Sunday, August 31, 2014

National Post advises: Convert to Islam to avoid being murdered by jihadis

National Post advises: Convert to Islam to avoid being murdered by jihadis

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/08/national-post-advises-convert-to-islam-to-avoid-being-murdered-by-jihadis

kenya_attack_42

Kathy Shaidle’s comment on this appalling piece is excellent: “I would die before I would repeat those words under any circumstances. And yes, there is a ‘peaceful verse for every violent one.’ However, Muslims use abrogation to decide which verses are more authoritative. The later violent (‘sword’) verses cancel out the earlier, peaceful ones. ‘The odds are that if you are assailed by a radical Islamist in the streets of London or Toronto, it will be with words not bullets.’ You forgot to mention knives. Just ask Lee Rigby. Oh wait… you can’t… Everything I needed to know about Islam, I learned on September 11, 2001. Take your talk of tolerance and understanding to a Muslim majority country and see how you fare.”

Imagine: a publication in the free West counseling submission to murderous thugs in order to save one’s miserable life. Giving in to thuggery has never been a virtue. Give me liberty or give me death, we used to say in the U.S., but probably there is a considerable number of enlightened Leftists here who will be nodding in agreement with Afsun Qureshi’s insulting and menacing piece.

Some comments from me interspersed below. “Afsun Qureshi: The Muslim prayer that might save your life,” by Afsun Qureshi, National Post, August 29, 2014 (thanks to Kathy Shaidle):
London, England — As a young girl in a downtown Toronto hospital, I stood on my tiptoes, peering at my cancer-ridden uncle lying mutely on the hospital bed. He was asleep — exhausted and wasted from years of waging war with cancer. For some reason, I was left alone with him for a few moments, which turned out to be the moments in which he took his dying breaths. He woke with a jolt and started shrieking in a booming voice that belied his deathly ill state. His eyes were dilated but fixed straight at me while he shouted the lines twice. I ran to my mother, hysterical and shaking. Nurses sprinted to him, adjusting machines and pumping fluids — but within minutes he had died.
In her attempt to comfort me, my mother explained that the words he had uttered to me comprised the shahadah, a testimony to the identity of Allah as the one true God, and Muhammad as his prophet. Muslims are supposed to recite the shahadah if they know they are dying. It signals to God that they are indeed Muslims, the real deal. Still, I was spooked for years.
Yet these words that terrified me saved a number of lives during the 2013 al-Qaeda-linked attack at Kenya’s Westgate Mall. To weed the Muslims out from the infidels, terrorists asked people to recite the shahadah to prove their faith. They asked other things too, like certain key passages of the Koran, the name of Mohammad’s mother, that sort of thing — it was al-Qaeda Question Hour. The wrong answer meant death.
After that, many, myself included, wondered: Should we — Muslim or not — learn the basics of Islam and have a read through the Koran? If one of us ever finds herself in a situation similar to that of Westgate Mall victims, could even a rudimentary knowledge of Islam save us?
Yes, non-Muslims should indeed learn the basic of Islam and read the Qur’an, in order to inform themselves about the ideological underpinnings of the jihad threat — not in order to kowtow to one’s would-be murderer in order to buy a few more years of a wasted, cowardly life.
More broadly, being versed in the Koran might help Muslims to discredit and marginalize the fundamentalists who have warped the words from that holy book.
That would be great: I would love to see a Qur’an-based refutation of the Islamic State’s understanding of Islam. Although everyone in the West assumes that such a thing exists and is easy to find, in reality the only refutations of the Islamic State’s theology from Muslims in the West are exercises in deception, diversion, and dishonesty.
Earlier this month, Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary of the UK, where I live, said there were at least 500 British Muslims training with ISIS in Iraq and Syria — more Muslims, apparently, than there are enlisted in the UK Military. What if these lunatics decide to use their passport to come back to the UK to launch Westgate-style attacks?
For every violent passage in the Koran, there is a peaceful passage — which can be a handy tool when it comes to confronting radicals in the realm of ideas.
Nonsense. As Shaidle noted, the “radicals” know full well according to the Qur’anic (2:106) principle of abrogation as it is understood by mainstream Islamic scholars, the violent Medinan passages take precedence over the less violent Meccan passages. This is an ancient concept in Islam: in his eighth-century biography of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq explains the contexts of various verses of the Qur’an by saying that Muhammad received revelations about warfare in three stages: first, tolerance; then, defensive warfare; and finally, offensive warfare in order to convert the unbelievers to Islam or make them pay the jizya (see Qur’an 9:29, Sahih Muslim 4294, etc.). Mainstream Qur’an commentaries by Ibn Kathir, Ibn Juzayy, As-Suyuti and others also emphasize that Surat At-Tawba abrogates every peace treaty in the Qur’an.

In the modern age, this idea of stages of development in the Qur’an’s teaching on jihad, culminating in offensive warfare to establish the hegemony of Islamic law, has been affirmed by Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb, Pakistani Islamic scholar and politician Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, the Pakistani Brigadier S. K. Malik (author of The Qur’anic Concept of War), Saudi Chief Justice Sheikh Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid (in his Jihad in the Qur’an and Sunnah), and others. The “radicals” know all this.
The odds are that if you are assailed by a radical Islamist in the streets of London or Toronto, it will be with words not bullets. For the sake of intellectual self-protection, it is worth getting up to speed on what these fanatics are so fanatical about.
There is much in the Koran about “kafirs” (non-believers) and how Muslims should deal with them. (Spoiler: They shouldn’t always be killed.)
No indeed. The “People of the Book” should be subjugated: “Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).
From my personal experience, a conversation with a Muslim theologue always changes for the better once you show them you have some kind of knowledge of the Koran and Islam.
Odd. In my experience, once I show Muslim spokesmen that I have some kind of knowledge of the Qur’an and Islam, their response is invariably rage, contempt, and furious attacks on my character, parentage, associates, family, and more.
Some might fear that learning a bit of Islam will lead to a Homeland type situation, with folks going all Brody on us. But I doubt that. When I was growing up in Don Mills, Ont., school kids had to learn and recite the Lord’s Prayer, regardless of the fact that the majority of students at my school were Jewish. I don’t recall any of us going on to become Christian soldiers.
But the shahada is different: Muslims understand that saying it publicly in the presence of a male Muslim witness makes you a Muslim. It signifies conversion to Islam. Then if you say, “But I didn’t mean it!,” remember that the penalty for apostasy is death.
In the years since the Iraq War, paramilitary jihadist groups have been growing. They are all competing for the Gold Medal in the Jihadist Games: a big hit on America. UK is the Silver — and let’s hope Canada isn’t the bronze. Until this fight is over, a little knowledge could go a long way.
In other words, a little cowardice, a little submission.


Give Palestine—Not the U.N.—the Money, Responsibility, and Glory :: Joffe and Romirowsky in New Republic



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Give Palestine—Not the U.N.—the Money, Responsibility, and Glory
What the UNRWA representative in D.C. misunderstands about our argument

by Alexander H. Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky
The New Republic
August 29, 2014
Be the first of your friends to like this.

In responding with pique to our piece on the the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, Matthew Reynolds deflects attention from our real proposal—one that would put the organization at least partially out of business.
Reynolds' criticism must be situated properly. Having found the distance from New York to Washington too great, UNRWA opened an office in the capital in 2011. As UNRWA's representative in Washington, Reynold's job is to lobby UNRWA's largest donor, the United States.
For this reason, he seizes upon various observations of ours that he believes are "canards" for the sake of "cheap political shots." For example, he is outraged that we observed that UNRWA's union in Gaza is dominated by Hamas members, who won 25 out of 27 seats in a 2012 election. As one unnamed former UNRWA staff member put it at the time, "For the moment, Hamas and UNRWA seem to have an agreement that UNRWA may continue to function in Gaza so long as it does not engage in actions that significantly contradict Hamas' world view." This would appear to support our assertion that "UNRWA is effectively a branch of Hamas" and belie Reynolds' claim of UNRWA's "policy of strict neutrality."
We observed that "an unknown number of employees are actual Hamas fighters (or at least know UNRWA employees with keys to the schools so that rockets can be stored in classrooms over the summer)." Reynolds calls this "a very extreme accusation made without any substantiation." He might take up the matter with former UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen, who in 2004 stated, "Oh, I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime. Hamas as a political organization does not mean that every member is a militant and we do not do political vetting and exclude people from one persuasion as against another." (This was before Hamas took over Gaza and its ruling institutions.)
As for Reynolds' mention of UNRWA's vetting of employees, this is done under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1267, a terrorist screening list meant to ensure that no known members of Al Qaeda join the organization. A 2010 Congressional Research Service report notes that the "list does not include Hamas, Hezbollah, or most other militant groups that operate in UNRWA's surroundings…. Nevertheless, UNRWA officials did say that if notified by U.S. officials of potential matches, they would 'use the information as a trigger to conduct their own investigation.'"
Excluding Al Qaeda members from UNRWA is a lesser concern than say, excluding members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, like UNRWA school headmaster and PIJ rocket maker Awad al-Qiq, killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2008, or other local Islamists who might fill out an UNRWA job application in Gaza.
Regarding our allegation that some relief supplies brought into Gaza are ending up in Hamas, Reynolds seizes upon a photo used in a news item we linked to and fabricates an accusation from us, about UNRWA cement bags found in Hamas' tunnels. Alas, we do not mention cement bags (or flour bags) in our piece.
He does so to divert attention from several things, above all the question of what happened to all the cement UNRWA imported into Gaza. Cement, like money, is fungible. Given the undeniable immensity of Hamas' underground tunnel infrastructure, it behooves UNRWA to demonstrate what became of the cement it imported above ground.
Reynolds protests our assertion that Hamas supporters "shape the curriculum" and retorts "the curriculum of the host country and in the specific case of Gaza we use the Palestinian Authority (PA) curriculum." But in the link we cited no less an authority than Motesem Al Minawi, spokesman for the Education Ministry in Gaza—which is run by Hamas—who complained that in the PA's curriculum, "There is a tremendous focus on the peaceful resistance as the only tool to achieve freedom and independence."
Indeed, another report quotes that Al Minawi complained precisely that "UNRWA is acting like a state within a state… It must understand the limits of its authority; that it is bound by the curriculum taught in its areas of activity." Are we then to believe that UNRWA's teachers, who belong to the Hamas-run union, do not "shape" the curriculum to conform to what UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness has called "local values"?
Perhaps because it would put him out of work, Reynolds never does address our substantive proposal: that Western donors should reprogram monies from UNRWA and toward the Palestinian Authority, in order to strengthen the latter in Gaza.
In 2013, the U.S. gave UNRWA more than $294 million and the European Commission gave more than $216 million. This money is power; reluctantly we conclude it should be given to the PA rather than to UNRWA.
We do so fully acknowledging that the PA is corrupt. We should add that it differs ideologically from Hamas mostly in the extent of Islamist rhetoric. It too believes, as Adli Sadeq, the PLO ambassador to India, recently put it, "We are protecting all humans, and are on the first line of defense in the battle of humanity against the dogs."
In the end, Reynolds tips his hand: "With very generous and much appreciated contributions from the American people, UNRWA is able to provide basic humanitarian services to some five million registered Palestine refugees not only in Gaza but also in Lebanon, war-torn Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."
Like all welfare organizations, UNRWA wishes "to provide" endlessly and to a unique population whose "refugee" status it has independently expanded. In doing so it insinuates itself into every level of Palestinian society and discourse, competes with the PA for international funds, and expands its welfare and legal mandates on its own authority.
Our proposal is to begin the long, painful and overdue process of shifting money away from UNRWA to the putative Palestinian state. Let "Palestine"—a "non-member observer state" in United Nations parlance—take responsibility for its own people. Let the PA show to the people of Gaza that it can "provide." We propose to give them the money, the responsibility, and the glory.
This, perhaps, is what UNRWA cannot abide.
Alexander Joffe is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow of the Middle East Forum. Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct fellow at the Middle East Forum. They are co-authors of the book Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief.


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The Malsi-Tung Social Virus


The Malsi-Tung Social Virus




Posted: 31 Aug 2014 12:59 PM PDT

The image always has the last word [1]

In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt introduces the concepts of Moral Foundations psychology. Moral foundations psychology studies the moral frameworks our minds appear to have built into them. These frameworks are what lead us to see the events around us in a moral way. This means, for example, that instead of simply seeing a strong person abusing a weak and vulnerable person we experience feelings of offence, emotional intuitions which arouse anger towards the bully and pity towards the victim. This is what gives us a sense that a bully is ‘in the wrong’ and should be stopped, reprimanded, and possibly punished. It is this that gives us the sense that people should not behave in this way. These moral foundations have evolved during the course of human evolution and form the basis of all our moral thinking and moral codes. Different moral codes emphasise the different moral foundations in slightly different ways but they are all built using the same basic components.

Six moral foundations have been identified so far. They are expressed as pairs of opposites which define a specific dimension of morality. They are:
§ Care/Harm
§ Fairness/Cheating
§ Liberty/Oppression
§ Authority/Subversion
§ Loyalty/Betrayal
§ Sanctity/Degradation
I’ve examined these dimensions in more detail here. I want to focus on the two which are most relevant to the political left: Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression.

As discussed in my previous post, Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression are given particular emphasis by those on the political left. You can see this reflected in their political aims: concern for the weak and vulnerable; the desire for greater political and economic equality; the protection of various minority groups from discrimination; a distrust of those in power and a desire to reduce power differences.

(I would be the first to agree that left-wing policies often have the effect of disempowering the weak but the moral aspiration is our concern here not the actual outcomes.)

The Care/Harm foundation is the basis of our outrage at the sight of cruelty and persecution. We feel motivated to protest against the suffering of others and we feel hostility towards those causing it. From this foundation springs our opposition to torture, the exploitation of children (sexual and otherwise), and our tendency to run to the defence of the defenceless.

Caring for the young is beneficial for survival and genes associated with this behaviour have a better chance of being transmitted to the next generation. The original trigger for the Care/Harm response was a child in distress or danger. The original trigger then became associated with other subjects. For example, many more people are sensitised to the suffering of animals and see it as morally wrong to be cruel to them than was the case 100 years ago.

The triggers for these responses are susceptible to cultural variation, both between cultures and within the same culture over time. The extent to which individuals within societies experience these responses varies too.

We can see that the Care/Harm foundation is active in the politics of the left in their concern for the poor. The poor suffer higher levels of just about all social ills: poorer health, lower life expectancy, higher levels of mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, child abuse, etc. All these are manifestations of suffering and elicit the duty of care in the left (generally by spending other people’s money).

This also underlies the tendency of the left to take the side of the perceived victims and to see the poor as the victims of circumstance. Their poverty is never understood as the result of their poor decisions. They are also very uncomfortable with the idea that the poor reach their natural position within the social order according to their level of innate ability.

The Liberty/Oppression foundation is most clearly seen when people unite to take collective action against a bully or tyrant. A sense of righteous anger is often the driving force for corrective action against a powerful person or group that is seen to be too dominant over others.

Moral foundations theory accounts for this reaction in the following way:
Humans, like our primate forebears, are naturally adapted to living in hierarchies and have learned how to navigate successfully through relationships of dominance and submission. However, the archaeological evidence shows that our ancestors lived as bands of mobile hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. Hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian.

Hierarchical societies become widespread later once agriculture develops. Private property and the accumulation of wealth lead to inequalities of power. So, are we natural egalitarians trapped in hierarchical social structures?

No we aren’t. The anthropologist Christopher Boehm has studied tribal cultures and also chimpanzees. He was struck by the remarkable similarities in the way humans and chimpanzees display dominance and submission.[2] We are wired for hierarchy. He suggests that at some point in the last half a million years we underwent a political transition whereby dominant Alpha males were taken down through collective rebellion. These mechanisms allowed our ancestors to maintain egalitarian groups.

By doing this, we created the first moral communities in which violations of group principles (that no individual should bully others and hog resources) were punished by ostracism or death. These changes were facilitated by the development of language and weapons. The first giving the group the means to communicate disgruntlement and plot the overthrow of the bullying Alpha male; the second, giving the means for weaker opponents to attack him.

This foundation is expressed in situations where justice is seen to be served by groups of weaker individuals uniting to overthrow a dominant group or individual. People still retain the tendency to dominate others when they can get away with it but we also have the desire for a more equal distribution of power and resources when we are the underdog.

As Jonathon Haidt says, “The hatred of oppression is found on both sides of the political spectrum. The difference seems to be that for liberals−who are more universalistic and who rely more heavily upon the Care/Harm foundation−the Liberty/Oppression foundation is employed in the service of underdogs, victims, and powerless groups everywhere.” [3]

Perception and Reality

In an previous post I looked at the selective and interpretive nature of perception. From all the information arriving in our senses our brains create the interpretation that we treat as reality. This doesn’t mean that what we see is a fiction. What it does mean is that ‘reality’ is skewed and coloured by a whole range of factors including emotion, memory, selective attention, expectations, assumptions, and so on. The internal representation is an approximation to reality. Some approximations are better than others. Some are outright distortions.

This must be even truer when the reality we are trying to understand is hard to apprehend, highly complex, hotly contested, and covers a long period of time. Such is the case with respect to Israel and the history of the Jews. Much of what we ‘see’ as we try to understand the reality is held in our imagination. As such it is affected just as much, if not more, by all those factors listed above which are skewing and colouring the representation that we hold.

The Liberty/Oppression framework is applied by the Left to Israel and the Palestinians with Israel cast as the bullying Alpha male. This model is sustained by focusing on Israel’s strength relative to the angry mobs of Gaza and the West Bank; on Israel’s ability to hit back hard when provoked. It is also maintained by focusing on the unequal number of casualties on each side and ignoring the fact that whereas Israel seeks to protect its citizens (and that is why it is fighting in the first place), Hamas puts its people in harm’s way because this helps to reinforce the view that Israel is an oppressive bully.

The mental models that people hold are also sustained by filtering out information. This is particularly the case with morally charged models: they are not tested against the full range of facts in an objective way but rather facts and the interpretation of events are selected in order to sustain the model. The result is then paraded as the truth.

We should all recognize in ourselves the tendency to avoid information that conflicts with our viewpoint (internal models). We should also recognize that we find it harder to remember information which conflicts with our viewpoint. The internal model organizes our response to a particular subject and when the subject is highly charged and controversial this organising is particularly vigorous, having a strong tendency to discard information that conflicts with the model.

We usually enjoy information (however unpleasant in itself) which confirms our model of reality. We dislike information that is dissonant. Dissonant information is more likely to be questioned, distorted, avoided, or forgotten.

Moral foundations form part of the mental architecture that organises our perception of reality and the internal representation of it that we build and maintain. In the case of Israel and the Left, the dominant moral foundations of the Left are very active in forming their perception and internal representation of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians and the Middle East as a whole. They act like a template which forces information to conform to a predetermined pattern or narrative. Information which conflicts with the template is blocked; that which conforms is endlessly rehearsed.

Within the framework of this template, Israel is cast as the stronger opponent while the pitiful Palestinians take the role of plucky victims standing up to the Alpha male. They take on the mantle of virtue in the face of oppression, only wanting to live in peace and freedom, while Israel is the ironclad monster that dominates and terrorises, taking more than its fair share of resources and trapping the Palestinians in misery and poverty.

Seen in these terms, the Left then justifies terrorism as the “weapon of the dispossessed”, an understandable recourse for those in an intolerable situation. Glowing with feelings of identification with the oppressed they then rehearse their endless slogans in solidarity with the enemies of Israel.

What we must remember is that this application of the Liberty/Oppression framework is relatively new; the mental structure underlying the framework is as old as mankind.

David and Goliath

Whist writing this article I came across a review by Daniel Greenfield of a new book by Joshua Muravchik called Making David into Goliath: How the world turned against Israel. This sets out how Israel has come to be cast as the bullying Alpha male in this conflict, how it is deemed by the Left to be the oppressor and not the victim of persecution.

The story of David and Goliath is a great metaphor for the Liberty/Oppression foundation and the perceptual template derived from it. It even includes a long range weapon being used to bring down a stronger opponent. I can just imagine Hamas rockets being romanticised in the same manner. The youths throwing stones at Israeli tanks certainly fit the pattern.

The turning point in the West’s (but particularly the Left’s) attitude towards Israel was the Six Day War of 1967. Until this time Israel had been something of a darling for the international Left: it was democratic, liberal, egalitarian and communal, all neatly encapsulated in the kibbutzim movement.

It previous conflicts with the Arab states surrounding it Israel had looked like David fending off Goliath but the very swiftness and decisiveness of its victory in 1967 provided the seed for a new approach by the Arabs.

Incapable of destroying Israel by brute force the era of Palestinianism began - meaning the presentation of the Palestinians as the hapless victims of Israel’s military and economic superiority, a dispossessed people suffering perpetual exile.

Ironically, it was the dazzling display of military prowess by Israel against all the odds that would be used against Israel, used to present it as Goliath, the evil oppressor that should be overthrown. This pattern would be reiterated in a thousand conferences and used to demonise and delegitimise the only country in the region with civilised standards; in fact, the true David in the situation, not oppressors but the victims of centuries of persecution defending the homeland that is so obviously needed in the face of all the hatred now directed against it. Hatred of Israel proves Israel’s necessity.

As Muravchik says, “The world’s historical “Clock” for Israel has been set to right after 1967. The initial perceptions of its aftermath; Israel’s military superiority, the “oppressed” Palestinians who suddenly came into being after coming out of the rule of Egypt and Jordan, and the urgent need for a negotiated solution, have been frozen in time as the default worldview with little regard for what came before or after.”

This frozen view of Israel has been consolidated in the ensuing decades. Muslim spokesmen have multiplied in the West thus affording them the opportunity to frame Israel as the oppressor to Western audiences. Departments of Middle East Studies have been established with Arab funding which shamelessly echo the Arab/Muslim demonization of Israel and promote the view that all conflicts have as their ultimate source the Israel/Palestinian issue; that once this is addressed (in favour of the Palestinians) all will be well in the world; the opportunities to portray Israel as a bullying usurper and occupier have been exploited to the full.

Acting as an organising framework for all this information in the minds of Western audiences is the Liberty/Oppression foundation. It is this which appears to give the Palestinians a moral cause against Israel. The Liberty/Oppression framework also plays into the tendency of people (probably the majority) who think with their emotions. When those emotions are also given a moral fervour we witness the hideous sight of leftists marching in lockstep with Islamo-fascists in self-righteous hatred.

Given that the media is dominated by liberals and leftists, it looks at the world through the template of Liberty/Oppression and defines Israel as the bully. Its focus is narrow and looks at events in an ephemeral manner, giving emphasis to the sensational. A glib narrative suits its purposes. Thus, by and large, it takes the view that justice is to be served by siding with the Palestinians; Israel does not need or deserve a fair hearing. Media bias then reinforces the perceptual template in millions of minds and thus drives the need to redress the balance against Israel ever further – a need the media is eager to satisfy; to subject the Palestinians to any critical scrutiny is seen as oppressive in itself.

Summary

The complex relationships and historical realities of Israel and her neighbours have become simplified and distorted in such a way as to cast Israel as the oppressor. The Liberty/Oppression moral foundation is triggered by this perception and leads to the increasing demonization and de-legitimization of Israel. The application of this pattern to the situation allows the Palestinians and the wider Arab/Muslim world to manipulate world opinion in accordance with an inversion of the David and Goliath story. Israel is seen to be powerful and wrong, the Palestinians as weak and virtuous.

This view can only be sustained by ignoring the wider context of Israel’s vast, heavily populated neighbours, many of whom have massive (unshared) wealth derived from natural resources, and the Jew-hatred that has been endemic in Islamic culture ever since Muhammad. The Palestinians are simply the frontline in Israel’s conflict with the Islamic ummah.

Because the Left has swallowed the bait of Israel as oppressor, the inference that Palestinians are victims is intuitively accepted. Having succumbed to this fallacy they then imagine that the Palestinians must be motivated by a desire for equality and freedom – they see a desire for liberation where there is none. This is the logical conclusion offered by the moral architecture underpinning their perceptions. The overwhelming evidence that this is not so is filtered out by the organising effects of the Liberty/Oppression framework on perception, memory and thinking.

This perceptual framework is writ large in the work of the mass media.


Conclusions

Given that the Liberty/Oppression foundation exerts a strong organising force on the thinking of the Left and makes it extremely difficult to alter their viewpoint on a subject like Israel and the Palestinians, are there any lessons to be drawn from the foregoing analysis?

I think we can try and deconstruct the application of the Liberty/Oppression foundation in the following ways:

1. Investing Palestinians with the mantle of the oppressed can create the impression that they have egalitarian aspirations. This is demonstrably false:
      a. As stated emphatically in the Hamas Charter, they seek the complete destruction of Israel and all Jews.
      b. They seek the implementation of Shariah law which is far from egalitarian
      c. The current regime run by Hamas is male-dominated, brutal, coercive and anti-democratic
2. Expand the time frame. Muslims have been persecuting Jews for centuries. Muhammad hated Jews and taught that Muslims should do likewise.
3. Religion comes first in the Islamic world. Religion drives events and jihad drives the religion. It is amazing how many Christians in the West attribute the actions of Hamas to poverty and lack of freedom. It seems too far-fetched to these religious people that Muslims are motivated by their religious beliefs. But they keep referring to religion in all their pronouncements.
4. The battle is not between Israel and the Palestinians but between the West and the Muslim ummah. Israel/Gaza is just one front in the global jihad. Israel is a tiny beacon of enlightenment surrounded by a sea of darkness.
5. Israel is still David and the Philistine is still Goliath

Finally, with regard to Israel, there is also the consideration that Israel is better than Gaza and the wider Muslim world for which Gaza is the spearhead. On any measure of human progress or achievement, scientific, artistic, political, humanitarian, it is far in advance of its Arab/Muslim neighbours. Should the superior yield to the inferior on the say-so of the international Left? As Pameler Geller puts it, "In any war between the civilized man and the savage,support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad."

If we are seriously concerned about reducing oppression then a far more logical strategy is to support Israel instead of becoming the dupes of the global jihad; for that is all Hamas is, a brutal, theocratic puppet for far more extensive Islamic forces intent not only on the destruction of Israel but of the entire non-Muslim world.

[1] A very perceptive maxim given to me by a dear friend
[2] The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt p. 170
[3] ibid. p.175
Posted: 31 Aug 2014 03:06 AM PDT
The Rotherham horror finally surfaces. The inaction of multicultural ideologues is exposed. The evidence points unequivocally in the direction of Muslims. There is a clear link with Muslim attitudes to non-Muslims.

Nietzsche warned of Europe becoming so decadent that it would lack the will to defend itself. Well, here it is.

In my friends and acquaintances I see further denial, an unwillingness to talk about it. Their timidity terrifies me; it makes me realize how it could all happen again anywhere and the same spineless liberals now showing enough dazed indignation in order to avoid appearing uncaring would be just as ineffective in confronting it, just as they are ineffective at confronting all aspects of the Islamic invasion.

We now have a culture so compromised that it cannot respond adequately to a scandal like Rotherham. Once a few scapegoats have lost their jobs and their reputations (and deservedly so) we will return to the status quo ante.

We are in cultural meltdown.

Perhaps we even deserve what’s coming to us. This same decadent society which cannot stir to its own defence also condemns a less decadent society for defending itself from annihilation – Israel.

Even now with all the attention that Rotherham is getting a cover-up is still taking place, collective denial is still hard at work. None of the key questions are being confronted:

Why are so many Muslims involved?
Why so much brutality?
Why such extensive complicity in the whole Muslim community?
Why so much fear about racism?
Why so much fear about ‘community cohesion’?

There are symptoms of dhimmitude written all over this case:

Silencing the victims in order to appease the Muslims
Avoiding confrontation with the Muslim community
Failure to inform ourselves about Islamic culture
Looking to ourselves as the source of the problem

How is it that in spite of everything the Muslims still succeed in portraying themselves as the victims of discrimination and ‘racism’? They are virtuosi on those instruments!

The accusation of racism is a theme running through this horror story:

the girls are initially seduced by a Romeo who tells her that her family’s opposition to the liaison is due to racism
the authorities and carers are paralysed by their fear of the same accusation of racism
being thought racist created a fear of doing, saying, or even thinking about objecting to what was going on

This same fear is crippling our response to the wider jihad. The same multiculti felons have criminalised any proper discussion of Islamic doctrine by means of their nonsensical and hysterical accusations of racism.