The more one understands the
built in duplicity of the Koran itself and the demand that all submit to its
doctrines the less one retains any sympathy for the ideology itself. I have posted in the past that it was necessary
to rip up Nazism from the ground by its roots.
The followers of Islam need to understand that that is an option that
the non Islamic world is quite capable of exercising. I sincerely hope it never comes to that.
It is a doctrine that is designed
to inflame fanatical thinking and incite it.
We have our own subculture of such fanaticism but they get scant support
from the scriptures themselves and generally none from bona fide leadership.
Here we have an item that notes
the nature of present Islamic response to Western confrontation.
The moral teaching of Islam is to
strip all honor from an individual dealing with a non Muslim. Yet the foundation of all moral teaching is
ultimately personal honor in one’s dealing with another human being. In exactly the same way the Nazis
systematically dehumanized whole ethnic groups in the minds of their own people
allowing the atrocities that followed.
We understand that God made all
men equal. We also do not understand
that God had any other option. Mohammad and
not God has chosen to claim otherwise.
By that definition Mohammad is in revolt against God.
In the meantime, Islamic indoctrination
has merely made the Islamic world sympathetic in quite the same way that national
indoctrination makes all citizens enthusiastic cheerleaders. Otherwise, natural philosophy takes the
center of most Islamic societies and people do live properly as we would
expect.
Three Fundamental Mistakes in Dealing with Islam
We made three fundamental mistakes in our dealings with Islam.
First, we assumed that the only politically acceptable answer was also the
right answer. This is the most common mistake that politicians make.
Second, we established a construct of a moderate and extreme Islam
that reflected how we saw it from the outside. This construct had no
theological relationship to any actual belief or movement within Islam. Had
we made the division into modern and fundamentalist, we would at least have
been using words that meant something. Instead we used moderate and extreme in
a military sense to mean hostile and friendly or neutral. But as a Vietnam
Our construct was black and white with few shades of gray. But the
Muslim world is all shades of gray. The absolute choice we wanted them to make,
“you’re either with us or with the terrorists”, was foreign to their culture
and their way of life. Multiple layers of contradictory relationships and
alliances are the norm in the region. You expect to betray and be betrayed,
much as you expect to cheat and be cheated while bartering for a carpet at the
souk. In a region where coalitions of Fascists, Communists and Islamists are
doable, contradictions don’t exist, all alliances are expedient and built on an
expected betrayal. The rise of Islam itself was built on broken peace
treaties. So it is no wonder then that in response to Bush’s call, they
chose both us and the terrorists. Appeasing America
And the more we prattled about the peacefulness of Islam, the more we
looked like we could be easily appeased with a few gestures. And so it was the
Islamists who were more threatening, who got the benefit of of their
appeasement. We had asked Muslim countries for an alliance with no mixed
allegiances, in a region where only kin could ask or count on such an
arrangement. And we are not their kin, neither by blood and certainly not by
religion. While we insisted that all people were the same, this was a
statement of our belief, not theirs. And they did not believe that we believed
it either.
Rather than learning what the Muslim world was, we had already decided
what we wanted it to be. But our perspective was a foreign one. They might
pander to it, but they would never dictate their own beliefs by it. We might
talk of a moderate or extreme Islam, but that is our idea, not theirs. There is
more than one form of Islam, they are not defined by their extremism or
moderation. Nor by their approach toward violence. No more than we are.
Muslim theology is violent, because violence has always been a tool
of its expansion. When we ask Muslims to disassociate themselves from
violence, we are really asking them to disassociate themselves from Islam. And
this they will not do. They will contextually condemn some acts of terror,
depending on the identity of the perpetrators and the targets, and the impact
of the acts on the nation and ideology of the Muslim or Muslims in question.
But they will dub other acts of terrorist as valid resistance. The differences
are not moral, but contextual.
The Muslim world is a gray zone full of alliances written on sand where
every principle can be bent at need, but is dominated by a religion that
pretends to be morally absolute. This is an inherent contradiction. And like
most moral conflicts it is resolved through self-deception. Our absolute
standards have no meaning when applied to the Muslim world. They have moral
force, but little practical relevance.
Islamic moderation is not theology, but pragmatism. Its fanatics
are the most trustworthy, and its pragmatists the least trustworthy. We have
put our faith in the moderation of the pragmatists, but confusing pragmatism
with moderate beliefs, morals or friendship is no better than lapping at the
sand of a mirage and calling it water.
Our third and final mistake was to believe that we held all or most
of the cards, and were free to give away as many of them as we wanted to. But
the more we thought we were calling the shots, the more we were shot at.
Because we were not in control. The political, religious and armed conflicts we
were engaged in were being fought on their terms, not ours. They began the
war. They decided when to initiate the violence or call a halt to it. Their
violence set the tone, we tried to defuse it. Our attempts to promote
moderation in the Muslim world were reactive. It is the bomber who has the
initiative once he chooses to act. And so we tried to teach the bombers not to
bomb, while the bombers taught us to appease them.
When a psychiatrist rewards rats for finishing a maze, is it the
psychiatrist who is training the rats to finish mazes, or the rats who are
training him to give them cheese. The answer to that question hinges on who
controls the experiment. While we thought that we were experimenting on the
Muslim world to make them more moderate, they were actually experimenting on us
to teach us to appease them.
While we were trying to force the Muslim world into our maze with two
openings, one labeled ‘extreme’ and one labeled ‘moderate’, they were really
moving us into their meta-maze with two openings, ‘death’ or ‘appeasement’. Our
plan was to keep forcing them to choose the moderate openings in order to
moderate them and break them of any attachment to terrorism. But our chief
method for moving them there was appeasement. Once we got bogged down in Iraq
The rats turned out to be training the psychiatrist and they have done
an excellent job of it. The Muslim world is more Anti-American than it was 10
years ago, while we are more pro-Muslim. Each time they finish the moderate
maze and assure us how peaceful Islam is, we gift them with the cheese of
appeasement. Rather than teaching them to be moderate using the reward of our
appeasement, they have taught us to appease them using the reward of their
faked moderation. Like tourists at the souk, we have been cheated badly by
laying out good money for a fake rug. But worse than that we have been
turned into rats in their maze, rushing to appease them in the hopes that they
will reward us by being moderate.
Pavlov demonstrated that once you teach dogs to associate a ringing
bell with a meal, they will salivate when you ring the bell even when there is
no food. So too rats will keep running the maze even when there is no cheese.
So too governments continue appeasing Islam, even when the promised cheese of
moderation fails to yield any significant changes on the ground. A plot broken
up here or there. Or even a mosque that opens its doors to the FBI or Scotland
Yard is enough for them. But is it the FBI that is teaching Muslims to be more
cooperative, or Muslims who are teaching the FBI to be more accommodating. Who
is the psychiatrist and who is the rat?
By initiating violence, the Muslim world turned us into their rats. We
reacted to their stimuli as we desperately looked for a way out of their maze
of violence. Except when we took the initiative by attacking them– the locus
of control was always in their hands. And even when we did take their
initiative, it was still in response to their violence. We were still making
war on their terms. Trying to work with them, reform them, reach them and
appease them. We were running the maze and still are. Starving to death still
searching for the cheese which isn’t there.
All this drives the flywheel of appeasement round and round. The more
we turn it, the worse the violence becomes. The capacity for terrorism made
Muslims prominent. They have become ticking time bombs we are driven to defuse.
We shower the Muslim world with respect, money, political power and every
possible thing that might keep them from killing us. It is absolutely vital in
the minds of our leaders that we make them like us so that they won’t kill us.
Which means that it actually is in their interest to kill us. Rather than
rewarding them for their moderation, we are actually rewarding them for their
extremism.
The more we appease them, the more violent they become. And the more we
habituate ourselves to appeasement, the harder it is for us to stop. Our worst
mistake in dealing with the Muslim world was to habituate ourselves to the
appeasement solution. To make it a reflex action. American politicians chose it
as their path of least resistance between complete surrender and all out war as
their safe way through the maze. They rationalized it as a wedge strategy to
split the minority of extremists who wanted a superislamic state from the
majority who wanted peace and prosperity. By embracing Islam, we would reform
it. The majority of Muslims would choose peace and prosperity, and ally with us
to isolate the extremists. Then we would use the wedge strategy to split the
extremists into the moderate extremists and the extreme extremists. Using the
carrot of foreign aid and close ties to the United States
But it was the Muslim world which was forcing us to choose between
their carrot and their stick. The carrot was a positive relationship with the
Muslim world, the stick was a negative relationship. And since 2001 we have
been chasing the carrot, while getting whacked over the head with the stick.
Some of the politicians have realized that there is no carrot, only the stick.
For these ‘New Realists’ avoiding the stick or at least minimizing the force of
its blows has become the new carrot.
If we’re good little infidels, we’ll only have 5 terrorist attacks a
year instead of 10. We’ll have 100 rapes instead of 200 if all wear our burqas.
And even that is another illusion. The Muslim world cannot control its own
violence, only channel it. There is no off switch. Only pipes that they can use
to funnel it our direction. They cannot offer us peace. It is not within their
power. Only by directing their own violence inward could they do this. And
that is obviously not in their interest. Only by forcefully demonstrating that
the violence is absolutely not in their interest, will we ever put a stop to
it. And to do that we would have to pose more of a threat to them, than their
own people do. Appeasement is the worst possible way to go about doing that.
With our first mistake, we limited our options to one single course of
action. With our second mistake, we guided that course of action based on a
construct that had no relationship to the reality of the Muslim world. With our
third and final mistake, that course of action was hijacked and used to
manipulate our behavior, causing us to repeat the same disastrous course of
action over and over again. The more we did it, the more it seemed like the
only possible course of action. And our only way to check whether we were
succeeding or failing was a misguided construct that could not measure what we
needed it to.
In real world terms, this is equivalent to driving the wrong way, using
a map from the wrong country and repeating the same course over and over again,
because rather than realizing that something must be wrong, we just look at the
map and assume that if we repeat the course enough times, we will reach our
destination. Even when we no longer seem to know what the destination is
because we have become so used to going in circles that the circle has come to
seem like our destination.
Like most mistakes that are based on a process that was wrong from the
beginning, we can only begin to fix it by going back to the first broken train
of logic, the first error in understanding. Only then will we be able to break
the loop and begin anew.
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