Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the Moussaoui sentencing:
The list of mitigating circumstances that apparently resulted in Moussaoui receiving a life sentence instead of the death penalty reads like a parody of everything that is most sentimental and silly in modern psychiatry (Karl Kraus: “Psychiatry is the disease for which it is supposed to be the cure”).
What the prosecution should have done, but apparently felt it could not do, or possibly simply did not ever even think of doing, was to preempt both the “insanity” and the “on account of he’s deprived” excuses, and set out clearly why Moussaoui did what he did with clear and uninhibited discussion of that book he was clutching — the Qur’an — and with the Qur’an, the Hadith. And with the Hadith, the figure of Muhammad, uswa hasana and al-insan al-kamil.
Did the psychiatrist Dr. Vogelsang (one more Upper-West-Side name out of Lillian Ross’s comical period-piece “Vertical and Horizontal”) give any sign of having studied the belief-system of Islam, without which no conceivable judgment can be made about the sanity, or lack of it, of a devout Muslim such as Moussaoui?
Why didn’t the Prosecution rebut the argument of the defense lawyer that Moussaoui is “crazy” because of his wretched childhood, etc. by pointing out that a large number of other people — such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawihiri and Mohammed Atta — were children of great privilege in the case of the first two, and middle-class in the case of the third, and that furthermore studies of terrorists had found them to be far above average, in their societies, in the amount of education they had received, and in the degree of their economic wellbeing?
Lay it all out. Explain that yes, Moussaoui, like a few billion other people, may have had a “deprived” childhood. Yes, he was quick to sense any slight, and yes, he was quick to resent his treatment at the hands of Infidels, because, as a Muslim (one who grew to be more and more faithful and observant) he knew that Muslims should be on top — not equal, but on top. Infidels lording it over him, or other Muslims, in France, were contra naturam, against the natural and just and right order of things, islamically speaking. The prosecutors should have explained that Moussaoui viewed the world through the prism of Islam, and the texts he read, the society he inhabited (both real, and virtual), taught him to blame, always and everywhere, Infidels.
Eventually this is going to have to be done. Eventually this is going to be unavoidable, if the United States and other Infidel countries are going to continue to use the criminal justice system as it is, and to continue to rely on untrained and inexpert juries who are the products of their age — with all its sentimentality about mitigating circumstances because, you see, the blame for your behavior can always, always, be found in some part of your background, so that blame can be passed onto one’s upbringing, say.
But this misses the point. There are always people who have had unhappy childhoods, unhappy adolescences, unhappy adulthoods. As noted many times before, we who are Infidels may lose status, a job, a spouse, a girlfriend or boyfriend, or suffer setbacks or perceived slights. Did not Moussaoui think he was entitled to more than he received? Yet his inshallah-fatalism prevented him from simply working hard and doing what he could to overcome, as his brother did, that same background. Why? The answer is that he took Islam far more seriously, was far more of a deep believer, than his brother.
Infidels have a thousand things to blame. They can blame their parents — just as many on that Infidel jury wanted to blame, for Moussaoui, his treatment by his parents. They can blame their aggressive or unpleasant siblings, their ungrateful children, the System, Racism, The Man, Amerikkka, Kapitalism, Fate, the stars, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level, anything and everything at all — even, just perhaps, themselves. But Muslim Believers have one thing to blame always at the ready. And to the extent that one takes that belief-system seriously, it is likely that one will, viewing the universe through the grid, the prism, of Islam, blame the Infidel. And that is exactly what Moussaoui did.
Unless this is going to be understood by the usual “experts” — including those complacent psychiatrists who appear not to have thought it necessary for them to study the doctrines of Islam and what might follow and has naturally followed from them (starting with the perceived behavior of Muslims conducting Jihad over 1350 years, wherever they were able to conduct it because of local conditions or circumstances) — then there will be more miscarriages, with justice stillborn, the result of those thanatotropic bromides and thalidomides, sentimentality and ignorance.
And what do we conclude? We have two possible conclusions:
1) Moussaoui was and is simply following the tenets of Islam faithfully, and putting into practice the requirement that at least some Muslims must engage in Jihad (in order that others may, temporarily, be relieved of the duty).
OR
2) Moussaoui became depressed, as so many of us do, all over the Infidel world as well, but in the case of Muslims, the problem is that that depression, or any kind of emotional setback, can lead to blaming the Infidel. Viewing the universe through the prism of Islam makes one almost automatically ready to blame that Infidel, and to seek revenge.
Those are the two possible explanations.
And either one has immense implications for the Muslim presence all over Europe and North America. For the sake of the legal and social order and the physical wellbeing of the resident Infidels who created those societies and have no desire to see them islamized, these implications need to be faced.