Over the last few days, in response to my post A Recurrent Theme: On Moderate Muslims there has been another in a series of fairly intense and well thought out discussions concerning the existence or non-existence of Moderate Muslims. The tone has been civil throughout though those who suggest that Islam is irredeemably violent and immoderate sometimes come close to a nihilistic position.
Ken Spiker, in particular, makes an eloquent case for the problems with Islam arising from the toxic combination of the most intolerant and radical explication of Islam and primitive child rearing techniques:
Islam is a religion and a political ideology and on the surface it might seem possible to change people's minds once the advantages of, reason, liberal democracy and free markets are demonstrated to them. But Islam, like other cultural and ethnic systems, is also a style of child rearing, pre-conscious and therefore unaccessible to rational thought. ...
... Criminals, psychopaths, for the most part, are created by bad (sometimes horribly bad) parenting and genetic factors, none of which are cured by either reason or a better environment. Sometimes the factors can't be known, but the character distortions that result in psychopathic behavior are rather permanent and incurable. The same with Muslims--there's something twisted in their family dynamics that is impervious in later life to reason or experience. How else can one explain that it's Muslims, and only Muslims, who are are sufficiently motivated to blow themselves up in order to kill innocents? In my opinion it would have to be more than the persuasion of ideas, which are the catalyst, but do not in themselves supply the overwhelming emotional impetus to do such hideous acts or even to condone them. Naturally there are Muslims on whom the distortions of personality that characterizes Islamic emotional style are more or less severe. Some must be reasonable and free from ideological certainty. ...
There are books waiting to be written on the intersection of tribal, primitive child rearing and Islamist ideology and violence against infidels; unfortunately, there is a limited amount of material readily available upon which to base a thesis but the connection seems more than plausible. Nonetheless Ken, perhaps unknowingly, leaves a large "out" in his thesis.
He recognizes that even in the most monolithic child rearing system, there are many children who grow up and escape the worst ravages of their childhood. A relavant statistic is the recognition that only ~30% of children who have been abused end up abusing their own children, suggesting that a majority of children can overcome even the most terrible childhood. Early childhood experiences are formative (and what Psychoanalyst could dispute that?) but we remain human and our minds can develop and we can learn and change throughout life. This also implies that there is room for the external environment to impact on those at the margins who, depending on circumstances, can become Jihadi "martyrs" or local shopkeepers or high energy physicists.
Without question the best responses to the thesis of irredeemable Islam have come from David Thomson (a contributer to Flares into Darkness aka YARGB) and Maxed Out Mama, whose erudite and clear comments should really be expanded into some blog posts of their own. (That's a hint, MOM.) The entire comment thread is well worth considering. I firmly believe that acting as if Islam is irredeemable and moving the large body of apathetic and/or neutral and/or passive Muslims into active opposition is a poor way to conduct this war. Further, I think it is as unnecessary as it is counter-productive. However, to be fair, Ken, GaryK, Flash Gordon, Morton Doodslag, et al, make a powerful case, which appeals to the very kinds of emotional and cognitive responses that Islamic terror and war evoke, and yesterday, they received some potent ammunition from an unimpeachable source, Theodore Dalrymple, writing in NRO.
Dalrymple pondered the significance of the fact that Europe, much further along in the nuturance of an unassimilable Muslim community, has become a net exporter of Westerners and a net importer of Muslims. He points out that the complacency exhibited by the European Multicultural elites is unwarranted:
Interesting People, Yes
. . . but, sadly, not absorbingThe problem for the complacent, however, is that not only have a small number of Moslem fanatics already blown themselves up, unlike the Chinese, Jews, Poles, and Hindus, but they seem to have received widespread understanding, to say no more, from their coreligionists. It is no consolation to the worried that 90 percent, 95 percent, or even 99 percent of Moslems do not support terrorism. In Britain, that still leaves 200,000, 100,000, or 20,000 who do support terrorism, if only intellectually. There may be more rejoicing in heaven over one repentant sinner than over 99 just men, but in the security services and the population at large there is more concern over 20,000 supporters of terrorism than over 1,980,000 peaceful men. This is not wholly irrational.
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In fact, no European country has found the solution to the problem posed by mass Moslem immigration, which is one of the reasons that the traditional populations of western Europe are now a source of net emigration rather than of population growth. They have seen the future, and it doesn’t work.
Dr. Sanity echoes Dalrymple's comments and points out that fear, so often denied and ridiculed by our own elites, is an appropriate response to a real danger.
We all feel the emotion of fear. And it is good that we do so. Fear and all our other emotions are the software "shortcuts" that encourage our mind and body to act. An emotionally mature individual tries to understand his or her fear--i.e., he or she uses the rational faculty and reason-- because in doing so, one may determine the appropriate course of action for countering a perceived threat to youself or your loved ones.
Pretending that you aren't afraid; displacing or minimizing your fear; ignoring the slow-moving rhino heading in your direction or other dangerous realities; are hardly effective strategies to deal with the many threatening things in the world today.
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The proper role of emotion is to be an "early warning system" that alerts us that something good or something bad is on the way. We ignore our feelings at our peril; and alternately, if we rely only on them as a method of determining reality, we are equally screwed.
But, when emotions are used in concert with reason, we are able to optimally deal with the real world.
Contrary to what CAIR repeatedly suggests as it tries to brand all such incidents as "Islamophobic", the emotion of fear is not synonymous with prejudice or stereotyping; nor does "succumbing" to it necessarily involve irrational, histrionic, or some sort of overreaction to reality. Rather, fear is always an essential emotion that must be appropriately listened to by a rational mind because it is absolutely necessary for survival.
Only the very foolish and the very dead do not experience fear.
Different battlefields require different approaches and Europe's problems are exponentially more difficult than ours, not least because the EU elites in the bureaucracy are either stunningly insouciant about the threat or complicit in the attack on the West by virtue of their fundamental opposition to Representative Democracy.
While recognizing the power (and the temptation) of the arguments for the thesis that Islam is an implacable foe and Moderate Muslims are a myth, I would reiterate that the existence or non-existence of Moderate Islam and/or a significant cohort of Moderate Muslims will ultimately prove to be a minor factor in the ultimate outcome of this ideological war.
The outcome of this Long War will fundamentally depend upon the West rediscovering the common values that unite us and finding a way to resolve the internal conflicts that weaken our ability to assert those values. That is the topic for a future post.
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