Exactly one year ago…

…I revaluated my values on the Jewish Question (also known as the Jewish Problem). Previously I was kept in the dark not only by the mainstream media, but by the academia, the regular bookstores and even in casual conversations with friends and acquaintances. In the totalitarian world in which we inhabit very few, if any, seemed to have the slightest clue about the Jewish Problem.

Tanstaafl, who blogs at Age of Treason, is one of the bloggers who helped me to make the scales fall from my eyes. A few days ago he wrote about my February 2010 transformation:

The letter writer, using the pen name Takuan Seiyo, admits that Jews played a prominent role not only in our disastrous immigration policy but also in our disastrous civil rights legislation and “the dysfunctional minoritarian tyranny that has resulted from it.” Funny then that he would attack Kevin MacDonald as an anti-Semite when they’re making similar arguments.

“Takuan Seiyo” is the misleading pen-name of a pro-Western poseur who claims to be half-Slav and half-jew. When push comes to shove Seiyo cares more for jews than he does for Whites.

If you’re curious why Seiyo attacked MacDonald, consult the exchange at Chechar’s A lightning in the middle of the night! The exchange continued with Chechar’s Tanstaafl on Auster and culminated with Tanstaafl et al on Takuan Seiyo.

At the time of his Lightning post Chechar was just becoming conscious of jewish influence. He had previously developed a rapport with Takuan and others at Gates of Vienna, a “counter-jihad” blog whose comentariat is dominated by jews, crypto-jews, and deracinated, jew-blind, pro-Israel “whites”. Takuan and others didn’t like Chechar’s change, and in the process of making their disapproval clear they laid bare the jew-first premises behind most if not all of the “counter-jihad” movement.

Pro-Western jews like Seiyo, or like pro-”white” Eugene Girin (whom Seiyo links in the quoted comment to Sailer), or like pro-Western/pro-“white” Lawrence Auster, are dissembling and dissimulating. They want Whites to stand up strong, but only in order to better defend jews. They detest Whites like MacDonald for educating and motivating us to stand up strong in opposition to jewish aggression against us.

(Links in the original post.)

On Oriana Fallaci, Melanie Phillips et al

Note of 3 September 2010: This entry has been modified

The anti-jihad barrel consists basically of fresh and good apples. But there are a few worms at the bottom of the barrel. For example, I agree with Robert Spencer that Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is an “execrable libel-blogger”. To a much lesser extent, elsewhere I have mentioned in passing that:

• I disagree with Pat Condell’s views on the British National Party;

• I disagree with Bat Ye’or’s and Fjordman’s motivational thesis that borders on a conspiracy theory (a little more about Fjordman here);

• I disagree with Bruce Bawer’s homosexual activism and his repudiation of the right-wing European parties that oppose Islamization;

• I have quoted criticism by Conservative Swede on Larry Auster’s stance against properly defeating Islam—Carthaginian Peace. And at the same time I have exposed Swede’s hypocrisy at the bottom of the same post;

• In a previous incarnation of this blog I quoted Auster’s perfect rebuttal of Daniel Pipes and also of Melanie Philips (see below);

• I absolutely reject Robert Spencer’s views on the British National Party (BNP) published in his Jihad Watch blogsite: “It’s no wonder that British citizens are turning to noxious racist parties like the BNP: the elites have abandoned them.” I would go further and say: Mr. Spencer: “racism” is a word that should never, ever be used by those in the counter-jihad movement: it is the enemy’s main semantic weapon. Only doubleplusgood duckspeakers babble that word.

In this entry I would like to point out to a critical view on another anti-Islamist: Oriana Fallaci. The following is an abridged version of the critique that appeared in Auster’s site under the title “A Wrong Basis on which to Defend the West: Sexual Liberation”.

In his blogsite Auster wrote:


Here is a passage from Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride:

Wake up, people, wake up! Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the mainstream, that is to appear racist (a word inappropriate here because we are not discussing race, but religion), you do not understand or don’t want to understand that what is underway here is a Reverse Crusade.

You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that what is in motion here is a religious war. A war that they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that is not after the conquest of our territory, perhaps, but certainly aims to conquer our souls. To the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. To the annihilation of our way of living and of dying, our way of praying or not praying, of our way of eating and drinking and dressing and enjoying ourselves, and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if it is not opposed now, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. It will destroy the world that good or bad we have managed to create, change, make better and render it a little more intelligent, that is less bigoted or not bigoted at all. With that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morality, values, pleasures.

Christ! Don’t you realize that [all these] Osama Bin Ladens consider themselves authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear a long beard or wear a chador, because you go to the theater and the cinema, because you listen to music and sing some songs, because you dance in the discotheques or in your house, because you watch TV, because you wear mini skirts or short pants, because at the beach or pool you’re naked or almost naked, because you make it with whom you want, when you want, where you want? [Emphasis added.] Don’t you care even about this, idiots?

While Fallaci’s passionate dread of Islam is exemplary, her description of the Western society she wants to defend from Islam is unfortunate. Virtually making soulless Playboy-style sexual promiscuity her definition of the West, she radically devalues our civilization even as she issues a call to arms for its protection.

Interestingly, the phrases used by Fallaci, “make it with whom you want, when you want, where you want” are identical to those used by Jamie Glazov in his recent debate with Dinesh D’Souza. What this kind of language plainly signifies is that any consensual act that people want to perform—wherever and whenever and with whomever they want to perform, it’s fine. If they want to commit adultery, or if they want to have group sex, or whatever, that’s fine, and of course homosexual conduct is fine too. That’s what we believe in, this is what we are, and this is the stand we take against tyrannical Islam.

It seems that Fallaci, even in her later years when illness and death were closing in and she was terrified for the future of our civilization, never went beyond the destructive mentality of the Sexual Revolution, never had any remorse about it, never had any Second Thoughts.

I like Fallaci for her fiery opposition to Islam. I wish thousands more of us, millions more, felt the way she did. But our civilization cannot be preserved on the basis of radical sexual liberation. To the contrary, the modern demand for absolute freedom in the sexual sphere is inseparable from the modern prohibition on any kind of moral or cultural discrimination—and, of course, the latter underlies the open immigration orthodoxy that has allowed into the West the Muslim hordes that so alarmed Fallaci. Sexual freedom and open borders are merely two sides of the same liberal coin. There is no indication that Fallaci understood this.

—end of initial entry in Auster’s site—

Tom S. said…

I believe that your comments about Oriana Fallaci highlight a deep divide in the leftist camp, one which is only now becoming obvious. On one side of the leftist divide stand those like Fallaci, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Joan Baez, and a few others, who really believed all the propaganda, who thought that leftism was all about freedom and human rights and sexual liberation and racial equality and feminism and joy, who were shocked by Islamic terror and thought it right to fight it. And then there are the Chomskys, the Moores, the Carters, the Myrmidons of the EU and International A.N.S.W.E.R., who know what the true meaning of leftism is.

Leftism was never about freedom—otherwise why were there so few protests when the Communists slaughtered one hundred million people? It was never about human rights—otherwise why were leftists almost silent when the Gulag and Laogai swallowed up their hecatombs? It was never about sexual freedom—else why would the left make de facto common cause with those who bury gays alive, and mutilate women? It was never about racial equality—otherwise the left would not be on the side of the slavers of the Janjaweed in the Sudan, and the murderers of the Kurds. And it was certainly never about joy—if it was, why would so many leftists ally themselves with those who ban music, ban kite flying, and forbid little girls to feel the sun on their faces?

No, leftism has but one purpose, and one purpose only: to destroy the West. Sexual liberation and free speech and feminism and “human rights” and “racial equality” were only battering rams, siege equipment, used to breach the West’s defenses. Having done their job, they can be discarded, leaving the Fallacis standing stunned, saying, in effect, “Why are we abandoning freedom and liberation? Why won’t you fight for them? Isn’t that what we were fighting for all these years?”

No, actually: you were fighting to destroy your civilization. You just didn’t realize it.

Oriana Fallaci had courage, and intelligence, and wit, and insight. It’s too bad that she spent so much of he life tearing down a civilization that she finally, almost too late, realized that she loved.

END OF AUSTERITE TEXTS (My own voice again:)

A perfect exposé of a rotten apple...

I am grateful for the work of Melanie Phillips. Her courage to speak out about the islamization of the United Kingdom contrasts dramatically with her coward countrymen. Nowadays there are no Richards the Lionheart in Britain’s political arena: only eunuchs.

However, as can be seen in the following exchange with Auster, Phillips has some limitations, too. The West’s Zeitgeist has been so polluted in the last few decades that all people in the mainstream media, including Phillips, breath in the toxic air of liberalism. As always, I won’t add ellipsis between the sentences, paragraphs and e-mails that I omit in the following excerpts:


Auster said...

Melanie Phillips replied to my article critiquing her approach to Islam and I wrote back to her. Here, with her permission, is her e-mail. Below it I repeat her entire e-mail, with my replies to her interspersed.

Auster writes:
Your basic position is that we cannot make any general statements about Islam, because such statements will perhaps not be fair to a small and insignificant number of genuinely moderate Muslims. Liberal anti-discrimination remains your highest value and guide.
For example, you think that if we present evidence to the Muslims that we are not attacking them, that will convince them that we are not attacking them, and so they will give up their hostility. That assumption is false. Their hostility is based on the fact that we are infidels. And nothing we do, other than converting to Islam, can change that. We should say very clearly that we recognize that Islam is a threat to us, and that we therefore have to defend ourselves. We must say this, not to get into a dialog with them, but to defend ourselves. We shouldn’t be concerned about saving the Muslims’ souls, since that is beyond our power.

Melanie Phillips writes:
There is a growing number of young Muslim professionals in Britain—not many, true, but once again they exist—who are impervious to the siren song of the Islamist recruiters. Brushing aside the lethal intersection of cultural alienation and predatory jihadism, as you do, on the grounds that the only analysis to be allowed is that “Islam is the problem” both ignores the actual routes to extremism and once again wrenches the evidence to fit a theory.

Auster replies:
I dismiss your alienation analysis (1) because it’s small potatoes compared to the Muslim phenomenon as a whole, and (2) because it’s typical of a certain Western approach I’ve discussed many times, the tendency to explain Islamic radicalism in terms of some discrete socio-economic phenomenon understandable in Western terms, rather than in terms of ISLAM ITSELF. Muslims have been waging jihad war against non-Muslims for 1,400 years. There are minor variations from time to time and place to place in the exact manner of this jihad war. But it all follows the same basic, Islamic-authorized pattern and comes down to the same thing. Yet Western intellectuals refuse to admit this and look for some cause, any cause, other than Islam, to explain it. Leftists explain it in terms of Muslims being upset about evil Israel oppressing the poor Palestinians. Sociologists explain it in terms of alienation attendant on immigration into the West. Bernard Lewis explains it in terms of an inferiority complex caused by the Muslims being “left behind.” I could go on and on. What all these fancy theories have in common is that they ignore Islam itself as the cause of Islamic radicalism.

Melanie Phillips writes:
You have a crude, black and white approach to this problem. I think it is much more complex than you allow.

Auster replies:
Miss Phillips, I understand that Islam is our adversary and that it is our mortal enemy. If that to you is a crude black and white approach that you disdain, then you are admitting that you will never see the truth about Islam and that, like a liberal, you will keep diddling while the West burns. The fact that you refuse to say that Muslim immigration into Britain should be stopped is proof of your ultimate lack of seriousness about the issue.
Best regards,
Lawrence Auster


COMMENTS IN AUSTER’S BLOG

Anthony D. writes:
I think this was one of your finest rebuttals. By failing to see the very simple black and white nature of Islam’s existential threat to the West, she is missing the very big and obvious picture. Liberalism demands the very notion that the savage can and may be anything other than noble. One observation is that despite all evidence that the ideology of Islam is awful, and stands against absolutely everything liberals stand for, liberals refuse to attribute collective responsibility to the millions standing in solidarity with its violence and global aspirations. Instead, the focus is placed on the minority of Moslems who may not demonstrate obvious hostilities.

Ben writes:
It’s amazing how your arguments were so clear but she just cannot grasp it. Very simply you were saying Islam is the problem. But for the liberal this issue must be complex and not black and white.

Jeff in England writes:
This is great stuff. Would Melanie have accused you of black and white thinking regarding opposition to the followers and teachings of Hitler or Stalin? She wants us all to live together in one happy world, and will in the most deceptive way pretend to be dealing with the threat of Islam in a “complex” way when she is really appeasing it. I say deceptive not to insult her but because she will never take an issue to its logical conclusions because of her liberal agenda, even if she seems to be “conservative.” It is so obvious that Islam needs to be stopped from growing in the West no matter how moderate it seems. Didn’t the recent Cartoon Affair and the Rushdie Affair before that prove that? But no, Melanie won’t confront that reality. She has to play at attacking Islamic fundamentalism while encouraging “moderate” Islam, a smokescreen for letting Islam and Muslims continue in their takeover of the West.
I asked her the simplest question: Would she support the banning of Islamic immigration?, and she wouldn’t answer me. Not to ban it means Muslims will become the majority by the end of the century. Melanie seems not to mind that, as long as there are professional, educated Muslims who may not listen to the “Islamist recruiters”.

Anthony J. writes from England:
You wrote: “Right, if Melanie represents the “conservative” side of this debate, then that means there is NO serious response to the Islam threat on the horizon.” You are quite correct; there is no serious response as of yet in current mainstream thought in the UK.

Karen writes from England:
I wonder if she will answer you and what she would think about stopping all Moslem immigration. She has never said this and I expect that if she did, her articles would not get published as she is already considered by many to be beyond the pale. She is brave in continuing to write as she does at least bringing this problem to public attention, and she had major problems getting her last book published. However, she is still in denial about the real problem, i.e., Islam itself.
The problem for liberals is that they have no religion themselves and because they believe others are like them, they cannot understand that others do believe in religions and follow them fanatically.

Matt H. writes from England:
I wondered when you and Ms. Phillips were going to “have a go” at each other. I have had a few brief email exchanges with her, poising the question of “Islamist” or Islam itself as the root problem with Britain. She doesn’t view any of this in “black and white” terms simply because to confront it publicly as such, would see a swift end to her journalistic career in this country. She is like the “black sheep” of the liberal flock of lambs that are lining up for the slaughter, and she is at least semi-conscious of this reality. If she were to take the VFR [Auster’s blog] position on Islam, she would be writing leaflets for BNP [British National Party]. (Some BNP members have publicly acknowledged her writings and criticisms.)
I do notice that when she speaks in America, she toughens up a bit more, and feels at liberty to be more frank about it. But here in Britain, there is an invisible plug that gets pulled. If I hear the word tolerance anymore in association with terrorism, I think I will get physically sick. Today, on the radio, I think I heard that word about ten times in a span of five minutes: “We are tolerant! Therefore, we will tolerate more terror!”

Charles G. writes:
I have found that when you expose the essential “liberalness” of a people’s ideas, they tend to escalate the dialog into a contentious framework. A person confronted with the truth will always be hostile initially before accepting the inevitable.

Jeff writes:
Melanie openly declares she is a liberal. There certainly are serious UK conservative (non-BNP) thinkers on the Muslim issue: Anthony Browne, Leo McKinstry, Minette Marin, Barbara Amiel, Michael Gove to name five.

Auster writes:
Suppose Melanie did come to agree with, say, the idea that all Muslim immigration should be stopped and that many Muslims in Britain should be deported or encouraged to leave, with the aim of reducing the Muslim population in Britain? Would saying that get her expelled from the mainstream? I suppose it would. After all, how many pundits in the (somewhat less politically correct) American mainstream press take that position? None. After all, even in the world of the Web, the number of by-lined writers who argue for such a position is minuscule. Can anyone give me a list of names? My sense is that it’s because people are still in a basically liberal mindset where they can’t even conceive of taking such a position.

Andrea writes:
Alas Melanie, the truth is unpleasant! She mistakes the awfulness of the truth for rudeness. Let us hope that she will really be able to see what you mean.

Scott B. writes from England:
Essentially, what Melanie Phillips seems to be saying with her comment about upstanding, professional Muslims is that we need to instill in immigrant Muslims a sense of Western identity sufficient to over-ride the jihad component of the religion, and that this is eminently possible because, well, the Sufis managed to discard jihad.
It is incoherent to believe that general criticism of fundamentally intolerant ideas is valid when directed at a subgroup (“Islamists”) but becomes invalid when directed against a more widely defined group (Muslims). Mrs Phillips however, being in a state of denial about the true nature of Islam, resorts to dismissing on these fallacious logical grounds the abundant empirical evidence that in the specific case of Islamism and Islam, the subgroup and the group are essentially and unalterably the same.

Miss Phillips wrote back:
Once again you misrepresent my views to a startling degree. I do NOT say mass immigration should continue: on the contrary, I say in terms it should be stopped. I’m afraid you clearly have not understood what I have written. I stated clearly that moderate Muslims DO exist. You have simply reversed what I said. People can judge for themselves how you have interpreted what I wrote. This discussion is now closed.

Auster to Melanie Phillips:
I’m sorry that you are closing the discussion. I have written extensively on the “moderate Islam” question, particularly on Daniel Pipes’s insistence that “moderate Islam is the answer.” However, if you do believe that moderate Islam exists, that obviously does not let you off the hook, since, as every serious student of Islam recognizes, there is no such thing.

Melanie Phillips to Auster:
For goodness sake, read the book [Phillips’ Londonistan].

Auster to Phillips:
Since I don’t have your book at hand, and many people are following this discussion at VFR right now, it would be very helpful to the debate if you would provide at least one passage from your book for me to post in which you argue that mass immigration should be stopped. It was certainly not the impression you gave at a discussion on Islam we both attended a couple of months back. You said, equally strongly, that Britain was a “liberal pluralist society”.

Jeremy G. writes:
I just read through her entire website and didn’t find any argument that mass Muslim immigration should be stopped. And why not make the argument right now? The publicity would be huge. It would sell her book by the hundred of thousands and make her a millionaire in a week. She doesn’t say it because she doesn’t believe in it...

Auster replies:
Miss Phillips writes:

Next, a properly motivated nation would set about the remoralisation and re-culturation of Britain by restating the primacy of British culture and citizenship. To do this, it would recognise that British nationhood has been eviscerated by the combination of three things: mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country’s Judeo-Christian values. It would institute a pause to immigration while Britain assimilates the people it has already got.

A “pause to immigration” means no immigration. I note again that, while I am very much heartened to learn that she has said this, if this is her position she has not exactly been consistent in stating it, and I don’t know why she has not been more clear about that.

P.S. NOTE:
It turned out, as I [Lawrence Auster] have explained in later entries, that the passage in the published version of Londonistan of which Miss Phillips had sent me her manuscript copy did not call for a “pause” of immigration, as the manuscript did, but only for unspecified “tough controls” on immigration. Thus, her angry claim that she had called for immigration to be “stopped” was blatantly untrue.

______________

Read it all here.

Pat Condell & Fjordman - friends or foes?

Note of 13 September 2010:
This entry has been modified



Fjordman’s philo-Semitism in a nutshell

“It appears that the only people who can denounce genuine anti-Semitism yet at the same time criticize liberal Jews are people who are part-Jewish themselves, such as Larry Auster or Takuan Seiyo.” —Fjordman

Gosh! And these are the defenders of the West! Go figure. Only the Jews can criticize Jews in spite of the fact that the Jew Genrikh Yagoda is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people in the century when I was born! (the Soviet government killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first 25 years of its existence during the height of Jewish power). No ethnic group has had such privileges after World War II. No one.

“Pay no mind to jews, except you must send your sons to die serving them, you suicidal morons!” —Tanstaafl

That’s Tan’s abstract of Fjordman’s de facto stance on Israel and the Jewish question. See the full thread here (though I don’t like that black background for an otherwise important blog).

Criticism of Fjordman aside, his Defeating Eurabia has some merit:

• Maybe the West will “celebrate diversity” until our countries fall apart, and global leadership will be transferred to East Asia.

• Freedom is free speech, that’s the simplest definition of it... The European Union [EU] is a slow-motion coup d’état conducted against dozens of countries simultaneously. It is designed to empty all organs subjected to the popular will of any real power and transfer it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy. In fact, it’s worse than a coup d’état because this traditionally implied that a group of people seized control over a country. The EU doesn’t just want to seize control over nation states; it wants to abolish them. The EU is organized treason.

Pat Condell

I have moved the text I posted last year at the bottom of this post because I have changed my worldview even further. The fact is that in other videos Condell has stated vehemently that there are no races and that he wouldn’t tolerate going back to the times when in the United States negroes had to take the back seats in the buses. Condell has also stated that he spares the Jews from his anti-religious diatribes because in his opinion they are decent people.

It is true that the Jewish question requires an effort to wrap our heads to get it. However, since virtually all of westerners’ minds—including Condell’s—have been snatched, counter-jihad speakers like he and Robert Spencer are doing a great job to disabuse a few Body-Snatched Liberal Pods regarding, at least, some of the viruses that the snatchers have programmed in our minds. In Realpolitiks, therefore, counter-jihad may thus function like a baby step toward white nationalism (such baby step worked in my case to get rid of my old, body-snatched head).

____________________

Old, 3 September 2009 text:

While I disagree with Pat Condell’s opinion expressed elsewhere about the British National Party, the only party that actively defends the United Kingdom’s ethnicity and culture against the traitors, Condell is nonetheless a superb speaker. He has several internet videos on the suicidal Islamization of the West. This is one of the best that I have watched until now:



Condell on March 2008

Hotspur’s magnificent critique of Bruce Bawer

Bruce Bawer





Although I am not a religious person, I must acknowledge that the best criticism I’ve read so far about Islamization comes from the pens of conservative writers. Here I post the full article “Who Speaks for Europe?” by Henry Hotspur, published originally in Taki’s Magazine.

The spring issue of the City Journal runs an essay by Bruce Bawer, entitled “An Anatomy of Surrender,” in which he describes the West’s acquiescence of “creeping sharia.” Bawer cites numerous examples of censorship and self-censorship from both America and Europe. They prove that critical views about Islam are no longer tolerated.

Bawer points out that attempts to roll back freedom of speech and other liberties have been less successful in the U.S. than in Europe. He is right. However, he does not explain why this is the case, apart from briefly mentioning that it is “thanks in no small part to the First Amendment.” Unlike Europe, America has not introduced so-called “hate speech legislation” which imposes fines and jail sentences for voicing politically incorrect opinions about certain taboo subjects. Yet, as Americans know, speaking one’s mind can get one into trouble in the U.S. as well. There will be no fine or imprisonment, but one risks losing one’s job and being ostracized.

Yet the question remains: Why is Europe collapsing at a faster rate then America? The reason is one which people like Bruce Bawer are reluctant to acknowledge. Bawer is a liberal American homosexual who wrote books such as A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. In 1998, he moved from New York to Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. It is not a coincidence that he went to Amsterdam. What Bawer loved about the Netherlands was, he says, “its tolerance, its secularism.”

He moved there soon after finishing his book Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity because he wanted to live in a secular society, away from the Christian fundamentalism of America. The Netherlands is the country that has taken secularization, multiculturalism, tolerance of alternative lifestyles, drug abuse, and other fads to their furthest extremes. It was the first country to discard its Christian past and introduce legalised abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, legally regulated prostitution and drug dealing. On his website Bawer explained:

Moving among the native Dutch, whose public schools teach children to take for granted the full equality of men and women and to view sexual orientation as a matter of indifference, I felt safe and accepted.

However, having settled in Amsterdam Bawer noticed that the country that had renounced Christianity was not a paradise for gays. The Dutch had renounced their Christian heritage, giving in not only to the demands of gay lobby groups, radical feminists and the like, but also to those of Muslim extremists. Unlike in the U.S., homosexuals in Amsterdam are legally allowed to marry because the Dutch no longer uphold the traditional moral order. At the same time, homosexuals in Dutch cities live in constant fear of being beaten up by Muslims youths obeying the Koranic decree that homosexuals be put to death, because the Dutch no longer uphold law and order either.

Bawer fled. In 1999 he left for Norway, another liberal Shangri-la in Europe, just a few steps behind the Netherlands in legalizing liberal fads. However, as in a comical movie, in his quest for the gay paradise, Bawer went from one dire situation to another. Last January, in a piece entitled “First They Came for the Gays,” he relates how his “partner” was recently:

confronted at a bus stop [in Oslo] by two Muslim youths, one of whom had asked if he was gay, started to pull out a knife, then kicked him as he got on the bus, which had pulled up at just the right moment. If the bus hadn’t come when it did, the encounter could have been much worse.

Two years ago, Bawer published the bestselling book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within. Since he is a liberal homosexual, who had previously written a number of books advocating the liberal and gay agenda, he had no problems finding a mainstream publisher and getting his book widely reviewed in the mainstream media. His book is a very useful tool to awaken an American audience to the drama that is currently unfolding in Europe. Nevertheless the book fails to explain what the root cause is of the phenomenon its author describes. Bawer is blind to the basic lesson Americans can learn from Europe’s predicament. He refuses to admit that secularism and liberalism destroyed Europe by creating a demographic and religious vacuum that Muslim immigrants and Islam are simply filling up.

What Bawer calls America’s “oppressive Christian fundamentalism” is exactly what keeps America healthy (at least in comparison to the continent). If the situation in Europe continues to deteriorate it will not be long before Bruce Bawer, for his own safety and that of his “partner,” will feel compelled to flee back to his native America. One can only hope that liberalism will not progress to the point where the American nation, like the nations of Europe, loses the will to assert its own identity, the conservative belief in the supremacy of its Christian heritage, the willingness to fight for the preservation of its traditional values.

Contrary to what Bawer says, it is not true that “first they came for the gays.” First they came for the Christians, and radical homosexual activists were in the vanguard of the liberal storm troopers who silenced the Christians in Europe.

Last October the Brussels Journal, a website that pursues the dual goal of giving the conservative minority in Europe a voice in the public debate and, even more importantly, warning Americans so they can avoid Europe’s mistake, was attacked by Little Green Footballs (LGF), the website of one Charles Johnson, an ally and friend of Bawer’s. Johnson is a liberal who saw the light after 9/11 when he transformed into a so-called “anti-jihadist” and installed himself as the Grand Inquisitor of conservatism. Johnson pontificated that the Brussels Journal is not conservative, but is run by far-right white-supremacist neo-fascist Europeans, as dangerous as your average Islamist fanatic.

The reason for Johnson’s ire was BJ’s support for a counterjihad conference in Brussels last October, where members of European anti-immigration political parties such as the Belgian Vlaams Belang (VB) and Sverigedemokraterna (the Swedish Democrats) attended, as well as the fact that the BJ had criticized Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch politician and Muslim apostate. Hirsi Ali, whom Johnson calls “a heroine of the highest magnitude” and Bawer “perhaps the greatest living champion of Western freedom in the face of creeping jihad,” advised the Belgian authorities in February 2006 to outlaw the VB. She opined that the party:

hardly differs from the Hofstad group [a Jihadist terror network in the Netherlands, involved in the assassination of Theo van Gogh]. Though the VB members have not committed any violent crimes yet, they are just postponing them and waiting until they have an absolute majority. On many issues they have exactly the same opinions as the Muslim extremists: on the position of women, on the suppression of gays, on abortion. This way of thinking will lead straight to genocide.

There it is: Anyone who does not agree with the secularists on their feminist dogmas, their homosexual propaganda and their pro-abortion stance, is just as dangerous as al-Qaeda and is a maniac bent on genocide. Bruce Bawer eagerly joined the controversy by attacking Paul Belien, the Brussels journalist who founded the BJ. He posted the following letter at Charles Johnson’s LGF website:

In May, Paul Belien wrote as follows in the Washington Times: “Europe is in the middle of a three-way culture war between the defenders of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, the proponents of secular hedonism and the forces of Islamic Jihadism.” “Secular hedonism” is plainly his term for secular liberalism. Plainly he identifies with what he calls “traditional Judeo-Christian morality.” And the structure of his sentence suggests that for him both “secular hedonism” and “Islamic Jihadism” are equal enemies. And what about those of us who foolishly think this is a war for individual liberty? Are we just supposed to sit back and shut up and take orders from a bunch of little Euro-fascists?

Another “little Euro-fascist” according to Johnson, Bawer and their ilk, is Brigitte Bardot. In April, the 73-year old French former movie star was tried in court for the sixth time for “inciting racial hatred.” The public prosecutor demands that Bardot be given a two-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of €15,000 ($23,000) because she wrote in a letter that she is “fed up with being under the thumb of this population [of Muslim immigrants] which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its habits.” In Europe, it is a criminal offence to hold such opinions.

Johnson and his friends refuse to defend Bardot. In their eyes she, too, is as horrible as the average Islamist suicide bomber. One of Johnson’s friends, an American neocon of French origin, wrote that Bardot is a “fascist,” just like the Muslim “Islamofascists.” About the prosecution of Bardot by the French authorities he said:

As far as I am concerned, this particular case is a dogfight between two equally totalitarian factions. I certainly do not recognize myself in the kind of France Brigitte Bardot (and the company she keeps) mourns. Her getting in trouble for that is not enough of a reason for me to drop my principles and side with one flavor of Fascist just to oppose the other. I’ll just wait on my side of the line in the sand, to see which one comes on top. Rifle at the ready, if need be.

Interestingly, Johnson’s friend explained why he regards Bardot as a fascist. She has:

a neo-Fascist outlook on homosexuals, immigrants and contemporary American foreign policy.

For neo-conservatives and other former liberals, the conservative Europeans opposing the Islamization of their continent and the Islamists are “equally totalitarian.” They hate the traditionalist Europeans as vehemently as they hate the Muslim extremists. Everyone who does not condone their lifestyles is opposed with the same vigor. People like Bawer, Johnson, Hirsi Ali et al. have become America’s preferred critics of Islam. Like cuckoos they have laid their egg in the conservative nest. They defame real conservatives as “racists,” “fascists,” “homophobes,” and try to drive them from the conservative movement. They are self-styled anti-Islamists who, as Lawrence Auster notes at his blog, condemn every critic of Islam from outside their own liberal and/or neocon envelope, including everyone who dares raise the topic of deportation, or looks for the root causes of Islamization in either immigration policies or the West’s moral decadence.

In his City Journal article, Bruce Bawer lists numerous cases of prosecution for “hate speech crimes” in Europe. The article is deliberately one-sided. It tells only half the truth. Bawer does not mention Bardot, though since 1997 the poor woman has already been fined four times for criticizing the Islamization of France. The public prosecutor in Paris told the court last month that Bardot should be given a tough sentence because the prosecutor has run out of patience with her. Bruce Bawer writes that in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini:

introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Khomeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”

He does not mention that there is another assault against freedom of speech going on by another type of “cultural jihadists.” It began well before 1989 and those who dare to call a spade a spade are “homophobes.”

Last year, a French appeal court sentenced Christian Vanneste, a conservative member of Parliament, to a fine of €3,000 ($4,600) plus €3,000 in damages to each of the three homosexual activist organizations that had taken him to court for his views on homosexuality. His crime? He had said that “heterosexuality is morally superior to homosexuality” and that “homosexual behavior endangers the survival of humanity.” The homosexual activist groups welcomed the court ruling, saying that freedom of speech should be restricted in order “to punish homophobic comments which should be fought because they inspire and legitimize verbal and physical attacks.”

Bawer criticizes hate-speech legislation that criminalizes “religious insults” and places the burden of proof on the defendant. This kind of legislation has been introduced in most European countries and Canada. It criminalizes not only every statement that might inspire and legitimize verbal and physical attacks on Muslims or that is deemed offensive by them (so-called “Islamophobia”), but also every similar statement about homosexuals (so-called “homophobia”). Indeed, hate speech legislation was not primarily introduced to facilitate the Islamization of Europe but, under pressure of homosexual lobbies, to undermine the traditional Christian roots of European society. Islamization is but the logical consequence of Europe’s dechristianization. Islam is the monster that the liberal secularists allowed in to devour their Christian opponents. Now that the monster has begun to devour the liberal secularists as well, the latter start to wail about oppressive legislation, though they continue to use the same legislation to harass Christians.

Unfortunately, the liberal secularists have not learned from the disaster in Europe and are eager to inflict the European predicament on other corners of Western civilization such as Australia and America. The Daily Telegraph of Australia reported last month that the Australian authorities have told schools to stop using terms such as husband and wife. The terms boyfriend, girlfriend and spouse are also on the banned list and have to be replaced by the generic “partner.” Australia is also going to include “same-sex attraction issues” in students’ lessons on relationships, diversity and discrimination. According to Australia’s Education Director-General schools have a responsibility to fight homophobia.

“Cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us,” laments Bruce Bawer. The other “cultural jihadists,” however, are determined to impose their social and sexual agenda on us. They, too, intimidate and terrorize. America has not been immune to this.

Last week homosexual activists at Smith College, Northampton, MA, rioted in protest against a speech delivered by Ryan Sorba entitled “The Born Gay Hoax.” Ryan was talking to the Smith Republic Club when activists stormed the podium and deprived Sorba of his right of free speech. Uniformed police officers who were present at the scene just stood and watched. Rather than take action against the rioters, the officers and a university official walked to the podium and ordered Sorba to leave the room “for his own safety.” As Nancy Morgan recently wrote:

Gays are portrayed as victims of an unfeeling society. As such, they have been granted special rights not available to other Americans. The right not to be offended, the right to automatic respect, and the right to offend any person or group that dares to object. Imagine the outcry if Christians were granted these same rights. The fear of being branded homophobic, racist, mean-spirited or any of the other politically-correct labels has effectively silenced millions of Americans.

This bears an eerie resemblance to Bruce Bawer’s description in City Journal of Europe’s appeasement of its Muslim bullies, who, like the gays, have also been granted special rights not available to other Europeans: the right not to be offended, the right to automatic respect, and the right to offend—and silence—any person or group that dares to object. In fact, the two situations illustrate one and the same phenomenon, which occurs when Westerners are no longer prepared to defend their traditional values and the moral heritage of Christianity which once formed the core of their identity.

Why Muslims belong to a lower “psychoclass”

I believe that part of the etiology of Western self-hatred and its eventual suicide could be understood in terms of deMausean “growth panic” theory. But in this entry I would like to quote something about the primitive Islamist mentality. The following article is an abridged version of a piece by Robert W. Godwin, “The Land that Developmental Time Forgot.” Godwin uses Lloyd deMause’s childrearing model to understand both the Muslim mind and Islamic terrorism:




Bob Godwin


In his excellent book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the economist and historian David Landes writes that it is impossible to understand the dismal economic performance of Muslim nations “without attending to the experience of Islam as faith and culture.” Likewise, Bernard Lewis, the pre­eminent scholar of the Muslim Middle East, blames the slow pace of progress in the Islamic world on various cultural factors—in particular, the theological shackling of independent analysis, which has tended to “suppress enterprise, experiment, and originality and to reinforce a fatalistic world view.”

After having gotten off to a fine start just four or five centuries earlier, Islamic civilization peaked in around 1200, since which time it has been “mostly downhill,” leading to the “economic and intellectual backwater” of today. “History,” writes Landes, “had gone awry.” Perhaps it is not far­fetched to speculate that Islam may have gone the way of other large-scale dysfunctional civilizations, such as the Aztec, had it not been for the fortuitous discovery of oil under their feet, which essentially rewarded their cultural maladaptation with a constant flow of uncreated wealth.

In this article, I would like to attempt to define some of the variables that have caused Islamic culture to fixate, regress, decay, and fail to prosper on so many fronts. In today’s politically correct academic climate, even raising this issue is a controversial proposition, because it assumes that some cultures are more healthy and advanced than others, and that it is possible for an entire culture to become “sick” and developmentally stunted. However, since September 11 we have all learned many disturbing facts about the Islamic world that make it difficult for even the usual academic suspects to accuse us of being racist and Eurocentrist for criticizing such practices as female genital mutilation, stoning adulteresses, burying homosexuals alive, amputating limbs from suspected thieves, etc. In fact, it is more than just intellectually naive to think of all cultures as equally healthy: it is a dangerous delusion.

In order to comprehend the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, we might begin with Howard Stein’s thesis that developmental time is embodied in cultural space, so that to study various cultures around the globe represents a literal form of time travel, as we encounter groups that have attained different levels of psychological development. As Lloyd deMause has demonstrated, it is possible to take a “bottom up” approach to culture, and show how early childhood experiences lead to the various cultural practices that define a given psychoclass. In describing the brutal child-rearing practices prevalent in the Middle East, deMause has surely identified the dysfunctional axis around which the culture of the terrorist revolves and renews itself. If, as psychohistorians believe, any given culture reflects the psychological development of its individual constituents, there are many aspects of Islamic culture that can be traced directly to childhood trauma.

While most academics continue to blame the cultural pathologies of the Middle East on the legacy of colonialism, the Muslim world has now been free and independent for at least fifty years, enough time to organize itself around its own center of psychological gravity, so to speak. In other words, various nations in the Islamic world have developed a broadly similar pattern of cultural beliefs, practices, and institutions that reflect the unresolved needs and conflicts of their collective childhood. Therefore, although the Western and Islamic worlds are surely engaged in the “clash of civilizations” predicted by Samuel Huntington in his prophetic book by the same name, it is not as if “civilization” is an arbitrary construct set apart from unconscious psychological factors. In fact, if Huntington is correct that there is no evolutionary cultural trend toward universal liberal values of liberty, democracy, individualism, private property and the rule of law, then our historical situation is truly hopeless, and perennial civilizational conflict is inevitable. However, if deMause and like minded psychohistorians are correct, then our present clash of civilizations is really only the outward manifestation of a “clash of psychoclasses,” and there is every reason to believe that the world of Islam can proceed through the same evolutionary process that saw the Christian West gradually master external and internal (emotional and cognitive) reality over the past 500 years, as childrearing practices became increasingly humane.

Unfortunately, just when the West was breaking away from a primitive “hand-me-down” form of mythic knowledge, and turning down an historical road that pointed to the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution, Islam took a wrong (but very emblematic) turn which involved “closing the gate of Ijtihad,” or independent analysis.

According to Daniel Pipes, the adage “better a hundred years of repression than a day of anarchy” encapsulates the dread of social disorder, or fitna, that “lies deep in Islamic civilization.” Because of the anxiety involved in making the break from childlike conformity to authoritarian religion, the Islamic world refused even the printing press, because it was “seen as a potential instrument of sacrilege and heresy.” For this angst-ridden society, “the truth had already been revealed. What led back to the truth was useful and permissible; all the rest was error and deceit.” Again according to Landes, “Nothing did more to cut Muslims off from the mainstream of knowledge.” Unlike the West, the Islamic world did not develop the cognitive sophistication to conceive of any separation between the religious and secular. For all practical purposes, this meant that the cognitive domain or “reality principle” was dominated by a superimposed grid of fixed and final knowledge, so that it became very difficult to actually learn from experience.

The preoperational mind—specially when it is arrested and structured around a complex of developmental trauma—is simply not equipped to “think through” its cognitive dissonance; instead, it must eliminate the cause of it, through violence if necessary. Certainly this is a major preoccupation of the Koran, which declares that “the infidels are your undoubted enemies” (Sura 4), so kill them wherever ye shall find them (Sura 2), because “they will not fail to corrupt you and long for your ruin” (Sura 3).

These types of sentiments would not be so problematic if they were understood, like the Old Testament, as a developmentally earlier form of religious expression that could be modified or softened through time. In the West, there is a long history of biblical exegesis, commentary and criticism. But even today Islamic theology remains mired in the Dark Ages, still hewing very closely to its original mythological formulation. The omnipotent fantasy that the 7th-century Koran “contains all the truth required in order to guide the believer in this world” was tantamount to civilizational suicide. As a result, “the Muslim world has been in paralysis since religious extremism rose in the twelfth century.”

What this means is that mainstream Islam is comparable to the most extreme form of Biblical fundamentalism, certainly to the right of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Actually, according to historian David Gress, the qualifier “fundamentalist” only makes sense in the West, where there is something to weigh it against. But in Islam these types of ecumenical distinctions are out of bounds, because in the Koran there is “no possibility of error. Therefore the question of fundamentalism versus critical analysis had never arisen in Islam. No Muslim had ever felt himself entitled to read the Koran in any way other than the literal.”

What the Islamic fundamentalist gains in the form of a comforting omniscience, he loses in terms of being able to adjust his thinking to the dictates of reality. But rather than seeing this concrete, inflexible adherence to scripture for the cognitively debilitating weakness it is, Islam openly regards itself as superior to the West because it offers “more perfect knowledge of the world.” Therefore, the all too obvious economic and cultural supremacy of the West leads directly to paranoid and conspiratorial thinking. For all these years, we have been under the mistaken impression that the epithet “Great Satan” was nothing more than typical Islamic rhetorical excess when in fact, it is the signpost of a deeply paranoid psycho-political reality.

It is a natural mistake to assume that radical Islam is opposed to the West only in terms of some definable thing that we are doing, such as “defiling the holy soil” of Saudi Arabia with our armed forces. Rather, what we are again primarily dealing with is a clash of psychoclasses, in which the fundamentalists object to the very form of our thought: a form of thought that makes possible such things as democracy (because it values individuation from coercive group fantasies), formal operations, scientific thinking, rational economic development, equality of the sexes, and modernity itself.

In short, it is a battle between the cognitive/emotional past and present of the human species, no different than if we had somehow entered a time warp and were fighting the barbarian hordes of Genghis Khan. Even when logical, formal operations thinking is employed by the terrorists, it is in the service of perverse paranoid-schizoid envy and sadism, so that they have no interest in designing planes, only crashing them; building magnificent skyscrapers, only destroying them; curing disease, only spreading it. The very real problem we are facing is an adversary with a dangerous combination of primitive psychological development but access to sophisticated weapons and technology that their level of cognitive integration could never have produced on its own. If it could have, the human race would have been extinguished several thousand years ago by barbarians with weapons of mass destruction.

The preoperational style of thought predominates between the ages of two and seven, and if a child is traumatized at that time (as vividly described by deMause), it can lead either to a general stunting of emotional and cognitive development, or to a cordoned off part of the psyche where the trauma is held “in escrow” for later processing. If such an individual is traumatized later in life, it may “resonate” with the old trauma, causing the person to enter a trance-like altered state. In such a trance state, the individual may become highly suggestible especially toward intimidating or charismatic authority figures. Radical Islam, as embodied in the Koran, Hadith and Sharia, is the spurious cure for the type of childhood trauma described by deMause. It is an absolutist, closed, dogmatic system that looks backward to the lost perfection of a fantasized, infantile past. Anti-evolutionary to the core, it believes that “progress” consists of undoing the historical developments of the past millennium and returning to a time when there was no freedom of inquiry, no deviation from the “already known,” no individual rights and no due process, a time when the word Islam was literally true: “submit,” usually at the end of a sword.

In his book, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, Daniel Pipes provides example after example of the type of preoperational, magical, paranoid thinking style that pervades the Muslim world. Even sophisticated Middle Easterners “interpret great public issues through the prism of conspiracy theories” which are “virtually immune to rational argument.” While we of course have our paranoids as well, this is a cognitive style that only exists on the fringes of the West, e.g., in the Militia movement on the right or among radical environmentalists on the left.

[An] attitude that may be traced to the Koran tells followers that women are “a pollution.” The pervasive male sense of superiority over women is actually a cultural defense mechanism against unconscious maternal fears. And again, this fragile sense of manhood feeds directly into the violence of the region, because “violence is the quintessential, testosteronic expression of male entitlement.” What we have to imagine is the incredible disorientation these “chosen” men feel, growing up with unrealistically high self-esteem, and believing they are heirs to a superior civilization, but all around being confronted by the social and political disaster that is Islam. Something has gone wrong… and someone must pay. Thus the search for scapegoats begins.

According to Huntington, in recent years Muslims have been participants in twenty-six of fifty ethnopolitical conflicts, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars. “They also have had a high propensity to resort to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142” between 1928 and 1979; and when they do involve violence, conflicts involving Muslims tend to be heavy in casualties. Huntington concludes with an empirical statement that nevertheless attracted a great deal of controversy, that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”

Yet another outcome of anxiety-based male sexual superiority is the inability to integrate the psyche, in particular, to experience enduring loving and sexual feelings toward the same object. Here again there is a ready-made cultural defense mechanism that legitimizes this developmental arrest: polygamy. Islamic tradition allows up to four wives, and even if most Muslim men are not wealthy enough to avail themselves of this option, there are all important psychological implications for a society that does not hold out monogamous heterosexuality as its ideal. This probably contributes to the fact that women are not regarded as quite fully human in most of the Islamic world: they are simply degraded figments of the projected male psyche. And we also see evidence of part-object relating carried over to the afterlife, with the childlike fantasies of scores of young virgins (as opposed to frightening or polluted adult women) waiting upon the elect.

From a psychohistorical standpoint, the societal attitude toward women and sexuality is no small matter. Along with childrearing practices, the status of women is one of the hinges of cultural evolution. In fact, according to Landes:

In general, the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity. If we view gender relations as a continuum running from nothing to full equality, the Muslim countries, especially the Arab Muslim countries, would bottom out the scale.

And obviously, the treatment of women circles back on the treatment of children. Indeed, if we consider only the staggering rates of female illiteracy in the Islamic world (again, endorsed by Muslim tradition), having an illiterate mother presents an additional barrier to a child achieving a more developed formal operational style of thinking. And it goes without saying that depressed and terrorized women cannot help but unconsciously transmit this terror to their children.

In deMause’s article, he describes how the Muslim child develops a tyrannical superego that forbids the experience of pleasure and short-circuits the spontaneous expression of the will. In the Muslim Middle East “there is little evidence of the idea of a carefree childhood,” and “in adult eyes, the period of childhood is a nuisance, and childhood activities, especially play, are a waste of time.” When these children grow up, they impose the same joyless tyranny on the next generation of children, preventing any freedom of thought, expression, will, creativity, or dissent. For example, teaching methods in the Middle East are very different from our own, emphasizing rote learning as “the major method of teaching. Throughout the Arab world memorization has been a common element of education.” This involves forcing the child, under threat of corporal punishment, to mindlessly memorize lengthy passages of the Koran perfectly, so that the indoctrination “still remains with the individual throughout his lifetime.” As such, children are not encouraged to reason or develop formal operational capacities.

Of course, the ultimate myth is not just the resurgence of Islam as the preeminent global power, but the delusion of how that would come about. The fundamentalists believe that Islam is the magical solution to all the world’s problems, and that “Muslim strength follows directly from living the sacred law of Islam,” or Sharia. The way the fantasy goes is this: about a thousand years ago, Islam flourished with great armies, wealth, and cultural attainments surpassing both Europe and China. All of this followed, according to Islamist doctrine, from the fact that all of the “good children” of Islam strictly followed the “parental” law of the Sharia. Likewise, when the Islamic world became “contaminated” by Western and Jewish influences, it became weak and vulnerable.

In attempting to analyze the motives of the terrorists, I see evidence of a superego so violently suffocating that we are essentially dealing with people who have become psychically “dead” through childhood trauma. A clue to this was provided in a statement from one of the Al Qaeda terrorists after the commencement of the bombing of Afghanistan, when he said that the terrorists “love death the way Americans love life.” Again there is a temptation to dismiss this as rhetorical bluster, but I believe it reveals a great psychological truth that we ignore at our peril.

Let me be explicit: the nineteen terrorists who went down with the planes, the ten more who were planning to do so, the thousand or so “sleeper” terrorists still hiding in the U.S., the hundred Palestinian suicide bombers since 1993—all were and are already dead emotionally. Just as the terrorists’ psychic “death” is something that happened in the past but which they were not mature enough to experience, physical suicide involves “sending the body to a death which has already happened to the psyche.” The need to experience death for these soulless “living dead” is equivalent to the compulsion of a neurotic patient to either act out or remember unconscious conflicts; suicidal terror is repetition compulsion taken to the highest extreme. [As Boltas put it:]

The person who has been “killed” in his childhood is in unwilling identification with his own premature mortality, and by finding a victim he transcends his own killing, psychically overcoming his own endless deaths by sacrificing to the malignant gods that overlooked his childhood.

And for this unconscious drama to be emotionally complete, it is critical that the victims be innocent, just as the terrorist once was before being converted to the cult of death by his parental “body snatchers.”

We see this necrophilic inversion of life and death in much of the Middle East, in a way that beggars belief. For bin Laden, this is the natural order, because true Muslims “all seek martyrdom and want to meet Allah as soon as possible. One billion Muslims are capable of turning their bodies into bombs which are equal in force to all the weapons of extermination and mass destruction possessed by the Americans.”


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Note of 29 August 2010: I have removed some paragraphs from this article according to my new mind after a lightning struck me. Robert Godwin’s complete article, twice as longer of the above abridged version, contains numerous endnotes.