Let’s face it – Islam is the Nazism of the 21st century. It’s a supremacist ideology that treats entire classes of people like dogshit for no good reason. It’s aggressive, expansionist, and far too arrogant to respond to reason, compromise or even sanity. Most crucial of all, we have ended up fighting it whether we wanted to or not, and it appears the fighting will increase in intensity and scope.

In the century after Islam was founded, it swept out of the Arabian peninsula and immediately began a wave of conquest that took it as far as the gates of Paris. This wave saw Persia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, North Africa and Iberia all fall under the sword.

In the decade after Nazism took power in Germany, it swept out of Central Europe and immediately began a wave of conquest that took it as far as the gates of Moscow. This wave saw Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine fall under the jackboot.

Hitler himself drew inspiration from the conquests of Islam, claiming that if Charles Martel had lost the Battle of Tours and thereby allowed the Umayyad Caliphate to conquer Europe, the Germans would have become heirs to “a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and in subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the German temperament.”

Given such pronouncements, it isn’t surprising that the postwar Allied commanders believed that Nazism was, considered as a meme-school, too virulent to simply go away on its own accord. It would have to be rooted out, and with extreme prejudice.

Denazification required that the All-Lies “rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of the National Socialist ideology.”

Can the West rid Middle Eastern society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of Islamic ideology? In the final analysis we may have to – Islam is every bit as virulent as Nazism, and, like Nazism, has a similar tendency to arise every time some populist wants to climb onto a soapbox and stir up those with a chip on their shoulder.

This column puts forward the claim that the West has a moral imperative to do precisely that. After all, in much the same way that the damage done to the German people by Nazism was ultimately much greater than what had been done to them by the Jews, so too is the damage done to Muslims (especially women) by Islam far greater than, for example, the damage done to Palestinians by Israel.

The final calculus can perhaps best be considered in light of a line from Niccolo Machiavelli’s Prince:

The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don’t just go away, they are only postponed to someone else’s advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy…

To whose advantage is it that the West does not go to war with Islam?

It could be the West – recent advances in solar power, mostly thanks to enormous Chinese investment, suggests that we might be able to reduce our dependency on oil to a fraction of what it currently is. If we did so, the Middle East would lose not only much of its income but also its strategic importance, and Islam would fade into irrelevance.

It could be Islam – with every passing year, their proportion of the European population increases from a combination of mass immigration and a higher birth rate. As their propaganda becomes more sophisticated, more lone wolves would be inspired to commit terror attacks within Europe which would inspire others who believe that Europe is finally, after 1,300 years, ripe for the taking.

In the end it is most likely to come down to a question of will. The European will to survive never fully recovered from the Hemoclysm of World Wars I and II; the Islamic world is yet to recover from the century of humiliation that began with the British action to shatter the Ottoman Empire.