Also, as Hitler railed against the “victimization” of the Germans by Jews and other “foreigners,” so Islamists insist that the world’s Muslims are under assault by Jews, Christians and other “infidels.” To “defend” themselves, no acts – no matter how vile and inhuman – are forbidden. Hitler would have approved. "Terrorism,” he once said, “is the best political weapon.” With uncanny prescience, he said too: “Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.”
Hitler preached that Germans and Aryans were a master race, born to rule over others. Militant Islamism is similarly supremacist.
But Islamists offer one incentive even Hitler could not: the afterlife. Those who fight and die for Islam become shaheeds – martyrs entitled to a seat next to Allah and 72 virgins. (Female martyrs spend eternity with the man of their dreams). Forty more seats in paradise are reserved for friends and family.
The 20th century’s greatest analyst of mass movements was Eric Hoffer, a self-educated longshoreman who wrote ten books and won a Presidential Medal of Freedom. In “The True Believer,” published in 1951, he wrote: “Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one. The same is true of the force which drives them on to expansion and world domination.”
He wrote as well: “The practice of terror serves the true believer not only to cow and crush his opponents but also to invigorate and intensify his own faith.” Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah and others of their ilk may be evil and perhaps they are mad. But it is a serious mistake to underestimate them, as so many of us do