“Islam is a totalitarian ideology bent on world domination, masquerading as a religion,” writes Admiral James A. Lyons in a forward to the new book, Islam and the Suicide of the West: The Origins, Doctrines, and Goals of Islam. The author, Luiz Sergio Solimeo from the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property (TFP), documents this conclusion in an insightful Catholic critique of Islam just as many Catholic shepherds have gone astray.
Solimeo declares that the claim that “Islam as a ‘religion of peace’ is pure fantasy,” like the “Enlightenment fabrication” of a “culturally refined Arab world” facing a “barbaric and uncultivated Christian Europe” during the Crusades. Jihad, a “military offensive aimed to impose the Islamic religion and dominion throughout the world,” is “at the very core of Islam’s history.” Meanwhile, the oft-maligned Crusades “countered and blocked Islam’s centuries-old offensive” of “pillaging and massacring of populations throughout the Mediterranean basin.”
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In the current era, “Muslim hordes arriving in Europe…appear more like occupation troops than peaceful immigrants,” Solimeo notes. A book section analyzes Islam’s totalitarian “Affinity with Communism and Nazism,” as shown by historical figures including Adolf Hitler and Carlos the Jackal. Like-minded political extremists today often “find in Islam an ally for the destruction of what remains of Christian civilization.”
“Unfortunately, very few Catholic bishops raise the alarm, urging the faithful to defend the faith and remnants of Christian civilization,” Solimeo laments. This quiescence reflects the fact that following the Second Vatican Council’s end in 1965, “relations with non-Catholics were no longer directed toward converting them to the Faith, by logical persuasion.” Rather, the emphasis shifted to dialogue, supposedly “something of a talisman or charm capable of resolving all disputes with non-Catholics, even communists.”
“Dialogue with Muslims was flawed from the outset because it was based on extremely ambiguous statements in Second Vatican Council documents,” Solimeo observes. Here the Islamophile Louis Massignon exercised heavy influence. Pope Pius XI in 1934 had jokingly called Massignon a “Muslim-Catholic.”
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“Dialogue has become an end in itself, the vapid occupation of some professionals,” Solimeo accurately notes. Yet “Islam has no hierarchical authority to impose doctrinal conclusions and decisions and, therefore, interfaith summit meetings will never have practical consequences for other Muslims.” Not surprisingly, “Catholic-Muslim dialogue has not served to alleviate any persecution of Christians and their forced diaspora from their homelands in the Middle East.”
Solimeo observes that Catholic clergy have “silenced and declared non-Catholic,” under “dialogue’s disarming mindset,” accurate portrayals of “Islam’s historical reality,” particularly its “1,400-year war on Christendom.” Catholic bishops have prohibited Islam experts such as Robert Spencer from appearing at Catholic institutions due to their alleged “Islamophobia.” Yet, says Solimeo, “‘Islamophobia’ exists only in the minds of Islamic propagandists,” and “functions like the concept of ‘anticommunist,’ used by communists for fifty years to prevent any criticism of communism.”
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Solimeo sees little agreement forthcoming from such dialogue, for, as Lyons writes, the “myth that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is nonsense.” Islamic canons deny the Blessed Trinity as “idolatrous, polytheist and punishable by death,” and treat Jesus merely as a prophetic predecessor to Islam’s prophet Muhammad, Solimeo observes. Thus the
Koran and Islamic traditions vilify and blaspheme Our Lord Jesus Christ the Word Incarnate and our Redeemer. There is nothing in common between what our Faith teaches us about Him and His grotesque and sacrilegious caricature as presented by Islam.
Solimeo finds little to recommend Islam’s scripture, the Koran. Unlike the well-ordered Bible, the “Koran is utterly confusing. Suras [chapters] are arranged by size, from longest to shortest,” while “continuous repetition of ideas, stories, and narratives, makes both reading and understanding difficult.” Additionally, the “Koran is full of fantasies” (e.g. King Solomon speaking with birds), making it “more like children’s fairy tales than divine revelation.”
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Solimeo also states that the “Muslim heaven resembles very much that of ancient mythology,” whose “inhabitants would indulge in sensible pleasures, especially those of the flesh.” Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1797), a Doctor of the Church, correspondingly described Islam’s heaven as “only fit for beasts.” Contrastingly, the “joy a Christian expects to have in heaven is above all the fullness of sanctifying grace, the light of glory (lumen gloriae)” in God’s presence.
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In this world as well, Solimeo notes that Christian and Islamic moral conceptions radically differ, given the “Koranic conception of a God entirely aloof from His creatures, a God Who is not the Supreme Wisdom but acts capriciously.” Therefore “what determines the goodness or wickedness of an act is not its nature but rather the arbitrary will of God.” Orthodox Muslims blindly obey; indeed, the “very name of Muhammad’s religion” is Islam, “meaning submission.” “Islamic morality as a whole represents a giant step backward from that of the Gospel” on matters such as polygamy and divorce.
Solimeo and his collaborators reject the claim that they have “any personal animosity towards Muslims.” The authors hedge their concerns about Islam with the accurate observation that “not all believers of a religion follow every one of its precepts all the time.” Thus “it would be blatantly untrue for us to affirm that every Muslim is a jihadist and a terrorist.”
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Solimeo’s book is a much-needed wake-up call concerning Islam at a time when Catholic clergy complacency leads to a stark choice:
Will the West follow the example of the Prodigal Son and choose to return to the Father’s House, to a Christian civilization inspired by the “philosophy of the Gospel,” or will it submit to an Islamic totalitarianism that highly resembles communist ideology?
As seen on Jihad Watch.