ISLAM, ISRAEL AND THE WEST: A Former Muslim’s Analysis, by Danny Burmawi, was released on October 7, 2025: the second anniversary of the genocidal assault by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
I started following Danny Burmawi on Substack several months ago. When he announced his forthcoming book, I pre-ordered the Kindle edition. I take long walks at home with my Kindle Oasis, and I just finished reading this exemplary book.
“Islam, Israel and The West” is the most succinct and cogent description of the history and principles of Islam. Burmawi explains why Islam is one of the biggest threats facing America and other Western countries:
- Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion.
- Islamic jihad has murdered +350M people over 1,400 years.
- +96% of globally-designated terrorist organizations are Islamic.
- +60,000 Islamic terrorist attacks in 70 countries since 2000.
- Islam demands the eradication of Jewish sovereignty to restore a global caliphate.
- Islam is invading the west through immigration and investment.
- Saudi Arabia spent +$75 billion (1982-2005) spreading Islam worldwide, constructing 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 200 Islamic colleges, and 2,000 schools in non-Muslim countries.
- Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait, and Iran have spent +$20B on cultural invasion of the West.
- Leftists in the West — advocates for Marxism, Postmodernism, and Critical Theory — have allied with Islam to destroy their common enemy: free markets, free speech, and liberal democracy.
- Exposing the truth about Islam is not bigotry. It is not “Islamophobia.”
The rest of this post is a selection of quotes from this very powerful book:
The easiest way to demonstrate how Islam constitutionalized violence would be to overwhelm you with raw data…I could walk you through the Sunnah, the sayings and actions of Muhammad, narrations that record the assassinations of poets, the killing of women, elders, tribes, caravans, even children; the 86 military campaigns he led or authorized. I could zoom out to 1,400 years of history and recount the 350 million-plus deaths directly resulting from jihad — the imperial conquests from Spain to India, the razing of Christian, Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist civilizations. I could cite the fact that over 96% of all globally designated terrorist organizations today are Islamic, or the more than 60,000 jihadist terrorist attacks carried out in 70 countries over the last 25 years. I could dismantle the narrative that Islam is “open to interpretation” by showing that the Prophet’s life — the uswa hasana, the “perfect example” — is the only valid lens for understanding the Qur’an, meaning that the ideal Muslim is not a philosopher, reformer, or peaceful neighbor, but a man who wages war, kills dissenters, enslaves women, and demands absolute allegiance.
Just as the Palestinian cause in the Arab world serves as a shell for religious hatred, in the West it functions as a shell for something else. The twentieth century unleashed a wave of ideological revolutions — Marxism, Postmodernism, and Critical Theory — that reshaped Western thought. Marxism reframed history as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed. Critical theory cast every social structure, law, tradition, and belief as an instrument of domination. These currents converged into a radical leftist worldview that saw Western civilization — its capitalism, traditions, colonial past, and moral framework — as inherently oppressive.
[This book] is a forensic and unapologetic inquiry into the ideological architecture of a political theology masquerading as a religion. The aim is not simply to explain what Muslims believe, but to show what Islam produces — institutionally, psychologically, and geopolitically.”
The war against Israel is not a border dispute. It is not about settlements, checkpoints, or territory. It is a theological crusade rooted in an Islamic ideology that demands the eradication of Jewish sovereignty to restore a global caliphate. In this worldview, Israel’s existence is not just inconvenient—it is an affront to Allah’s will.
Western civilization is not merely a system; it is a sanctuary. Its laws, values, and moral architecture have sheltered dissidents, heretics, dreamers, reformers, and exiles. It alone dares to write its sins into its history books and teach its children never to repeat them. That is what makes it different. That is so much of what makes it worth defending.
Another misconception is that incompatibility can be ignored — that rival narratives can coexist indefinitely under the umbrella of tolerance. The West, in its generosity, embraced this illusion, believing its openness could hold all stories without cost. But pluralism is not universal. It is a fragile achievement, born of the Judeo-Christian belief that truth can withstand scrutiny and conscience must be free. Pluralism survives only when all parties agree to its rules. When a narrative [Islan] enters that rejects pluralism itself — demanding exclusive allegiance, silencing dissent, or enforcing its moral order by law — tolerance becomes the West’s Achilles’ heel.
[In Judeo-Christian cultures…] The sacred was not authoritarian; it was relational. This is why the West could develop moral philosophy, scientific inquiry, and democratic governance without severing itself from faith. Islam leaves no such space. The Muslim story is confined to a single text — the Qur’an — and a single life — the Prophet Muhammad. The Qur’an is not to be interrogated by reason or conscience but obeyed. Surah 33:36 is explicit: “It is not for a believing man or a believing woman, when Allah and His Messenger have decided a matter, to have any choice in their affair.” In Islam, the mind must bow. Reason is not a partner in revelation but a threat to it. If reason contradicts the Qur’an, reason must submit. If conscience recoils from a command, conscience must be silenced. The very name “Islam” means submission. The believer’s role is not to wrestle, but to obey. Virtue is not measured by thoughtfulness or moral struggle, but by conformity. The life of Muhammad — ordering assassinations, taking child brides, distributing female captives as spoils of war — becomes the unquestionable template for human conduct, sacralized not as history but as timeless righteousness.
And this has consequences far beyond individual psychology, it explains the collective moral [and economic and innovation] stagnation of Islamic societies. In a community shaped by this framework: A man does not avoid injustice because it is wrong. He avoids it because he fears divine retaliation. A woman does not dress modestly because of self-respect or social virtue. She covers because the hadith says that her hair will drag her to hellfire and bring down the community with her. Children are not taught to love the good, but to fear hell and crave paradise. This infantilizes the moral consciousness. It freezes entire generations in pre-conventional morality, unable to ascend into principled reasoning. It creates believers who do not question violence, because violence has been made divine. Believers who do not protest injustice, because conscience is untrained. And believers who cannot separate righteousness from reward.
At the same time, Muslims have mastered the art of adopting progressive language for strategic camouflage. They attach themselves to feminist, LGBTQ, or anti-racist causes to rebrand Islam as compatible with progressive values. In doing so, they secure the left’s protection while advancing a theocratic project that fundamentally contradicts those movements’ stated goals.
History shows where this ends. Islam has never remained in partnership with non-Islamic forces once it gains the upper hand. The 1979 Iranian Revolution is the clearest modern example: leftist and Islamic factions united to overthrow the Shah, but once the Muslims seized control, they purged, imprisoned, and executed their leftist allies. The same fate awaits today’s radical feminists, LGBTQ activists, and socialist revolutionaries who imagine they are paving the road to equality. They will find themselves silenced — or worse — once Islamic objectives are secured.
This hardening process would be limited without infrastructure—but the infrastructure is there. Between 1982 and 2005, Saudi Arabia alone spent more than $75 billion spreading Salafi-Wahhabi Islam worldwide, including the construction of 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 200 Islamic colleges, and 2,000 schools in non-Muslim countries. Much of this infrastructure went directly into Western cities. A European Parliament estimate put Saudi spending on Salafi missionary activities at $10 billion through organizations like the Muslim World League, with Europe as a primary target.
Islam does not produce morality; it produces suppression. It does not build conscience; it builds fear. It does not nurture upright men and women; it breeds double lives. The vices Muslims condemn in the West are not absent in Muslim societies. They are often more rampant, only hidden behind veils. Pornography consumption rates in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt rank among the world’s highest. Homosexual activity thrives in secret.4 Prostitution flourishes under Islamic camouflage through mut‘ah (temporary marriage in Shi’ism) and misyar (in some Sunni contexts). Islam does not eliminate vice; it only drives it underground. When vice is hidden, it mutates. It corrupts everything around it.
The old jihad of force has not disappeared—it is still visible in Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Houthis—but it is no longer the only or even the primary mode of expansion in the West. The modern advance of Islam is bureaucratic jihad. It flows through the same global systems that govern finance, health, education, climate, and migration. It rides on the back of what some call the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP): the intertwined network of international organizations, central banks, think tanks, corporations, NGOs, governments, and media that sets the agenda for nations.
Islam has learned to play this system. Instead of standing outside it, it infiltrates it. Instead of fighting against the United Nations, it captures UN resolutions. Instead of rejecting Western institutions, it forces those institutions to bend under the weight of accusations of racism, Islamophobia, and colonial guilt. Instead of needing to topple governments, it pressures governments to write laws that censor criticism of Islam, subsidize mosques, and re-engineer education. In short: Islam today expands less through direct jihad than through policy jihad.
Islam’s Unique Immunity
Unlike communism or radical leftist ideologies, Islam is not seen as merely political but as a religion. It wraps itself in that mantle, which in the West carries a unique immunity. Governments may ban a party, censor a movement, or outlaw an ideology, but religion occupies a separate, protected category. Islam exploits this shield. The very protections liberal societies extend to religion, freedom of worship, legal recognition, deference to belief, become barriers against critique or containment.
Communism collapsed under scrutiny when its promises failed. Radical leftism can be contested in the open marketplace of ideas. But Islam advances under cover, immune to exposure, because any honest critique is recast as bigotry. The Bolsheviks understood this a century ago: Islam, precisely because it is religion, could be harnessed with less resistance than their atheistic creed. Today’s radical left has rediscovered the same insight. By allying with Islam, they gain a revolutionary partner that enjoys protections they themselves could never claim.
Christian communities, once the bedrock of the Middle East’s cultural and religious landscape, have followed a similarly tragic path. In Egypt, the Copts, who predated Islam by centuries, comprised a significant portion [60-80% is the best estimate] of the population before the Arab conquest. Today, they constitute less than 10% of Egypt’s population, their numbers diminished by centuries of discriminatory taxes, social exclusion, and periodic violence. The 2013 attacks on Coptic churches, following the ousting of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, saw dozens of churches burned and Christians killed, with little intervention from state authorities. These incidents reflect a broader pattern of state complicity or indifference, as Coptic girls are kidnapped and forcibly married to Muslims, and Christian communities face relentless pressure to conform or emigrate.
In Iraq, the Assyrian and Chaldean Christian populations have plummeted from 1.5 million in 2003 to fewer than 200,000 today, driven by sectarian violence and targeted persecution following the Iraqi war. The Islamic State’s 2014 campaign in Mosul, marked by the infamous “Nun” symbol painted on Christian homes, forced thousands to flee, leaving behind centuries-old communities.
In Syria, the civil war has reduced the Christian population from 1.5 million in 2011 to under 500,000, as extremist groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra have systematically targeted Christians for execution, enslavement, or displacement. Lebanon, once a Christian-majority nation, offers a poignant case study in demographic and political decline.
The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), coupled with Syrian occupation and the rise of Hezbollah, has eroded Christian influence, driving many to emigrate. Today, Christians make up less than a third of Lebanon’s population [vs. 60-80% in the 1700s], their political power curtailed by a confessional system that favors Muslim factions.
Even in Jordan, often lauded for its tolerance, Christians face restrictions on religious expression, such as bans on public Christian symbols and prohibitions on converting Muslims. These examples illustrate a sobering truth: Christian communities, despite their historical rootedness, are dwindling under the weight of Islamic dominance.
The middle is where clarity lives. It is where truth is not bent to fit narratives or manipulated to preserve comfort. It doesn’t flinch under the weight of political correctness or ideological pressure. It doesn’t care who’s offended. What Critical Theory poisons, the middle restores. Where it [CT] sees oppression in design, the middle sees order. Where it cries for deconstruction, the middle builds. Where it brands all strength as abuse, the middle distinguishes between tyranny and responsibility. And where it tears down the very concept of truth, the middle insists: truth is not a construct. It is not whiteness. It is not colonialism. It is not Christian supremacy. It is what it is, unbending, clear, uncomfortable, but necessary for civilization to stand.
The middle does not submit to either [Left or Right]. The middle does not care for appeasement or overcorrection. The middle reads the Qur’an and the hadiths. It understands the concept of dar al-Islam and dar al-harb.* It knows that Muhammad was not just a prophet but a warlord, that Sharia is not a spiritual guide but a total system of governance. The middle sees clearly that the threat is not a few extremists but the theological machinery that produces them, generation after generation. And it dares to say so.
Exposing the truth about Islam is not bigotry. It is not “Islamophobia.” It is intellectual integrity.
And only from the middle can such integrity be practiced, because only the middle is free from ideological captivity. It has no need to protect Islam to prove it’s tolerant. It has no need to demonize Muslims to feel superior. It simply tells the truth and prepares accordingly.
* Dar al-Islam (“the abode of Islam”) and Dar al-Harb (“the abode of war”) are classical Islamic jurisprudential categories dividing the world into two spheres: territories under Islamic rule versus territories outside Islamic control.
Ben Slivka 