EDWARD CLINE: ISLAM: AN IDEOLOGY OF LETHAL ABSURDITIES
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/
Daniel Greenfield wrote on FrontPage about the absurdity of the news media in accusing Pamela Geller and Bosch Fawstin of encouraging violence by conducting a drawing Mohammad contest and inviting others to the event:
“The actual attempt at mass slaughter was dismissed as the terrorists ‘take the bait’ from the cartoonists who had been fiendishly plotting to be mass slaughtered by them for the publicity.”
But, this is the actual motive of Islamic terrorists; they are fiends looking for “bait” to take in order to be killed by their intended victims (or by a lone policeman, as in Garland) so their names can be publicized as “martyrs for Allah.” The only time terrorist outfits like ISIS, Al Qaeda, et al. value and recognize such self-sacrificing fools (aka “brothers”) is when they’re dead. This policy reduces the average jihadist to the level of a passive receptor, or a human lemming, who just can’t help himself for wanting to die, of seeking immediate if not eventual death.
But then, Islam is a nihilist ideology, chock full of absurdities.
While the jihadist is alive, he values going to an ethereal Howard Johnson’s or Marriott kind of Paradise with 24-hour room service and 24/7 meals-on-wheels and houris-on-call at the touch of a button, with Allah acting as the Supreme Pimp, the All-Knowing Concierge, and the Greatest Bellboy.
In this splendid accommodation, the consumption of pork will be permitted, provided the porkers are slaughtered per halal rules. Other celestial livestock will also be similarly slaughtered: horses, camels, goats, sheep and other Muslim delicacies, all raised and grazed in the Big A Ranch. These are special beasts who blood from their slaughter turns into the finest French wine. Moreover, once they’re slaughtered, like the seventy-two virgins, their lives are renewable.
This is Fantasy Land on steroids. Life is a burden. Let’s imagine an effortless existence. Let’s do “the right thing” and end it all now, and send a few infidels and blasphemers to hell in the meantime.
That is, actual life is of no value to a terrorist seeking “martyrdom.” But the alleged values of life in actual existence are projected in this Paradise. That’s one absurdity of Islam. Actual life is a burden, a bother, an imposition imposed by Allah. The things that can be had while one is living don’t count. They count only when one is dead, and can be experienced without guilt only in a glittering afterlife.
The jihadist who seeks “martyrdom” in death seeks to be relieved of the responsibility and requirements of living. Such relief can be found only in an Islamic “paradise.”
Cocooned in each “devout” but “non-violent” Muslim is an ideological incubus prepared to seduce its host to commit violence. This violence is initially visited on Muslim children. Then it is visited upon non-Muslims or Muslims of another sect. The hijab-covered Muslim woman who brings her wash to the local laundromat could some day just as well enter the place wearing a suicide vest.
Muslims can be regarded as pre-programmed beasts, programmed by irrational premises of Islam which most of them do not question. If one taunt, provokes, or aggravates a lion or a gorilla, one can expect the animal to attack its tormentor. An animal acts according to its nature. It acts with no volition, no moral choice. There are countless YouTube videos of the phenomena.
Muslims, however, are human, and are vested with the attribute of volitional choice. They can choose to be ciphers of their creed or its passive drudges. But if a Muslim becomes “radicalized,” the new slander is that it is the victim’s fault that the victim’s life is put in jeopardy, and that the jihadist terrorist is merely blameless victim, instead.
This is an absurdity promoted not so much by Islamic apologists, propagandists, or proselytizers, as by Western political correctness.
Daniel Greenfield (Sultan Knish), in a personal communication, offered a perfect analogy:
What keeps the lie alive [that the victims of terrorism invite their own demise] is another paradox. Call it Schrödinger’s Jihad. The more famous Schrödinger’s Cat is a paradox in which a cat in a sealed box with poison that has a 50 percent chance of being released is in an indeterminate state. It is neither dead nor alive until someone opens the box.
In Schrödinger’s Jihad, the Muslim terrorist is in an indeterminate state until some Western observer opens the box, collapses his wave function and radicalizes him. The two Muslim Jihadists were in an indeterminate state until Pamela Geller and Bosch Fawstin and the other “provocateurs” suddenly turned them into terrorists in a matter of days or weeks. It didn’t matter that Elton Simpson, one of the Garland terrorists, had already been dragged into court for trying to link up with Jihadists in Africa.
Every Muslim is and isn’t a terrorist. He is both a peaceful spiritual person who is eager to embrace our way of life and a violent killer who can be set off by the slightest offense. Like the cat in the box that is neither dead nor alive, he is both violent and peaceful, moderate and extremist, a solid citizen and a terrorist. He does not choose which of these to be or to become; we decide what he will be.
Which means that your average Muslim can be an A and non-A entity at the same time. He can be something and not that something, depending on who opens the box, raises his hackles, or “provokes” him. How Kantian. How Hegelian. How Existentialist.
The Associated Press on May 7th ran a hostile profile of Pamela Geller, “Activist: No regrets about cartoon contest ended by gunfire.” (Actually, the event was concluded, and wasn’t “ended by gunfire.”) The AP thought it apropos to quote the New York Times estimate of Geller’s activism:
In an editorial Thursday, The New York Times said Geller “has a long history of declarations and actions motivated purely by hatred for Muslims” and called the Garland event “an exercise in bigotry and hatred posing as a blow for freedom. … To pretend it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.”
Here is what preceded that quotation in the New York Times editorial:
Whether fighting against a planned mosque near ground zero, posting to her venomous blog Atlas Shrugs or organizing the event in Garland, Ms. Geller revels in assailing Islam in terms reminiscent of virulent racism or anti-Semitism. She achieved her provocative goal in Garland — the event was attacked by two Muslims who were shot to death by a traffic officer before they killed anyone.
Those two men were would-be murderers. But their thwarted attack, or the murderous rampage of the Charlie Hebdo killers, or even the greater threat posed by the barbaric killers of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, cannot justify blatantly Islamophobic provocations like the Garland event. These can serve only to exacerbate tensions and to give extremists more fuel.
You see: Muslims aren’t the only humans capable of harboring the capacity for being A and non-A at the same time.
Geller is passionate about her activism. So are Robert Spencer on Jihad Watch, and Daniel Greenfield in his Sultan Knish and FrontPage columns, when they chronicle the murderous depredations of Islam and its “extremist” Islamic terrorists, and also about the dhimmi submission to Islam by Western politicians and the Western news media. Yet, the mere reporting of the crimes committed by ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other Islamic gangs is “venomous” and “bigoted.”
Warner Todd Huston of Breitbart, in his May 7th article, “AP Slams Pam Geller as Having ‘No Regrets’ That Two Terrorists Died in TX,” made these two pertinent observations:
It doesn’t appear to have occurred to the AP that the two would-be killers wouldn’t be dead if they didn’t go to the event with guns blazing in the first place.
And that The New York Times and the Associated Press are also susceptible to Islamic-like provocations such as a Draw Mohammad contest:
Just as it’s apparently a calling for the AP to attack free speech.
Overall, the attacks on Geller, Fawstin, Spencer and others who exercise their right to “provoke” killers, are not instances of the finest hours of Western journalism. Overall, Western journalism has descended into the maelstrom of the theater of the absurd.
* * 30 * *
Edward Cline
Williamsburg, VA
May 2015
Links:
Greenfield on cartoonists and terrorists:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/05/cartoonists-are-controversial-and.html#comment-form
Greenfield Front Page on
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/it-takes-a-good-guy-with-a-gun-to-defend-free-speech/
(deliberately planning to be killed for the publicity.
Breitbart on Geller no regrets jihadists dead
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/07/ap-slams-pam-geller-as-having-no-regrets-that-two-terrorists-died-in-tx/
Associated Press sides with jihadists against Geller
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d4e05cd9ac8b4e048a37428692e6a00a/activist-blogger-says-911-inspired-criticism-Islam
New York Times on Geller’s “hogwash”
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