World-wide Muslim support for terror

Meanwhile, a Pew Foundation poll of the attitudes of Muslims in six Muslim countries and four Western countries shows widespread Muslim support for terrorism and suicide bombing. In no Muslim population does a majority acknowledge that Arabs carried out the 9/11 attack. Daniel Pipes lamely concludes that the Pew survey “sends an undeniable message of crisis from one end to the other of the Muslim world.” Uh, no, Mr. Pipes—the crisis is not in the Muslim world, the crisis is in the Western world, which imported and now contains vast West-hating Muslim populations.

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Jonathan L. writes:

I think the most significant result of the Pew Foundation poll is not the re-affirmation of Muslim support for terrorism, but rather the re-affirmation of Muslim proclivity for conspiracy theories. Such refusal to accept responsibility for one’s own actions or indeed any news which is unwelcome is, in effect, sociopathic because normal constraints on behavior—such as guilt or shame—rely on the acknowledgment of an objective reality. A person who is able to easily evade it, though, becomes, in effect, capable of anything.

Muslims take this one step further, though, by believing in exculpatory fantasies as well as those things which severely undermine them. For example, Muslims commonly claim that 9/11 was a conspiracy to make the world hate Muslims, since Muslims couldn’t have been capable of committing such a crime. Yet in the same breath they’ll admit America in fact deserved 9/11, in effect proving they are capable of an atrocity like that. Similarly, Muslims deny the reality of the Holocaust since that would engender sympathy for Jews and only interfere with their righteous hatred of them. Yet they freely proclaim (such as during the Danish cartoon controversy) that a “real Holocaust” is on the way.

After some reflection I’ve concluded that such indifference to logic or consistency is not a hallmark of insanity—since apparently entire societies suffer from it yet are still basically functional. Rather, it is the hallmark of a mind that is incapable of denying itself immediate gratification, even at the expense of its own coherence. In the West such behaviorisms are confined mainly to children, yet in primitive, irrational, and emotionally-unrestrained cultures they are often the norm.

LA replies:

Yes, and the most stunning such denial is the statement that if someone commits terrorism, he is not a Muslim, which, as you point out, the speaker will immediately contriadict by turning around and justifying terror acts in the name of Islam! There is no rational content to such statements. They are merely the way Muslims assert themselves against their non-Muslim enemies, saying whatever suits themselves from moment to moment. Such verbal manipulations would be exposed and discredited in a second by Westerners who were capable of logical thought and confident enough in their own identity so as to be unafraid to confront Muslims in their lies. But liberalism has crippled both the capacity for thought, and the cultural self-confidence.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2006 08:25 AM | Send