60 percent of UK Muslims deny that Muslims carried out the July 2005 bombings

This is from Little Green Footballs:

A new survey of British Muslims by Channel 4 shows that nearly 60% believe that Muslims were not responsible for the 7/7 London bombings—and nearly a quarter believe the UK government was behind them. LGF operative Kasper has a disturbing 8-minute clip on the survey, featuring one interview after another with Muslims who deny and come up with conspiracy theories.

Of course, the respondents don’t literally believe that Muslims didn’t do it and that the British government did. When Muslims deny that Muslims did it, they are sticking it in the face of Britain. Yet in a different context, where terrorism was being presented as a positive and not a negative, the same people would celebrate the London bombings. It’s like Holocaust deniers who mock the idea of the Holocaust then boast of how they will do the job right next time.

So we need to understand this. When Muslims express doubts that Muslims carried out the 9/11 attack or the 7/7 attack, they are not showing themselves as believers—perhaps innocent, duped believers—in paranoid conspiracy theories. They are showing themselves as enemies. Far from denying that Muslims performed those attacks; they are taking the side of the Muslims who performed those attacks. This psychological rather than literal understanding of what Muslims are telling us puts these various poll results in a different light. A poll found recently that 25 percent of UK Muslims said that the July 2005 attacks were justified. But based on the more recent survey showing that 60 percent of UK Muslims believe that Muslims were not responsible for the attacks, we can reasonably conclude that 60 percent of UK Muslims support the July 2005 attacks.

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Jonathan L. writes:

I think these results illustrate once again how truly alien (or rather, primeval) the Muslim psyche is and the ludicrousness of any talk of Islam constituting one leg of a shared “Abrahamic monotheistic” tradition. In Judeo-Christian-Hellenistic civilization there is the notion of an objective reality that exists independent of human will or desire, which in turn makes intelligible the concepts of both guilt and inner-directed morality (i.e. conscience). Even if I am able to commit a crime no one else will ever know about and therefore go unpunished, the crime still exists (i.e. it has an objective reality) and so I will be tormented by my own inner feelings of morality (i.e. suffer guilt).

In the shame-based Muslim/Arab tradition, however, the notion of objective reality and therefore an objective morality is much weaker as everything is much more socially-constructed. If I can commit a crime that no one knows about, or better yet, convince my village, or my countrymen, or even the Muslim world that the crime never occurred, or was committed by someone else, or that it was not really a crime at all (i.e. my victims deserved it) then I avoid being shamed on account of the crime and so it may as well have really never occurred. Thus the reason Muslims both deny as well as exult in the various terroristic atrocities committed by coreligionists. In front of a predominantly non-Muslim audience admission of the crime serves to shame Islam, and so any connection must be denied; in a predominantly Muslim milieu, however, the infidel by definition got what was coming to him (in addition to the fact that displays of aggression and strength are considered admirable in and of themselves) and so the connection is proudly admitted.

I do think you underestimate the extent to which Muslims allow themselves to get caught up in their own fantasies and swept away on their own high tides of emotionalism. During the invasion of Iraq, for example, the entire Middle East let itself be electrified by the buffoonish antics of “Baghdad Bob”, yet when Baghdad fell there was genuine shock and agony across the region at this undeniable proof of the “Arab nation’s” failure once again to courageously resist. This running with the fantasy until disaster strikes is in fact a repeating pattern in Arab/Muslim communal life (for example, the Six Day War). But in your main point you are absolutely correct- Muslims who engage in what can only be described as epistemological guerrilla warfare have taken the side of our enemies and so should be considered in league with them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2007 11:34 AM | Send