religion of peace”, with this supposed heresy only
sometimes giving rise to Islamic terrorism. On the very rare
occasions that a politician in the West has tried to grapple
with the problem of politics and Islamic terrorism, this is
what he said:
Islamism is essentially a twentieth-century
phenomenon. Like its sibling ideologies,
fascism and communism, it offers followers a
form of redemption through violence. [...]
Communism, fascism and Islamism have all
been responses to Enlightenment thought.^238Michael Gove, the British politician who wrote the above
was renowned for his intellect. But this is a profoundly
ahistorical understanding of Islam for someone who
graduated from Oxford University. As we have been at
pains to demonstrate, “redemption through violence” is
precisely what Islam has offered Muslims since Mohammed
was waging war in seventh-century Arabia: it is only
through dying while imposing Islam on the Kuffar that
Muslims are assured of an eternity in Paradise. This “right
wing” politician goes on to lambast the “wilful blindness
among many in the West”,^239 whilst he blindly ignores the
history of the rise of Islam through horrific violence (a
history of violence proudly accepted by Muslims for over a
thousand years). One of the only English-speaking
politicians to write at any length about this civilisational
threat facing the West, Gove blindly ignores the works of
Western scholars writing in English, German and French