Thursday, June 28, 2007

Our Moral High Horses

Moral high horseI’ve been blogging for almost three years now, so I’ve gotten used to writing every day. The engine stays warm and the gears are all greased up, so that I can crank out the rhetoric whenever I need it. I find a topic, churn out a rant, and then go back to my real job.

But it never fails to amaze me how some of our commenters, people who keep no blogs of their own, can write concisely and elegantly on a topic and get to the heart of an issue much effectively than I can. It’s even more remarkable when some of the most eloquent writers do not have English as their native language.

Our Danish commenter Phanarath is one such writer. The essay below was taken from an exchange of opinion between him and another commenter on Monday’s post.

Phanarath’s essay is part of a larger discussion about the folly of treating Islam as a religion like other religions. Islam is a political ideology, and modern radical Muslims have become adept at manipulating the tolerance of our free societies to advance their political agenda and gain local control within our political systems. Their long-term goal — as stated clearly in the propaganda of the Muslim Brotherhood and groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir — is complete control, when the conditions are ripe.

The place where my grandfather used to live, and where I sometimes played as a child, now lies within a Muslim area. Today it’s a very unsafe place with the problems I described above and much more, smaller things like gender separation, halal this and haram that and constant demands for special treatment for the mostly unemployed population of the area.

The only group of people behaving in this destructive way are Muslims. And it’s not just a few, as some might think; it’s a collective pattern that they repeat everywhere, wherever they become a local majority. The visible troublemakers might only be a small percentage, but the collective pattern always seems to be the same.

It’s Islam itself as a whole that creates these problems, and for most common people this is obvious. I get so tired of intellectuals who try to find ways to explain this simple fact away. And many have tried.
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There are lots of Muslims who are kind and peaceful as individuals, that’s true. But they still show the same collective patterns when enough of them get together. They start to see themselves as opposed to the non-Muslims around them.

To target Jihad and Sharia as the real reason for the problems is just one more clever way to try to excuse Islam. And while intellectuals play mind games, teenage girls get raped. And yes, it makes me hostile, as it should, but I am sorry for directing it at you.

The essence of the problem comes from the Muslim identification as being in opposition to other groups. If we somehow make all Muslims sign a treaty or a contract, saying that they reject Jihad and Sharia, and we let them keep the identification as Muslims, they will simply hide their belief in Jihad and Sharia from us and keep it to themselves until they feel ready to confront us. As long as they can identify themselves as Muslims, it will be used to control the behavior of people within their system, and at the same time tell us what we want to hear.

Therefore we must strike at this identification, by banning Muslim organization, symbolism and garments that are used to signal that people are Muslim. By doing this we can remove the iron grip the Muslim community has over its members, and then it be will possible to slowly start to make things more positive and peaceful for everyone. I am pretty sure that many of those we call moderates would be happy about this, secretly at first.

Or we can sit on our moral high horses and wait for the whole thing to blow, while we argue details about how many peaceful Muslims there are or what verses we think are the most evil. We can let our children and people who don’t have the resources to relocate be the foot soldiers in a war, a war they never asked for and that we refuse to even acknowledge, while we convince ourselves that this somehow makes us better then others.

6 comments:

locomotivebreath1901 said...

"The only group of people behaving in this destructive way are Muslims. And it’s not just a few, as some might think; it’s a collective pattern that they repeat everywhere, wherever they become a local majority. The visible troublemakers might only be a small percentage, but the collective pattern always seems to be the same."

I think this explains very nicely what many people see or believe to be true, but cannot quite put their finger on it.

I live in the U.S. of A., and see or read from afar how the encroaching cancer of islamism corrodes what is left of a once great civilization in Europe. And the European population seemingly facilitates the parasitic invaders!

I believe the Baron clarified the madness & its method:
"Islam is a political ideology, and modern radical Muslims have become adept at manipulating the tolerance of our free societies to advance their political agenda and gain local control within our political systems."

The time for being 'nice' is over. A radical 'cancer' treatment is warranted - before the patient is no longer in need of a treatment, but in need of a coffin.

Athos said...

Islam is and ever has been a reactionary doubling rivalrous entity to the biblical faiths of Judaism and Christianity. Coming 600 years after the latter, it resorted to the sword, knowing that the "strong horse" gets more recruits than the (seemingly) weak. Of course, as the historian Hilaire Belloc pointed out, it also erased all debts of converts as well - quite an incentive program during the Middle Ages.

What Islam cloaks, like secular materialistic atheist programs of the failed Enlightenment project, is what cultural anthropologist René Girard calls the "primitive sacred." This is, simply, the human bloodlust at the heart of all cultures (hence, the religious altar at the center of all cultures).

Only the biblical faiths attempt to move away from such bloodthirstiness in favor of "legitimate defense" (think: Crusades) and gentlemen soldiers (think: WWII).

Islam is a sad, slave-making entity that holds in thrall half-a-billion women and half-a-billion miscreant men.

It is time for chivalry, nobility, and honor to draw together Christian men, once again.

Francis W. Porretto said...

It's been my contention for a while now that as harmless as individual Muslims might seem, in any sort of concentration they become mob-minded and dangerous to others. We've had enough demonstrations of this. The sole remaining question of importance is when a sufficient number of Westerners will admit it to raise firm political and military barriers against further Islamic penetration.

The United States is perilously close to a tipping point with only about 2% Muslims. I fear for our European brethren, whose penetration has been much greater, and whose will and capacity to resist Islamification must be assessed as small to nil.

Athos said...

FWP wrote: as harmless as individual Muslims might seem, in any sort of concentration they become mob-minded and dangerous to others.

How true. But why? And is this observation applicable only to Muslims in mobs?

A popularizer of Girard's mimetic theory, Gil Bailie (author of Violence Unveiled) said this about a sad incident in a Japanese school:

What is going on in a situation like that (a Japanese school boy was bullied, stuffed head-first into a rolled up gym mat, and suffocated) is hard to sum up quickly, but I think we could say this about it:

It is a form of social rejuvenation at the expense of the victim; the recreation of the esprit de corps of a community at the expense of a victim, which has both social and psychological effects. It produces both social and psychological conviction. The etymology of that word (conviction) reminds us that it happened with a victim. It is a form – what we would call a largely unconscious one – of regenerating social and psychological stability at the expense of a victim. And the question is, Can we do it otherwise?

Because of the Crucifixion, we can’t do it that way any more. The Crucifixion has made those who it influenced, it has exposed the gears and pulleys of this (sacrificial) system such that it has crippled them. It has awakened an empathy for the victim of such things so that we can’t do it any more. Those people who are even tangentially exposed to the Crucifixion and its cultural effects can’t do it that way any more. That does not mean we won’t keep trying to do it, but our efforts will be increasingly disastrous.


***

Muslims are less influenced by the gospel's empathy for victims; hence, they are more dependent on such "mechanisms" for rejuvenation of social and psychological coherence.

A_Nonny_Mouse said...

Athos seems to be talking about "scapegoating", a way of externalizing and expiating blame and guilt.

(see
http://www.scapegoat.demon.co.uk/
for an interesting article.)

It also ties in with what we observe daily in the news from shrieking, ranting imams: nothing is ever Islam's fault. Any evil they do is justified by some outside force or circumstance; men who rape are unable to control themselves due to the "provocation" of the victim, rioting thugs are unable to control themselves due to the "provocation" of a book they've never read, and so on. I don't see any indication of what you might call "internal controls" in the Islamic mind.

Sort of off topic, but sort of not: An Iranian writer, Amil Imani, considers Islam a group delusion and says "If you believe that all the troubles of the world are due to the evil-doings of the non-Muslims who war against Allah, then you do all you can to fight and kill them, particularly since Allah tells you to do so in the Quran."
see
http://www.amilimani.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=67&Itemid=2
for an interesting look at the problem of groupthink or mutual delusion.

Satantiago said...

Only the biblical faiths attempt to move away from such bloodthirstiness in favor of "legitimate defense"

Yeah, I love biblical bloodthirstilessness. Think about Dawud, erm David, killing 200 Philistines to bring their foreskins to king Saul to buy his first wife. Way to go Dawud! Invading a foreign inhabited land and harvesting some foreskins to make the king a gift.

It is time for chivalry, nobility, and honor to draw together Christian men, once again.
think: Crusades


Ah yes, it's about time the West dust their hauberks and assume the role played by those noble chevaliers who, amongst other things, sacked and desecrated Constantinople from 1204 to 1261. Their contribution to the cause of Christianity was well appreciated by the Turks who had no trouble toppling a debilitated empir... city. Thank you very much noble crusaders!!!! Thanks in fact to all those Christian empires cannibalizing one another, whilst the Turks pushed at the doors of Europe. Such is the union religion brings about.

and gentlemen soldiers (think: WWII)
I'm always moved to tears by the Christmas truce story *snif* Thank you Santa, football soccer, and Coca-Cola for that. Did you know Turks and Brits truced in Galipolli? To bury the dead, that's it. I love humankind.