Islamic terrorism in France and Belgium and Nigeria and everywhere reveals the grand pattern of evil in modern history.  All the notionally different systems of malice in modern history are the same.  All these wicked systems view the Jews and Christians (and other peaceful religions, like the Bahá’í and Zoroastrians) as the enemy.  Moreover, all these evil systems are, at heart, the same.

Nazis and Communists, for example, were close allies at the beginning of the Second World War.  Communist sabotage of Weimar Germany quite deliberately brought Hitler into power.  Whole units of Storm Troopers were composed of former German Communists.  The fighting between these sibling misologies was identical to the internecine fighting among Islamic extremists. 

Nazis passionately hated Christians, a vital but often ignored fact, and progressively began the persecution and destruction of Christianity in Nazi-occupied Europe.  Many writers at the time in fact stated that violent de-Christianization had progressed farther in Nazi Germany than in Soviet Russia.

Soviets were just as hateful toward Jews.  Virtually every Jew was purged from the Politburo and murdered, and synagogues were treated as despicably in Soviet Russia as in Nazi Germany.  How bad was Soviet maltreatment of Jews?  There were Polish Jews in the Soviet-occupied half of that tortured nation who actually migrated to the Nazi half of Poland because, they thought, nothing could be worse than the Soviets.  I cover both these hatreds in the second volume of Sinisterism, which examines exhaustively both the Soviet war on Jews and the Nazi war on Christians. 

Less known but also important, Fascist Italy also battled the Catholic Church.  Catholic youth groups were absorbed into Fascist units, Catholic clergy were murdered by Fascists, and portraits of the pope were publicly burned by Fascist thugs.  As late as 1931, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical noting that “[i]n no state of the world has Catholic Action been so hatefully treated, so truly persecuted (we do not see what other word conforms to the reality of the truth of the situation) as in Our Italy and in this Our Episcopal seat of Rome.”  Fascism initially had many Jewish supporters in Italy, but, as in Bolshevik Russia, all Jews were ultimately purged, and anti-Semitism was adopted.

These three evil systems – Nazism, Bolshevism, and Fascism – also deeply admired radical Islam.  Many folks have heard how Hitler met with the grand mufti, and how Himmler incorporated Muslims into SS units, but more interesting is the number of visitors to Nazi Germany who considered it identical to Islam, some calling it the “New Islam.” 

Many members of the Muslim Brotherhood were also Marxists, so formally atheist but still Muslims.  Very early on in Bolshevik Russia, Islam globally was recognized as an anti-imperialist and proletarian movement entitled to Marxist support and recognition.

Mussolini also touted himself a “Defender of Islam,” and his war against the Ethiopian Empire in 1935 was proclaimed by Fascists as a war to liberate Muslim tribes forcibly incorporated into the Christian Ethiopian Empire.

The war on peaceful religions seems to be everywhere.  India is our friend in the war on Islamic militancy, but Hindu mobs today ferociously attack Christians in India.  In a single province, Kandhamal, 30 Christians were murdered, 3,000 Christian homes were burned, and 130 churches were destroyed.  Christian missionaries have been burned alive before gleeful crowds of Hindus. 

In Iran it is not only Jews and Christians who are persecuted.  The peaceful Bahá’í of Iran, living in the land where their faith was born, face murder, torture, imprisonment, and the malicious destruction of their holy sites.  Zoroastrians, whose religion was also founded in Iran, have been decried by the Council of Guardians as “sinful animals”; Zoroastrian services have been disrupted; fire temples have been desecrated; and their clerics have been sent to odious prisons.

There is a global war waged against us by those who reject the idea of a loving God.  Those who wage the war have different names and profess different notional beliefs and theories, but their main enemy is always the same: Jews and Christians.  We need to grasp this crucial fact and resist these dark and angry armies as if our lives depended on it – because they surely do.