Michael Freund in the Jerusalem Post suggests that we start doing our arithmetic:
It's time we open our eyes and confront reality. Ever since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the media has sought to reassure us that only a tiny minority of Muslims actually support the use of violence against Israel and the West. It's just a small fringe, a marginal few at best, they tell us, so don't worry about it all too much.
One percent or three percent - who cares? Just sit back, enjoy your morning eggs and coffee and have a nice day.
But a look at the numbers tells a very different story. The extent of support for global jihad is frightening in its proportions, and the numbers are anything but insignificant.
Consider, for example, the following statistics regarding support for suicide bombings and other types of terror attacks.
In a poll conducted five months ago, and broadcast on Britain's Channel 4 TV, nearly 25% of British Muslims said the 7th July 2005 terror bombings in London, which killed 52 innocent commuters, were justified. Another 30% said they would prefer to live under strict Islamic Sharia law rather than England's democratic system.
Now, one in four justifying terror may not be a majority, but it certainly isn't a "small fringe" either.
An alternative strategy adopted by those desperate to deny reality is to insist that merely by responding to terror attacks, we are creating more terrorists.In other words, if we just close our eyes and pretend it doesn't exist, it will all magically go away and everything will be hunky-dory. Oh, and by the way, it isn't historically significant anyway.
Those who profess this irrational perspective never seem to contemplate the reality that since the first WTC bombing--and even before then-- the U.S. followed that course and did very little to comprehensively respond to the rising terrorist threat in the world. And yet 9/11 still happened.
The Balinese did nothing, and yet, the Bali bombings still happened.
The Spanish were opposed to the war and yet the Madrid bombings still happened.
The British, the French, and the Dutch welcomed immigrants from Islam, and yet.... you get the point.
Terrorism has been on the rise since the first time the West appeased its violence and gave into its unreasonable demands, all the while pretending that the blackmail was reasonable and that the violence was only a problem confined to a few backward areas of the world (remember the Iran hostage taking in '79? Remember the Somalia debacle?). But those "few backward areas of the world" keep on expanding into the civilized one. As do the demands of the blackmailers.
The West closed its eyes and resolutely kept them shut for a quarter century. And still the terrorist threat continued to rise and their demands grew ever shriller and more insistent. The madrassas they set up both in their own lands and in the West had been teaching hate for more than a decade before 9/11. The nations of the Middle East were trying to wipe Israel off the map long before 9/11; the Palestinians under the Nobel Peace Prize winner Arafat were still enthusiastically blowing up innocents; but still, both they and their enablers on the left would have you believe that America brought 9/11 on itself; that America (or Israel) is the cause behind all their violence and death; and that America acting against Islam's documented desire for peace is only making it worse.
We hear issuing forth from the peaceful adherents of Islam, "Death to America!"; "Death to Israel"; "Death to those who insult Islam"; death, death and more death; always death.
But the clear thinkers of the MSM and the left keep telling us that we are the ones who want to kill them.
They want peace and brotherhood.
Yeah, right.
Well, what if we had done nothing after 9/11?
What if we had stood in a circle and sung Kumbayah and worn flowers in our hair, chanting our love for those who wanted to kill us?
What if we had tried to reason with the suicide bombers of Islam? How would that have played out, do you think?
Not only would the terrorist threat still be rising--in spite of our desire to negotiate and to tolerate their diversity; in spite of no retaliation; no Afghan war; no Iraq war-- it would undoubtedly be rising at an even faster rate than it is now. And terrorism would be a daily occurrence on our own soil as terrorists operated with complete abandon and free from fear and oppression.
If you do not understand this reality, then you do not understand the psychology of the bully and the tyrant.
Our response did not suddenly instill hatred in the masses of Islam that already believed that Jihad was demanded by their religion and that Islam will dominate the world through the sword. They already believed that Jews were "pigs and monkeys" and needed to be exterminated; they already believed that Israel was the "little Satan"; and America was the "big Satan"--despite the millions and millions of dollars in foreign aid and goodwill expended.
They already believed that their backwardness and inability to function in the modern world was entirely the fault of the West's. They already had been glorifying death and destruction and embracing violence and terror for years.
Before 9/11, most Americans could have cared less about their religion and how they worshipped. They had already embraced and perfected the role of the barbarian before most Americans even noticed them.
Being granted an incredible gift by the fates (or Allah) and an economic opportunity unparalleled in history by just happening to live on top of the modern world's greatest source of energy was not enough good fortune to motivate them to better themselves and their own lives; or to live in peace; or to contribute to the forward progress of humanity. Instead, their good fortune only magnified the backwardness of their culture and religion, and made them yearn for a medieval past when they had not yet been left behind.
A quirk of history that could have helped them integrate into the modern world only intensified the psychopathology generating hatred and envy; and increased their already overblown sense of entitlement; it helped them externalize their grievances and blame their oppression and psychological manipulation at the hands of other muslims on the objects of their envy.
The psychopathology of the Islamofascists and their mindless jihadi minions is equaled only by the psychopathology of the international political left and its pervasive denial of reality. And the psychological synergy between the despots of the Middle East and the intellectual elites of the left is fascinating.
Both are masters of the coercive Utopian dream; cynically and deliberately manipulating and oppressing their own populations in order to enhance their power and domination over the masses and to demonstrate their own moral and intellectual superiority. Like the Saudi Royal Family, the neo-marxist intellectual elites of the left imagine that they will reap the personal and economic benefits of stoking the anger and rage of their "inferiors" and focusing it on convenient scapegoats like America and Israel and all that those countries represent--freedom, democracy, capitalism and progress. They are deeply oblivious--or merely completely indifferent-- to the evil and destructive forces they have unleashed in their quests for absolute power.
But those malignant forces have been unleashed on the world.
And they grow, not by fighting them, but by blindly pursuing a course of appeasement and submission.
They grow because fear and tolerating the intolerable only encourage their growth.
They grow because the hate and envy is never ending and will always find a rationale and a focus to exploit.
It grows because it cannot be appeased, and every behavior that tolerates it makes it grow faster and stronger as the underlying unquenchable narcissistic entitlement and grandiosity expands at an exponential rate.
Do the math.
1 comment:
A good post.
An interesting viewpoint on how Liberals lost their way is given in a book by Nick Cohen, who grew up on the left and assumed that the left stood on the moral high ground. Now he feels betrayed. Events since 9/11 and especially since the invasion of Iraq has pursuaded him that the left has been turned upside down. Almost everywhere leftists are liklier than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements. The failure of socialism has freed the left "to go along with any movement however far to the right it may be, as long as it is against the status quo in general and, specifically America".
He was bemused at the anti-war protests around the world in Feb 2003, in which millions of supposedly liberal-minded people marched in order "to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime". Few of the marchers seemed to take any account of the near-genocidal nature of Saddam's rule. The left chose to enoble as a "resistance" the jihadists and Baathists who continue to slaughter thousands of civilians in the hope of creating a right-wing theocracy or restoring dictatorship.
Why has the [British] left reacted in this way? Is it a scared refusal to see Islamic terrorism for the implacable, irrational enemy it is? Is it a deep-seated anti-Americanism?
However he predicts confusion ahead. "The time will soon come when the liberal-left's escape routes will close. George W.Bush, their bogeyman, will be gone and they will be all alone in a frightening world without the enemy who has defined them and held them together for so long".
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