Since 9/11, a lot of nonsense has been talked about
the root cause of Islamist terror.
The left has attempted to explain it as driven by
"poverty" or "oppression",
or American foreign policy,
or Israel,
or at least some sort of logical grievance.
But we are gradually coming to see that Islamist terror
is in fact driven by a vile, totalitarian, hallucinatory ideology
- Islamism
- that has its own dynamic,
and that is not based on any logical or rational grievances.
Many are now also realising that Islamist terror before 9/11
- such as in Israel
- was basically the same thing.
Arab terror against Israel
is also
fundamentally based on Islamism,
not on logical or rational grievances.
Assuming there must be a reason that makes sense behind 9/11
is a basic logical error.
The cause of 9/11 may make no sense at all.
There was no logical or coherent reason behind most of history's mass killings.
There was no logical reason behind Hitler's genocide of harmless, rural, East European Jewish peasants.
There was no logical reason behind Stalin's democide of harmless lower-middle-class "kulaks".
The idea that 9/11 has to have a logical cause is an assertion that fails to understand human nature.
Kevin Myers, 9 Sept 2011, says followers of
Chomsky
think that evil deeds must stem from some logical cause or grievance.
While followers of
Edmund Burke
understand that evil men committing evil deeds is the oldest story in history.
"On the one hand, there were the Chomskyites, henceforth the chumps, who felt that there was an underlying "reason" for 9/11, which had been "created" by US policies. And there were the others, the Burkians, who felt that 9/11 represented yet another occasion when evil had captured the souls of men.
We'd seen it before - the French Revolution, the October Revolution in Russia, the Third Reich in Germany, Mao and Pol Pot. And now, here we go again."
He wasn't born evil: Bin Laden
(2nd from right) in Sweden in 1971.
He wasn't born evil. He chose evil.
Bin Laden's life illustrates clearly how Islamist terror is not caused by poverty or oppression.
He wasn't poor. In fact, he was obscenely wealthy.
His life's work was as a rich man killing people who were much poorer than he was.
He was never oppressed either.
Islamist terror is not caused by poverty or oppression.
It is caused by memes.
It is caused by ideas inside the killers' heads - and nothing more.
The idea that 9/11 must have had some logical cause:
Infallible haters?
by Thomas Sowell
- The idea that hatred has to have a good reason
is absurd
and ignores history.
Why talk is useless
by Andrew Bolt
- The Islamofascists
"have no cause. They have nothing for us
to discuss."
Sometimes, it is true, there is a cause.
There is something to discuss.
But sometimes not.
And this is one of those cases where there is not.
The only proper response to Islamofascism is total war.
These guys want to kill us anyway,
Mark Steyn,
March 15, 2004,
after Madrid,
on the difference between Islamist terrorism
and IRA or ETA terrorism.
Victor Davis Hanson
rejects the Chomsky-Said idea that 9/11 must have had some logical cause.
- ".. this
post-Marxist idea that wars are the product of material grievance or clear-cut exploitation, unfortunately, is not true;
.. so many wars in antiquity and in the modern world start because of perceived grievances only. They deal with
irrational elements like fear and honour, and we don't necessarily have to believe they have any basis in fact."
Philip Bobbitt (paraphrased):
"for instance, if terrorism is rooted in Muslim grievances about western support for Israel or engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq, why are so few of those apprehended in the West for terrorist crimes Palestinians, Afghans or Iraqis?"
The terrorists' complaints are fantastic
and are not based on reason:
Lo, the Poor Terrorist
by Theodore Dalrymple
-
"The idea that if someone is prepared to do something truly
horrible, he must have a worthy cause remains attractive to
liberal intellectuals"
Basically,
the left don't understand the Islamists.
Islamist
terrorism is not caused by poverty.
It is not caused by any rational grievance
or logical complaint.
It is caused by a sick fantasy ideology
flourishing in a corrupt political world
of dictatorships.
The solution is not more aid.
The solution is not to address their "grievances".
The solution
is to attack the followers of the fantasy ideology
wherever they live.
The solution
is to invade
and end the dictatorships in their home countries.
The solution
is to transform their entire world against their will.
The 9/11 attackers
are motivated by fantasy that bears no relation to the real world,
and "it is absurd for us to look for the so-called
"root" causes of terrorism in poverty, lack of education, a lack of democracy, etc.
Such factors play absolutely no role in the creation of a fantasy ideology."
"Equally absurd, on this interpretation, is the notion that we must review our own policies
toward the Arab world - or the state of Israel - in order to find ways to make our enemies
hate us less.
... There is no political policy we could take that would change the attitude of our
enemies - short, perhaps, of a massive nationwide conversion to fundamentalist Islam."
Describing them as simply "evil" is not a bad response.
"There is one decisive advantage to the "evildoer" metaphor, and it is this:
Combat with
evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust
your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers' point
of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on
the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the
same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic - you try to wipe it out."
The terrorists have no clue what is happening in the world:
Of course the terrorists' complaints are not based on logic and evidence,
because the terrorists are usually completely ignorant of world history and politics.
They rarely have a clue what is happening in the world.
All they know is that they love Islam.
Poll, Nov 2010: 92 percent of Afghans have never heard of the 9/11 attacks.
92 percent of Afghans have no idea why America came to their country.
Ignorant, illiterate, and above all, incurious.
Kevin Myers, November 10, 2009, on the "grievances" of Islamism:
"within, it seems, all "moderate" Muslim communities are some fundamentalists who hold the local franchise for the global grievance of Islam. And no one really knows what such Islamic fundamentalists want, because the demands change according to whatever market the local Islamic franchisee is operating in.
...
somewhere inside the greater Islamic mind is an absurd sense of victimhood: and where there is no local grievance, why then there is always "Palestine", as if those few disputed acres in the vast Islamic landmass of Afro-Asia merited the unanimous and indignant global furies of all Muslims, from Delhi to Dearborn."
Rachel Woodlock, 23 Mar 2011, expresses in almost pure form the absurd idea that Islamic terrorism is caused by ... fear of Islamic terrorism!
She says
"we can cut the oxygen that fuels the flames of [Islamist] fanaticism by"
-
not "stopping Islamist hate speech",
not "deporting Islamist clerics",
not "fighting all support for sharia or jihad",
not "controlling Islamic immigration"
-
no, rather, by:
"actively countering anti-Muslim paranoia."
There you go. To stop Islamic terror you should clamp down on opponents of Islamic terror!
She says that to stop Islamic terror in Australia, we need:
"societies in which there is religious freedom and the state ensures social services are provided to all - this means facilitating the settlement and integration of Islam and Muslims in Australian society."
Roland Shirk, 23 Mar 2011, shreds her argument.
"All that Muslims need to be peaceful is multicultural laws and a generous welfare state. If only someone had tried that strategy before!
...
The problem with Islam in the West is that we don't yet have enough Muslims in our midst, we don't bend over backwards to accommodate their preferences, and we don't cut them enough government checks to make sure that they really feel welcome. Because of this, many Muslims have grown understandably sulky, and ignored the dictates of their own peaceful religion to become suicide bombers, honor killers, and preachers of totalitarian sharia. Isn't that what every group would do in that situation?
Remember how the Southeast Asian “boat people” in the 1970s formed terror cells throughout the West? How the Haitians who fled that country's political chaos in the 80s took to blowing up New York skycrapers?"
Cracking comment on Woodlock's article:
"So when Muslims bomb coptic Christians in Egypt is that due to western racism and discrimination as well?"
Actor
Matthew Modine, Mar 2010, illustrates the failure of so many well-meaning liberal westerners to understand jihadis.
He absurdly says:
"Imagine if somebody were to really sit down with Osama Bin Laden and say, 'listen man,what is it that you're so angry at me about that you're willing to have people strap bombs to themselves, or get inside of airplanes and fly them into buildings.' That would be the miracle if we can get, sit down and talk to our enemies and find a way for them to hear us."
As Greg Gutfeld says:
"Modine just turned 51, but his opinion reflects that of a six year old girl ... It's a perspective that suggests one has never contemplated evil beyond a character portrayed in a script. MM fails to realize that there are people out there who see your desire for "understanding" as one reason why you'll be killed first."
Ignore the idiot commentary against Gutfeld on the video above.
Original Modine interview was
here.
".. consider the case of Russia. For over a century Russia and then the USSR dominated and oppressed Central Asian Muslims. The Soviets then brutalized Afghanistan
...
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the attempt by Muslims in Chechnya to gain their independence has been brutally suppressed at the cost of perhaps 50,000 dead
...
So is Russia, its hands red with Muslim blood, the "Great Satan" of the jihadists and their state sponsor, Iran? Of course not.
The United States is: a country that never colonized or ruled a Muslim nation, a country that helped Muslims in Afghanistan, a country that liberated Muslim Kuwait, a country that bombed and killed Christian Serbs to protect Balkan Muslims, a country that has spent its blood and treasure getting rid of Iran's most bitter enemy and the Shia Muslims' worst oppressor, Saddam Hussein,
a country that even now is fighting to empower Iran's fellow Shiites.
We are the Great Satan, while the Iranian mullocracy happily does business with the Russians and seldom says a word of condemnation against them.
Why is this so? Obviously, Russia serves Iran's interests by helping with their nuclear development and protecting its interests on the Security Council. But there's another important reason Russia's much more extensive crimes against Islam are given a pass:
the jihadists know the Russians are not susceptible to the therapeutic blackmail used against a self-loathing West.
Russia uses brutal force to promote and defend its interests
and doesn't give a damn what the rest of the world thinks."
Bruce Thornton again:
"Historically the greatest slaughterer of Muslims has been Russia, most recently in Chechnya, where by some estimates a 100,000 people were killed, torture and collective punishment freely employed, and the capital Grozny shelled into rubble. That's how Russia solved its jihad problem. But that hasn't kept Iran's lunatic president Ahmadinejad from cheerily posing for the cameras alongside Vladimir Putin. But more important, you never hear criticism of Russia from most Muslim countries, for the simple reason that Russia doesn't care what anyone thinks about its pursuit of its interests. Only we Westerners, so sensitive and guilty, are vulnerable to that sort of emotional blackmail.".
Bernard Lewis, May 16, 2007, on how the Islamists gave a pass to the Soviet Union - because it was brutal and they feared it.
In the Cold War,
"While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism
and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune.
Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim colonial empire
accumulated by the czars in Asia passed unnoticed,
as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.
Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979."
When the UN tried to weakly condemn it,
"Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states.
South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained;
Libya was absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets."
Who is our enemy?,
by Steven Den Beste
- Their hate is not based on reason.
It is not based on things we have done, or any rational grievance.
They hate us because they are failures
and we are successful.
"They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours
...
In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher, it's that their score is zero.
They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are, and they know it.
And since this is a "face" culture, one driven by pride and shame, that is intolerable. Nor is it something we can easily redress."
Arab psychology
by David Gutmann,
argues that Arab culture is driven by
shame and avoidance of losing face.
He argues that, paradoxically,
western weakness and tolerance
invites attacks,
while
western strength and aggressiveness
brings peace and respect.
Nonie Darwish
(born an Egyptian Muslim):
"The Arab culture is famous for its concept of pride. Image is very important and pride and shame are great motivators. Protecting the image of Muslims in front of the non-Muslim West is vital. Thus elaborate behavior is done to saving face. Admitting to a mistake can bring terrible shame and is not regarded as a virtue; those who admit to mistakes are not rewarded for their honesty but ridiculed and shamed or even severely punished.
...
Fear of being accused of defaming one's tribe, nation or religion leads to a culture that tends to blame others rather than look within.
...
There is also a concept in Islam called "taqueya"
which allows lying to non-Muslims if it is in the best interest of Islam.
That concept is very deep in Muslim culture that we don't even think of the term
"taqueya" any more; it has simply penetrated every aspect of Muslim life.
Because of it there is very little self-criticism.
Thus, saying sorry, admitting guilt or looking within for solutions is not a strong value;
it will surely get a person in deep trouble instead.
Such a person will bear the blunt of the blame for everything
- even for what he did not do;
thus you have Muslim denials and defensiveness over matters that many in the West cannot comprehend.
...
Shaming is prominent in the Arab child. To avoid the intense pain of shaming,
denying responsibility turns into a virtue to save face and protect one's pride.
The concept of "taqueya" is one of the reasons many Muslims were silent after 9/11.
Only a few were speaking out honestly and openly by admitting there is a problem in Muslim culture that needs to be examined and corrected. The few Arab Americans who did that where not rewarded for their honesty by their Muslim community; instead they were condemned, shunned and shamed by the majority of Muslims.
...
This charade of denials and games has done nothing but keep
the Muslim world in a permanent state of stagnation,
turmoil and poverty despite of the wealth from oil."
In contrast to the mainstream left-wing view:
"The HSJP understands the Arab-Israeli conflict through the prism of honor-shame culture
and Islamic jihad. These elements of Arab culture are the main factors that have made it impossible to reach a solution to the conflict."
"The HSJP identifies Arab political culture as an example of "traditional" or "pre-civil society" culture.
...
According to HSJP, the Arab-Israeli conflict is fueled by wounded Arab honor
and frustrated religious imperialism.
...
Arab elites prefer losing wars to resolving the conflict by allowing Israel to exist. When they are weak they withdraw and cherish dreams of revenge. When they feel strong enough - no matter how delusional that feeling - they go to war with Israel (1948, 1967, 1973, 2000)."
"This paradigm's conclusions seem dark, with apparently no possibility for negotiations and war as the only apparent alternative.
Although this is not necessarily true, it seems deeply depressing. Those who begin to comprehend HSJP find it difficult to communicate with people strongly committed to PCP."
[Post-Colonial Paradigm]
Saddam Hussein and Arab Honor
- The pathology of Arab culture that can forgive Saddam
for killing a million Muslims
because he died with "honour".
Why Arabs love their oppressors and hate their liberators
- article by Victor Davis Hanson,
discusses why
"Kids whose
parents were butchered by Saddam Hussein and are now fed and protected by American money and manpower
nevertheless dance upon a burned out Humvee while shouting for Saddam to return.
The same is true of those on the
West Bank who have their capital looted by the Palestinian Authority,
their relatives jailed or murdered, and their votes
and speech curtailed: They will still praise Arafat to the skies
- if he at least mutters some banality about hating the West.
Because these are irrational responses - people acting from their appetites and impulses
rather than their heads"
- because their philosophy, and their hatreds,
are built on fantasy
rather than reality.
"In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances,
a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from "blowback"
from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc."
His observations could be dismissed as "racist",
but in reality maybe they should be taken on board by Saudis (and others).
After all, culture is a human invention,
and we can all change our culture.
His observations:
They don't think the same way we do.
When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.
Their values are fundamentally different from ours,
their self-esteem is derived from a different source
(not work, and not relationships).
Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can't maintain it either
(Saudi Arabian maintenance is like the old Soviet bloc).
They do not think of obligations as running both ways
(hypocrisy does not bother them).
In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.
In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do.
They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.
They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.
We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.
We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.
"I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run
we are going to have to hammer these people hard
to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization."
What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language.
If you can't explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don't try to explain it at all - they won't believe it.
Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas like liberalism vs. communism.
They are about which tribe gets to rule.
So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It's the South vs. the South.
The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel's mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can't understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful.
A Northern Irish student's impression of Syria:
"In a closed society such as Assad's Syria, language is not for transmitting or exchanging information. Its main purpose is to reinforce the values held by the community and by the regime. These values are outdated and dangerous: self-pity, purity through sacrifice, a leader who will redeem us, the Jews with their wicked plots foiling us, etc.
When I first arrived this was funny in a strange Borat
kind of way. Now it just scares me."
Why Muslim cultures lag behind
by
Pedestrian Infidel.
He asks why the Islamic world (unlike, say, the Far East)
has not been able to understand and adopt the western ideas that made the West so rich and powerful.
He says the Islamic world has failed because of:
Belief in magic.
Belief in conspiracies.
Lack of innovation.
Lack of devotion to non-family/non tribal/non-clan organizations.
Lack of empowerment of women.
Lack of personal responsibility.
Lack of skilled labour.
Lack of meritocracy.
U.S. soldier chews out Iraqi police.
A brutal encounter between the culture of empirical results
and the culture of honour/shame/tribe.
From here.
Also here.
Great comments.
What Makes a Terrorist?
by James Q. Wilson
- Terrorism is not caused by poverty:
"Krueger and
Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in
the GDP of the region and found that the number of
such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved."
"More terrorists do come from poor countries than rich ones, but this
is because poor countries tend to lack civil liberties.
Once a country's degree of civil liberties is taken into account
..
income per capita bears no relation to involvement in terrorism.
Countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned
relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking
in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil
liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists."
"Apart from the size of a country and the extent of its civil liberties,
no factor that I could find ..
could predict whether people from that country were more or
less likely to take part in international terrorism."
Freedom squelches terrorist violence
- Alberto Abadie concludes that terrorism is not caused by poverty.
"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty,
but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there."
Osama Bin Laden
was a son of the wealthiest non-royal family in Saudi Arabia.
Majority of British Islamic terror suspects are middle-class or upper-middle-class, says MI5 study leaked in Oct 2011.
In a study of 90 Islamic terror suspects investigated by the security service:
"Where data is available, two-thirds came from middle or upper-middle-class backgrounds, showing there is no simplistic relationship between poverty and involvement in Islamist extremism."
Marc Sageman,
University of Pennsylvania
(see here
and here),
found that of Al-Qa'eda members and associates:
18 per cent were upper class, 55 per cent were middle class.
90 percent came from caring, intact families.
29 per cent had some college education; 33 per cent had a college degree;
9 per cent had a postgraduate degree.
91 per cent had a secular education.
70 per cent joined the jihad while away from home.
They joined the jihad at the average age of 26
(mis-quoted as the average age of all of them being 26).
In short, they are educated, alienated middle-class twenty-something
young men, who as likely as not developed their hateful fascist ideas
in the middle of tolerant, democratic western society.
Just like Hitler, Marx, Lenin and a million other angry, hateful young men
who reject the decent tolerant society that surrounds them.
"Sageman describes them as the
"elite of their country" sent abroad to study because the schools in Germany, France, England
and the US are better.
...
Al-Qa'eda's "breeding ground", it seems, is as much in fragmented cities in the West
as in hotbeds of Islamism in the East."
What this means is that
the western media and the western left
are partly to blame for
the conversion of young people to Islamism in the west.
The constant left-wing attacks on America and Israel one sees in the west
is not simply being watched by westerners.
Young potential jihadis are watching too,
and it encourages some of them to join Al-Qa'eda.
The media and the left
encourage the enemy
(even if they don't mean to).
Sageman notes, for example, that France is breeding lots of jihadis
while the US is not.
The different media climates in France and America
probably has a lot to do with it.
If French political culture changed to become supportive of America,
France would breed a lot less jihadi killers.
Arthur Chrenkoff on Al-Qa'eda not being poor:
"The problem is hardly new. Poor people rarely become revolutionaries because
they are far too busy trying to survive to engage in political pursuits. Historically,
it has always been the relatively well-off and the well educated who constituted a vanguard of any revolutionary
and/or terrorist movement, from the French Revolution and 19th century revolutionary socialism to Bolshevism,
Red Brigades-style terrorism, and Palestinian terrorism.
...
Overthrowing existing order is and has always been an elite pursuit."
Poverty is not the cause of 9/11:
"It is indeed reassuring to view the terrorists who now threaten us
as an exogenous threat rooted in the Middle East's Hobbesian
environment of obscurantism, poverty, and repression
- but police and press investigations offer evidence of a far more complex, and
ominous, picture.
The key hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, were well-educated children of privilege.
None of them suffered first-hand economic
privation or political oppression."
So who are the 9/11 attackers, if not poor third worlders?
In fact, they are very much like the middle-class
anarchist, fascist and
communist revolutionaries of the past:
"To understand the September 11 terrorists, we should have in mind the profile
of the classic revolutionary: deracinated, middle class,
shaped in part by exile. In other words, the image of Lenin in Zurich or London;
or of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh in Paris."
"many of the terrorists we are now confronting are a Western phenomenon,
existing inside the Islamic diaspora
that is an established fact of life in the U.S. and Europe.
...
Like the leaders of
America's Weather Underground, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang,
Italy's Red Brigades, and Japan's Red Army
Faction, the Islamic terrorists [are] university-educated converts
to an all-encompassing neo-totalitarian ideology.
...
youthful members of a bored middle class who have grown contemptuous
of "soft" and corrupt elites and are drawn to the
romance of revolutionary guerrilla movements."
Theodore Dalrymple on the mind of the Islamist revolutionary:
The Suicide Bombers Among Us
- On the confused mind of the starry-eyed young Islamist man.
"According to Islamism
... Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve
all personal and political problems at the same time."
It is incredible that anyone would believe such a thing.
But, of course, we've seen this kind of insane utopianism before:
"This notion is fundamentally no more (and no less)
bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century:
that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men."
The Terrorists Among Us:
"terrorism is not a simple, direct response to, or result of, social injustice, poverty, or any other objectively discernible human ill.
... People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that has so wounded them.
...
Conrad tells us that one of the sources of terrorism is laziness, or at least impatience, which is to say ambition unmatched by perseverance and tolerance of routine.
...
The mental laziness of Islamism, its desire that there should be to hand a ready-made solution to all the problems that mankind faces, one that is already known, and its unacknowledged fear that such a solution does not really exist, Updike captures well."
The Persistence of Ideology:
Starry-eyed rebels and terrorists are often not poor (or even oppressed):
"Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete."
Islamism is the new global communism:
"There are many other parallels between Leninism and Qutb's Islamism, among them the incompatibility of each with anything else, entailing a fight to the finish supposedly followed by permanent bliss for the whole of mankind; a tension between complete determinism (by history and by God, respectively) and the call to intense activism; and the view that only with the installation of their systems does Man become truly himself."
The radical loser,
by
Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
makes the obvious point that
the idea that Islamist terror could bring about a better future for the Arab/Muslim world
is absurd.
He notes that so far,
Islamist terror damages the Muslim world far more than the West.
Unless terrorists get WMD (*),
if attacks continue as they are now:
"it makes no difference to the actual power relations.
Even the spectacular attack on the World Trade Center was not able to shake
the supremacy of the United States. The New York Stock Exchange
reopened the Monday after the attacks,
and the long-term impact on the international financial system and world trade was minimal.
The consequences for Arab societies, on the other hand, are fatal.
For the most devastating long-term effects will be born not by the West, but by the religion
in whose name the Islamists act. Not just refugees, asylum seekers and migrants
will suffer as a result. Beyond any sense of justice,
entire peoples will have to pay a huge price for the actions of their self-appointed representatives.
The idea that their prospects, which are bad enough as it is, could be improved through terrorism is absurd.
History offers no example of a regressive society that stifled its own productive potential
being capable of survival in the long term.
The project of the radical loser, as currently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan,
consists of organizing the suicide of an entire civilisation."
(*) Even then, any Islamist WMD attack
will more likely lead to devastating conventional and nuclear war against the Muslim world.
Islamism has nothing to offer the Islamic world except repression, poverty, death, war,
terror, famine,
and potentially even total destruction.
Summary:
"Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved."
New York Times Square bomber
Faisal Shahzad
proves that poverty does not cause terror.
Rather, Islamism causes terror.
This young man was born in Pakistan
to a wealthy family,
the son of an
Air Vice Marshal
in the Pakistan Air Force.
He had the incredible luck to be accepted into the US to study and then work.
He received a B.A. in computer science and engineering
at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
He got an M.B.A at the University of Bridgeport.
He got a job as a financial analyst in Connecticut,
and lived in suburban America
in freedom and prosperity.
He responded in May 2010 by trying to kill random American men, women and children,
and now faces decades of misery in American jails.
Only Islamism
can explain not just such ingratitude, but also such personal self-destruction.
The Daily Show, December 1, 2008 (after Mumbai), sums up these revolutionaries, fighting for a fantasy world that nobody wants.
Killing innocent people is meant to attract
the world to the virtues of a global Islamic tyranny:
"We hate and kill everything you stand for - Join us!"
Their solution to everything is violence.
World poverty - The solution is to suicide bomb a hotel. And so on.
And pure genius:
"One final question:
When will these motherfuckers go away?"
Image links to a search, since online copies have vanished
or are not visible from my location.
Robert Spencer
has a sharp comment on a story of
yet another third world Islamic mob getting angry about some crap
and attacking innocents and burning schools, and so on.
After a local says Muslims were "driven to a frenzy" by rumours and false reports,
Spencer says:
"That ability to be so easily "driven into a frenzy" aggravates underdevelopment in the area: it's hard to develop anything stable, let alone an educational system, in a "frenzy"-prone area. Hence, here is another study in jihad and its accompanying attitudes and sense of entitlement causing poverty, rather than the other way around."
Robert Spencer on the "Islamic street" culture of anger and rioting:
"If one's priorities are so disordered" [as to be offended by everything and start rioting]
"that mentality will have far-reaching effects on the stability of one's culture, society, and economy. The resulting climate of fear stifles development and innovation: Why think outside the box if it will get you killed? And why develop anything if the next enraged mob will burn it down? In other words, the logical conclusion of this sort of behavior is jihad causing and perpetuating poverty through mental enslavement and physical terror.
It is a consequence of the absence of that mentality that explains why Danes and Norwegians aren't flocking to Islamic countries for a better life, but the other way around."
Terror causes poverty. Jihad Watch, 3 Apr 2011, on the crazed Afghan "Koran burning" riots.
"It also contributes to Afghanistan's prolonged poverty. People who are out indulging in an orgy of furious self-pity are not producing wealth. And in this case, they are destroying it, moving the country that much more backwards, save for more American aid to fix self-inflicted wounds."
Jihad Watch
on an attack on the British Council cultural and academic exchange program in Afghanistan, Aug 2011:
"once again, jihad causes material and intellectual poverty: no one will invest if they conclude they are only building new targets. And the obstacles to "academic and cultural exchange" in an atmosphere of random acts of jihadist terror are obvious."
Another aspect of the bitter, hate-filled, young male terrorist
(especially the Islamist kind)
may be a poor sex life,
and hatred of women.
The sex repression of Sayyid Qutb,
the snobbish, fanatic America-hater and
father of modern Islamic Fascism.
This Egyptian weirdo was scandalised by the "decadence" of
an alcohol-free church dance
in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949.
Mark Steyn on the sex freak Sayyid Qutb:
"His disgust at the lasciviousness of America is vaguely reminiscent of the old joke about the spinster who complains that the young man across the street strips naked in full view every night: when the cop says he can't see anything, she explains you have to climb up on the wardrobe and crane your neck up over the skylight.
...
In 1949, Greeley, Colo., was dry. The dance was a church social.
... it's a useful reminder of how much we could give up and still be found decadent and disgusting by the Islamists."
The 9/11 killers:
Article
by Richard Cohen, 26 Sept 2001,
on the inadequate young 9/11 killers,
who lived in the free West, and hated it
- or liked it, and hated themselves for liking it:
"They remind me in this regard of men who pick up someone for sex -
and then beat that person up afterward."
It has since emerged that the killers were sexually inadequate
- religious young men
obsessed with sex with virgins
in the (imaginary) afterlife,
who, when they got to the West,
rented porn videos,
went to strip clubs,
and paid prostitutes for sex,
before they began their killing.
Islamic radicals male rape a Christian barber in Pakistan, Apr 2010.
They tricked him into shaving the beard of one of the radicals, and then, pretending to be furious,
attacked him.
So far, so normal.
But these Islamic sex perverts then also sodomized him.
Senior Hamas politician Ahmad Bahr says that
2.5 million virgins
await those who slaughter in the name of Allah.
The dirty old goat.
Bin Laden
married one of his wives, Amal al-Sada, when he was 44 and she was 15.
The leading Islamofascist
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
is said
to have
married a 14 year-old when he was 60.
Some sources
say that Ayatollah Khomeini's wife
Khadijeh Saqafi was 10 years old
when he married her in 1930. He was 28.
What Islamic terrorists are really afraid of is women,
Boris Johnson, Daily Telegraph, 27 Sept 2001,
says that what the
9/11 killers hate is not
Western foreign policy
(why should Saudis care about the Palestinians?),
it's the way Western culture threatens their culture.
Good, I would say, and Johnson agrees:
- "Let me say what the Left
cannot say, since it chokes on the contradictions of its position, at
once feminist, and yet relativist.
It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They are wrong about
women. We are right."
The jackpot:
Porn found on Bin Laden's computers after his death, May 2011! Priceless!
This account
says that in Bin Laden's house:
"The SEALs also found an archive of digital pornography. “We find it on all these guys, whether they’re in Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan,” the special-operations officer said." The Jawa Report
suggests he might have been watching "Deep Goat".
Parody of "Deep Throat".
"Saudi Cleric Omar Al-Sweilem Extols the Breasts and Thighs of the Black-Eyed Virgins of Paradise".
"They will push you onto your back. Jamal! Allah Akbar!"
See
video
(and here)
and
transcript.
Every violent, genocidal utopian movement is fundamentally absurd
(think of the beliefs of Nazism or Communism),
and Islamism is as mad as anything humans have ever believed in
in 10,000 years of human delusions.
Starry-eyed, young, fit, sexually repressed, virginal men dream of
sex after death
like this demented cleric here.
This is to be their reward for torturing and slaughtering innocent people.
Sex with submissive sluts is to be the reward for these narcissists
for cutting the throats of children.
Douglas Murray
perfectly describes the mindset of the Islamist terrorist:
"narcissism, wildly misconceived altruism, youth, envy, mental and sexual dysfunctionalism, will to destruction and utopian absurdity"
"The face of a woman is like her vagina"
says popular Salafi Egyptian preacher
Abu Ishaq al-Huwaini,
Dec 2011.
The dirty old goat.
It is an expansionist fascist movement that aims to rule
much of the third world.
It is at war with everyone
who is not an Islamic fundamentalist fascist.
It has killed vast numbers of Muslims.
Ongoing list of killings for Islam around the world.
This lists the non-stop killing by Islamists
of
Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, animists, moderate Muslims
and others,
in
Algeria, Pakistan, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria
and other places in the third world.
This killing has been going on since the origin of Islam.
And it has nothing to do with America or Israel.
25 are Islamic (56 percent)
even though Islam is only 20 percent of the world's population.
7 are communist (16 percent).
11 are secular nationalist (24 percent).
None are Christian (0 percent),
even though Christianity is 33 percent of the world's population.
Our World-Historical Gamble,
by Lee Harris,
argues that much of the unhealthy mindset in the
Arab world comes from the fact that their wealth has
come by lottery
rather than by hard work (i.e. they happen to sit on oil).
Our liberal respect for sovereignty
recognises their ownership of resources
they did nothing to create.
So we pay them for doing nothing,
and as a result many have become decadent,
and have lost touch with reality
like spoilt adolescents.
"What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common
is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural
resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will,
and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been
inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes
of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western
liberalism that they have pledged themselves to destroy."
So "the quite unintended consequence of the West's conduct"
is: "the prodigious funding of fantasists".
Harris attacks the idea of
sovereignty
and self-determination
- "The principle of self-determination in a world of perpetual peace may not in fact be the panacea for mankind's ills, but rather a means for prolonging these ills"
Another person angry with sovereignty
is Ralph Peters.
Harris argues that if we do not abandon sovereignty
and adopt new policies of pre-emptive attack,
then nuclear attack on the west will come soon.
He argues for an uncompromising assault on "fantasy" Islamism
in order to force it to see reality. -
"it is .. critical that we are not misled into trying to win the hearts
and minds of the Islamic fantasists. We must not set about trying to convert
them in believing in our principles and accepting our values,
.. Nor must we be seduced into believing that we are in a popularity contest"
- Instead we must re-shape their entire world against their will.
The root cause of Sept 11th - "U.S. foreign policy" and "Israel"
The left, of course, has a different answer to what is the
root cause of Sept 11th:
U.S. foreign policy
and
Israel.
The hope seems to be that if "we" (Americans, Israelis, westerners)
change our behaviour, then "they" (Arabs, Islamists, third worlders)
will be alright, and will live with us in peace.
Sadly, this is fantasy.
The sad fact is that "they" must change.
The entire Arab Islamic world must abandon
tyranny, totalitarianism, theocracy, religious hatred
and anti-semitism,
and they must embrace freedom of religion, free speech and democracy.
A World Without Israel
by Josef Joffe
- If Israel vanished, the Arab Islamic world's problems would remain.
The Global Peace Index
is a (very) flawed list of the world's most "violent" countries.
But despite its flaws, it still is a powerful indictment of
the violence of Islamism.
The Global Peace Index
is basically a
left-wing view of "peace".
Your score is knocked down by
possessing WMD, engaging in wars abroad,
and having high military expenditure.
So any country that defends the West (like the US and UK) scores badly.
So any country that is being attacked by aggressors (like Israel) scores badly.
Neutrals and appeasers do much better.
It's also full of arbitrary subjective scores
(see scores for the
US
and
Israel).
But having said all that,
it is interesting to see what this index ranks as the
top most violent countries, because
it can immediately be seen
(though of course the index itself does not see)
that
Islamism
is the cause of the violence in most of them:
2009 ranking
Country
Cause of the violence
No.1 most violent country
Iraq
Islamism
No.2
Afghanistan
Islamism
No.3
Somalia
Islamism
No.4
Israel
Islamism
No.5
Sudan
Islamism
No.6
Congo
Non-democracy
No.7
Chad
Islamism
No.8
Pakistan
Islamism
No.9
Russia
Islamism and Communism
No.10
Zimbabwe
Communism
Terrorism Risk Index - The violence of Islamism
Similarly, the
Terrorism Risk Index by Maplecroft, released Nov 2010, shows the following:
Ranking of
countries at risk from terror attacks
Country
Cause of the terror
No.1 most terror-prone country
Somalia
Islamism
No.2
Pakistan
Islamism
No.3
Iraq
Islamism
No.4
Afghanistan
Islamism
No.5
Palestine
Islamism
No.6
Colombia
Communism and Drug prohibition
No.7
Thailand
Islamism
No.8
Philippines
Islamism
No.9
Yemen
Islamism
No.10
Russia
Islamism
World Watch List - The violence and intolerance of Islamism
Similarly, the
World Watch List, by Open Doors,
shows the countries with the worst persecution of Christians.
It is noteworthy that 8 and 10 years respectively after military victory,
both Iraq and Afghanistan are still in the 10 worst countries.
This does indicate that "nation building" in these deeply corrupt and screwed up societies
has ultimately been a failure.
The 2011 list:
Ranking of
countries with the worst persecution of Christians
Country
Cause of the persecution
No.1 worst country
North Korea
Communism
No.2
Iran
Islamism
No.3
Afghanistan
Islamism
No.4
Saudi Arabia
Islamism
No.5
Somalia
Islamism
No.6
Maldives
Islamism
No.7
Yemen
Islamism
No.8
Iraq
Islamism
No.9
Uzbekistan
Islamism and Communism
No.10
Laos
Communism
"Once I interviewed a young Taleban fighter who was almost too angry to speak as he described how he joined the insurgency after American soldiers had dishonoured his mother by entering and searching their family home, casually looking at her as they did so."
- Article
by Tom Coghlan, The Times, 17 Aug 2009,
beautifully illustrates the "root cause" of Islamic violence.
Infidels looked at his mother.
Does he shrug and say so what?
Does he ... write a letter of complaint?
Does he ... join a political party and stand in the upcoming Afghan elections?
Does he organise a demo?
Does he write a witty article?
No. He turns immediately
and without trying any other solution
to barbaric violence.
The "root cause" of his violence
is crap inside his head,
not anything outside it.
"[The left's]
idea of root causes
[is] a pseudo-intellectual exercise that prevents a real understanding of evil actions. Every culprit can tell a story, but by listening to that story, you insult each and every one of his victims."
-
Greg Gutfeld, 23 Nov 2009.
"They can't blame it on poverty or any of that stuff. They will have to realize that it's an ideology and it's a way of life that makes people change."
- American-born Islamic terrorist
Omar Hammami
(see here)
himself denies that "poverty" is the root cause of Islamic terror.
Rachel Woodlock is a Muslim convert who wears the veil.
Funny how she never told us that in her other article!
await those who slaughter in the name of Allah.
The dirty old goat.
Since 1995.
