Boko Haram is the name of a Muslim terrorist gang in Nigeria that has murdered hundreds of thousands of their compatriots, men and women and children, by shooting them, chopping them into pieces, and burning them. The words mean literally that book-learning is forbidden by Islam, and imply that civilization is evil and must be destroyed. Illiteracy is good. The murdering hordes are driven by religious enthusiasm. They are obeying the commandments of their god as they believe he revealed them to his prophet Muhammad.

The Muslim mass murderers who attacked America on September 9, 2001, were moved by the same passion to perform the same service to the same god in obedience to the same commandments. 

And the Muslim organization called the Taliban is driven by the same passion for destruction inspired by the same commandments of the same religion.

David Horowitz writes at Front Page:

The Taliban’s spokesman put forward [to the capitulating Biden administration] the reasonable-sounding offer to respect our culture if we will respect theirs. What is [the Taliban’s] culture? Their culture is to throw acid in the face of any woman whose required Burka shows too much flesh, and to murder them if they are guilty of “fornication” – after a trial in which the jury is all male. Their culture is to behead an entire family in front of its father and then to behead him for working for the Americans. This atrocity occurred during the Kabul airlift after Joe Biden had made these barbaric killers the security for America’s withdrawal.

The atrocity of 9/11 was a deeply religious act. But the savage passion to destroy that drove the perpetrators is not exclusively religious. It can and does drive the uncivilized anywhere at any time.

The brilliant essayist Theodore Dalrymple often witnessed its work. He wrote (in part) in the Autumn 2001 issue of City Journal:

I learned that the passion to destroy, far from being “also” a constructive one, as the famous but foolish remark of the Russian anarchist Bakunin would have it, soon becomes autonomous, unattached to any other purpose but indulged in purely for the pleasure that destruction itself brings. …

I saw the revolt against civilization and the restraints and frustrations it entails in many countries, but nowhere more starkly than in Liberia in the midst of the civil war there. I arrived in Monrovia when there was no longer any electricity or running water; no shops, no banks, no telephones, no post office; no schools, no transport, no clinics, no hospitals. Almost every building had been destroyed in whole or in part: and what had not been destroyed had been looted.

I inspected the remains of the public institutions. They had been destroyed with a thoroughness that could not have been the result of mere military conflict. Every last piece of equipment in the hospitals (which had long since been emptied of staff and patients) had been laboriously disassembled beyond hope of repair or use. Every wheel had been severed by metal cutters from every trolley, cut at the cost of what must have been a very considerable effort. It was as if a horde of people with terrible experiences of hospitals, doctors, and medicine had passed through to exact their revenge.

But this was not the explanation, because every other institution had undergone similar destruction. The books in the university library had been one and all—without exception—pulled from the shelves and piled into contemptuous heaps, many with pages torn from them or their spines deliberately broken.

It was the revenge of barbarians upon civilization, and of the powerless upon the powerful, or at least upon what they perceived as the source of their power. … Could there have been a clearer indication of hatred of the lower for the higher?

In fact there was—and not very far away, in a building called the Centennial Hall, where the inauguration ceremonies of the presidents of Liberia took place. The hall was empty now, except for the busts of former presidents, some of them overturned, around the walls—and a Steinway grand piano, probably the only instrument of its kind in the entire country, two-thirds of the way into the hall. The piano, however, was not intact: its legs had been sawed off (though they were by design removable) and the body of the piano laid on the ground, like a stranded whale. Around it were disposed not only the sawed-off legs, but little piles of human feces.

I had never seen a more graphic rejection of human refinement. I tried to imagine other possible meanings of the scene but could not. Of course, the piano represented a culture that was not fully Liberia’s own and had not been assimilated fully by everyone in the country: but that the piano represented not just a particular culture but the very idea of civilization itself was obvious in the very coarseness of the gesture of contempt.

The passion for the destruction of Western “white” culture has spread through America. It is a movement called “cancel culture”. Monuments, statues, paintings, murals, books, are smashed; historical records of all sorts are consigned to oblivion.

Or at the very least marked as objectionable. The founding documents of the nation, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are now labeled with a “Harmful Contents Alert” warning.  

The country’s flag is burnt, desecrated – even in the schools and universities.

Sportsmen and women refuse to stand for the national anthem. They kneel on one knee to insult it – to insult their country.

And white Democrats who govern the nation, have knelt in sympathy with that message. They knelt in the Capitol, the place and supreme symbol of government by the people – by Americans of all colors. Their message was clearly: dulce at decorum est for Americans to hate their country. It was an eloquent gesture meaning that these United States are evil. 

That “whiteness” is evil and America is “too white”.

That Western civilization is characterized by “whiteness”. It is a cult of “white supremacy”. It is too whitely heterosexual. Too whitely free.  Too whitely capitalist.  Its system of “heteropatriarchal capitalism” is unendurable and must be destroyed.

So “whiteness” is being “dismantled” in public libraries – presumably by the removal of unapproved books from the shelves.

Musicians want to stop performing works by white composers.

Math teachers declare that to demand accuracy is racist.

“Cancel culture” is the translation of “Boko Haram”. 

“Boko Haram” is the perfect motto for this new age.

We do not think the oft-repeated diagnosis of the conflict between Islam and the West as “a clash of civilizations” is true, because it is actually a clash of a dark age force with modernity; of the primitively superstitious with the enlightened; of barbarism with civilization. 

Barbarians know nothing of what we understand by the word “culture”. Their ways are called a “culture” by anthropologists and sociologists and Prince Charles, but that’s jargon.

In his book Monrovia Mon Amour, Anthony Daniels describes the library of the (only) university in Liberia, wrecked in the course of civil strife:

I walked through the three or four floors of the library. Books had been pulled from the shelves and hurled across the floor, and even the books that remained on the shelves were at strange angles, as though the destroyers had been interrupted in the work and obliged to flee in mid-vandalism. There were rooms piled five feet high in books, their subject matter promiscuously intermixed, soil science with Herodotus. The covers were bent or torn off, the pages ripped out. … They were piled as if in preparation for a bonfire, round which the illiterate and the doubtfully literate might dance for joy.

There the meaning of “Boko Haram” was illustrated. “Book-learning is forbidden” (“haram” meaning “forbidden by sharia law”).

This is from The Japan Times:

When Islamic State group militants invaded the Central Library of Mosul earlier this month, they were on a mission to destroy a familiar enemy: other people’s ideas.

Residents say the extremists smashed the locks that had protected the biggest repository of learning in the northern Iraq town, and loaded around 2,000 books — including children’s stories, poetry, philosophy and tomes on sports, health, culture and science — into six pickup trucks. They left only Islamic texts. …

Since the Islamic State group seized a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria, it has … destroyed many archaeological relics, deeming them pagan, and even Islamic sites that it considers idolatrous. …

Mosul, the biggest city in the Islamic State group’s self-declared caliphate, boasts a relatively educated, diverse population that seeks to preserve its heritage sites and libraries. In the chaos that followed the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, residents near the Central Library hid some of its centuries-old manuscripts in their own homes to prevent their theft or destruction by looters.

But this time, the Islamic State group has made the penalty for such actions death. Presumed destroyed are the Central Library’s collection of Iraqi newspapers dating to the early 20th century, maps and books from the Ottoman Empire and book collections contributed by around 100 of Mosul’s establishment families.

Days after the Central Library’s ransacking, [IS]  broke into University of Mosul’s library. They made a bonfire out of hundreds of books on science and culture, destroying them in front of students.

A University of Mosul history professor … reported particularly heavy damage to the archives of a Sunni Muslim library, the library of the 265-year-old Latin Church and Monastery of the Dominican Fathers and the Mosul Museum Library with works dating back to 5000 B.C. …

The professor said Islamic State group militants appeared determined to “change the face of this city . . . by erasing its iconic buildings and history”.  Since routing government forces and seizing Mosul last summer, the Islamic State group has destroyed dozens of historic sites …

An Iraqi lawmaker, Hakim al-Zamili, said the Islamic State group “considers culture, civilization and science as their fierce enemies”.

Al-Zamili, who leads the parliament’s Security and Defense Committee, compared the Islamic State group to raiding medieval Mongols, who in 1258 ransacked Baghdad. Libraries’ ancient collections of works on history, medicine and astronomy were dumped into the Tigris River, purportedly turning the waters black from running ink.

“The only difference is that the Mongols threw the books in the Tigris River, while now Daesh is burning them,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. “Different method, but same mentality.”

And these extracts are from our post “Old civilizations put to the sword”, October 1, 2014:

Islam is one of the most ruinous forces in history. Giulio Meotti wrote this short account of its barbarous destruction of the world’s heritage of past civilizations.

(Note: Wherever Meotti uses the word “Islamists” we would use the word “Muslims” or “jihadis”. We do not believe there is a variety of Islam that needs a different name.)

Around the year 645 A.D., Omar Ibn Al Khattab, the second caliph and a successor of Muhammad, set fire to the library of Alexandria.  …

The world lost several centuries of knowledge and thought due to that Islamic fire.

Today another caliph, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has issued a fatwa against the World Heritage Sites of the Middle East. The much vaunted Middle Eastern richness is shrinking to a cultural desert …

For over five thousand years, many civilizations have left their mark in Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Arameans, Jews and Romans. Their ancient buried cities, palaces and temples are scattered throughout what is now northern Iraq and eastern Syria. Now most of the archaeological wealth is under the control of the Islamic State. Two days ago, Isis leveled the “green church” of Tikrit, the symbol of Assyrian Christianity in the seventh century.

Among the most important sites now under the control of Islam are four ancient cities – Nineveh, Kalhu, Dur Sharrukin and Ashur – which, at different times, were the capitals of the powerful Assyrian empire. The greatest damage has been wreaked by Islam on the Palace of Kalhu, from which the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II reigned in the ninth century B.C.

They have destroyed some of the “ziggurats”, the impressive temples that rise into the sky. The non-Islamic tradition of Mosul no longer exists. The Islamists have destroyed thirty historic sites, including the shrines of the biblical prophets [well, anyway, biblical characters – ed] Seth, Daniel and Jonah.

In Syria, the Islamic terrorists have demolished relics as part of their “purge of paganism”, destroying Assyrian statues. In a video, they unashamedly claim the duty of the mujahideen is to “remove the appearance of evil”.

Harta, the archeological site … is in IS hands and risks destruction. …

In Libya, the “treasures of Benghazi”, coins, jewelry, and small statues of antiquity have been lost since the revolution of May 2011. …

The great library of Al Saeh in Tripoli, Lebanon, was recently given over to the flames by the Islamists. …

Meotti lists many more examples of such destruction.

The people doing these things are savages. As savages always do, they itch to destroy what they do not understand.

They are burning books because they cannot understand them, and out of envy of those who do.

Much worse – atrociously – they are burning living people.

Today we hear that the Islamic State savages have burnt alive a captured Jordanian pilot, Muath al-Rasasbeh. They’ve issued a video of him standing in a cage as the flames consume him.