Canadian Killed Fighting Islamic State Called Progressives 'Useful Idiots of Jihad' in Impassioned Essay

A Canadian reportedly killed as a volunteer with Kurdish forces battling the Islamic State group in Syria wrote an impassioned manifesto in which he detailed his motives for traveling to Syria, painted the Islamic State conflict as a civilizational battle between reason and theocracy and blasted progressives who downplay Islamist violence as “useful idiots of jihad.”

The conservative Canadian newspaper the National Post published John Robert Gallagher’s essay, which Gallagher originally posted on Facebook in May.  Gallagher, 32, was killed last Wednesday in Syria, Canada’s CBC reported. Reports conflicted as to whether he was killed in a suicide bombing or was shot.

John Robert Gallagher was reportedly killed by an Islamic State fighter after traveling to Syria to volunteer with Kurdish forces. (Image via John Gallagher/Facebook)

In his essay, Gallagher first acknowledged that joining the fight against the better-equipped and better-staffed Islamic State was “objectively insane.”

While he supported an independent Kurdistan, he said that the “better reason” for joining was what he described as the fight against the “new bad idea: Theocracy.”

Not surprisingly, given his position on individual freedoms and Islam-fueled violence, his Facebook page included Bill Maher and “Amnesty for Edward Snowden-Canada” among his “favorites.”

During the 1500s, Gallagher wrote, Christianity pushed religious rule; however, today, he pointed out that Muslims are the “most violent proponents of theocracy.”

“There is nothing uniquely Islamic about this trend, except that it just so happens that the most violent proponents of theocracy today happen to be Muslim,” he wrote. “The Muslim world has been dominated by theocratic politics for decades now, and that war has overflowed to engulf the rest of the world.”

The Canadian fighter warned that the West is on the “front lines” of this conflict and pointed an accusatory finger at "pacifists" on the left who think Muslims "enjoy their mental oppression":

The stance of pacifists and the appeasement left on this issue is not tolerance, but ironically, what it claims to oppose: fearmongering, and even ‘Islamophobia,’ since it betrays their utter terror of offending the sensibilities of immigrant communities and the so-called ‘community leaders’ who are presumed to give them their marching orders. Their pre-emptive apologism for barbarity betrays a deep contempt for the character of immigrant Muslims, since it presumes that they enjoy their mental oppression and prefer the moral stagnation of sharia law and the hadith to the pleasures of an open, cosmopolitan, secular society.

He also condemned government tolerance — in the name of “cultural sensitivity” — of Islamist “thuggishness,” writing that “elements of our government are perfectly willing to accept that thuggishness is something we must automatically and un-judgmentally expect from Muslims, that it is US who must accommodate ourselves to THEM. What we need here is more historical education, not cultural sensitivity.”

“Our war is not just about theocracy; it is between those who still believe in the enlightenment, that self-determination is the most basic and most crucial of all human rights, that the first duty of every man in society is to defend the mechanisms by which we make ourselves free; and those who ultimately lack the capacity to believe in anything,” Gallagher wrote.

“These people have been corrupted by the masochistic fables circulated by leftists and identity politicians that tell us Western society is inherently racist, inherently sexist, and inherently imperialist, when it is Western society which pioneered the ideas that racism, sexism, and imperialism might be a problem in the first place,” he continued.

“Because of our beliefs, we live in the most racially inclusive, sexually liberated, and anti-imperialist society which has ever existed in human history, and to teach young people anything different is a criminal act of intellectual violence,” he added.

Gallagher accused “progressive thinking” of contributing to an “environment of moral decay”:

And the crisis we face today is the direct result of this ‘progressive’ thinking: we are now under threat by those who take advantage of the masochism and apathy fostered by the left to recruit people who will take a violently affirmative ideology over nihilistic pessimism, even or especially if that means committing atrocities that would make the average ‘imperialist’ vomit. Those who contribute to this environment of moral decay and vulnerability are the useful idiots of jihad and fellow travelers of theocracy, and it is the duty of thinking persons to oppose their influence by every means at our disposal.

“We have the ability to eradicate jihadism in our lifetime,” Gallagher wrote before he, himself, was killed in the fight against Islamist extremists.

“I’m prepared to give my life in the cause of averting the disaster we are stumbling towards as a civilization,” he wrote. “With some fortitude and guts, we can purge the sickness that’s poisoning our society, and come together to defeat this ultimate evil.”

Read his entire essay at the National Post.