Islam fails both individuals and societies, yet non-Muslims keep making excuses for it. As a set of ideas for the ordering of the lives of individuals and societies, Islam has proven to be a singular failure. Aside from the accident of geology that has provided them with oil wealth, Islamic states are generally economic basket cases and serial violators of human rights. All too many converts to Islam end up turning to terrorism. Yet in the face of these truths, which historian and Islam expert Robert Spencer definitively establishes here, it has become a cultural habit in the non-Muslim West to retreat into fantasies and tout glories of Islam that are more imagined than real. These widely disseminated falsehoods have created the cultural context for the fad of conversions to Islam that swept TikTok in the wake of the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and widely believed falsehoods regarding an Islamic Golden Age and Muslim inventions of the past. Often, these fantasies are handsomely subsidized, even government-sponsored endeavors. The Western governments that pour money into these endeavors hoping that they will lead to an eradication of “Islamophobia” are ignoring the real problem: Islam’s failure breeds fanaticism and intolerance, as Spencer explains in detail. He demonstrates that if the failure and tragedy of Islam is not faced honestly, the same pattern of societal destruction and decay that swept over much of the Islamic world will bring down Western civilization as well. Spencer’s findings will infuriate the woke and blinkered—but they will find them impossible to refute.

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