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.