In 633 CE, a year after Muhammad’s death, the commander of the new Muslim armies wrote a letter to the Persian emperor, Yazdegerd III, the last king of the great Sassanid dynasty.
“Submit,” Khalid ibn al-Walid declared, “or you will be conquered by men who love death as you love life.”
To the emperor, the general must have seemed like a madman. How could the Persian Empire, standing for more than 400 years, be threatened by those who love death?
“We love death more than you love life.”
“Submit,” Khalid ibn al-Walid declared, “or you will be conquered by men who love death as you love life.”
These words are still dogma for Muslims at war with the West and Israel, from Osama bin Laden to Ayatollah Khamenei. Words that seem like delirium to the eyes of Westerners educated to live in a safe space, who, faced with Islamic fundamentalism, delude themselves into thinking that the world is all like their placid next door neighbor and who identify the enemy in those neighbors who have retained the ability to smell danger and sound the alarm.
Undoubtedly, like today’s woke Westerners, that Persian emperor laughed at the letter from the Muslim general al-Walid, but within 20 years he was ousted from the throne, hunted down and massacred. If a barbaric but well-disciplined force that “loves death as we love life” could do it in the 7th century by converting the Persians to Islam, why not in the 21st?
The now deceased head of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah used the same phrase to explain why Hezbollah is destined to prevail: “The Jews love life, so that is what we will take away from them. We will win, because they love life and we love death.”
This time Nasrallah found death in his bunker, built among Lebanese civilians who he has always been ready to sacrifice in large numbers.
After learning of the death of a son, Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas, thought it appropriate to publish a photo of himself with his wife smiling and making the victory sign.
Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani explained that “the use of even one atomic bomb against Israel would completely destroy the country,” while if Israel used the atomic bomb “it would only succeed in hurting the Islamic world.”
After spending ten days in Iraq and Syria with the Islamic State, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German journalist, gave a summary of their ideology. “One day we will conquer Europe, the question is not if we will do it, but when, for us it is obvious,” a German jihadist speaking on behalf of the ISIS command told him. “Our expansion will be perpetual and the Europeans must know that when we come, it will not be beautiful, it will be with our weapons, and those who do not convert to Islam or pay the Islamic tax will be killed.”
“And if they refuse to convert,” Todenhöfer asked? “150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it doesn’t matter. We will kill them all,” the jihadist replied. “They are preparing for the greatest religious cleansing in history,” the German journalist concludes.
We did not take ISIS seriously and we saw how it ended.
Do we still love the civilization of life more than they love death to the point of defending it tooth and nail from our enemies?
We cannot understand what is happening unless we delve into the theological realm. They are asking for the death of Jews and Christians, not “Palestinian Arab rights.”
In this war between lovers of the civilization of life and apologists of death, the radical Islamist today delights in the sobs of the Western white man and the woke indulgence for the bloody extortions of the “noble savage.” Just look at how the Western mainstream media portrayed Nasrallah: it looked as though Mother Teresa of Beirut had died. So the human shield strategy works wonderfully.
“It is like the desire of a powerful faction in the West exhausted by life and longing for one last time to feel something similar to life, the redemption that culminates in the coup de grace. It was inevitable that they would oppose the Jews, who chose life instead of death.”
This is how Lee Smith explains the Western love for Hamas and Hezbollah.
This is a war and wars end in victory or defeat and there are two ways in which the war of radical Islam against the West could end. So either we raise the white flag on what remains of our culture and freedom, we rely on absolute and woke relativism that is a friend of scoundrels, on weak and fanatic multiculturalism and on the care of the UN. Along with that we abandon Israel, we face a massive reaction, made up of attacks and blackmail, we prepare for the Iranian atomic bomb and then that of the others. It will be the dance party of the defeated.
Or we hold on.
But are we Westerners still capable of holding on? Do we still love the civilization of life more than they love death to the point of defending it tooth and nail from our enemies?
Published originally under the title “Those Who Love Death Vs. Those Who Don’t Love Life Enough to Fight.”
