The Clash of Civilizations I Didn’t Want to Believe In (ISC3)

Islamic Settler-Colonialism, part 3

When the first blackbird comes down to roost on the climbing frame it seems individual, particular, specific. It is not necessary to deduce a general theory, a wider scheme of things, from its presence. Later, after the plague begins, it’s easy for people to see the first blackbird as a harbinger. But when it lands on the climbing frame it’s just one bird.

In the years to come he will dream about this scene, understanding that his story is a sort of prologue: the tale of the moment when the first blackbird lands. When it begins it’s just about him; it’s individual, particular, specific. Nobody feels inclined to draw any conclusions from it. It will be a dozen years and more before the story grows until it fills the sky, like the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon, like a pair of planes flying into tall buildings, like the plague of murderous birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s great film.

Salman Rushdie
from the Prologue to Joseph Anton: a Memoir

This is part 3 of a series. In part 1, I discussed why I am using the term “settler-colonialism” despite its usual deployment in bad faith.

In part 2, I looked at how the origin story of Islam provides a recurring inspiration to those Muslims who want to colonize or “purify” societies.

In this installment, I will consider a watershed moment that foreshadowed many changes in how westerners relate to forces of Islamist colonization.

Series intro:

The term “settler-colonialism” and its associated academic disciplines were designed to incriminate Israel and Anglophone ex-colonies like the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But the term would be better applied to Arab, Turkic, Persian, and other Islamic empires that colonized the world from Iberia to the Philippines and from Sarajevo to the Zambezi watershed. Present day threats to humans are far more likely to come from would-be Islamist colonial masters than from the usual targets of settler-colonial theory.

The leaders and citizens of not-yet-Muslim-majority nations often display basic misunderstandings about the past, present, and future of Islamic colonization. I hope this series sheds light on the matter.

What do you call a conflict when only one side shows up to fight?

With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following WWI, the most recent caliphate ended. For the first time since Muhammad, there was no Islamic empire. The vast Islamic colonial project had fallen on hard times, ultimately broken up by a rising tide of nationalism, including Arab national rebellions that had been aided by western powers.

For the next several decades Arab nationalism and squabbles within and between the states defined by the 1920 Cairo Conference (and their successors) seemed to be the main story of the Middle East insofar as western governments were concerned — when they could spare a moment from WWII or the so-called Cold War.

For 81 years, the western nations overlooked an ideological vacuum in the heartland of Islam. But Imam Khomeini (founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran) and Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) took advantage of that vacuum. Today, their movements represent the largest Shia (IRI) and Sunni (MB) plays for power. I'll take a look at the IRI in this post and revisit the Muslim Brotherhood in the future.

As recently as 1978, few could imagine that Iran would become a totalitarian Islamist state essentially overnight. The ancient seat of the Persian empire was a growing regional power, allied with the USA and Israel. The Shah was pushing for rapid modernization, and western fashions were popular among the middle and upper class in cities like Tehran (though not in rural areas).

However, the Shah's regime was widely seen as decadent and brutally repressive, leading to a growing push for his government to be overturned. And so we come upon our first big victory for the Red-Green Alliance.¹ Communist agitators in Iran joined forces with Islamist radicals to overthrow the Shah.

In his gripping book Rise and Kill First, Ronen Bergman relays an account gathered from retired Mossad agents that the ailing Shah² had appealed to them to assassinate Imam Khomeini when he was just an exiled radical preacher living in France. Mossad had previously carried out hits against PLO terrorists in Europe, and it would have been an easy operation. Their top brass discussed the request and concluded that it was not worth the risk. They couldn't predict how powerful the soft-spoken Khomeini would become, and they didn't want the rulers of other countries to use them as mercenaries. It's mind-boggling to think how things might have gone differently if the future Ayatollah had been removed from the board in 1978.

The Islamist revolution in Iran was the first victory for the Red-Green Alliance, but after achieving victory, the leftist “Reds” were quickly purged.

To quote Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton again:

After he came to power the imam murdered many of those who brought him there and everyone else he disliked. Unionists, feminists, socialists, Communists, homosexuals, whores, and his own former lieutenants as well. There was a portrait of an imam like him in The Satanic Verses, an imam grown monstrous, his gigantic mouth eating his own revolution. The real imam had taken his country into a useless war with its neighbor, and a generation of young people had died, hundreds of thousands of his country’s young, before the old man called a halt. He said that accepting peace with Iraq was like eating poison, but he had eaten it. After that the dead cried out against the imam and his revolution became unpopular. He needed a way to rally the faithful and he found it in the form of a book and its author.

It would take several articles to discuss the Iran-Iraq war, an attempt at sectarian expansionism within the Muslim world that ultimately failed. Winning Iraq for Shia Islam would be the legacy of one George W. Bush, President of “the Great Satan.” But the war gave the world multiple images that clarified what the new IRI policies looked like under velayat e-faqih (rule by the Islamic jurist).

One of the new practices that horrified the world was the widespread adoption of suicide attacks, rebranded as “martyrdom.” Swiftly adopted by Iran-backed Hezbollah (the new power in southern Lebanon after Israel had fought a multi-year war to force the PLO out), suicide bombings became a primary tactic in Islamist terrorism.³ But these methods also had an impact on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war. Troops of young boys in Iran were brainwashed with messages about the glories of paradise and marched in rows into minefields to clear the mines with their own bodies.

Decades later, when IRI-backed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said “We love death” it resonated with his followers as a badass declaration of commitment to higher values than the consumerist, cowardly Jews and their western allies who “love [as in, cling to] life [instead of sacrificing for a cause].”

Yet while the Iran-Iraq war was the near-at-hand face of Shia expansionism, Ayatollah Khomeini was clear that the real enemies were the USA and Israel. Strange, that. From a Cold War chessboard mentality of western foreign policy, it didn’t make sense. President Carter had done nothing but accommodate the IRI. No subsequent presidents until Donald Trump would engage with them militarily.⁴ Yet in speech after speech, Khomeini made it clear that his enemies were the self-described leader of the free world and the world’s only Jewish state. This only makes sense in a framework of Islamist imperialism.

On February 14, 1989, 10 years after the Islamist revolution in Iran, Khomeini’s battle on the west took an even stranger turn. This time instead of denouncing entire countries, he issued an Islamic judicial ruling (fatwa) demanding the execution of Salman Rushdie and all those involved in the publication of his novel that supposedly defamed Muhammad.⁵ A large cash reward was attached, later increased and supplemented by Iranian foundations. Riots had broken out in multiple countries, leading to deaths in Pakistan and India. Bookstores in the US and UK were firebombed. The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was murdered by stabbing, and the Italian translator was assaulted and seriously injured. Thirty-seven intellectuals of the mystical Turkish Alevi sect were murdered when a mob of Sunni Muslims burned down the hotel where they were meeting — an attack likely prompted by one of the attendees supporting Rushdie’s writing.

This last incident illustrates that while being the mouthpiece of Shia Islam, and hated by many Sunni leaders, the Ayatollah was able to shape public opinion across both Shia and Sunni populations. From the man on the street in Malaysia to the British folk singer Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens), many people began expressing open support for the vigilante murder of anyone who dishonored the prophet.

Once again, the non-Muslim world was caught by surprise and fumbled its response. The chief Muslim jurist of Iran put western values on trial and, for the most part, we didn’t fight back. There were no material consequences for this flagrant violation of sovereignty. Cultural, religious, and political luminaries took sides, allowing the validity of an Islamist death sentence to become a matter of debate in the west.

Former president Jimmy Carter scolded Rushdie for insulting a world religion, having apparently bought Khomeini's accusation hook, line, and sinker. The chief rabbi of the UK, some MPs and, multiple literary figures joined in blaming Rushdie instead of Islam. The Bradford Council of Mosques lined up a number of outspoken Islamists who kept the controversy alive with TV appearances and op-eds.

The Pakistani-British philosopher Shabbir Akhtar wrote in The Guardian "…there is no choice in the matter. Anyone who fails to be offended by Rushdie's book ipso facto ceases to be a Muslim...Those Muslims who find it intolerable to live in a United Kingdom contaminated with the Rushdie virus need to seriously consider the Islamic alternatives of emigration (hijrah) to the House of Islam or a declaration of holy war (jihād) on the House of Rejection."⁶

In the last two years, a couple of books have retold the story of Jesus in unconventional ways. Him makes Jesus a trans man (born female). Dayspring focuses on the homosexual relationship between Jesus and his beloved disciple John. Consider how bizarre it would seem if Christians rioted in the streets, firebombed bookstores, or mounted violent pressure campaigns against the publishers to have these books taken out of circulation, destroyed, and denied any further printings.

Consider the societal backlash if the Pope had ordered the murder of these authors and everyone involved in publishing these books, or worse yet, if Christian vigilantes had (heaven forbid) made attempts on their lives. Does such a scenario seem completely insane? Then why do liberal westerners still accept it as normal that Muslims lack the grown-up agency and simple decency to not want people murdered for a literary portrayal of their prophet as anything less than perfect?

As mentioned in my previous post, western, Christian-majority societies struggled for centuries to get to the point where the right to offend, indeed to blaspheme, is sacrosanct. But instead of mounting the societal version of a strong immune response to Islamist bloodlust in modern times, what was the net effect of the Ayatollah putting western freedom of speech in the cross-hairs? A new and growing anxiety over doing things that appear “Islamophobic.”

That word has an interesting history. As Pascal Bruckner has written:

At the end of the 1970s, Iranian fundamentalists invented the term "Islamophobia" formed in analogy to "xenophobia". The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist. This term, which is worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world….

The term "Islamophobia" serves a number of functions: it denies the reality of an Islamic offensive in Europe all the better to justify it; it attacks secularism by equating it with fundamentalism. Above all, however, it wants to silence all those Muslims who question the Koran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce religion, and who want to practice their faith freely and without submitting to the dictates of the bearded and doctrinaire. It follows that young girls are stigmatised for not wearing the veil, as are French, German or English citizens of Maghribi, Turkish, African or Algerian origin who demand the right to religious indifference, the right not to believe in God, the right not to fast during Ramadan. Fingers are pointed at these renegades, they are delivered up to the wrath of their religions communities in order to quash all hope of change among the followers of the Prophet.

Khomeini and his revolutionaries framed the terminology that many Islamists and leftists use to this day. Even more so, average Muslims are being sensitized to “Islamophobia” without considering that they're using the tactics of a human rights struggle to sign onto the restriction of their own rights. The “Rushdie Affair” began in the period when political correctness was becoming the order of the day, and right-thinking liberals feared to be seen as judgmental of another culture. Yet in many ways, that affair has never ended.

Indeed, it was in 2022, 33 years after the fatwa was issued, Rushdie himself barely survived a knife attack by an American-born Muslim of Lebanese descent who wasn't even alive when the fatwa was issued. In the UK in 2025, Labor PM Keir Starmer is flirting with anti-blasphemy laws, a demand of Muslim MPs. The rift between Islamist values and western values has only been highlighted by the passage of time.

I haven't even discussed the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the beheading of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the Bataclan massacre, the Nova massacre, or many other such attempts to attack our freedom of expression with bullets and knives. All of these can be seen as vigilante enforcement of Islamic law.

Despite having known about some aspects of the evils of the IRI, or Saudi funding of Wahhabi extremism, or the many bloody crimes of the PLO, for many years I allowed myself to be talked out of seeing these things as a clash of civilizations. Such language influenced needless military adventurism in Iraq and ensuing chaos throughout the Middle East. And the Muslim immigrants I had gotten to know were so nice. Surely it would be bigoted to portray the societies that produced them as a threat!

I had shifted my attention to the many Arab and Muslim voices using the language of civil rights, tolerance, and peacemaking to argue that they were the true victims. Their message was full of grievance hidden behind a veneer of progressive right-think. I had fallen into the trap of assuming that western values like universal equality and human rights were easy to transfer to other cultures and religious civilizations, based on an act of will, or by showing enough compassion. I was wrong.

Although George W. Bush’s attempt to deploy democracy in societies that prefer to “bet on the strong horse” was catastrophic, the fact that Islamist leaders continually refer to this clash of civilizations shows that our academic, governmental, and pundit classes have created a mental structure for hiding what is in plain sight.

In the era that produced post-Gulf War II regret, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and a foreign policy establishment obsessed with “de-escalation,” many believed we could prevent the clash of civilizations by not noticing it. For my part, I kept rationalizing what I was seeing until October 7th, 2023.

When Hamas (a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, also supported by the IRI) massacred 1,200 Israelis and took 251 hostages of multiple ethnicities, religions, and nationalities (but mostly Jews), the genocidal settler-colonial mandate of Islamism was on full display. The subsequent sexual enslavement of female hostages was part and parcel of the rules of war laid out by Muhammad 1,400 years ago.⁷

The genocidal vision statements of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Boko Haram, and Islamic State-aligned groups in various countries clearly see themselves engaged in civilizational conflict — present-day manifestations of the “settler-colonial” impulse, turned up to 11.

Some would argue that present-day descendants of American or European Empires have no right to object to Islamic resistance conquest and assimilation when they too have been the face of violence and power in the world. But benefiting from prior colonization efforts is not the same as pulling the trigger. Living in a society that formerly committed massacres is not the same as taking hostages. The moral inversions of the left make fools of us before the entire world. It’s unnatural to feel guilt for things you never took part in (enslavement, genocide, murder, etc.). And that guilt-consciousness is causing us to run our own societies and cultures into the ground while the forces of violence in the world laugh at our shame.

The cyclical nature of attack, provoke retaliation, then loudly perform one's victimhood is akin to the schoolyard (or university) cry-bully. But while this has been used by everyone from the Bradford Mosques Association to the Palestinian national movement, the time scale in years has led generations of liberal westerners to be duped while the facts on the ground keep getting worse. Will the recent spate of incitement and violence in Europe and the Anglosphere wake people up this time?

As Lee Smith points out in The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, secular Arab governments suppressed Islamist extremism at home while wielding those same groups as a cat’s paw against their regional rivals. A similar pattern is at work in Islamist regimes and terror organizations who wield crime gangs and drug networks as proxies in both neighboring countries and western Europe. The Times of Israel has recently reported that the IRI has direct links to two of the largest gangs in Sweden, and is using them as mercenaries (once again, with children as fighters). Muslim rape/prostitution gangs in the UK are another example of vigilante enforcement of Islamist norms about the sexes while flouting the "weakness" of westerners to resist them.

Sunni Arab states committed to secular governance have banned the Muslim Brotherhood (for example, Egypt, the UAE) because they realize that participation in the modern world is antithetical to establishing a new Islamist caliphate. But, fools that we are, its affiliates are still allowed to operate in the UK and the USA (for example, CAIR).

What will western governments do to prevent a takeover by Islamic supremacists? Will we remember that western values were won at great cost, created the modern world, and are worth defending? Or is it too late?

Next in the series: How the West Was Won - Dar al-Harb and Manifest Destiny

1. Red as in leftist, Green as in Islamist

2. He was battling lymphoma.

3. The earliest of these attacks claimed hundreds of lives, as in the 1983 attack on the US Marines in Beirut, which led to President Reagan abandoning a US troop presence in that country. Rules of engagement had to change and diplomatic and military infrastructure had to be hardened to adjust to the new paradigm.

4. I’m referring to the assassination of IRGC Major General Qassem Soleimani.

5. In fact, The Satanic Verses is a linguistically adventurous and frequently humorous written meditation on the immigrant experience and the way we make devils or angels out of people without really knowing them. The representations of the Muhammad-analogue character are sympathetic and humanizing, but that was a bridge too far for Rushdie’s critics.

6. Despite his repeated demands for an Islamic exception to free speech, Shabbir Akhtar was made a professor at Old Dominion University in the US state of Virginia, and later at Oxford University, a job he kept until the day of his death.

The Bradford imam Kalim Siddiqui was a more strident critic of Rushdie, repeating calls for his death in British media, while simultaneously portraying Muslims as the victims. His “Muslim Manifesto” contains a clear statement of Islamic superiority over British society.

7. Hamas displays a Muslim way of war