ShrinkWrapped

Anders Behring Breivik, Naser Jason Abdo, and the Nature of Evil: Part I

This should be a very short post.  It is really not that difficult to define Breivik's actions and Abdo's plans as evil, and all civilized people, and all those who evince pretensions to being numbered among the civilized, should be able to agree on the fundamentals.  Unfortunately, we neither have a decent theory of action which can explain Breivik and Abdo, nor do we have a common moral compass which allows us to understand their behavior in useful ways. 

In the last week we have been treated to a variety of shop worn memes purporting to explain Breivik's actions and, in a typical MSM contrast, we have been treated to the relative absence of the obvious memes which could be used to explain Abdo's behavior. 

(Consider the "paper of record's" description of Abdo:  Two reporters and the usual army of editors manage to describe Abdo as a Soldier Arrested in Suspected Bomb Plot (who) Had Series of Disputes With Army; despite acknowledging a religious element to his disagreements with the army [and one is left to wonder how child porn and murder fit into his Islamic beliefs] the Times does not even once venture into any explorations of what those beliefs might be!  The New York Times is remarkable for its fastidious adherence to the highest standards of modesty when discussing Islamic terrorists; they showed no such diffidence in discussing, and smearing, those who allegedly fueled Breivik's terrorism.)

Since I attempt on my blog to "Understand Our World" the first order of business would be to explain the limits of our understanding of action, to wit:

None of our Neurosciences, ranging from the most behavioral (Psychoanalysis) to the most biological (Neuro-psychiatry) have an adequate theory of action.

In other words, while we can often create post-hoc explanations that are convincing and superficially compelling, we have no theories that can predict future behavior, except in the most limited, mundane sense.  This leaves us with a major lacuna in the center of our understanding of aberrant acts.  Consider this from Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Anthony Daniels, who worked for many years as a Forensic Psychiatrist in England and was quoted in the WSJ Saturday:

Unraveling the Mystery of Murderous Minds

Your garden-variety convicts, he contends, are much simpler subjects than a man like Breivik. To ask them why they steal, he says, "is like asking you why you have lunch." They want something, so they take it. "And since in Britain," he adds with a smirk, "the state does very little to discourage [thieves]," or to incarcerate them when they are caught, "the question is not why there are so many burglars, but why there are so few."

A Breivik is a deeper mystery. Of him, "you can say, 'This man is highly narcissistic, paranoid and grandiose,'" and this may lead you to seek reasons for that in his past—"his father disappeared at the age of 15 and so on and so forth." But uncovering such facts doesn't solve the mystery because "whatever you find, you would also find among hundreds or thousands or even millions of people who didn't do what he did." There is, he says, "always a gap between what is to be explained and your alleged explanation. So there's always a mystery, and I think that's going to remain."

[Dr. Dalrymple has some most interesting comments on our need to explain, and our self-deceptive belief that such explanations are possible but that is beyond the scope of this post.]

[As for a predictive science of individual behavior, I am indebted to, and  retain a deep sense of satisfaction and humility with, Roger Penrose's explanation that consciousness may not be computable; he uses math and information science to show that a predictive science of consciousness may well require more computing power and time than the universe allows, a subset of the incompleteness theorem.  If he is correct, and I do not doubt that he is, considering the complexity of the human brain and mind, we may someday improve in our ability to predict the behavior of large groups, where irrationalities sum, but will never be able to perfectly model or predict an individual's behavior at all times; the antecedents and interconnections in the mind/brain are simply too complex to ever decipher in less time and computational ability that is available in the known universe.]

What this means is that we will never be able to predict with certainty which person who complains that _____ (fill in the blanks with your own choice) is unfair will take violent action to redress his grievances and who among them (the vast majority who may agree) will either remain passive or work within the accepted bounds of social and political decency.  That does not, however, argue for taking a passive stance when confronting those with grievances.  We do, in fact, know that there are a number of factors that make violence more likely.  Note that this is, as suggested above, a consideration of group dynamics from which violent individuals emerge.

1) In the face of societal regression, less mature modes of thinking and acting become more likely.  In other words as a society is stressed, and as individuals are stressed, the ability to take appropriate actions (hard work, debate, organizing and voting to redress political grievances) becomes more friable; on the fringes, violence can come to be seen as the only alternative for those who experience themselves as weak and disenfranchised.  Nonetheless, even at times of great stress and regression, the majority of people do not resort to violence unless directly threatened themselves; perhaps this is the greater mystery than why the few become dangerously violent.

2) In circumstances where one's culture, or sub-culture, explicitly sanctions or glorifies violence as a response to real and imagined slights, the risk of violence increases dramatically.  Even here, it is remarkable that though close to 100% of Palestinians hate Jews and wish they would be destroyed, it is, despite the efforts of the entire society to mobilize to destroy their enemies, a small fraction who actually engage in murderous acts toward their neighbors.  Here, the distinction between Breivik and Abdo is most stark.  Breivik comes from a culture that finds violence anathema; he has been universally condemned, even by those who he and the Left-leaning MSM cite as inspiring his ideological posture.  Abdo, although living within a culture that abjures the use of violence for resolving political disputes, identified himself as a member of a culture that celebrates the use of violence for expanding its writ.  It is thus no coincidence that there are far more Abdos than Breiviks.

3) In addition to the societal factors, there is broadly speaking, one additional factor related to the individual's transition from passive to (violently) active, best explained by the Poet:

On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert
I pick up my money and head back into town
Driving cross the Waynesboro county line
I got the radio on and I'm just killing time
Working all day in my daddy's garage
Driving all night chasing some mirage
Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge

CHORUS
The dogs on Main Street howl
'cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land

I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start

- The Promised Land

When you have done all the "right things" and you still cannot succeed to your specifications, if you still don't "get the girl", the rage at frustrated desires can be overwhelming.  One can start off as a loser or become a loser, ie one who loses in the competition for success and status in a modern economy; either way, for those will limited internal resources, there are only two options: the resulting rage can be turned inward (depression and suicide) or outward (externalized onto others in violence.)

Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode

In the early 21st century, the old orders are failing across the board.  Societies are under great stress: the Blue, welfare state model is failing; Communism has failed; Islam has failed, and we are careening toward a modern world that looks more and more as if it is regressing to a Hobbseian state of nature.  During times of extreme dislocation, the possibility that we are finally (once again?) approaching Apocalyptic times, becomes prominent and man's usual tendency for hyperbole escalates; exaggeration is de riguer at such times.

[See Richard Landes' new book, Heaven on Earth, for an explication of Millennialism in its various forms; sadly, it is likely to be a more useful discussion as time goes on.]

At this point I would only add one more element that distinguishes Breivik from Abdo:  Breivik is no more evil than Abdo, but he was far more competent, a sad commentary on the much greater ability of Western Culture to cultivate competence even in its least able.  Further, he was aided and abetted by the incompetence of those who the Norwegian innocents relied on for protection.  A healthy, self correcting society would immediately recognize that there is never going to be a guarantee that a lone loser will not take up arms against his own feelings of inferiority and weakness and direct his inchoate rage at his surround.  That hypothetical healthy society would recognize that a citizenry must be able to protect themselves (either by demanding competency from their police and military or arming themselves) or they will have forfeited the right to be free men and women.

Although I have not cited the Neuropsychiatric research or the Psychoanalytic investigations which support my contention that we currently lack anything approaching an adequate theory of action, the evidence is available for anyone who wants to devote the time and energy.  The next step is to establish that Breivik's actions, just as Abdo (and Major Hasan, and Timothy McVeigh, and a host of other terrorists) were not psychotic, but were rather  behaviors that occurred at the extreme limits of a continuum from normal behavior to pathological behavior without ever crossing the boundaries of psychotic behavior; to wit, neither Breivik nor Abdo are "crazy" either in the Psychiatric or the forensic sense.

To be continued...

The New Millennial Mania

Recent conceptions of Mania have likened it to a Seizure Disorder.  In this construct, an unstable groups of cells in the Cerebral Cortex become highly excitable and begin to fire with an increased frequency and intensity.  As they stimulate all of the neurons with which they have synaptic connections, these neurons are recruited into an ever widening network of neurons firing at elevated rates and intensities.  In a Seizure disorder, the network rather quickly becomes disorganized and the neural functioning becomes grossly impaired.  The result is a disorganized firing of neurons leading to loss of consciousness and uncontrolled stimulation of the end organs (muscles) which results in the typical spasmodic twitching of the Seizure victim.  In Mania, such elevated firing rates and intensities overwhelms the baseline neural activity which causes disturbances in sleep, appetite, and energy level/expenditure, as well as impairing the higher cognitive functioning of the brain.  As a result the manic patient loses his ability to accurate perceive and test reality.  In other words, he misunderstands reality in ways which are characteristically pathological.  The Manic patient, whose antic behavior brings him into conflict with his loved ones and often with authorities, perceives the efforts of others to control his behavior as persecutory.  He is typically quite irritable and irrational, in the worst case ready to fight at a moment's notice, and often becomes overtly paranoid and delusional.  At that point the person has usually become a danger to himself and/or others and must be hospitalized for the protection of himself and the greater society.  No amount of reasoned and rational debate can convince the patient that his psychotic weltanschauung is disordered.

On occasion, large groups of people exhibit behaviors that, if found in an individual, would be understood as Manic and Paranoid.  Throughout human history there have been periods marked by seemingly psychotic and bizarre actions sweeping through entire populations.  These Millennial movements usually take place during times of severe societal stress but are only predictable in retrospect. [HT: Richard Landes]

A World Gone Mad

I  hesitate to go as far as Melanie Phillips, who labels the growing, frenzied international vilification of Israel "a global pogrom in the making." No, it seems to me more like widespread loss of sanity. The general hysteria, not just in the Islamic world but in Europe and the Americas too, brings to mind the words of the late British historian Norman Cohn, written more than a decade ago:

There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."

We now seem to be witnessing such a period of insanity, and it may well change the course of history. While the trend has been gaining momentum for some time, it took a grotesque distortion of Israel's operation against the Gaza flotilla to reveal the level to which much of the international community has sunk. One of the pinnacles of lunacy came from Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who, without blinking an eye, told reporters over breakfast in Washington that Israel's action was Turkey's 9/11.

...

None of this [exculpatory evidence- SW] makes any difference to the raving hordes that are storming the Israeli embassies, drowning out Israel's voice in the universities and flooding the airwaves and thousands of opinion columns in the press with their delirious portrayal of Israel. To them, facts seem to be a nothing but a distraction, and no evidence from Israel will change their mind. At the moment, even friends appear to have been bitten by this bug.

In a world gone mad, to be right is not good enough - we need to be smart. Israel needs to immediately establish its own independent commission of inquiry. In fact that should have been Prime Minister Netanyahu's first public announcement after the flotilla operation. By delaying the announcement, Israel has lost valuable points once again.

There are going to be very difficult times ahead for Israel. We need to reduce our conflicts with the international community to the ones that are most critical for our survival, and stick to them.

What is happening in the Muslim World is nothing less than a Millennialist movement in Islam.   Shia Islam has always been a Millennialist sect; the extremist group in charge of Iran, followers of the Twelfth Imam, believe that by precipitating the final clash between Good and Evil they will set in motion events leading to the emergence of the Twelfth Imam from the well in which he has been hiding for 1000 years and the Caliphate will be restored.  One plausible explanation for Turkey's recent moves presenting themselves as an authentic protector of the besieged Palestinian victims, is that by so doing Turkey will be able to wrest the leadership of the Muslim world from the Shia Persians, with whom the Turks have been at odds for several hundred years.  At the same time, by enabling the Iranian nuclear program while demonizing the Israelis, the Turks support Muslim solidarity while creating conditions that rationalize their need for their own nuclear program, in public to protect against the hated Jews, in private to offset the hated Persians.  However, there is a problem with riding the tiger of Millennialism:  [My comments are in parentheses.]

Millenarianism

Fourth, millenarian ideas have qualities which makes them tend to form the nuclei of narrative communities. The believers in the millenarian story have a role to play in the story, and so to accept the story is to feel that one is, or should be, part of the community of believers. Non-believers are not part of the community. But, in such situations, there is a natural tendency to think that everyone who is not part of the community is an enemy of the community, and since the real enemy is the Adversary, they are (at least) the Adversary's tools. [Community=The Ummah] ...

Fifth, there is an element of positive feedback at work. [Millennial movements must grow, ie recruit new members, or begin to die out, extinguish.  Since the movement si sustained by a manic passionate intensity, it cannot last indefinitely.] ...

Sixth, millenarian movements are not sustainable, for the simple reason that the millennium is not now at hand, and never has been. [Emphasis added- SW] When this becomes apparent --- and the human capacity for wishful thinking is not so great that it won't, eventually, become apparent --- something has to give. Either the movement ceases to be millenarian, or it collapses qua movement, leaving behind, perhaps, a few die-hard followers who keep finding reasons why the glorious day should be just a little more remote than they thought.... (Logically speaking, the failure of all previous millenarian expectations doesn't mean that they will necessarily be disappointed in the future. By definition, however, at most one of them could succeed.) The first five considerations apply, mutatis mutandis, to many other kinds of movement, like novel political ideologies; this one does not.

Taking these things together, we reach the conclusion that, in order to become large, a millenarian movement must grow very rapidly, if it is not to be killed off by disillusionment, but that this is hard, because many mechanisms work against rapid growth, particularly the rapid growth of a small movement. But under what circumstances will those inhibitory mechanisms not apply?

Read the rest of Cosma Rohilla Shalizi's post for some further discussion of Millenarianism, including its roots and the conditions that foster its spread.  Consider that the current conditions are ripe for such a movement.  Modernism has brought the failure of the Muslim world into unmistakable focus.  The presence of a Jewish state, run by dhimmis, in land once formerly part of the Dar al Islam, is a constant reminder, a constant irritant, to the Muslims whose pride and honor are damaged more everyday by the insult of Israel's continued existence.  The passions being aroused in the Middle East are not amenable to reason or reality.

Further, and more chilling, the wild fire of anti-Semitic Millenial rage flowing through the Umma, cannot be quenched as long as Israel continues to exist.  This means that the existence of Israel represents an existential threat, on many different levels, to the versions of Islam being promulgated by the Shia and Sunni Millennialists in the Middle East.  The pressure must intensify against Israel.  Iran is certainly playing their part, as their genocidal, eliminationist rhetoric escalates.  If Israel cannot be destroyed by the Iranians, and soon, the spasms of passion and rage will either dissipate or need to be re-directed against a more available opponent. 

Israel's best hope is to hunker down and play defense.  They may well be forced into making the terrible decision to protect themselves from an existential, nuclear attack (though so far, it appears that Iran does not yet have the capacity to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.)  Israel must not be drawn into another War it cannot win.  The more time that passes without an Iranian nuclear attack, the more likely it is that Israel will weather the storm.  The more time that passes, the more likely it becomes that the Millennial passions now at play will burn out; the manic episode will pass, and all will be able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Israel must work on its defensive missile screen, Iron Dome and derivatives, protect itself as best it can, and wait.

For the Umma, the lessons of Psychiatry and Neurology should be understood and recognized: The aftermath of a Seizure is a period of confusion and enervation; the aftermath of a Manic episode is a Depression.

Using a Scalpel: A More Refined "Samson Option"

Over the last few years we have learned that the best way to protect ourselves against terrorism is to target the leaders of the terrorist groups.  Generally the leaders of such groups desire martyrdom, but primarily for their followers.  The leaders of such groups typically cry (to paraphrase St. Augustine) "Dear Allah, let me become a martyr... but not yet."  Even when the leaders do desire martyrdom, removing the leaders means that they are replaced by terrorists with less knowledge, sophistication, and ability.  Killing Imad Mughniyah did not destroy Hezbollah, but has eroded their ability to commit terrorist acts out of the area.  (That Hezbollah has become a powerful paramilitary force is another matter entirely.)

It is incontestable that Israel cannot destroy its enemies, even with overwhelming conventional force.  It must, therefor, find an alternative approach.  It may be that Israel can maintain its deterrence by threatening the destruction of Mecca, Medina, the Dome of the Rock as Geoffrey Britain suggests (and I would add the city of Qom and a number of other sites on the "holiest sites of Islam" list for greater deterrent effect)  but it may ultimately prove to be impossible to confidently deter Islam when it finds itself faced with an existential threat (which  is what modernity and the existence of the state of Israel represent to Islam.) 

Consider a near future scenario:

By 2020, Islam has become so emboldened that it has become unmistakable to most people in the West that Geoffrey Britain was correct; the problem is Islam and Islam and modern liberal society are incompatible. 

Israel's existence hangs by a thread.  It is increasingly being abandoned by its friends, who still need Arab oil and fear the fifth column in their midst.  It has never been able to solve the moral conundrum that a first strike use of Nuclear weapons poses and its deterrent capabilities have steadily eroded as it has never been able to master the Information War in ways which disarm its foes.  In 2020, for the first time, the number of people emigrating from Israel is greater than the number immigrating to Israel.  The future looks grim:

It is early spring, 2021 

In a magnanimous gesture applauded by the global community (this is fiction, so bear with me) the Israelis announce that they are going to release every Palestinian prisoner convicted of terrorism over the course of two weeks in March  of 2021.  The Americans and Europeans, committed to the chronically moribund "Peace Process" applaud the release and commit to re-convening the long eclipsed Final Status talks.  Finally it appears that the Peace Process will resume and that the Israelis, whose intransigence has been determined to be the primary cause of the failure of the Peace Process, have become committed to Peace.   A new dawn in the Middle East appears to be (once again) at hand.

The fact that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, along with the rest of the HISH alliance (Hezbollah/Iran/Syria/Hamas) remain committed to the destruction of Israel and that genocidal propaganda remains a staple of Palestinian (along with Arab and  Iranian) media continues to be ignored as an inconvenient Israeli raised obstacle to Peace and as such has not been a matter of concern since the days of the Netanyahu administration.  With the news of the prisoner releases, the Palestinians and their allies are more convinced than ever that history is moving in its favor and that the hated Jewish state will soon be destroyed.  At the same time, paranoid conspiracy theories abound throughout the Middle East; the theories escalate and become increasingly fantastic as no one can believe the Israelis would release deadly enemies with no promise of peace, yet as the first prisoners arrive home to hero's welcomes, the idea that Israel may finally be surrendering due to exhaustion and because of the superior will of the Palestinians takes hold throughout the once occupied territories and throughout the Middle East.

Meanwhile, for the Western powers, the media are filled with the news that the new Labor government of Israel is ready to deal and a break thorough is at hand.  All assure that genocidal ravings are simply the background noise of the Middle east, not to be taken seriously.

Unbeknown to most of the participants, however, two major developments have occurred which render the Israeli behavior somewhat less than the suicidal acts that the Israeli and American right believe.

Each of the released prisoners, as part of one of his last meals, has unknowingly ingested, disguised as a grain of rice, a tiny nanobot which comes complete with an RFID and wideband transmitter.  Each nanobot is designed to not only relay real time information about its subject (including sounds in the ambient environment) but to become part of a seamless mesh network with each of the other nanobots now carried within each of the former prisoners.  For the weeks prior to their release the Israelis have been testing and bringing on line the computer network designed to integrate the immense amount of information that will be generated by these bots.

At the same time multiple squadrons of stealthed UAV's have taken off from an open field in Northern Israel.  Additional squadrons have been released near the border of Gaza.  Yet another set of UAV squadrons were already set aloft from the deck of an Israeli submarine in the Persian Gulf.  Each squadron is carrying a payload consisting of a multitude of "mosquitoes", "centipedes", "spiders" and, "wasps".  Once over their target, the UAV's all release their payloads and what appears to be nothing more than balloons drift down toward the surface, only to burst at various heights above their targets.  The bugs then drift, glide, and fly to their assigned locations (with specific locations unimportant since there are so many bugs that the coverage will be excellent) and begin to silently go about their deadly business.

One further data point: each of the nanobots and each of the bugs is equipped with a range of toxins designed to mimic various fatal conditions including cardiac arrests and intracranial hemorrhages and leave no trace on autopsy toxicology.

In the ensuing weeks and months a number of spectacular terror attacks are thwarted.  A planned cruise missile sneak attack from Southern Lebanon is noted prior to launch and coutner-measures deployed which destroy the missile and the launch crew.  A number of high ranking Hezbollah and Hamas members suffer mysterious deaths and several Iranian Mullahs along with the leader of Syria's intelligence agency also succumb.  Rumors of Israeli secret weapons, ray guns, biological agents, and other more fanciful inventions take off across the Middle East.  Paranoia escalates within the HISH alliance who have very good reason to believe they have been infiltrated by Israeli agents.  Massive purges take place as internecine warfare breaks out while the Israeli spies are sought out.  Many are executed though none have any actual connection to the Mossad.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffers a fatal heart attack, the Israelis announce that this is what happens to all tyrants and anti-Semites.  Several Rabbis announce that the mysterious deaths of so man of Israel's enemies in such a short period of time are signs of G-d's displeasure at the anti-Semitic ravings of our enemies.  The pace of attacks against Israel diminish as none are successful, save the rare "lone wolf" events.  Program directors at state run Arab media organizations also have been suffering the same mysterious illnesses and deaths.  The level of anti-Semitic agitprop begins to diminish as articles appear in the Arab press describing secret Jewish rays able to kill those who threaten Israel from a distance; such articles are occasionally based on suggestions from Israeli sources but more often occur to the writer de novo.  The pattern of suspicious deaths of leading anti-Semites does not go unremarked.  Eventually the Middle east quiets down. 

In this scenario the Israelis are able to wield a scalpel to remove the Cancerous stem cells from the Arab body.  The bugs and nanobots act as a powerfully enhanced immune system for the Jewish state.  Vigilance will be required for generations but the accelerating pace of technology means that those states and societies which have a lead in technology today will find their lead increasing exponentially against their competitors and adversaries.  The Arab world has existed for a thousand years as a culture based on extraction; for too many Arabs work is a dirty word and innovation is against Allah's will.  Such a  society cannot compete in a high tech environment.

Finally Peace comes to the Middle east through the workings of Jewish magic.

A Time of Testing

The news out of the Middle East is dispiriting.  Israel has suffered a major defeat in the information war being waged against it.  Among Israel's friends the reactions ranges from anger at the Israeli government for botching the response to the aid convoy to appropriate concern that Israel Does Not Understand 4GW.  The soldiers who boarded the Turkish ship were inexcusably unprepared by their military/political superiors for the violent reception they met.

Yaacov Lozowick points out the ecology of Israel's existential crisis:

We need to step back and remind ourselves of the broad picture of the concentric circles at whose center we live.

The outer circle is the utter hatred large swathes of the Muslim World bear towards the idea and reality of a Jewish state. As a demonstrator in Istanbul shouted, there can be no Jewish state in the Arab world: what bothers him about the siege of Gaza is that Jews are in the position to impose it, not it's particular details. (The irony of Turks hating Jews for infractions of human rights or international law is striking).

The next circle are the Westerners of various stripes who also wish Israel gone, and reject the right of the Jews to be a nation. Many of the hate-motivated Muslims are willing or eager to engage in violence. Most of the Westerns haters aren't. They prefer to spew their malice at places like the Guardian, as documented daily by CiFWatch, or at many similar cesspools. Some, however, go further: Gerta Berlin, for example, a spokesperson of the Free Gaza Movement which collaborated in launching the flotilla, tells proudly that she's been active in Palestinian causes since the early 1960s, when Gaza was occupied by Egypt, not that she cared. She and her ilk are enemies of Israel, and will hi-jack whatever narrative holds out promise of damaging Israel. Today it's Gaza, before that it was Jenin, and next it will be... whatever.

Then there's the very large circle of cynics idealists and the lazy. The cynics are epitomized by, say, China. The Chinese don't care about international law or morality. They care about power and China. When working with Israel fits their purposes they'll do so gladly; when not, not. In neither case will they be motivated by the conditions in Gaza, to which they are utterly indifferent unless there's an angle for Chinese profit.

The idealistic and lazy typically rely on an international media that has been repeatedly "played" by those forces inimical to Western Civilization and as a result tend to buy into the narrative of brutal (White) Western oppressors and innocent and desperate (brown) victims; this allows the aggressors to start each engagement with a decisive advantage.  Further, the early pictures and video come prepared with a ready narrative (built in the weeks prior to the incident)  which leaves the conventionally more powerful defender at a significant disadvantage.

All of this is unified by the international Jihad being waged by Islam and their allies on the Left against Western Civilization.  Andrew McCarthy discusses how Jihad is being waged in America, The 'peaceful' Jihad in America; the "peaceful" Jihadis leverage the violent Jihadis to advance their ideology.  As usual, Israel serves as the "canary in the coal mine" but where Israel goes, the United States soon follows.  Once Israel has been rendered incapable of self-defense, American efforts to safeguard our country will be further eroded in ways which make a successful defense of civilization itself problematic.

Barry Rubin tries to use reason and reality to fight this war: Sympathy for the Devil and the Gaza Sea Confrontation: How Can Helping a Repressive Fascist, Genocide-Intending Hamas Regime be Noble?  It is certainly important for supporters of Israel and Western Civilization to know the facts as clearly as possible but it seems to me we are well past the point where facts are going to sway public opinion in any significant way or advance the cause of Peace or Victory over those forces of barbarism that threaten us.

Richard Fernandez, perhaps remembering his Three Conjectures, believes that eventually the reality of this global war will become unmistakably real:

The Consolations of Philosophy

Both cases [the Gaza flotilla and the Cheonan sinking] demonstrate that nothing is more paramount either to the establishment nor to the politically correct sections of the media than the maintenance of a lie. For the lie is in the service of the greater good. High reasons of policy will be invoked to explain why the truth should not be so. But the extreme reliance on fantasy by parts of the Western establishment goes well beyond surrounding a kernel of the truth with a “bodyguard of lies.” Instead it is the lie itself which is guarded by even more falsehoods.  Gradually and inexorably, an entire political class has staked its existence on continuation of falsehood. The greater good is the fiction. Deception has become a necessity in itself.

As a result, any moderately well informed individual knows that there is no Islamic extremism, nor even terrorism. There are only man made disasters. Everybody knows that we can borrow our way out of debt, that the welfare state is the sustainable wave of the future; that Egypt has no border with Gaza through which it can provide supplies if it wanted; that the UN has kept Hezbollah from importing hundreds of missiles into Lebanon; that the thought of a handful of Jews has kept hundreds of millions of oil-rich Muslims from attaining prosperity; and that Global Warming is the main danger facing the planet Earth. That these assertions are untrue hardly matters; that they are indisputable is what seems to count. For who shall dispute them?

Reality might. And therein lies the problem.

Here’s what is going to happen with one hundred percent certainty. All of these lies will explode with considerable force in the faces of political establishment. Nothing can prevent it. Just as reality eventually exposed the hollowness of the financial bubble and showed that nothing was “too big to fail,” eventually it will demonstrate to our extreme cost, that no lie can be maintained forever. That is the real reason anyone should really care about what happened on the “peace flotilla.” We are as corrupt as a preacher in a whorehouse. It ain’t what we don’t know that will hurt us, it’s what we know that ain’t so that will drive the dagger into our hearts.

In 2010 we have been knowingly at war with radical Islam, now referred to using euphemisms designed to deny that very fact but recognized as such by anyone paying attention, for almost 10 years.  Radical Islam (with very little demurral from "moderate" Islam) has been at war with the West since the 1940s, more openly since the 1967 Middle East War, and most directly against America since 1993 (the first WTC bombing.)   Europe is, as has been their wont, determined to be the last crocodile by tossing Israel over-board.  Our current administration, convinced by the European style facile rationalization popular at elite Universities, is either confused, has ambivalent leanings, or is simply disinterested in understanding our current peril and as a result facilitates the growth of Islamist ideology. 

[In any local situation, the choice of submission to the Islamists versus alliance with the West must now be filtered through a lens of American neo-isolationism.  The local thugs will win every time in this calculation.]

Israel can not win this war by using conventional means.  It is a civilized community living in the middle of a population of sociopaths and lunatics.   As Max Boot points out, Israel Can Win Every Battle but Still Lose the War. 

I can see no way out for Israel in the near term.  It is rapidly being delegitimized and made a pariah.  The best, perhaps only, way to protect oneself from sociopaths (the Islamist leadership) is to threaten them with an overwhelming response.  Sociopaths desire to live and the Islamist leadership give every indication of desiring to live and continue to wield power, whether as a Prince in Saudi Arabia, a Mullah in Iran, or a heroic Hezbollah or Hamas Resistance fighter in Damascus.  Only if the leadership are convinced that their well being is at risk will they be at all willing to rein in the lunatics who they send to murder and die.  The problem for Israel is now several fold:

Can Israel credibly threaten, sotto voce, a Samson Option?*

Will its enemies believe its threats?

Can a democracy make such a threat and convince itself of its necessity?

The logic of the Information War against Israel and the Iranian race to obtain nuclear weapons, combined with European animus and American insouciance, suggests that at some point, a willingness to use nuclear weapons in the defense of Israel will become a necessity if the state is to survive long term.  The more credible the threat of use is, the less likely it will become necessary.  Unfortunately, in the Middle East, there will always be those willing to test Israel's resolve to use all means at its disposal to confirm Never Again.

I fear we are moving perilously close to that test.

* The Samson Option will be a necessary deterrent for the next 10 years.  At that point the asymmetry at the heart of Israel's problems will be addressable and the Islamists will no longer have the advantage in unconventional war.  That makes the next ten years the most perilous in recent memory. I will expand on these ideas in a future post.

On the Necessity of Drawing Cartoons

Today is Everybody Draws Mohammed Day.  Nick Gillespie explains

Why We’re Having an Everybody Draw Mohammed Constest on Thursday, May 20:

Before the calendar page turns to Thursday, it’s worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris. Soon after asking everyone to draw the Prophet in solidarity with the arguably millions of people repressed by threats of theologically justified violence, Norris herself went into ideological hiding, suggesting instead that everyone draw another target of South Park satire: former Vice President Al Gore.

While Gore, who likes to credit himself with understanding the architectonics of cyberspace (if not creating them) and who way back when convened Congressional hearings to discuss the dread menace of satanic heavy metal lyrics (via con diablo, Ronnie James Dio!), is certainly worthy of the sort of ongoing abuse that only a fully distributed Internets can deliver, the obvious reason that Norris changed her target is real and potential violence.

Mark Steyn elaborates:

I initially had mixed feelings about Everybody Draws Mohammed Day. Provocation for its own sake is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture, but that's not what this is about. Nick Gillespie's post reminds us that the three most offensive of the "Danish cartoons" — including the one showing Mohammed as a pig —were not by any Jyllands-Posten cartoonists but were actually faked by Scandinavian imams for the purposes of stirring up outrage among Muslims. As Mr Gillespie says:

It is nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created “Piss Christ” and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism.

So, if it really is a sin to depict Mohammed, then these imams will be roasting in hell. (Unless, of course, taqqiya permits Muslims to break their own house rules for the purpose of sticking it to the infidels.)

And Zombie describes this as nothing less than

The New Free Speech Movement

Islamic extremists still seem to think that banning Facebook or threatening to kill the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day organizers will somehow make the problem of blasphemy go away. They don’t yet understand that we in the West have spent the last 600 years not merely earning the right to be blasphemous, but more importantly creating a society and a worldview in which there is no such thing as blasphemy, because all forms of speech are permitted and religious bullies no longer get to determine what is forbidden.

Now get out your pencils and start drawing.

I would add that Radical Islam behaves as if it is the embodiment of Psychopathy: [All emphases added-SW]

Facing the Psychopath

Psychopaths are not, in fact, particularly good liars; they spin tales and get away with it because their listeners fail to confront them on the inconsistencies.  So, why bring Psychopaths into the mix when discussing the danger from radical Islam?  Unfortunately, those who follow the dictates of their Koran (whether it is simply one of many interpretations or the only interpretation, as insisted upon by the Islamists, is immaterial) are explicitly permitted to lie, threaten, cheat, do whatever it takes to dominate the infidel.  Whether or not the typical Muslim is a psychopath is not the issue; the issue is that Islam, as practiced in the public sphere, behaves like a Psychopath.  Note that it is often the apostate Muslim, most at risk from the reactions of their former co-religionists, who most acutely points out the failures (and questions the existence) of Moderate Islam and Moderate Muslims.

I suspect Dr. Steve will at some point discuss how the victims of the psychopath unconsciously collude with the Psychopath.  I touched upon this last week in Undercurrents where I described an analytic treatment that failed to progress until I recognized that I had colluded with my patient in avoiding her underlying rage.  She was not in any way a Psychopath, but the dynamics, of unconsciously appeasing her in order to avoid her rage being directed at me, is a sine qua non of interactions with the Psychopath.  (Take a look at the Iceman Interviews for a close-up peek into the mind of the Psychopath.  You will be fascinated, repelled and disturbed.  Imagine being in the room with the Iceman.)

No one likes to think of themselves as a coward.  It is damaging to one's self-esteem to imagine being craven and allowing one's fear to control one's actions.  That is why so many find ways to rationalize their surrender to the forces of intolerance and hate.  Our MSM, which has never shied away from attacking religious beliefs suddenly finds itself terribly respectful of religion when the religion involved is Islam.  The New York Times quite easily and repeatedly abandons its vaunted free speech principles when the free speech risks insulting Islam.  (And please note that it is taking less and less of an insult to arouse the rage of Islam.  We have gone from obnoxious cartoons to teddy bears in the space of just a few years.)

Radical Islam is fighting an asymmetrical war against the West and they are more than holding their own because so many of the Western elites and governments are more than ready to buy a brief respite for the cost of our fundamental freedoms.  Radical Islam is a losing ideology incompatible with modernity.  They sense it but we often act as if we do not appreciate what we have.  A unified front by America and the West would dispense with Radical Islam with minimal bloodshed and minimal drama simply by standing up for what we profess to believe in.  As Americans we should remember our roots:

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

-- Ben Franklin

From Holden Caulfield to Jihad Jane

Holden Caulfield was the literary embodiment of adolescent existential angst.  He was familiar to all of us who grew up privileged in America.  We were blessed with freedom and amazing wealth compared to every prior generation, but suffered from a paucity of meaning.  The baby boomers grew up in an era where God and country were slowly becoming less important and central than the aggrandizement of the Self.  The 1960s were a time where John F. Kennedy's stirring Inaugural speech on January 20th, 1961:

"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Morphed into Grace Slick singing, in 1967's After Bathing at Baxter's:

Rejoyce

Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me. [Emphasis mine-SW]

The processes that fed the anomie that led to the large scale "rebellion" of youth in the 1960s have not gone away.  As the Western elites have become more and more secular and entitlements and the entitlement mentality have grown (with Europe far in advance of America in their dissolution) hedonism has replaced selfless devotion as a major core dynamic.  "Just do it" is far easier to follow as a commandment than the original Ten Commandments.  Yet, the turn away form traditional religion means that for a significant cohort there is no replacement for the meaning derived form religion.  This is not to suggest that it is impossible to live a life imbued with meaning without believing in God or organized religion; it is to imply that living a life filled with meaning is more difficult without a Deity; the Existentialists have done us no favors by devaluing a structure that has worked for several thousand years.  As a result, once the joys of the hedonistic life have paled, there is often a turn toward spirituality to fill the void.

"Jihobbyists" No More: English-Speaking Western Jihadists Coming of Age

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of all the media attention in the latest criminal allegations against "Jihad Jane" is that Colleen LaRose of Pennsylvania is only the latest example of this odd emerging trend in homegrown terrorism. Indeed, LaRose is hardly alone in this category, whether we speak of London resident Samina Malik, an active user on jihadi social networking forums who busied herself with transcribing Al-Qaida training manuals into English during spare time at her job working in secure areas of Heathrow Airport--or Canadian citizen Beverly Giesbrecht (a.k.a. Khadija Abdul Qahhar), who was taken hostage by the Taliban during rather suspicious travels through North Waziristan. Both men and women who were once written off as hapless wannabes and mere "jihobbyists" are unexpectedly rising to the occasion, in often quite desperate bids to prove their total commitment to the cause.

These individuals are, more frequently than not, English-speaking with only a cursory knowledge of Arabic or the Middle East. Their pedigree is less than elite, and they lack the traditional connections back to Al-Qaida's central leadership. Yet, even Al-Qaida's senior echelon now openly recognizes the critical value of these potential "lone wolf" operatives. In several prominent publications--including both the latest video from American Al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn and the most recent official magazine from Al-Qaida in Yemen--the terror group has openly broadcast its pleasure and interest in the actions of such independent actors as Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan and Jordanian webmaster and CIA bomber Humam al-Balawi (a.k.a. Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani).

Without meaning in one's life, without the sense that there is a purpose to our existence that transcends our petty appetites, one can develop a terribly skewed view of the world.  If  the world is merely a result of chance and we are only born into comfort or deprivation because of random luck, guilt and rage are to be expected.  Instead of appreciating the bounty with which we are blessed, the anxious and uncertain young person views the unfairness around him and, in the absence of an overarching schema, invents one or adopts one.  At that point, since there is no Satan to supply the evil, it can only be a derivative of man's behavior.  From there, it is a short step to externalizing all one's discontents.  Scapegoating depends upon such Psychological processes.  If you see successful people and a vibrant society, where you do not feel you fit in anywhere, resentment and an exaggerated sense of grievance flow naturally from one's personal psychology to a(n imagined) societal induced anomie. 

Toady our young people, and those who have become fixated or regressed to more infantile positions, can find meaning in such attractive alternatives as the struggle for social justice or for the environment (both offspring of Communism/Socialism, ie collectivism) while others may find meaning in a return to traditional religion or to a new iteration of traditional religion; still others may seek out less restrictive religions (how many Catholics reject Catholicism because of its attitudes toward sex and procreation?) or find solace in a religion which is self confident (at least superficially, though it hides a deep seated sense of insecurity under its violet and aggressive bravado)  and growing in strength while filled with an absolute certainty, ie Islam.  By submitting to Islam, all the difficult questions and problems in life are resolved. 

Islamism offers a framework, an external structure, that supports the externalization of one's problems, and supplies a ready response to difficulties in one's internal and external life. 

John Robb reports on testimony before Congress that supports this as one of the predisposing factors in home grown terrorism:

Scott Atran, Terrorists, and Global Guerrillas

Last year, open source warfare received some exciting validation in the form of a scientific study that reached the cover of Nature Magazine (although the theory reached the pinnacle of scientific validation, nobody in the DoD noticed -- wow, seriously, is there anybody with a working brain still working there?).   Now Scott Atran, a sharp anthropologist that has been studying terrorism scientifically (although from his narrow area of specialization), has noticed some shifts in terrorist behavior  that align more closely to Global Guerrillas using open source warfare than traditional Jihadis.  Here's a summary from some Congressional testimony he recently gave.

...

Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world's most powerful nation and army.

...

Although lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality, it turns out that some criminal youth really don't want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause.

Read the whole thing; this relates to the alienated foreign born terrorists as well as the Western born.  While you are at it, check out Jim Hoft's posts on an American born al Qaeda who has not been conspicuous in the MSM:

Stunner. Al-Qaeda Killer Who Shot His Way Out of Hospital Is Former Dem Operative

Breaking: Al-Qaeda Killer & Dem Operative Worked at New Jersey Nuclear Plant

All societies have their marginalized individuals.  Such people have traditionally borne their failures and their inner despair by themselves.  By offering a way out of a life of failure and/or meaninglessness (since even materially successful people can suffer from inner  emptiness) radical Islam solves their internal and external, Psychological and social, problems.  Once invested in Islamism, one's life is suffused with meaning and nobility; such a Siren call has a powerful allure.

What Are You Willing to Die For?

[Update at end]

In post-religious, secularized Western countries, the answer to the title question tends to devolve to "nothing" beyond the self and its interests.  Western elites are fond of instructing their inferiors to sacrifice for their Utopian ideal of the moment but sacrificing one's life for the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" for others is typically seen as the province of less well educated, less sophisticated, non-members of the elite.  America still has enough young people who value what this country has to offer that they are willing to put their lives on the line for us, but Europe has long since surrendered to the progressive forces of history and eschews self-defence of their ideals.   For Western elites, people who are motivated by religious beliefs, usually overlapping with those too ignorant to avoid the military, are essentially the equivalent of cannon fodder, ie, they do not count.  Our elites pride themselves on their functional atheism.  Politicians may from time to time profess their deep religious convictions but most often on the left this is a rather transparent attempt to appeal tot he rubes and when a politician appears to have genuine religious convictions, as for example Sarah Palin, they are savaged by the elites in media and academia.

Because religious belief has been so discredited by our elites, they tend to see anyone who believes as either a charlatan (using their beliefs to scam people) or as at best ignorant if not overtly intellectually limited.  The idea that there exist people whose religious beliefs motivate them to kill and die for their deity does not reach the threshold of consciousness for our elites.  They may occasionally give lip service to the idea (though less often since we are no longer at war with Islamic terrorists) and may admit that the Islamic foot soldiers of Iran, al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah are religious radicals, but they insist that the leaders of such groups can be approached as rational actors.  Greg Sheridan, in the Australian, points out how we fool ourselves by imagining our enemies to be rationally motivated:

Tehran on path to our destruction

Iran has been determined to acquire nuclear weapons for a long time. It is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes it, something of a military dictatorship, with the Revolutionary Guard assuming more and more power. It is still also, however, a theocratic dictatorship. The purpose of the state is to serve theological ends.

Most Western analysts refuse to take Islamic religion seriously as a factor in geopolitics, assuming there must always be a rational national-interest explanation for any state's behaviour.

The truth is that history is littered with states behaving irrationally and pursuing irrational ends, and doing so in often self-destructive ways. In Mao's China tens of millions of people died in famines directly caused by state policy. North Korea has driven its people into starvation. Pol Pot not only committed genocide on his own people, he then attacked Vietnam so that it would destroy him. Saddam Hussein was such a canny, realist calculator of the odds that his regime ended up gone and he ended up dead.

It is intensely ahistorical to believe political regimes will always act according to Western conceptions of enlightened self-interest.

Melanie Philips' comment on Greg Sheridan's article is apt:

It is striking, to this British observer at least, how very unlikely it would be to encounter anywhere in the British media such a well-informed, realistic and intelligent analysis of the Iranian crisis and the paralysis of the west.

Even among seasoned and reasonable observers who have been involved in thinking about the Middle East for a very long time, there is an implicit assumption that the belief structure of the enemy can be approached using rationality.  In the course of an article about Andrew Sullivan's antipathy to Israel* and himself, Jeffery Goldberg notes that he has for a long time worried about Israel becoming complicit in its own destruction:

Andrew Sullivan is Going to Tear Me To Shreds

I've been writing since 2004 that Israel will one day be considered an apartheid state if it continues to rule over a population of Arabs that doesn't want to be ruled by Israelis. That is why it is vital for Israel to establish permanent, internationally-recognized borders that more-or-less adhere to the 1967 border. Unlike Andrew, I believe that Israel has tried to free itself from ruling these Palestinians (the pull-out from Gaza is an example, as is Ehud Olmert's recent, unanswered offer to the Palestinians to pull out from virtually 100 percent of the West Bank). But the reality remains: It will be very dangerous for Israel to engineer this pull-back, but it will be, over time, fatal for it to stay in the West Bank.  Anyway, more to come, eventually.

According to this fairly common point of view, Israel has the choice of continuing to "oppress and occupy" West bank Palestinians, which will inevitably lead to the delegitimization of the Jewish state or they must engineer a (unilateral) Peace agreement which would be tantamount to Israeli suicide.  There has never been any indication that any Palestinian leader, no matter how "moderate" would be willing to accept a Jewish state.  The current favored Moderates of the PA insist upon an unlimited right of return and indefensible borders for Israel. 

It is sophistry to pronounce that a Peace can be accomplished in which the Palestinians accept some financial inducements and a token right of return in exchange for permanent Peace.  There is no evidence, zero, that any Palestinian could cede the right of return and survive, let alone continue to rule.  To believe otherwise is delusional, an invention of the Western, rational mind.

Unfortunately, this is the current choice; there can be no compromise with people who believe that compromise, and the continued existence of the state of Israel is an anathema to their deity.  They are certainly willing to kill for their beliefs, more significantly, they are willing to die for their beliefs.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can not end until the Palestinians, and their Arab backers, accept the legitimacy of Israel, yet they cannot do so and remain loyal to their religion.  Islam believes that it is the superior faith, that the Koran is the final, perfect word of Allah.  An independent Jewish state, especially one that has repeatedly humiliated the Arab world (in War and in Peace) threatens to destroy Islam merely by its continued existence.  After all, how can Allah be supreme when the hated Jews, who proclaim their G-d the one true G-d, remain victorious over Islam?  Islam, in its current form, cannot survive and adapt to he modern world; the very religious foundations of the faith are at risk every day that Israel persists.  The struggle to eradicate Israel and the Jews can only accommodate Peace if it temporary and in the service of the final solution.  This is not something I am simply making up out of whole cloth, it is what our enemies say on a daily basis, if we only choose to listen. 

Of course, for the West to accept this truth would be a deeply unsettling recognition.  Yet once we come to understand the reality, the solution becomes clearer, albeit one that makes our elites most uncomfortable.  A long term minimization of violence with occasional reminders by the West/Israel to the violent ones that we know where they live (ie, the current status quo) is the only way to keep the forces of destruction under control.  Allowing the Muslim world's most extreme variants to gain power and strength is a path to disaster.

* The question of whether or not Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite is a non-starter.  Andrew Sullivan has been increasingly using language which is indistinguishable from classical anti-Semitic tropes as filtered through the post-modern lens; after a while whether or not he entertains any particular antipathy to Jews is immaterial.  Others may disagree but ultimately it hardly matters.  The mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes is ongoing.

Update: In an excellent article today Barry Rubin points out that the complementary (mirror image?) of the ubiquitous blindness to the reality of radical Islamic religious ideology occurs in the views that  "Moderates" have of Israel:

Why Isn't There Peace? One Reason: Few People Know How Much is Being Offered

Among Palestinians, as more broadly with almost all of the public in the Muslim-majority world and a lot of the elite classes in Europe, there exists a mythical Israel, reminiscent of the fabricated antisemitic stereotypes of the past, that has little to do with reality. They believe Israel isn't interested in peace, doesn't offer the Palestinians anything, opposes any real Palestinian state, intends to keep the West Bank (until Israel's withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip they would have added that territory as well), and is led by intransigent hardliners. Such a conception was comprehensible--if not fully accurate--describing the situation in parts of the 1980s but has nothing to do with the last 20 years.

In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s' peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel's agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government's peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lacking any knowledge of these offers, or at least knowing only very distorted ones, they can maintain that Israel has offered "nothing" and that therefore the continuation of the conflict is not due to Palestinian intransigence but Israel's alleged opposition to the creation of a real independent Palestinian state. This reminds me of how Mahmoud Abbas, today leader of the Palestinian Authority, responded to some reasonably accurate descriptions in the Palestinian media of what Israel offered in 2000 at Camp David. It is better, he said at the time, not to talk about these things at all, presumably lest some Palestinians might think that it was a reasonable deal.

Anyone who actually lives in Israel knows that--whether they like it or not--Israel is ready to make big conessions and take reasonable risks to achieve peace. They know, whether or not they agree, that the overwhelming majority is ready to accept an independent Palestinian state as long as it is willing to end the conflict and live side by side in peace.

Outside Israel, far fewer people than should do so understand this reality. And that includes journalists,academics, and politicians. If they address the issue at all, they presume that Israel is asking the Palestinians to make some huge or unreasonable concession. Often, as noted above, their understanding of Israeli views is more than 20 years out of date.

Read the whole thing.  The complementary blind spots of our elites toward Israel and the Palestinians (and in a larger sense, toward ourselves and the Islamic radicals)  has important Psychological dimensions; elaboration to follow.

The Problem of Over-Simplification in the War on Terror

It was not so long ago that we were regularly treated to stories purporting to show that the Democrats/Liberals appreciated complexity, while the Republicans/Conservatives generally supported overly simplistic narratives that failed to do justice to the complexity of reality.  Further, it was those who understood nuance who were best positioned to understand how to use the levers of power to improve the lives of most Americans.  It was never a particularly convincing story line but it did contain a kernel of truth.  The sad fact is that both left and right have a tendency to over-simplify; they just over-simplify using different memes.

Peter Beinart attempts to address this tendency to reductionism and in his article, proves the point, though perhaps not as he intends:

Obama Outsmarts the Terrorists

Which brings us to Barack Obama’s “war on terror.” Conservatives keep saying that Obama doesn’t really believe we’re at war; that he sees terrorists as mere criminals, not the epic evil-doers that they really are. But here’s the irony: It’s precisely because he doesn’t see the terrorist threat as quite so epic that al Qaeda is falling apart.

...

At the end of the day, all jihadist terrorists can really do is kill. But the more they kill, the more they alienate their fellow Muslims. As the French scholar Gilles Kepel has pointed out, the reason jihadists turned their attention to the United States in the first place was because they utterly failed in the 1990s to overthrow the governments of Algeria and Egypt. They failed because the more people they killed, the more hated they became. And when they lost popular support, they were easily crushed.

In recent years, the dynamic has been playing itself out again. In countries like Pakistan and Jordan, where al Qaeda keeps slaughtering innocent Muslims, its public support has fallen off a cliff. During the Bush years, the only thing that kept al Qaeda from complete ideological collapse was Muslim hatred of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our unblinking support for Muslim dictatorships and for Israel, and our use of torture at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

Now Obama, by pledging to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and close Gitmo, and by eschewing torture—in other words, by not overreacting to the terrorist threat—is cutting al Qaeda’s throat. Although the U.S. government is still not exactly loved in Muslim nations, it is hated less. Between 2008 and 2009, according to Gallup, approval of U.S. policies rose 23 points in Tunisia, 22 points in Algeria, 19 points in Egypt, 17 points in Saudi Arabia and 13 points in Kuwait. In Indonesia, according to the Pew Research Center, approval of the U.S. rose 26 points. And not coincidentally, al Qaeda’s slide seems to be accelerating. Between 2003 and 2009, according to Pew, support for Osama bin Laden has dropped 34 points in Indonesia, 28 points in Pakistan, 28 points in Jordan, 20 points in the Palestinian territories, 16 points in Lebanon and 13 points in Turkey. In Indonesia and Pakistan, much of the decline has occurred in the last year alone. Bin Laden is having so much trouble demonizing the United States that his last audio tape focused on climate change.

Al Qaeda's dimisihing support among his co-religionists stems from many different factors, of which Barack Obama's relative neglect must be counted as a minimal contributor. 

[On several levels I agree with the President that Islamic terror, whether from al Qaeda and its ilk or their Shia brethren, hardly represents an existential risk to America; on the other hand, I do believe that the fall-out, figurative to a much greater extent that literal, of a successful mass casualty attack, would eventuate in massive losses of life and resources; in our current economic straits, a many month disruption of normal economic activity could well turn our present recession into a double dip or worse.  On that basis, terrorism must be considered a major issue for the Executive branch.  In addition, and among other reasons for concern, their political viability would evaporate in the aftermath of a successful attack.  Ignoring, or minimizing, terror is a losing stance for the Obama administration.]

It is certainly true that some non-quantifiable amount of Islamist recruiting is abetted by the bad press that the US receives throughout the Middle East for our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our support for the hated Jews in Israel.  On the other hand, none other than Osama bin Laden himself has suggested that Arabs will support the strong horse in any conflict.  At the moment, al Qaeda is a weak horse indeed, the result of the military actions we have taken and our enlistment of various states in the neighborhood who are fighting against al Qaeda for their own reasons.

To add to the complexity, Martin Kramer posits yet another factor, demographics, to help explain Arab/Muslim terrorism:

Superfluous young men

You get six minutes at the Herzliya Conference to say something memorable (and there is a clock ticking away at your feet, facing the audience). So I made a memorable argument for the role of population growth in radicalization, a clip of which is embedded below. It's memorable—but not at all original. I first encountered the idea in the stimulating work of Gunnar Heinsohn (here is one example of many).

 

The over abundance of young men whose access to status and sex is severely constrained, would be problematic for any culture.  Societies which have almost no upward mobility, with failed parasitic  and zero-sum economies, will be societies that are ripe for violence.

Radical Islam presents such young men with a socially sanctioned pathway to express their aggressive and sexual energies in acceptable directions.  For the lowest functioning, most marginal, the appeal of a suicide-murder eventuating in 72 virgins in Heaven can be a powerful motivator.  For the higher functioning struggling with issues of meaning, shame, and humiliation, joining an organization that attempts to "fight back against the oppressors" can offer meaning and a semblance of power.  The variety of motivators for engaging in terrorism are multiple and any attempt to suggest that our behavior is the most important aspect of a decisison to join is simply inane.  The primary way in which our actions can slide the threshold for joining al Qaeda down (or up) has to do with our successes in killing al Qaeda leadership.  As al Qaeda has been forced to kill fellow Muslims by their lack of success killing infidels, and as they have shown themselves to be cowards and villains, and even worse, losers, al Qaeda's appeal naturally waned and will continue to fail unless and until they can pull off another terror spectacular.  Decreasing al Qaeda's appeal by attriting their ranks can at some times be best accomplished by the use of owevrwhleming force, while at other times by more carefully selected targeted assassinations. 

This really should not be a Democrat or Republican "issue" (which is why I suggested not too long ago that it would be in our best interests to find a synthesis.)  Unfortunately, until our political class comes to some open acknowledgment of the dangers of terror (including the downstream dangers of our all too predictable over-reaction to a successful attack) and determines an appropriate set of responses which the citizenry can support, we will continue to spend as much time over-simplifying and arguing with ourselves as we do conducting a war against our enemies.  Ultimately this may be the greatest failure of the Obama adminstration's approach to the War on Islamist terror: they have squandered a full year in which they might have been able to establish a rule set regarding terror more to the liking of the liberal community even while acceptable to the vast center.  Perhaps it just didn't occur to them that even "non-Right wingers" want to be kept safe.

How Do Universities Breed Terrorists?

"There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."
— George Orwell

Jeffrey Goldberg links to an interesting piece today by Delia Lloyd:

Smart Bombers: Do Universities Breed Terrorists?

"What most people say is that people who turn to terror are the underclass, excluded, social detritus of the globalized economy," says Anthony Glees, a professor of political science and director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence at the University of Buckingham. "But a significant number of people convicted of terror offenses or killed in the commission of those offenses are university students or graduates."

In fact, the Centre for Social Cohesion -- a non-partisan think-tank that studies issues related to community cohesion in the U.K. -- puts that number at slightly over one-quarter for this country. According to a forthcoming report by the center, 26.2 percent of those involved in Islamist related terrorism convictions and attacks between 1999 and 2009 in the U.K. were educated at or above university-degree level. As Glees -- who identified extremist organizations on as many as 30 British university campuses in his 2005 book, "When Students Turn to Terror" -- put it, "Not every radical is a violent extremist. But every violent extremist has been a radical."

Interestingly, two sociologists who looked into the situation determined that Engineers are over-represented among terrorists:

More recently, however, two sociologists -- Diego Gambetta and Stefan Hertog -- discovered that what really matters isn't so much the level of education of would-be terrorists but what they study. According to their research, engineers are four times more likely to pursue violent extremism than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. In the West, at least, these scholars found that jihadist organizations actually attract fewer educated individuals, drawing more heavily from the working and middle classes. But there are proportionately even more engineers among their ranks than there are in similar organizations in the Middle East.

In his comments, Jeffrey asks a salient question:

Fighting Terror by Closing Engineering Schools

While they're at it, I'm wondering if Gambetta and Hertog can explain why so many Palestinian physicians (even pediatricians) take the leadership of terror organizations.

[He includes a rather chilling exchange from an interview he had with Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a Pediatrician who became head of Hamas after the assassination of Ahmed Yassin.  Rantisi was later removed from the scene by an Israeli missile in April 17, 2004.  The leadership of Hamas during periods of active attacks against Israel is an insecure professional path.]

Although all such outcomes are over-determined, there are some fundamental reasons why Engineers and Physicians end up over-represented among ideologues who are so readily willing to murder those they see as their enemies.  In a post from 2007 I specifically considered the genesis of Doctors of Death:

Several trends intersect to produce Doctors of Death.  The intellectual underpinnings go back to the Nazis, whose ideology forms part of the ideology of the Islamists, adapted to their interpretation of Islam.  For certain types of Doctors who have an overabundance of intellect and an insufficiency of humanity, Physician training can be easily corrupted by ideology.

Physicians during their training must reconcile several seemingly contradictory impulses.  In order to cure illnesses it is almost always necessary to first inflict greater pain.  Early on, we learn that pain is a signal, it points to the source of the problem.  Patients who enter an emergency room in terrible distress ideally should not be treated with pain killers until the Physician has a very good idea what the underlying problem is; the alternative, treating the pain alone without an etiology, risks masking the illness and leading to disaster.  While pain medication should never be needlessly withheld, it is often necessary for the Doctor to allow for such pain in the service of the patient's greater well being.  Worse, many times manipulations and tests must be done that actually make the pain a great deal worse before a diagnosis can be found and definitive treatment established.  The only way for most Physicians to overcome their natural empathy is to objectify the patient in order to maintain an appropriate and helpful distance.  Only by turning the patient into an object, for example, can the surgeon allow himself to cut into a human being, causing immediate terrible damage and pain, with the ultimate aim of curing or ameliorating.  As our technology improves, the need for pain to direct treatment decreases, but pain will always be a part of Medical practice and, of necessity, so will objectification.

...

The Nazis took such objectification several steps further.  They skillfully created an ideology, based on identity politics, that considered the population as a whole as an organic entity, akin to a person.  The body politic was reified.  Once such a conceptualization had been made, the step toward seeing certain sub-populations as being akin to infectious agents or tumors, causing illness and distress in the body politic, became inevitable.  Medical Doctors then were tasked with curing the body politic by excising the offending sub-populations.  The gas chamber followed.

Islam as practiced by the purveyors of Wahhabism, goes yet another step.  Here the objectification of the sub-population is religiously sanctioned.  Islamic states overtly treat non-Muslims as sub-humans, with limited rights, whose very existence is a stain on Islam, though Islam gains stature by not only tolerating such lesser beings but actually hold themselves out as moral and peace loving by protecting the "inferior" races and religions ("Muslim man's burden", perhaps.)

The confluence of the Nazi inspired objectification of entire populations with its attendant genocidal rationalization with the Islamic religiously sanctioned genocidal rationalizations, creates a powerful toxic mixture which can easily overcome the rationality of a Muslim Physician.  Add in the tendency of the Muslim world to eschew any responsibility for their own suffering and the need to project all their hatred and failure onto others, and the Physician, in complete agreement with Mengele, Habash, Rantisi, and Zawahiri, takes it upon himself to "cure" his community by murdering the objectified other.  Murder and suicide then become evidence of his loving devotion to the well-being of his people and all the while he keeps himself unaware of the sadistic hate that fuels his "treatment."

The nature of engineering is such that there is a self selection of people who have less than the usual quota of "people skills."  The Engineer is then trained to understand problems in the most objective and objectified ways.  For someone steeped in the ideology of radical Islam (or raised in a religiously rigorous Islamic household)  it is a small step to perceive the problems of the Ummah as stemming from deformations of an ideal system caused by the presence of foreign objects, ie sand in the gears.  The necessity of removal of the offending dirt would naturally follow.

In the 14 Signs of Large group Regression discussed by the American Psychoanalytic Association panel at the 2005 winter meetings, number 3 on the list was:

3. Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.

Fundamentalist Islam specifically divides the world into the World of Islam and the World of War, members of the Ummah and infidels. 

Number 10 on the list was:

10. Dehumanization.  Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process.  Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus' degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as cafrads, or insects.  Interestingly, the Tutsis were also called the "Jews" of Rwanda.

The combination of a Regressive religion which fosters splitting and dehumanization with specific intellectual pursuits which foster objectification of other human beings can, in unfortunate cases, create a toxic mixture which enables the emergence of the well educated terrorist murderer. 

Ideologues have always valued the masses more than the individual human beings who occasionally have to be purged for the "good of all."  Islam does it as well as any other ideology we have seen.

Watching a Meme Evolve

For several years now I have been writing about the mythical Moderate Muslims, suggesting that we cannot win this war on radical Islam and that the primary struggle concerns Islam's relationship with the modern world.  I further have suggested that if Islam does not come to a peaceful resolution of their battle against modernity and tolerance, they will essentially end up "walled off" from the civilized world, just as the body walls off chronic infections that cannot be cured.  Israel is at the leading edge of such walling off (only partly literal; large sections of the separation wall have not been built and probably never will be build short of another Intifada) and the results shave been salutary for the Israelis and the Palestinians alike.  (Gaza's self imposed economic distress contrasts vividly with the metaphoric economic boom currently taking place in the West Bank.)

Today Tom Friedman advances the meme that one possible result of a failure of the World of Islam to behave themselves will be separation from civilized human intercourse:

What’s Our Sputnik?

Dick Cheney says President Obama is “trying to pretend that we are not at war” with terrorists. There is only one thing I have to say about that: I sure hope so.

Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which ones they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil — nothing would make us more secure — and we would be reducing the reward for killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to exactly what he’s worth: 10 cents and an autographed picture of Dick Cheney.

Am I going isolationist? No, but visiting the greater China region always leaves me envious of the leaders of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, who surely get to spend more of their time focusing on how to build their nations than my president, whose agenda can be derailed at any moment by a jihadist death cult using exploding underpants.

Could we just walk away? No, but we must change our emphasis. The “war on terrorists” has to begin by our challenging the people and leaders over there. If they’re not ready to take the lead, to speak out and fight the madness in their midst, for the future of their own societies, there is no way we can succeed. We’ll exhaust ourselves trying. We’d be better off just building a higher wall. [Emphases mien-SW]

As the terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted in an essay in The Washington Post: “In the wake of the global financial crisis, Al Qaeda has stepped up a strategy of economic warfare. ‘We will bury you,’ Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev promised Americans 50 years ago. Today, Al Qaeda threatens: ‘We will bankrupt you.’ ” And they will.

Our presence, our oil dependence, our endless foreign aid in the Middle East have become huge enablers of bad governance there and massive escapes from responsibility and accountability by people who want to blame all their troubles on us. Let’s get out of the way and let the moderate majorities there, if they really exist, face their own enemies on their own. It is the only way they will move. We can be the wind at their backs, but we can’t be their sails. There is some hope for Iraq and Iran today because their moderates are fighting for themselves.

I suspect most Americans would agree that we have expended enough lives and treasure trying to bring freedom to the Middle East.  Iraq may some day be a functional democracy which respects the rights of non-Muslims, but the signs are not auspicious.  We are disengaging from Iraq and no longer losing lives there; we are trying to replicate the surge in Afghanistan and there is probably a one or two year window before we become ready to give up there.  Pakistan is widely thought to be unsalvageable with  the emphasis going forward on managing the threat of disaster there (and in the long term this is more a problem for India than for us.)   For all of the administration's verbal emphasis on Palestine and Israel, nothing is likely to emerge from all the hot air until the Palestinians become willing to accept that Israel will not voluntarily surrender or be forced by the United States to accept defeat.  At some point, the Europeans will curtail Muslim immigration; at some point, after a further accumulation of insults and outrages, we will take radical Islam seriously and begin the process of minimizing the power of Wahhabi Imams and Saudi money to radicalize our most vulnerable people.  (It will first be necessary to more directly confront PC-thought but eventually, as per Tom Friedman, reality does re-assert itself.)

Our technology enabled walls are growing stronger and the Islamic World may have much less time than they imagine to reconcile themselves to the modern world.  The meme of separation is growing and once it appears, albeit reluctantly, in the New York Times, the time until it reaches critical mass is growing shorter.