Islamic Jihad, Cultural Marxism and the Transformation of the West
by W. August Mayer
San Francisco: Pipeline Media, 2016. 209 pp. $14.95, paper.
Reviewed by Beila Rabinowitz
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2018
In this in-depth study, Mayer recounts how three pivotal figures in Europe, Karl Marx; Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist theorist; and Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch film maker murdered by an Islamic terrorist, changed the trajectory of civil society and by extension Western civilization.
He calls the merging of Marxism and Islamism an “unholy alliance” whose aim is to dismantle and destroy Western civilization. Islamists share the same goals as the left, to subvert and destroy civil society and the established order. Both ideologies seek to foment revolution to overturn the established order and replace it with their radical utopian vision. Ideologues such as Marx and Sayyid Qutb, the founder of modern Islamism, were motivated by antipathy toward Western values and democratic freedoms, which Marx perceived as materialism and Qutb as immorality.
Mayer believes “both of these philosophies must be viewed as enemy threat doctrines” and calls Marxism “the sharia of the left.” The author warns that “when nations lose their souls, their days are numbered.” Mayer shouts out a wake-up call about the disintegration of democracy and provides the intellectual arsenal to combat it.
Beila Rabinowitz
Militant Islam Monitor
That’s it? That’s the whole article? That’s the shortest review of an “indepth study”
Sounds good. I will get it. User comment:
“This, in my opinion, is a very important book. In slightly over 200 pages it brilliantly sets forth the historic march of the Cultural Marxist movement from its origins in Russia and Germany to the United states, and its methodical subversion of the institutions that have sustained Western civilization, starting with academia and then to the media and government If you want to know about the communist ideas that propel Antifa, Black Lives Matter, groups promoting “diversity”, “multiculturalism” and open borders, the unholy alliance between the left and radical Islam, and the myriad tried and true tactics of communism employed by Lenin and Trotsky as modified by Antonio Gramsci, you must read this. Anyone who reads the newspapers should realize that Gramsci’s slow march through the institutions of the West is happening today and taking America closer to the revolution that Marxists hope will put an end to capitalism in its bastion. You will have to ignore Mr. Mayer’s insistence on including a rather lame, brief claim that Palestine doesn’t exist, and his inclusion of a short coda and flyleaf inclusion of his bad poetry at the end of the book (perhaps because he is the publisher as well as the author), but don’t allow this to ignore what he advances. The insights are brilliant and most timely. If only mainstream publishers would advance these insights.”
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