Why Jihadists, Hamas, and Radical Islam will Fail

by Gary DeMar 

“From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers:
The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love life.”

When people comment on world conditions they often put the worst and inevitable slant on them. Crisis politics leads to fear, a loss of liberty, and economic repression.

I’m reminded of a Bible verse when I hear about what’s happening around the world.
The following passage out of 2 Timothy 3 was written during the height of the Roman Empire’s power probably when Nero Caesar was in power. It was written to a young pastor, Timothy, who was part of a growing but very uninfluential and pesky group of religious believers that were harassed by their fellow-Jews and later by the Empire:

“But they will not make further progress; for their folly will be obvious to all. . .” (v. 8). 

A civilization does not advance if the adherents of the opposing worldview are lopping off the heads of their adversaries. The West grew because outsiders were attracted to its worldview. They often left everything to get in. Other than other radicals like themselves, you don’t find people breaking through the borders of Iraq and wanting to be part of a new Islamic State (IS) except those who love death more than their adversaries love life.
When the women are treated like dogs, there’s not much joy in marriage and propagating the oppressive ideology.
Then there’s Hamas. Where are these haters of Israel putting their time, money, and energy? In building elaborate tunnels so they can kill Jews.
If they were really interested in civilization building, they would use what gifts they have to out-produce the people they hate. There’s no better revenge than beating an opponent at its own game.

Competition makes both sides better at what they do, and the people benefit because of increased production at a lower cost. When people work, there is no time to fight and murder.
Instead, they scapegoat the Jews and blame them for all their ills. They are like the Philistines who saw the prosperity of Isaac and instead of digging their own wells filled Isaac’s wells with earth.

“Now Isaac sowed in that land, and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. And the Lord blessed him, and the man became rich, and continued to grow richer until he became very wealthy; for he had possessions of flocks and herds and a great household, so that the Philistines envied him. Now all the wells which his father's servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines stopped up by filling them with earth” (Gen. 26:12–15). 

That’ll teach them, the Philistines said to themselves, before realizing that they also wouldn’t have any water either. It didn’t matter. They could always blame it on the Jews.
Instead of building their own infrastructure, farms, schools, and business, Hamas spends millions of dollars and thousands of wasted hours and unproductive labor on tunnels that are designed solely for destruction.

If there were no war against Israel, Hamas would have to defend its disintegrating worldview on Hamas. As long as there is a scapegoat, the people are fooled into believing that Israel is the problem and with the end of Israel their civilization would blossom. This is the great Marxian dream. Once capitalism is deposed, the Marxist utopia will finally be realized. 

How is the new Islamic State going to advance when it demands that people convert to its brand of Islam or suffer loss of property, become slaves, be exiled, or die? Anybody who joins such a movement will be signing their civilization death warrant.
Islamists are raising their children to be soldiers in the cause of murder: to kill or kill themselves to destroy the infidels:

“For us, we believe that this generation of children is the generation of the Caliphate,” one ISIS fighter tells the camera. “God willing, this generation will fight infidels and apostates, the Americans and their allies, God willing. The right doctrine has been implanted in these children. All of them love to fight for the sake of building the Islamic State and for the sake of God.”

How does such an emphasis build a civilization? Once all the infidels are destroyed, then what? They will turn on one another. The faith will never be pure enough. There will always be another scapegoat to blame.

Many Muslims believe that pure Islam once ruled the world until the filthy Jews and blasphemous Christians ascended to power. This is a canard that even President Obama propagates.
Rodney Stark writes that the Muslim “Golden Era” is a myth. “Some Muslim-occupied societies gave the appearance of sophistication only because of the culture sustained by their subject peoples—Jews and various brands of Christianity.”

Stark goes on to point out:

“Islam’s conception of the universe and its resulting opposition to reason, science, and philosophical inquiry have had a profound impact down to the present day. Muslim societies today are manifestly backward in comparison with those of the West. As Robert Reilly points out in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, ‘The Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development; . . . scientific inquiry is nearly moribund in the Islamic world; . . . Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years; . . . some people in Saudi Arabia sill refuse to believe man has been to the moon; and . . . some Muslim media present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution.’” (Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2014), 43.)

How do these radical elements within Islam hope to advance their culture if their idea of advancement is through fear, intimidation, and death?
As this time “their folly is being made obvious to all,” including many who were born and raised in the Islamic faith. In time it will result in unmitigated disaster.

What needs to be determined is how we stop the indiscriminate bloodshed before the inevitable collapse comes, before it consumes our allies and us.
You can’t beat something with nothing. Turning to atheism, same-sex marriage and the normalization of everything sexual, abortion on demand, and the growth of the welfare State are not satisfactory responses to Islam.