The End of Islamophobia
Yes, the problem is Islam.
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Say what you may about the Boston Marathon bombing, it spells the end of Islamophobia.
The dictionary defines "phobia" as "an exaggerated usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation." Ever since 9-11, liberals have berated conservatives for suffering from "Islamophobia" because they sincerely believed that there was no logical reason to fear Islamic terrorism.
Now that the reality of Islamic terrorism has been demonstrated for all the world to see, nobody can argue that it's irrational to fear attack by devout Muslims. Nobody can call that a "phobia" because it's perfectly rational to worry about Islamic terrorism.
Let's Look at the Record
When Maj. Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. in November of 2009, our media were united in proclaiming that we shouldn't regard it as an act of Islamic terrorism. They stuck to that line when it was reported that he yelled "Allah Akbar" while killing his victims. Their accusations of Islamophobia continued even when it came out that he had consulted the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki on whether the Koran said he would be justified in killing American soldiers to keep them from killing his fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. The chorus of see-no-evilers even included Barack Obama himself, whose Defense Department ruled the murders as "workplace violence" so as to deprive the victims of their rightfully-earned Purple Hearts and the military benefits they should have received from combat with a self-confessed enemy of America.
Six months later, Faisal Shahzad filled an SUV with explosives and tried to detonate it in Times Square. He was born in Virginia, graduated from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, earned an M.B.A., and worked as a financial analyst. He married an American-born woman of Pakistani ancestry and had two children.
The New York Times summed up his statement after he was convicted:
Calling himself "a Muslim soldier," Mr. Shahzad denounced the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. The drones, he said, "kill women, children, they kill everybody."
"It's a war, and in war, they kill people," he added. "They're killing all Muslims."
It sounds like he thought he was fighting infidels on behalf of Islam. As with Jihad Jane, wouldn't his own words make him a home-grown Islamic terrorist by any reasonable definition?
In Their Own Words
There are many Muslims who don't run around murdering people, but that's because they don't follow the principles of the religion they claim. Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of one of the founders of Hamas, gives warning:
At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God... I know this is harsh to say.
Why?
Most Muslims are ignorant about their religion. Once they understand Islam, they become terrorists. Read chapter 9, verse 9, or verse 9.5, or 9.111: the Koran is the war-manual for Islamic terrorism. [emphasis added]
Our media won't take Muslims at their word. For a decade, nobody wanted to admit that Islam is an inherently violent religion which is dedicated to the extermination of all non-Muslims.
What's worse, European elites try to blame us for acts of Islamic terrorism. The Economist reports:
In Brussels, just after the July 2005 Tube and bus bombings in London, Lexington watched European colleagues question a British-born EU official about why Britain had been targeted. Was it because Tony Blair's government had sent troops to Iraq? Perhaps, the Briton growled in reply, you could let my country bury its dead before asking us to take the blame. But his questioners' tactlessness was representative. In much of western Europe, progress involves embracing a sort of deep-grained passivity towards the rest of the world: to be attacked is to be suspect. You must have done something wrong. And Britain is not immune to this. The supposedly conservative press rushes to examine the national conscience and demand more government action in the wake of any violent outrage. [emphasis added]
Even when a group of American Muslims refuses to associate with violence themselves, they don't seem to share the same sense of communal responsibility against those that do. One of the marathon bombers was thrown out of his mosque earlier this year for his extremist beliefs, specifically because he condemned the nonviolent practices of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and its promotion in a sermon.
Good for them - but it didn't occur to anyone to drop a dime and report him to the cops? Not that it would have made much difference as the FBI had already "thoroughly" investigated the terrorists before the attached and found nothing to worry about.
Noble Savages?
The two Chechen brothers who perpetrated the Boston bombing were able to perpetrate their horrors only by the kindness and generosity of America in letting them come into our country, escaping the war-ridden hellhole of their homeland. We even granted them American citizenship, helped along by the marriage of one to an American wife and production of American-citizen kids. It would be no surprise if some of our media blamed conservatives for not giving them enough money to make their lives in America pleasant enough that they wouldn't resort to violence, even though the Times Square bomber had an MBA and a high-paying job.
Ordinary American citizens generally believe in evil even if our leaders refuse to acknowledge the reality of evil. Americans are suspicious of liberal claims that if we'd only spend enough money perfecting society, everybody will behave well. We've seen too many formerly prosperous cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Newark become uncivilized wastelands despite billions and billions of dollars spent "perfecting" them.
It's probably too much to hope that liberals would stop blaming conservatives for not wanting to spend more money on welfare and take a look at the actual results of their programs, but maybe, just maybe, they'll give up this particular delusion and admit that Islam is fundamentally a religion of violence and terrorism.
What's more, the evolving tale of the Boston Marathon bombing clearly demonstrates that Islam is a contagious mental disease. In the right (wrong?) circumstances, it can turn ordinary Americans into medieval psychopaths. We've seen this several times, from John Walker Lindh the American Taliban to Jihad Jane to, now, Katherine Tsarnaev.
Fearing Islam is no phobia. It's a rational reaction to a clear and imminent danger. This isn't a reason to go out and shoot every last Muslim in the world or even in our country, any more than we rampage through the world exterminating spiders and snakes - but anybody who wants them freely roaming their home without being closely monitored, much less welcomed in with open arms, has a serious screw loose.
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What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
I'm beginning to agree. Didn't used to. Beginning to now. Hard not to see the pattern. Hard to ignore their own words and teachings.
The un-holy koran was written by a madman. If one has read the book, one will readily see that it is filled with gibberish.
Peace, Robert Walker
To understand the nature of these terrorists, you need to understand that they are sociopaths. The life of others who are different means nothing to them. As to why Muslims attract sociopaths, you need look no further that the founder of that Religion Mohammad. Like Stalin, life itself was not sacred, power was. Anyone who opposed Mohammad or turned away from his new religion was to be killed. Those teachings are embedded in their holy book, and will not go away. While I have good friends who are non-practicing Muslims, and who value life in general, there is always that background theme in the religion, that fatal flaw, that can turn the children back to the sociopathic teachings of Mohammad.
Those who think that this can be breed out of the religion are mistaken. The keystone of that religion is submission to the will of Mohammed's god which demands that every follower be a sociopath.
Christians don't know how blessed they are with the teachings of the prophet of love. True the religion has been misused, but the Christian book draws people back to the ideas of peace and respect for life.
The Russians have issues with Islamic militants, too. No accusations of Islamophobia there.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/world/europe/pilgrim-in-violent-land-suspect-found-comfort-in-dagestan.html
Tamerlan Tsarnaev had already found religion by the time he landed in Dagestan, a combustible region in the North Caucasus that has become the epicenter of a violent Islamic insurgency in Russia and a hub of jihadist recruitment. What he seemed to be yearning for was a home.
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But the emerging portrait of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s time here seems inside out. Dagestan, which has been known to grow and export terrorists like those who carried out the deadly 2010 bombings in the Moscow subways, seems in this case to have been a way station for a young man whose path began and ended somewhere else.
On Sunday, the most feared terrorist group in the Caucasus, the Mujahideen of the Caucasus Emirate, issued a statement dismissing speculation that Mr. Tsarnaev had joined them and denying any responsibility for the Boston Marathon attack. “The Mujahideen of the Caucasus are not fighting against the United States of America,” the statement said. “We are at war with Russia, which is not only responsible for the occupation of the Caucasus but also for heinous crimes against Muslims.”
This continuing strife between Islamic militants and the Russian authorities receives little attention outside Russia, but it has yielded a long string of terror attacks, many of them in Dagestan, that have caused many more deaths than the three in Boston. It is a cycle of bloodshed that Mr. Tsarnaev would have experienced close at hand when he was living here.
@gChang:
I don't wish to sound personal or flippant, so I do apologize in advance, but what kept you? Why NOW? Why THIS? Why not before?
Why only three or four dead in Boston? Why weren't you convinced twelve years ago? Why not when one of these barbarians tried to blow up an airliner with his shoes? What about when one of them tried to blow up Times Square? What about the USS Cole? What about Daniel Pearl? What about the '79 hostage crisis?
I'm happy to welcome you to the sunlit uplands of the Recognition of the Obvious - but what took so long?
You were right, Will - the Times is blaming us already!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/opinion/immigrant-kids-adrift.html
We didn't do enough for them!
THE alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.
In 1997, we started a large-scale study of newly arrived immigrants, ages 9 to 14, in 20 public middle and high schools in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and the San Francisco Bay Area. Our participants came from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; many fled not only poverty but also strife, in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti. Over five years, we interviewed more than 400 students, as well as their siblings, parents and teachers. We gathered academic records, test scores and measures of psychological well-being.
The two brothers accused in the Boston bombings — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed on Friday, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who was captured later that day — were around 15 and 8, respectively, when they immigrated. Both attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin, that city’s only public high school. They were not part of our study, but they fit the demographic profile of the subjects of our research: birth to families displaced by war or strife, multiple-stage (including back-and-forth) migration, language difficulties and entry into harsh urban environments where gangs and crime are temptations.
When asked “what do you like most about being here?” an 11-year-old Haitian boy in Cambridge told us, “There is less killing here.” His response was notably succinct, but not unique.
A Salvadoran 10-year-old whose family had narrowly escaped death squads recounted intense loneliness. When a firecracker was set off in his working-class Cambridge neighborhood, he plunged into the arms of a stunned researcher.
A 12-year-old girl whose family had fled chaos in Guatemala for the Bay Area similarly turned inward. She lamented being “encerrada” (locked in) because of gang violence in her new community.
Not surprisingly, students from strife-torn areas were more likely than others to report psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression and trouble concentrating and sleeping.
Many newcomer students attend tough urban schools that lack solidarity and cohesion. In too many we found no sense of shared purpose, but rather a student body divided by race and ethnicity, between immigrants and the native born, between newcomers and more acculturated immigrants. Only 6 percent of the participants could name a teacher as someone they would go to with a problem; just 3 percent could identify a teacher who was proud of them.
When asked what Americans thought about immigrants of their national origin, 65 percent of the students provided negative adjectives. “Most Americans think we are lazy, gangsters, drug addicts, that only come to take their jobs away,” a 14-year-old boy in the Bay Area told us. We also found that many educators, already overwhelmed by the challenges of inner-city teaching, considered immigrant parents uninformed and uninvolved.
Having just one friend who spoke English fluently was a strong predictor of positive academic outcomes. Yet more than a third of the students in our study reported that they had little or no opportunity even to interact with native-born students, much less make close friends.
Our research also confirmed that kids who arrive during their high school years, as Tamerlan Tsarnaev did, face bad odds, especially if they experienced interrupted schooling, family instability and traumatic dislocations back home.
It's just gotta be our fault!
Taking in what Emma Lazarus called the “wretched refuse,” including asylum seekers like the Tsarnaev brothers, without providing a scaffold of support undermines the promise of America.
No offense taken, Bro. John. Very fair question. Answer - I'm very reluctant to stigmatize religions as a group. In saying this is a Muslim problem and not 'radical' or 'militant' Muslim problem, we stigmatize the whole group. There are maybe a billion Muslims in the world. I have been very reluctant to stigmatize the entire group for the actions of part of the group.
Here's a thought question, gChang - Was the Inquisition a Catholic problem? Or was it a Spanish problem, Jesuit problem, or the problem of a few thousand extremists?
Answer - It was a Catholic problem, even though the overwhelming majority of Catholics never personally tortured anybody, because that same overwhelming majority of Catholics pretty much put up with the Inquisition, not forcibly expelling them as the wicked, evil beasts they were. That's pretty much analogous to what we see in Islam today.
But the Inquisition gives hope, too, for the long term. It took several hundred years, but the Catholic Church evolved out of evil barbarism, and every Catholic from the Pope on down now recognizes just how wicked and un-Christian the Inquisition was. It's inconceivable that the Catholic Church would ever tolerate another Inquisition. In other words, it's civilized and is welcome in every free land.
But it wasn't always - our Founders were deeply concerned about Catholic influences and there was quite a bit of debate over the extent of Catholic toleration during the colonial era, precisely because the Inquisition wasn't that far in the past and Catholics were generally recognized, for good reason, to be prone to having more loyalty to the Pope than to their nation. That, too, is gone today - and for Islam to be tolerable in civilized lands, the same change needs to happen.
Patience, I disagree with your assessment that Islam will evolve. The inquisition had little to do with the teachings of Christ nor the scriptures that evolved from the Christian movement. It was more a movement of it's times and the intolerance of the Spanish leaders for dissent. You will note that there was little tolerance for such tactics in other countries, and in some, it was not practiced at all. So the driving force was the desire for absolute power by some priests and some rulers. And yes it is now gone from the world. There will still be intolerance as the Calvinists barbequed a disbeliever once, and individuals and small groups may go off the deep end even today.
Islam on the other hand was founded with the same intolerance as the inquisition, but the intolerance was codified into the scriptures of the Islamic movement as well as the "Hero" of that movement: Mohammad. Purging those actions and scriptures from the religion will be much more difficult, and can be resurrected at any time in the future by any madman with a following.
I'm afraid you're right, Sparky. The Inquisition is written directly and unarguably into the Muslim holy book. During WW II, we interned American citizens of Japanese ancestry and we didn't admit any Japanese immigrants during the war.
We're a lot dumber today. Instead of not letting them in, we're admitting thousands and thousands every year, giving them welfare, and then wondering why a few of them try to kill us.
Why are we admitting Iranian Muslims? Or Chechen Muslims who've been exposed to so much violence?
Why admit our enemies during a war?
Are we nuts? Or what?
Sam,
Your study proves nothing. When the Italians came here, they assimilated without any "help" from the government. They learned English, kept their customs etc. but they assimilated. The same with the Germans, the Poles, Spaniards, Chinese, Japanese and etc. Until the Vietnamese started to migrate here in the 1970's and received government help, with voter registration and driver's tests etc. printed in their language was there a problem with assimilation.
Today, in the Spanish speaking community especially, they refuse to even try to assimilate. They have their own radio stations in their own tongue, their own Spanish language newspapers, insist on using Spanish in their homes, and refuse to let Gringos in their home.
I worked with a fifth generation American whose ancestors came from Mexico and English was not allowed to be spoken in his home.
I have been twice refused service in a fast food restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada because I could not speak Spanish. Who footed the bill for your "study"? Was it some liberal think tank or University?
It is a well known Maxim, that if the government gets involved, the project will fail.
Patience, the Muslims have evolved already. They have learned how to kill and maim with machine guns and bombs, instead of machetes. They still use camel dung to cook their meals, however. Peace, Robert Walker
A friend sent me this:
GUN OWNERS LOGIC 101
According to the politicians we have in this country...
We're not supposed to judge all Muslims by the acts of a few "crazies".
But the acts of a few “American crazies” is enough to judge all Americans who own guns.