A French government commission of inquiry about the Muslim terror attacks on the Bataclan Theater in Paris last November heard testimony that some of the victims had been castrated and their testicles placed in their mouths. For those who know anything about Muslim society in the Arab world, the news is hardly surprising. For those who know anything about the blindspots of western democracy, it is also not surprising that this knowledge was kept from the French people for nearly a year. It is clear that Islamic terrorists are intent on cutting off the balls not only of the people they kill, but also of those they don’t, and especially of the leaders we have elected to defend us. In that they seem to be succeeding.

From Ramallah to Gaza, from Cairo to Teheran, in the Muslim no-go zones of Europe and the open society of America, not to mention Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Saudi Arabia, the drumbeat of repressed sexual desire has fused with the hatred of all things western, democratic and Jewish – what Muslim clerics and patriarchs roll into the grab bag of infidel. And as usual, the return of the repressed finds expression in rape and murder on the streets of Tel Aviv and Cologne, in Swedish towns and Florida nightclubs and Turkish jails where David Lean’s Lawrence again comes to life.

That’s what happens in societies where kinship determines all. Blood ties decide who is your enemy and who is your friend; the defense of family honor trumps all else. In that cauldron a tight lid is kept on sexual liberty, for it threatens the tight leash that keeps all in check. Were women to choose with whom they sleep and marry, or sons to announce they have have found a male lover, the bonds that keep the individual subordinate to family discipline would quickly pull apart. In such a society sexual liberty is sexual deviancy, to be condemned and eliminated. But also to be exploited. The desires which cannot be given recognition can still be used to avoid shame or settle scores. So in Gaza political opponents of Hamas are labeled homosexual and disposed of. So too are sexually active unmarried women forced into suicide bombing missions in the Palestinian Authority.

But even such tactics cannot repress the sexual instincts forever. Along comes Islam, a fundamentalist religion if ever there was one, born in deceit and propagated by the sword, intolerant of the other to the point of fanaticism, and the lethal cocktail to mobilize all that sexual fury is ready to hand. Think of it. Rows and rows of Muslim men at prayer, their rear ends high in the air as they bow over their prayer rugs waiting for Allah’s penetration. Little wonder that homosexuality assumes such terrifying proportions in Muslim denunciations of the evil western society will bring. Little wonder too that given a chance to eliminate the threat, murder is not enough. Sexual mutilation of the enemy alone can put the demons to rest. The revenge on the infidel is also revenge on all that their own society exacts as the price of admission. Sexual maturity becomes the submission that the very word Islam means and that the society requires. One has only to read the wet dreams of Arab journalists that are shamelessly printed in their newspapers. Imagine then when all that Muslim migrant male testosterone hits the streets of western civilization. It simply goes crazy.

Yet precious little is said of this in the western free press. Rapists in German towns are given community service for their crimes when punished at all. Better than in Pakistan where rapists simply go scot free; but not much better. An American born Muslim shoots up a gay nightclub in Orlando and no one connects the dots. Not even gays who march in their Pride Week parades under banners that proclaim Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. The very people who should stand up and defend western society, the one that is not run on family honor, the one that gives space and comfort to individuals, simply hide their heads in the sand and hope the madness will not come to a theater near them.

Maybe they simply do not understand the heroic achievement of western democracy. Maybe they do not understand that although people are the same everywhere in terms of their chromosomal structure and psychic confusion, their societies are not the same. But it is precisely this difference in society that makes all the difference in the world. Ethan Canin, an American author, wrote this lovely sentence in his book, Carry Me Across The Water: “Greenery, water, settlement, the enduring journey of children: the world was the same in every corner of its reach.” Unfortunately, this is not so in societies that groom their children to become human bombs and terrorists who sexually mutilate their victims.

Because we live in a democracy we are schooled in the ways of tolerance and compromise. We learn and expect that our outraged passions are no excuse for rape and murder, not even when we find someone in bed with our spouse. We learn and expect that homosexuals are not to be killed because they offend our moral sensibilities. Modern democracies, in short, calm down the moral temperature and soften our habits. They also allow us all greater freedom, which is their great virtue and strength, even if freedom brings its own share of problems. De Tocqueville understood this in 1840 when he visited America on a tour of its prisons. The Muslim world still does not, and nowhere more so than in that misnomer of a failed state called Palestine.

I explain all this in great detail in my book Ten Years And Counting And Truer Than Ever (That awful mess in the Middle East and what we can learn from it). Buy it and read it. You can click here to do so. It was written ten years ago and turned down by any publisher I approached, but events since then have borne out everything I wrote. Retitled, it sheds much light on the current impasse we find ourselves in.

De Tocqueville also understood that democracies run the risk of perishing from their moral flabbiness and the multiplicity of their internal differences. The current state of modern democracies suggest that his concern was well placed. If we do not defend freedom we risk losing it. It is time to connect the dots. It is time to understand what modern society is and what it is not. That’s what my book, Understanding Modern Society: Why Luhmann Matters, does. Check it out on this website under the sociology rubric. And in the meantime think about this: which is the society you wish to bequeath to your children?