Religious War: East and West opens by citing “the underground diplomats” at the New Sisyphus:
One of the most common observations about World War II was that if only Western leaders had heeded what the National Socialist Worker’s Party and its leader Adolf Hitler were saying, they would have known of the grave danger facing the world. After all, it’s not as if the Nazi Party or its frenzied Führer tried to hide what they were about. On the contrary, in speech after speech, newspaper after newspaper and book after book, Hitler and other senior Nazis laid out in some detail their plans for European domination, the destruction of parliamentary democracy and the elimination of the Jewish people.
And what do America’s enemies say today?
In an audiotape released on January 23, 2005, Zarqawi puts forth a view which he has repeated many times in the past, but which, like Mein Kampf, some are determined never to hear. In the audio Zarqawi cursed democracy because it promoted such un-Islamic behavior as freedom of religion, rule of the people, freedom of expression, separation of religion and state, forming political parties and majority rule. Freedom of speech was particularly evil because it allowed “even cursing God. This means that there is nothing sacred in democracy.”