Women is another example. The West has done more to advance the legal, economic, and social position of women than any civilization in human history. Equal access to education, equal employment law, the dismantling of the legal subordination that defined every pre-modern society and many of the post-modern ones, the emergence of women as full participants in every profession, these are Western achievements, accomplished within a century. Measured against any other civilization on earth, the West is the most pro-female civilization that has ever existed.

The left’s framing of this record is, again, the opposite. Women in the West are presented in mainstream feminist discourse as still oppressed, still subjugated, still in a condition of structural patriarchy that requires continuous activist intervention. The genuinely oppressed women of the world, those in Gaza, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, are absent from the same discourse, because attention to their condition would require the left to acknowledge that the civilization it is attacking is the one that gave women the freedom they have.

Immigrants too. In their framing immigrants come to wealthy Western countries as victims of those countries’ historical predations, that they are owed entry, that the host country owes them everything and they owe the host country nothing, that they should be encouraged to retain hostility toward the civilization that took them in. The actual record, again, is the opposite: immigrants from the developing world overwhelmingly come to the West because the West offers a higher standard of living, more freedom, and better institutions than the countries they leave.

Even the failures of post-colonial states are explained as the persistent legacy of Western colonialism. Western colonialism ended sixty to eighty years ago, and states that pursued the left’s recommended policies, autarky, anti-Western alignment, and redistributive socialism, collapsed, while post-colonial states that pursued opposite policies, open trade, alignment with the West, and market institutions, succeeded. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Botswana are absent from the discussion. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Cuba are heroically defended even after their collapses.

Across all of these cases, the pattern is constant. The left does not want its constituencies to escape the victim position. It wants to keep them inside it, because the victim position is what generates the political and moral capital the left spends.

The Model Breaker

The Jews had spent two thousand years as a persecuted minority across Christian Europe and the Islamic world. The Nazi murder of six million was the culmination of a long history that the left could plausibly claim as the worst single example of Western civilizational evil. By every metric the left uses to identify its preferred constituencies, the Jews should have been their model’s prized possession, the permanent witness to the West’s historical guilt, available indefinitely as moral leverage.

What the Jews did instead is what the left cannot forgive.

They survived. Then they built a state. Then the state succeeded. Then it became a developed country. Then it became a high-tech powerhouse. Then it built one of the most capable militaries on earth and demonstrated that it would defend itself with whatever force was required. The Jewish people, in two generations, transformed themselves from the model’s most useful victim into a thriving, sovereign, competent, and self-defending nation.

This was not supposed to happen. They were supposed to stay broken, to stay quiet, to accept perpetual victimhood as their identity, to function as the moral witness against Western evil. Israel was the rejection of all of this.

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The security guard’s name was Mohammad Hassan Al Bayati. He was thirty years old. He had arrived in Australia by boat as an Iraqi refugee, granted protection on the standard humanitarian grounds. At his trial in the New South Wales District Court in 2019, he was convicted of taking and detaining a person with intent to obtain an advantage, of committing an act of indecency with a victim under ten years old, and of indecent assault of a person under sixteen.¹

There is nothing exceptional about this story in the inventory of what occurs in Western cities every week. A predator targeted a child, but when this story appeared on my feed today, I was reminded of the foundations Islam has established not only to increase the number of such cases, but to sanctify the act itself.

By the Book

The Doha-based Islamic portal IslamWeb, used as a primary reference by Arabic-speaking Muslims worldwide since 1998, maintains in its public archive Fatwa Number 296044, dated 24 Rajab 1436 of the Islamic calendar, which corresponds to May 12, 2015. Its title is Dawabit al-Istimta’ bi al-Saghirah: “Rules and Limits Governing Sexual Enjoyment of the Young Girl.”²

The questioner cites a passage from Bada’i al-Fawa’id, the multi-volume work of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (1292–1350), the closest student and intellectual heir of Ibn Taymiyya and one of the four most-cited Islamic jurists. The passage reproduced verbatim in the question reads:

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To understand the alliance, you have to understand the fundamental disagreement about what drives human behavior.

The Western liberal tradition, and capitalism as its economic expression, rests on the premise that ideas shape the world. This is what philosophers call idealism. A society’s values, beliefs, and convictions determine what kind of civilization it builds. Freedom produces prosperity. Dignity produces justice. A culture that glorifies conquest produces tyranny. A culture that prizes individual responsibility produces order.

From this perspective, jihadist violence is exactly what it appears to be: the product of a specific set of ideas. Ideas about divine obligation, about the duty to subjugate unbelievers, about the virtue of martyrdom.

Marxism begins from the opposite premise. For Marx and every tradition that flows from him, socialism, critical theory, postcolonial studies, intersectionality, ideas are not the cause of reality but its reflection. Material conditions come first: who owns what, who exploits whom, who holds power over whom. Everything else, morality, religion, law, culture, is built on top of this economic foundation, and serves to justify it. The ruling class produces the ruling ideas, in Marx’s famous formulation. Ideas are instruments of power, not independent forces.

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This is the most precise framework available for understanding one of the most consequential and most persistent mistakes that Western societies, Lebanese Christians, and anyone else who has tried to coexist with Islam on liberal terms has made, the mistake of allowing the Muslim friend, the Muslim colleague, the educated unveiled witty charming Muslim woman at the dinner party, to serve as the representative data point from which conclusions about Islam as a civilizational system are drawn.

Your Sunni Muslim friend outside his habitat is not lying to you. He is genuinely warm, genuinely tolerant, genuinely committed to the pluralism he expresses in your company. Your Shia Muslim colleague at the office is not performing a deception when she treats her non-Muslim coworkers with respect, humor, and the full human complexity that makes her someone you would call a friend. The hijabless educated woman you know, funny, irreverent, entirely comfortable in Western social environments, is not a fraud. She is exactly who she appears to be. And she is not a representation of Islam.

She is a specimen in ecological release.

What she is not carrying into your office, your dinner party, your neighborhood, what the native habitat produces and the diasporic environment suppresses, is the full weight of the theological and social system that shapes Muslim behavior when the group is the majority, when the theology is the enforcement mechanism, when the mosque and the neighborhood and the family and the state are all pointing in the same direction, and when the individual Muslim who might personally prefer tolerance is no longer protected by the ambient pluralism of a liberal society but is instead embedded in a community where deviance from theological norms carries genuine social, familial, and sometimes physical cost.

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At the most basic economic level, OPEC membership meant the quota, and the quota meant constraint. The UAE today has a production capacity of 4.…

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Whether Muhammad existed in the precise biographical form that the tradition describes is a question for historians. Whether the Muhammad who has shaped the horizon of Islamic civilization for fourteen centuries is real is not a question at all. He is overwhelmingly, undeniably, consequentially real, more real, in the sense that matters for understanding human behavior and civilizational development, than most figures whose historical existence is beyond scholarly dispute.

He exists in the collective consciousness of a civilization of nearly two billion people with a specificity, an intimacy, and a comprehensive authority that no other founding figure of any tradition has achieved.

The tradition knows what he ate and how he slept. It knows which hand he preferred for which activities. It knows how he walked, how he smiled, how he treated his wives, how he handled the execution of his enemies, how he responded to mockery, how he negotiated with those he was in the process of defeating, how he organized the distribution of war spoils, how he prayed, how he expressed affection and how he expressed rage. This is not hagiography in the Western sense. It is a comprehensive behavioral template for human existence, preserved with the explicit theological purpose of making imitation possible and obligatory.

The companions who surrounded Muhammad absorbed this model at first hand, sat with him, fought beside him, watched him make decisions, heard his judgments, received his commands, and then carried what they had absorbed into the world with a momentum that is almost impossible to account for on purely material grounds.

Within a century of his death, the culture he founded had conquered the Arabian peninsula, destroyed the Persian Sassanid Empire, stripped the Byzantine Empire of its richest provinces, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar into Iberia, pushed into Central Asia, and reached the borders of the Indian subcontinent.

These conquests were understood by those who prosecuted them as direct application of Muhammad’s example. Muhammad had himself directed the massacre of the Banu Qurayza, between six hundred and nine hundred adult males executed on his order in a single day, their women and children enslaved, their property distributed among his followers. He had expelled the other Jewish tribes of Medina in campaigns combining military pressure, property confiscation, and forced exile. He had authorized the assassination of specific individuals whose mockery or opposition he found intolerable. He had organized and led raids against tens of the tribes in the peninsula. The companions who carried these precedents into the conquests were transmitting his legacy, faithfully, and specifically.

The Personal God and the Transcendent One

The standard assumption, shared by reformers who want a gentler Islam and by critics who want a simpler target, is that the Quran is the engine of Islamic civilization, that Muslims are shaped primarily by what the book says, and that the central interpretive question is therefore what the book means. This assumption produces the endless Western debate about moderate versus extremist readings of the Quran, about which verses abrogate which other verses, about whether the violent passages are context-specific or universal, about whether a sufficiently sophisticated hermeneutics can extract from the text a version of Islam compatible with liberal democratic coexistence.

The debate is beside the point. The relationship of most Muslims to the Quran across most of Islamic history has been one of memorization and recitation rather than reading and interpretation. The hafiz, the person who has memorized the entire Quran, is a figure of enormous social prestige in Muslim communities worldwide, and that prestige derives specifically from the feat of memorization rather than from any demonstrated capacity to understand, interpret, or apply the text’s content. Children in Quranic schools spend years learning to recite the Quran correctly in Arabic, which is not the native language of the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims. They learn the sounds. They learn the rhythm. They learn the ritual correctness of the recitation. They do not learn what the words mean, and this is not experienced as a deficiency. The Quran’s power is in its recitation, not in its comprehension. God speaks. The Muslim listens and repeats. Understanding is secondary to participation in the divine speech.

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