How can they reform their education systems when everyone has been educated in similar fashion? They wind up in the same place. Thus enforcing their beliefs that they have the perfect system.

Posted by: JanuaryMan at June 13, 2006 11:57 AM

"Democratic nations must exert pressure on Islamic countries to reform their education system. Education in Islamic countries is not conducive...."

The article is very thorough, but, somebody stop me here, it is precisely because of the twisted mindsets induced by this cultist ideology that this pressure that normally works on general individuals across all cultures, will NOT work against islamic countries, since these countries are themselves headed by the very radical of islamic elements who put on the garb of a Westerner to forward their cause some more, buy some more time, fool some more infidels into thinking that they stand for the same. (Some do not even bother to wear the garb, and prefer their bedouin outfits instead.) So what would seem to be the solution ?

Posted by: arjun.sevak at June 13, 2006 12:03 PM

Much of what is stated is very true, a great post. The solution for it's fix falls short however.

If you build a machine that has a fault in the basic structure, no amount of rebuilding around the core will remove the flaw.

And Islam is a no fix zone.

Islam is seen as perfect , even with the glaring flaws.

Start from scratch, and place Islam in the trash heap of history. This will get the desired fix.

Posted by: Islofob IS-1 at June 13, 2006 1:01 PM

I enjoyed this article and will use the knowledge in some discussion with some wussies i know. The Solution , sad as it may be, could be 7.62 fmj and a bigga badda BOOM.
I think the internet and freedom broadcasting radio stations and television programing in spreading knowledge--it may take a while but.

Posted by: exsgtbrown at June 13, 2006 1:24 PM

The symptoms are correctly identified. The cure isn't.

While education would definitely help, it's not the first thing that has to change. Seriously speaking, Singapore is the best model to follow, where the Islamic clerical establishment must be fully accountable to, and regulated by, the government (I don't know whether Singapore does this for Buddhists, Christians, Confucians, Taoists and Hindus). Under that model, what is preached in the mosques is strictly regulated, and Singapore Muslims aren't allowed to get away with Jihadist beliefs on the grounds of their religious freedom.

In the US, this would violate the establishment clause of the first amendment, so it may not be a workable solution here. The only alternative to that would be a widespread ban on Imams, mosques, madrassas in the US, as well as a ban on Islamic material being propagandized in schools. This is assuming that more radical measures, such as mass scale deportations, are non-starters in the current PC environment, where there are enough PC thugs even questioning the concept of enemy combatants (re: Gitmo).

Posted by: Infidel Pride at June 13, 2006 1:55 PM

arjun + Islofob - Too true. This excellent peice hits the nail on the head. Islamic countries cannot provide the impetus towards rationalising their problems because the group psychology is manifested in almost every individual Moslem, and isn't some abstract malaise emerging from a "clash of cultures". When confronted with undeniable truths and the realities that give the lie to their cherished, but wholly inadequate dogmas, their response is denialism. It's been my experience that whether discussing geopolitics, theology or even physics with a Moslem the same barriers to rational thought persist. Rote learning is everything - demonstrating numerous examples where preconcieved "facts" prove to be fallacious or deficient elicits denialist responses - a shrug, a laugh, Tu Quoque... anything but acceptance of the limits of their "reasoning". I don't see how Moslems can ever overcome these retrograde restraints, their racism, their blinkered veiws on economics, politics or anything else. This peice highlights exactly why Islamic culture cannot produce Nobel laureates, much less peaceful coexistence with free-thinking societies.

How do you rationalise with someone incabable of doing so?

Posted by: Animus at June 13, 2006 1:55 PM

"liberal democratic nations must enforce effective psycholinguistic, cognitive/behavior restructuring, and thinking for a change programs to modify Muslim's sense of righteousness and their simplistic all or nothing mentality that causes them to wage war against infidels."
-- from the article above

How, exactly, can "liberal democratic nations," themselves appeasing, or fending off the incessant assaults, within their own countries, by the bearers of an alien and a hostile creed who are masters at exploiting not only the pluralism and protection of individual rights which Infidel nation-states honor, but also the attitudes -- the sentimentalism, the refusal to think things through, the disappearance of an educated and self-confident class able and wililng to instruct and protect --- that is an observable feature of Western societies.

Since the texts of Qur'an and Hadith, and the biography of Muhammad (the Sira) are all immutable, either as the Word of God (the Qur'an), or historical facts too long, and too deeply accepted, for them now to be tampered with in the interests of changing Islam so that a belief-system that divides the world uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel, Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, no longer does so. It can't happen. There is no way to get hundreds of millions of exceedingly primitive Believers -many of them owing their primitiveness to Islam itself, and the habit of mental submission it encourages -- to accept any tinkering with the texts. Whatever false hope is held out here and there by Muslim recipients of Carnegie and other foundation or government money, whatever business about "sola scriptura" is waved about by the assorted Mustafa Akyols of this world (who wish to convince us, Infidels, that this "reforming" project -- by which the entire Sunnah will somehow be thrown out, leaving only the Qur'an, which in turn will somehow be stripped of its violent and dangerous elements, which is to say, of almost the entire group of harsher verses too easily described as the "Medinan" (as opposed to the softer, or "Meccan" verses, which whenver they conflict with the later verses are regarded as having been abrogated).

Ataturk, a war hero, and savior of Turkey when it was in danger of disappearing, used his unassailable position in order to introduce a group of reforms that systematically, at every level and in every part of Turkish life, would constrain Islam as a political and social force, and even make "Turkish" Islam less connected to the more virulent Arab variety. He gave women the right to vote. He passed the Hat Act, outlawing the fez that was more convenient for Muslim prayer purposes, and promoted Western dress. He commissioned a translation of the Qur'an and tafsir (commentary) into Turkish. He insisted that government employment would be forbidden to women wearing the hijab. Turkish officers were instructed to carefully watch, and not to promote, conscripts who exhibited too great an Islamic fervor. Only graduates of public, secular universities, not graduates of religious schools, were eligible for certain kinds of employment. He turned Hagia Sophia from being a mosque into being a museum, though the Green Flag of Islam still triumphantly hangs inside that former main church of Constantinople, when for a thousand years Constantinople was the first city of Christendom. Khutbas, the sermons delivered by imams in every mosque, were vetted, or even written, by a central government authority, careful to censor texts that whipped up anti-Infidel sentiment or too great an enthusiasm for Jihad; considering what the Qur'an is filled with, it was a tall order. Yet, with all of that, and with Ataturk's successors continuing to help promote the same constraints on Islam, perhaps only a quarter of Turkey's population can be described, charitably, as secularist, and only a small percentage of that could be described as westernized or advanced in a way that we would recognize. Most Westerners, for example, find it strange that given the interest of Western tourists in Hagia Sophia -- and tourism is a major money-earner for Turkey -- that it has not been returned to the status of a working church. But of course not even the most secular of Turks would even dare to suggest that; were they, as one told me, "we would have a revolution on our hands." The phrase "secular Turk" should not be endowed with a significance it does not possess. Nor should Turkey be seen as deeply, or widely, or permannently secular. Kemalism is always under assault, and Erdogan and his party have cleverly, and relentlessly, been undoing it wherever and whenever they can. Kemalism is temporary, and requires eternal vigilance. Islam is the natural state of affairs in Muslim Turkey, as elsewhere in Muslim countries, and keeps rearing its head, like Rasputin until he was shoved through the ice of the Neva.

Ataturk not only systematically constrained Islam, but constructed, with help from Turksih historians and ideologues, a narrative that about "the Turk" and the "Sun People" (i.e., the Turks) who, in this narrative that had little to do with real history, had always inhabited the area of Anatolia, and somehow predated the Greeks of Byzantium, and everyone else -- going back to the Hittites. And to accompany this myth of "The Turk" there was a myth constructed around Ataturk himself, the Greatest Man Ever (this will remind Infidels of a certain Arab who was "uswa hasana" and "al-insan al-kamil"). The keepers of that particular flame turned out to be those who possessed the force -- that is, the officers corps of the Turkish Army, carefully limiting access to their ranks to those who supported Kemal Ataturk's systematic attempt to weaken Islam as a political force.

Most people, most of the time, most everywhere, are very primitive. That is why the choice of their belief-system is so important. If it is one that is reasonably okay, then things can be okay. Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism all have their faults, but they do not inculcatge their followers with the idea that they have a right and a duty to engage in constant Jihad, through any and all instruments, until Islam triumphs and Muslims rule everywhere. Only Christianity has universalist pretensions, but its effort is directed not at finding recruits, as Islam does for the Army of Islam, but rather, in the saving of individual souls. There is a difference.

It is hard to see how Islam can be reformed unless Islam is seen to need reformation by Muslims themselves. And that is best brought about by forcing, or at least doing nothing to stand in the way of, the creation of conditions that will expose, to Muslims as well as to Infidels, the connection -- clear to some, quite mysterious to many others -- between what Islam teaches, what mental habits and attitudes, intellectual and emotional, it encourages or discourages, and the palpable failures of Muslim states and Muslim polities. If one can see that despite everything, not a single Muslim state has managed to create a democracy -- save for Turkey, and only following upon, and not proceeding, the Kemalist constraints on Islam; if one can see that the failure of Muslim states, despite many of them being the recipients of the largest transfer of wealth (all of it unmerited and unearned) in human history, to create modern economies, or even to end their reliance on foregin wage-slaves; if one can see that the mistreatment of women and of all non-Muslims helps explain the intolerable social conditions of Muslim societies; if one can see that the failure of Muslim societies to guarantee the rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights follows naturally from Islam itself, where the individual is not permitted many freedoms because, in Islam, it is the collective, the umma al-islamiyya, never the individual, that matters; if one can see that the failure of Muslim science (once the Christians and Jews were reduced in numbers, and marginalized, in Muslim-dominated societies, after the first few centuries following upon Muslim conquest)is not accidental or inexplicable, but follows from the view of Allah as whimsical rather than a deity following laws that can be uncovered (as Newton believed), and that the spirit of Islam is inimical to free and skeptical inquiry in every way; once one understands that Islam discourages most vehicles for artistic expression (sculpture, painting of living creatures, music) and leaves a mental desert in which the only thing allowed to flourish is Islam, Islam, Islam -- once all that is expressed, again and again, by Infidels, so that intelligent and thoughtful Muslims will have to hear it, and will have to begin to see the truth of the analysis, and will do so more quickly if instead of trying at great expense to transform these societies (Iraq to begin with -- Tarbaby Iraq, which the messianic impulse of Bush really thought could be transformed and, in an even greater leap of naive faith, would in being "transformed" serve as Light Unto the Muslim (Sunni Arab) Nations," which simply piles one absurdity on top of others.

Constrain them, let their divisions divide them, and stop squandering men, money, materiel on Tarbaby Iraq. Aided by what appears to be an all-female crew (Condoleeza Rice, who knows nothing about Islam or Iraq; Karen Hughes, who knows nothing about islam or Iraq; Meghan O'Sullivan, who knows nothing about Islam but a little about Iraq, because she, like some American officers, has had contact with a few, and that deceptively human contact, in which one's sympathies -- on a personal level -- and seeming comprehension - on a personal level -- in fact get in the way of a sober assessment of what would best further Infidel interests, and what would do the most to contain Islam. This last, in her dealings with SCIRI Party members, is simply re-playing the Wolfowitz-Perle script - they who found Ahmad Chalabi so delightful, so plausible, so fluent in his presentation of what would happen once he and his fellow Shi'a exiles had their devout wish granted, and the Americans would come in to do what no one else could do -- get rid of Saddam Hussein. The entanglements at a personal level with Iraqis who are masters at manipulating to get the Americans to do what they want continues. And it will always happen, whenever and wherever unwary Infidels come into contact with far more determined, and clever, Muslims. Shi'as in exile helped convince those making or influencing policy to have the American army end the Sunni despotism of Saddam Hussein, partly by predicting all sorts of things -- "Iraqis" relieved and forever grateful to their American liberators, Americans being able to use the oil revenues for "reconstruction" which would cost the American taxpayers almost nothing, and Sunni and Shi'a, Arab and Kurd, all so happy to see Saddam go that they would manage to overcome their comparatively petty disagreements -- all of course attributed to Saddam Hussein and his regime by these Shi'a exiles.

And if it was first the Shi'a exiles who helped form American policy, it is Shi'a in Baghdad who, meeting with Americans in the Green Zone, have used their personal charm, to deflect attention from Islam and the permanent fissure, sectarian and ethnic, that might be exploited by Infidels both less sentimental (of the "everyone wants freedom" type of sentimentality) and more sure of themselves. Avoid entangling alliances, and still more to be avoided are those entangling "alliances" that are not alliances at all, but rather a clever exploitation of American innocence by those who want to use American power for their own purposes in Iraq, and have no desire to constrain -- how could Hakim, how could Jaafari, how could Maliki, how could any of the members of the Sciri or DAWA Parties wish to constrain, divide, demoralize the camp of Islam?

Today, and yesterday, it was the Shi'a managing to inveigle the Americans. Tomorrow it might be the Sunnis. After all, it is Adnan Pachachi, described by J. B. Kelly, who knew him in Abu Dhabi in the early 1970s, as "intelligent, capable, and a complete shit," described by American reporters and Green-Zoners as "the elder statesman" of Iraq (the same way that reporters in Egypt would call Mohammed El-Heikal, the vicious adviser to Nasser and Sadat, an "elder statesman"), who is now trying to convince the Americans to ask in all kinds of Sunni Arab troops -- Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians -- in order, of course, not to bring "stability" but rather to undo the transfer of power, through the ballot-box, to the Shi'a. It should be an obvious ploy, but no ploy is too obvious for some of the Americans in charge not to be fooled by someone as cunning as Pachachi.

If the Americans manage to get unstuck from Tarbaby Iraq -- it's like pulling off a bandage, and you must do it very fast -- then the "Iraqis" themselves will demonstrate what it is about Islam that makes Muslim peoples so prone to conspiracy theories, to violence, so unused to compromise and the exercise of reason. It is a spectacle necessary for the enlightenment of Infidels. It will take place, in any case, no matter when those American troops leave. They can leave now, and save a few hundred billion dollars, and hundreds or thousands of dead and wounded, and can thereby preserve, and perhaps rebuild, the will to continue fighting what should properly be identified as a war of self-defense against the Jihad -- and all of the instruments of that Jihad, not merely that of terrorism. It is unclear if the Administration realizes that in 2008, the eleciton will be won by whomever promises to remove whatever forces are still in Iraq. The Administration can wait until then, in which case it is likely that someone opposed to the Iraq venture for all the wrong, and none of the right, reasons, will prevail. Or it can come to its senses, realize that what followed upon the initial invasion and removal of the regime was inevitable, was not the fault of the Americans, and certainly could not have been headed off by twice or three or four times as many troops.

It can recognize this, and get out, and then watch as Iraq becomes a place where sectarian and ethnic strife, at any level, can only help to divide and demoralize the camp of Islam inside and outside Iraq. Or it can continue, crazily, infuriatingly, as before, prating about "victory" and not "cutting-and-running" and all the rest of it.

The choice of Bush and company. The choice of Congressmen, who should be attacking the definition of "victory" in Iraq that the Administration vaguely offers, as being not only wrong, but the very opposite of what would constitute a true victory for the Infidels, as they try to keep the camp of enemies divided, demoralized, off balance.

Posted by: Hugh at June 13, 2006 2:01 PM

This type of thing ought to be taught in all schools. Especially Moslem ones.

Posted by: Animus at June 13, 2006 2:04 PM

I think the only way out is along the same lines as what happened to Nazi Germany. 'Cognitive restructuring methods' were not efficacious at that time and the only chance of redemption was a total war and the inevitable and inexorable self destruction of the Nazi regime and ideology.The Germans and Japanese could not be re-programmed. They could only be resisted and hammered from without and led over the cliff from within like lemmings.
Nothing can be done without the bloodiest blows and no deconditioning programme is useful against such an intractable and psychotic mind set as Islam.It has to expand, driven by its uncontainable aggressive impulses but will inevitably be defeated by the opposing forces of good that will rise up and vanquish it.

Posted by: johndoe at June 13, 2006 2:17 PM

"Now Jihadi terrorism has propelled to dangerous proportions and is a major threat to public health and world peace."

The verb "propel" is only a transitive verb, not an intransitive verb as it is being used here.

Posted by: Television at June 13, 2006 2:22 PM

I don't want to pour cold water on Dr. Suseelan, but I think that re-describing human behaviour in technical language - what he's basically doing - adds little or nothing to one's understanding of it.

Worse, it takes us away from the particular towards the general. So, for example, while Dr. Suseelan will tell us that Muslims have a "Mental Filter", which apparently means that they will "[fail] to see things holistically", Hugh can tell us something quite specific - for example, that in Kemalist Turkey "Turkish officers were instructed to carefully watch, and not to promote, conscripts who exhibited too great an Islamic fervor."

Sorry, for me history beats psychology by three falls here.

Posted by: Yojimbo at June 13, 2006 2:23 PM

"Education in Islamic countries is not conducive for raising the level of rational thinking."

This is the sort of thing said about American schools. It is quite difficult to "raise the level" of thinking, especially when the disaster described in this article concerns stuff taught at mother's knee and in an emotionally destructive environment. (The real effect of having multiple more-or-less permanent wives and occasional "temporary ones," aka whores.)

So much to learn about Islam, so little to respect.

Posted by: StillBreathing at June 13, 2006 2:46 PM

Sorry, I was unimpressed with Dr. Suseelan's article. I believe his basic thesis is right about Islamic terrorism being an emotional pathology. But his prescription for better education in school makes no sense.

When a young person has an emotional or mental disorder, no school can cure it with education. It requires intensive psychotherapy. In this case, the pathology goes even deeper than Dr. Suseelan suggests, since another major feature of radical Islamism appears to be deep-rooted misogyny, including officially sanctioned spousal abuse. No school can cure that with classroom instruction even if it wants to.

This pathology starts at a very early age. By the time the Muslim child is a toddler, he may have already had imprinted on his brain the sight of his mother beaten by his father; honor killings carried out and/or celebrated by his own family; and a glorification of violence against infidels by his adult relatives. He's emotionally damaged even before he gets to kindergarten.

In fact, even psychotherapy may not be enough. One of my former girlfriends was an LICSW who worked with young children who had suffered such emotional abuse. She told me that some of them were so far gone that even psychotherapy couldn't reach them and they had to be put on medication.

In my next post, I'm going to reply to Hugh and explain what I think needs to be done.

Posted by: Steven L. at June 13, 2006 3:30 PM

It is one thing to identify the problem. Quite another to identify the solution. I give him half points. The good Doctor has been schooled enough to correctly diagnose the cancer, but his prescription of cough syrup and aspirin is hardly effective treatment.

But I think we are moving into new terrority here. Before nobody spoke about the cancer. Now some scholars are. But still, nobody is willing to talk about chemotherapy. Not yet. Nor do I expect such talk to come from scholars.

Posted by: somethingaboutislam at June 13, 2006 4:03 PM

Hugh continues to cling to his theory that disengaging from Iraq as a first step to detaching from the Muslim world, would allow sectarian differences to surface; and that the resulting conflicts between various Muslim factions would weaken the worldwide jihad to our benefit.

While I am no fan of the current war in Iraq, I continue to maintain that Hugh's theory is an old isolationist fantasy in modern window dressing. It's similar to Pat Buchanan's thesis that the U.S. should have stayed out of World War II and let Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia destroy each other. And it fails for not just the same reason, but other reasons too.

To begin with, every would-be aggressor starts with a prioritized list of targets. But those priorities are subject to revision at any time, by an aggressor who is flexible and pragmatic.

History has shown that ideological conflicts among aggressors are a weak reed for the democracies to lean on. Because one thing that all aggressors do agree on, and often feel even more strongly about, is that America and democracy must be destroyed. America's latent power is so enormous that we present a threat to their aggression by our very existence. Even if we do nothing. Even if we say nothing.

The hatred that Hitler had for Bolshevism was well documented; he wrote extensively about it in Mein Kampf. But then he signed a peace treaty with the USSR and prepared to conquer the Western democracies instead. Eventually, he went to war against the USSR anyway. And despite the longstanding German abhorrence of fighting a two-front war, he declared war on the U.S. as well--even though a careful reading of Germany's treaty with Japan showed he was not obligated to do that. All this might have surprised Hugh, had he lived in the 1930's and 1940's. It would not have surprised me.

In conventional warfare, the fact that the aggressor is bogged down fighting a two-front war (one against the democracies and one against his other totalitarian opponents) can make it easier for democracies to win. But the war on Islamist jihadism is not a conventional war. It's terrorism, asymmetric warfare, which is highly leveraged. It took only 19 terrorists on 9-11 to wreak havoc on America comparable to the entire Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Terrorist (i.e. jihadist) training bases can still be set up in any or all of the Muslim countries engaged in the inter-ethnic warfare Hugh favors. While the Shi'a and Sunni are slugging it out, both can still be training terrorists against the democracies. They can do this for the same reason that Hitler and Stalin could make their twists and turns in foreign policy: The Sunni and Shi'a may fight each other, but one thing they do agree on is that the infidel democracies must all be destroyed.

Beyond this, balance-of-power strategies pitting Shi'a against Sunni will not affect in the slightest the "soft jihad" of massive Muslim immigration to the West, gradually undercutting and subverting Western culture and institutions. If anything, turning the Muslim world into a sea of flames, Shi'a against Sunni, will tend to increase Muslim emigration to the West. Muslim refugees will leave the combat zones in the Muslim world and come streaming into Western nations. Many of them will be battle-hardened from having fought each other. It would not be surprising if Shi'a and Sunni immigrants start to wage urban warfare against each other right in Western cities, turning New York City into Baghdad and Western Europe into the Gaza Strip.

So while balance-of-power strategies, playing enemies off against each other, can be effective in conventional warfare against an aggressor, I believe they are much less effective in asymmetric warfare due to the low cost of waging such warfare against us.

In the final analysis, then, America must do the whole job and put an end to the whole concept of Islamist jihad. In the past, even with conventionally armed adversaries, it fell to the U.S. to do this. We had to defeat them all: imperial Japan; Nazi Germany; the Soviet Union. Combined, these three nations had enslaved over a billion people in dozens of countries. Yet we did it anyway.

We didn't have to defeat them all at once; we too can have a prioritized list of targets. But sooner or later, the U.S. and the Muslim concept of jihad are going to come to a direct clash. To quote Ronald Reagan:

"Here's my strategy: We win. They lose."

Posted by: Steven L. at June 13, 2006 4:07 PM

A recently retired political science professor from UC Santa Barbara, I devoted 12 long articles at my web site to examining one of those excuse-making studies of Islamic jihadi terrorists by Robert Pape, "Dying to Win" . . . a book he published last spring that examines the alleged causes of suicide terrorism.

In it, Pape argues that suicide terrorists --- whom he describes in his book as "community-minded" and "altruists" --- are part of an organized nationalist resistance movement, resorting to suicide terrorism as a drastic last recourse to free their compatriots from the oppression of "democratic" military oppressors. Yes, only democratic ones. Religion per se has nothing to do with suicide terrorism, strictly in his view a nationalist reaction to military oppressors who all happen, in his view, to hail from democratic countries. To the extent religion has any influence on suicide terrorist groups, it does so only secondarily and indirectly: in particular, if the military oppressor's government and society are of a different religion from that of the oppressed society, then --- once ordinary military resistance or non-suicidal forms of terrorism fail to free their compatriots from the occupiers --- suicide terrorist groups will recruit and indoctrinate members willing to die for their nationalist cause by demonizing the enemy's government and people as evil and diabolical.

That in a nutshell is the Pape thesis, pursued at length for 335 pages . . . crammed with over 20 tables and some statistical tests.

As the buggy prof articles have tried to show, not only is the thesis wrong, the key data-tables are markedly flawed in my view, and the statistical tests are no better. More to the point, the book's numerous data omissions and errors, marred statistics, theoretical blunders, and strained reasoning --- all culminating in a "New Strategy" for "Victory in the War on Terrorism" (Pape's words) that adds up to military and diplomatic appeasement of the legitimate grievances of al Qaeda and other jihad terrorist enemies of the United States --- are not random, a sign of careless scholarship and nothing else. On the contrary, they are all heavily skewed and fall almost wholly without exception on one side of Pape's argument. The result? In my view, the book’s arguments, data, tests, and limited case-studies add up to whitewash job that conceals the near total-monopoly of suicide terrorist groups by Islamic terror groups --- a good 94.4%.

Nor is that all.

In the process of concealing this overwhelming dominance of Islamic groups, Pape omits more than half of the suicide terrorist groups that carried out attacks between 1980 and the start of 2004, the period his book concentrates on. What’s more, virtually all those suicide attacks that he omits were carried out not against democratic countries like Israel, India, the US, Turkey, and Russia (he sees the latter as democratic), but rather against authoritarian and despotic Muslim countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Essentially, in my view again, his nationalist theory of suicide terrorism adds up to a form of special pleading, based on blatantly unreliable and misleading data-sets, simple-minded and erroneous statistical tests, a lopsided use of sources on radical Islamist fundamentalism --- all essentially apologetic with one or two exceptions that Pape seems to have misused --- and a high-pulsating conviction on Pape's part that the United States not only shouldn't be fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but is also fighting an enemy that we have created (al Qaeda and its spin-offs and copycats world-wide) and that we should handle mainly by diplomatic appeasement of its well-founded grievances.

Some of the buggy articles are fairly technical, and I wouldn't recommend them to readers unaware of logistic regression.

Still, you can get a pretty good idea of the buggy criticisms by clicking on the 12th and final article, which also links to some of the previous articles in the long, spun-out series on “Dying to Win” . . . especially the mangled and almost always unreliable data-sets Pape uses. Click here for that 12th article. As you read the article, it will link to earlier buggy articles that set out the major blunders in data, statistical tests, and theoretical speculation that mar Dying to Win from almost start to finish.

Those who want to examine the other prof bug articles in the series will find a sidebar table of the archival contents on the upper left of both the home page and the full extended articles (like the 12th article linked to just now). Click on the war on terrorism, and you’ll find all the 12 Pape articles eventually listed in the buggy prof archive between the end of August 2005 and the start of April 2006.

Michael Gordon, AKA the buggy professor

PS: Something else: I have long admired this site and its sister site (Dhimmi Watch) and would like to commend both for alerting and informing all of us to what strikes me as the latest version of fascism . . . a theme that is teased out and documented in the11th buggy article, full of systematic comparisons between radical Islamist groups and states with Nazism and Italian Fascism in the interwar period.

Posted by: michael gordon at June 13, 2006 4:07 PM

I've read several books on Islam and came to the conclusion that somehow Islam itself produces defective thinking. I'm glad I found this article because it articulates & augments my findings.

Posted by: ldspatriot at June 13, 2006 5:01 PM

"Here's my strategy: We win. They lose." Posted by: Steven L.

How?

Actually steven "We win, they lose" is not even a strategy, but I suspect that you know nothing about Strategy and Tactics.

At any rate you have my attention, now please enlighten us uninformed ignorants as to How, (what strategy and tactics) you propose that will enable us to win and them to lose.

Oh I see, you have none do you?

Posted by: Nariz at June 13, 2006 5:08 PM

OR

become a muslim or die..............

Posted by: Texican at June 13, 2006 5:35 PM

Nariz, there is no problem with with "we win, they lose", it happened after WW2. but that was a very different era, where soldiers were able to fight the war without 24 hours news cycles.
too many of us in this modern time want things done very quickly, l believe it is going to take a very long time to win the war against islam. these website are doing the unraveling, and the islamofacists are speeding it up with their actions, sucicide bombs, heheadings, etc. educate the infedel is all we need for the first step.

Posted by: Lulu at June 13, 2006 6:32 PM

If you one to get some idea of the cognitive distortions and how early they start, read Bruce Bauer's book and what he has heard and been told young children say in the presence of Infidels in Europe.

If Muslim parents dump their kids back in a religous school in their home countries that encourage rote reading instead of understanding or critical thought that is basically what you get.

Posted by: amana39 at June 13, 2006 6:35 PM

Steven L. wrote: "It took only 19 terrorists on 9-11 to wreak havoc on America comparable to the entire Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor. Terrorist (i.e. jihadist) training bases can still be set up in any or all of the Muslim countries engaged in the inter-ethnic warfare Hugh favors."

Steven L.'s complaint is no biggie, according to Hugh, whose s argument rests on the supposition that terrorism is a peripheral, relatively minor threat in the grander, more nebulously articulated scheme of things.

On one side, we have our dhimmis telling us that we face an Enemy without an ideology; on the other side, we have JWers telling we face an ideology without an army.

Stuck in the middle with you...

Posted by: Television at June 13, 2006 7:04 PM

Television:

Or should I say "Dr. Pepper"?

Hugh didn't say anything like that.

I let it pass when you attacked me in quite sharp terms for an oversight at Sitemeter for which I had already apologized.

But some minimal reading comprehension would be gratefully received.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

Posted by: jihadwatch at June 13, 2006 7:08 PM

I read this article with great interest because I am so fascinated by any psychological angle on the problem of Islam.

Islam is an ideology. That much is clear. And an ideology is psychological by definition. So obviously confronting an ideology entails confronting something psychological.

Dr. Suseelan's proclivities obviously lie in the direction of "cognitive psychology".

He refers to scripts and closed thinking and cognitive rigidity and authoritarian thinking styles and faulty cognitive maps and mental filters and emotional reasoning and polarized thinking and catastrophic thinking and automatic thoughts and dogmatism and so on. etc etc.

In short, he's obviously a cognitive psychologist. He tries to slip in a few references to emotion as a secondary cause but still its pretty clear that as a cognitive psychologist he views emotion as driven by cognition.

But then we already pretty much understood that Islam is an ideology, didn't we? And that all kinds of deleterious consequences follow in the wake of human beings being total and complete ideologues.

I am wondering what all this extraneous language adds to that understanding?

It reminds me of something I learned many years ago. It was a story about a guy getting a tour of all of Oxford University's building and at the very end inquiring, well I've seen X and Y and Z - but where is Oxford University? I thought his question - but where is Oxford University? - meant that it was a category error to impute something real above and beyond the components of the thing.
Admittedly it's been many years since I was a college student but I thought that was supposed to be the classic example of a "category error" - the notion that there is something "real" above and beyond all the components of the thing. But when I look up "category error" on Wikipedia, that's not at all what I come up with. So I am wondering was there a name for the example I apparently erroneously recall as a category error?

Well never mind. Whatever. Because the point is does it add anything to our understanding of the problem to note that Islam is a closed cognitive system, incapable of self-criticism, characterized by cognitive rigidity, black and white thinking and so on...?

Because obviously to get rid of all those cognitively abhorent aspects of Islam would constitute getting rid of Islam - the ideology - itself. Because Islam is based on a lie, it cannot tolerate the opposite of everything which Dr Susaleen diagnoses as its problem. The good doctors Rx would constitute the death of the patient.

Islam IS a cult. (That's what the good Dr describes). Once you destroy the cognitive/ideological hold that the cult has on its followers - that's the end of the cult. And that would be the end of Islam too.

In other words, Islam has no reality above and beyond the kinds of cognitive fallacies that the Dr. describes. To imagine that there is something real about Islam which persists above and byond its multitude of cognitive fallacies, is to commit the kind of category error that I recall from my youth (If there's another term for that Oxford analogy I would welcome knowing what it is. )

Posted by: Caroline at June 13, 2006 9:24 PM

Robert,

Hugh has repeatedly argued that all forms of Islamic physical violence -- from terrorism to military invasion -- are problems subordinate to the non-physically-violent takeover of the West by Muslims. I have never read from Hugh a clear explication of the mechanism by which he might have his cake of expressing appropriate concern for terrorism (after being challenged to do so) and eat his greater concern for the non-physically-violent takeover of the West by Muslims; nor have I yet to read from Hugh a clear explication of the mechanism by which Muslims could, in fact, take over the West apart from tactics prioritizing forms of physical violence, including terrorism and military invasion. For someone who has read a sufficient quantity of my posts dealing with this disagreement between myself and Hugh, it should be readily apparent this is what my statement above, which you dismissed out of hand, means. Just as you appreciate it when people who criticize you show they have been reading you and are therefore actually critizing what you have argued, so too I would appreciate the same courtesy.

Posted by: Television at June 13, 2006 11:23 PM

Iran cares more about its own Islamic purity and security then Jihad.
Posted by: skald at June 13, 2006 07:16 PM
++++++++++++

Rubish.

iran has stated repeatedly that it will destroy Israel and this will happen when iran has sufficient weapons grade uranium to complete its nukes.

Posted by: Texican at June 14, 2006 12:22 AM

Robert,

you really don't seem anywhere near as effective a site moderator when you participate in bickering in the comment sections of blogs. Exactly how are you hoping to transmit your message effectively by doing so?

Posted by: jehana at June 14, 2006 3:25 AM

(OK, sorry if this comment gets duplicated - problems signing in. OD)

Television:

I'll give it a shot.

You misrepresent Hugh's writings - Robert's pleas for better reading comprehension on your part still stand as a justifiable request.
In your first sentence above, you assert that Hugh's contention is that Islamic terrorism is "subordinate" to the non-violent "takeover" of the West by Muslims. The way you framed this is not a correct representation of Hugh's assertions.

The correct representation is that violent Islamic terrorism and non-violent (population) takeover are both CONSISTENT and ASSOCIATED with Jihad objectives of total conquest of the West (and the world, by extension).

Wars throughout history have been fought for a variety of objectives: land, treasure, political disputes among leaders, and total conquest. Islamic Jihad has consistently held the latter objective as their ultimate goal.

When total conquest is the goal of a given war, the aggressor must attempt to implement the full range of tactics available to complete their objective upon the subjects they wish to conquer: violent attack, propaganda, demographic change, civil change, etc.

In the current War on Islamic Terrorism, Hugh's arguments, in my mind, indicate that Muslim mass immigration to the West, particularly Europe, has been intentional and more fruitful for Islamic Jihad as a tactic of total conquest, than just their terror attacks. The main purpose of his raising this argument is to call attention to the fact that a narrow focus on just "Terrorism" is to lose sight of the enemy's other (and more broad and effective) tactics.

In my opinion, the narrow- and short-sightedness of dominant Western PC ideology is the main gap in our walls through which Islamic Jihad seeks to invade and conquer. Liberals of the 1960's reveled in at the idea that God (Judeo-Christianity) is dead. Accordingly, it is now up to the PC church to assume the responsibilities of vigilance against our millennia-old aggressors - Islamic Jihadists.

So far, our PC lords have sent out written invitations for conquest (especially in the form of Eurabian immigration policies starting in the 70s), since they, like the enemy at the gates, hate the very Western realm in which they were born and they now reside.

This is a war between Islam and the PC church. Islam is supremacist and aggressive; PC is self-loathing and suicidal. Islamists recognized this gigantic opportunity the instant it appeared in the 60s and 70s, and have been exploiting it by any means necessary, violent and non-violent, ever since.

As to one of your queries:

"...nor have I yet to read from Hugh a clear explication of the mechanism by which Muslims could, in fact, take over the West apart from tactics prioritizing forms of physical violence, including terrorism and military invasion."

Hmm. Let's see. You can't see how massive demographic change can have an effect of takeover in democratic countries where popular vote determines national leadership and policy? You don't see how, assuming no change in current European immigration and population trends over the next several decades, Muslims can have majority vote in the respective populations and, by extension, the representative government institutions of countries like France, Germany, and Britain?

This is, in fact, the goal. Terrorism, among other objectives, merely serves to help keep the Islamic trend moving forward by creating intimidation - consequences to resistance on the part of dhimmi hosts.

Britain joined the resistance, and suffered London bombings. Spain joined the resistance, and suffered Madrid (then totally acquiesced to Jihadist demands). France has offered no resistance, and has been at the forefront of European Islamophilia, and has suffered no terrorist attacks (unorganized and unplanned domestic rioting notwithstanding).

Fight fire with fire; fight democracy with democracy. It doesn't take a genius to figure this out. It just takes minds that have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the virtue of millennial conquest and warfare, as Dr. Suseelan asserts in his post

Posted by: orangeducks at June 14, 2006 4:28 AM