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Fitzgerald: The vast folie à deux

Feb 25, 2007 8:06 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

TERROR suspects could be given taxpayer-funded counselling for being angry or having low self-esteem.

Under the proposal, the [Australian] Federal Government would provide psychological counselling and anger management support to terror suspects and those subject to control orders. — from this article

Not real comprehension. Not any sense that there may be something wrong with the naive and sentimental love-affair with the idea that People Are the Same the Whole World Over or People All Want the Same Thing or We Are All God’s Chillun’ or Why Can’t We All Get Along or If Only We Could Speak to Each Other We’d Be Able to Iron Things Out or Everyone Deserves High Self-Esteem No Matter What (in Louisiana this used to be translated as: Every Man a King) or…oh god, fill it in yourself.

Everything, anything, to turn the Real World and its Real Threats — the Nazis, the Communists, and those who believe, who agree (or might believe, or might agree, if they felt their triumph was inevitable) that “Islam is to dominate and is not to be dominated” — into something small, tame, and manageable.

To the social workers of this world, it is all about low self-esteem.
But even if one were to grant that there is certainly “low self-esteem” among many Muslims, at the very same time that all too many have inculcated in them a sense of the permanent superiority of Muslims and the duty to make Islam everywhere prevail and Muslims to rule everywhere, what should we do about it? If some are poor, and that causes “low self-esteem,” should we Infidels supply those tens or hundreds of billions of poor Muslims with Infidel aid, or should we rather suggest that the cause of their poverty is the inshallah-fatalism of Islam itself? And should we not further add that the diversion of time and resources by Muslims into the waging of permanent Jihad is not the way to create even a rudimentary economy (see Gaza, see “the West Bank”)? And should we not add, still further, that if the poor Muslims need capital, they have only to knock on the doors of the rich Muslims, the ones who since 1973 have received, without any effort, some ten trillion dollars in OPEC revenues? Oh, and wouldn’t that be better for Muslim self-esteem anyway — not to receive aid from the hated enemy, the Infidels, but from nice, generous fellow members of the umma al-islamiyya?

Doesn’t that make more sense, if we are so solicitous of Muslim self-esteem problems?

And what about all the other political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures of Muslims? Shall we participate in their fantasies about the exaggerated “greatness” of the Islamic past? Shall we refrain from pointing out how much of that “past” — more than a thousand years ago — is well “past,” and that the question What Have You Done For Me Lately is not exactly irrelevant? And should we point out how much of that “great Islamic past” was so short-lived in nature, and consisted of serving as a mere transmitter of the discoveries of others — Chinese paper-making (see Dard Hunter), Hindu algebra and the concept of “zero” (see any history of mathematics), and some Greek works, including part of what Aristotle wrote, which Arabic-speaking Christian and Jewish translators were responsible for translating — and then ultimately those works, which had so little effect in the Islamic world, were received, gratefully, back in the Europe from whence those works first originated?

Are we Infidels doing the intelligent thing by pretending to believe in the wonderfulness of Islam, or in refraining from pointing out the connection between Islam and despotism, Islam and the failure of economic development, Islam and the stifled artistic expression, and deep discouragement of the habit of free inquiry required for the enterprise of science?

Muslims in the West, or Muslims in Dar al-Islam, now come up against the non-Muslim world and have to endure, in their minds, this paradox:

They are, on the one hand, deeply committed to, and devout believers in, the Rightness and Only Truth of Islam. And in Islam, there is no real pluralism. Islam is not meant to be one faith among many, for “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated.” Muslims, rightly, must rule. Rightly, the Shari’a, or a system that does not violate the Shari’a and attempts to approximate it, must be the legal framework for Muslims wherever they live. And of course non-Muslims must ultimately face the same three choices they have always faced under Islam: death, conversion, or (if they are considered to be People of the Book, ahl al-kitab, as are Christians and Jews, or in some expanded definition, even Zoroastrians, and still later, even Hindus who needed to be kept alive to pay the Jizyah) dhimmitude. And “dhimmis” are not in Muslim-ruled societies treated as equals, as part of a committed pluralism. They are subject to all kinds of permanent disabilities that together amounted to a status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity.

Should we ignore all this? Or would we not be doing Muslims a favor, helping them to possibly change their texts (if such were possible), or at least to cause some Muslims, especially non-Arab Muslims, to see Islam itself in a new and different light — as the source of so much of what causes them to feel “low self-esteem”? Would it not be a favor to them to help them come to realize the ways in which Islam was not a blessing but a curse, for their own non-Arab peoples, a vehicle for Arab cultural, linguistic, and other kinds of imperialism?

And Infidels need to know the truth about Islam, and have a firm understanding of how the teachings, attitudes, and atmospherics of this Total Belief-System explain the failure of societies suffused with Islam — political failures, economic failures, social and moral and intellectual failures.

It is the only way.

It is the best kind, the only legitimate kind, of intervention that might be beneficial. The very idea of participating, as Infidels, in some vast folie à deux, where we all agree that Islam is just great, the greater, the very greatest, in order to cure “low self-esteem” by Muslims, is merely the apotheosis of the social-work mentality that becomes more obviously comical, and at the same time, more obviously dangerous, every day.

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