Not All The Terror In The World Is Muslim. But “99.44%” Is. Sort Of Like Ivory Snow.

Marty Peretz

Marty Peretz

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Maybe you remember Ivory Snow. Maybe you don’t. In any case, this is not about soap. It’s about murder, mass murder.
Benny Morris has written, for next week’s hard-copy edition of TNR (available in this space some days thereafter), a review of a book by a Kremlin diplomatic hack named Yevgeny Primakov. It is called Russia and the Arabs. Morris proves that even a mendacious writer sometimes inadvertently tells the truth. So what Primakov shows is that Moscow, under the boot of the Communists and of their less doctrinaire successors, financed, collaborated with, and fronted for Muslim terror.
The more research that comes out about the modern history of the Arab orbit and of the Muslim world, the more evidence we have of the cooperation of secular totalitarianism with these two phenomena.
The latest of the books in this regard is from Jeffrey Herf, a TNR contributor whose writings for us are almost always provocative, not to mention his book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World. The Arabs during the Second World War learned tactic and ideology from the Reich. Soviet and Russian entanglement with Arab terror and Palestinian terror has been axiomatic for years. Anti-Semitism was a keystone of the three ideologies.
But now Islamic jihadists have continued their warfare against the Russian people, with 39 utter innocents killed in the Moscow train system, 12 in Dagestan, and two or three others elsewhere. These give the sense of an ongoing war against the civilian population. I believe it will continue.
Dmitri Medvedev has retaliated just in words for now. But he does promise “a harsher, crueler terror crackdown.” Still, we all feel a sense of fraternity with the citizens of greater Russia. They are today’s victims. But Russia has been complicit with so many of the world’s terror systems that it is not innocent. It cannot be.
And now back to my “99.44% pure” Muslim origins of terror. Against non-Muslims: the Philippines, Thailand, Nigeria, Sudan, Chechnya, India, Britain, Spain, Germany, Holland, Denmark, France, Egypt, the U.S., Israel. And against other Muslims: the Shi’a in Iraq (the most haunted and taunted Muslims in the world), Gaza, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia.

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