The banality of evil has a new face. The West is so far advanced down the path of cultural relativism that its political leaders do not respond when Islamic leaders suggest killing homosexual people is acceptable if decreed by a committee. We have seen this all before. It was called Nazism.
The banality of evil was a phrase coined by political theorist Hannah Arendt to describe the methodical, bureaucratic nature of the Nazi killing machine.
Compassionate death for undesirables. After a century marked by crimes against humanity so horrific they required a new lexicon, we should be alert to the language that announces the spirit of genocide moving through a nation.
Yet in the days following the Orlando jihadist attack that claimed 49 lives at a gay nightclub, it emerged a sheik who preached death for gays was on a speaking tour in Australia. Sheik Farrokh Sekaleshfar stated in 2013: “Death is the sentence. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about this. Death is the sentence. We have to have that compassion for people. With homosexuals, it’s the same. Out of compassion, let’s get rid of them now.”
Suggesting killing gays is acceptable demands strong response
The public outcry was so fierce that the sheik left the country, but we are yet to learn if politicians have ensured he will never return. As though the week had not yielded enough murdered gay men to satiate hate sheiks, we learnt that the leadership of the Australian National Imams Council includes at least three executives who believe homosexuality should be punished by death. Their justification for such barbarity? Islamic law.
Speaking to The Weekend Australian, the chairman of the Council of Imams Queensland, Imam Yusuf Peer, defended capital punishment for homosexuals because “this is what the sharia law says and we have to follow that”. And then he uttered a sentence that chilled my blood: “Nobody can implement Islamic sharia on their own. There is a procedure, there is arbitration, there is a committee.”
There is the banality of evil.
There was no single cause of the Holocaust, no pivotal moment in which the fate of millions was surrendered to the darkest forces of humanity. The truth is much worse. There were years of political deals between governments, scores of ominous warnings and innumerable propaganda methods designed by the Nazi regime to stir the hatred of the masses and solicit their acquiescence to the murder of fellow citizens the regime deemed undesirable. There is no final solution to the Final Solution.