On Tue, 28 Feb 2006 02:35:09 +0100, "Kim Larsen" <kl2607x@yahoo.dk>
wrote:
>"Michael Laudahn" <laudahn2002@yahoo.se> skrev i en meddelelse
>news:1141081142.166069.4800@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
>
>
http://victorhanson.com./articles/thornton022606.html
>
>Skulle det ikke have været kommenteret med noget racistisk bavl (som du
>plejer) ?
Denne linken er så god at den fortjener du !
Sitat:
Private Papers
www.victorhanson.com
February 26, 2006
Absolute Certainty
Think Islamic fanaticism arises from material want? Think again.
=======================================
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers
Coming hard upon the heels of the cartoon riots and the election of
the Hamas terrorists, the destruction of the Shi’ite mosque of the
Golden Dome in Samarra by Sunni jihadists, and the subsequent Shi’ite
bloody retaliation, should put to rest Western delusions about the
true nature of Islam. But don’t hold your breath. Such displays of
Islam’s violent intolerance have been coming thick and fast the last
few decades, and can be found on every page of history going back to
the 7th century, when Islam began its expansion with the blood of
several hundred decapitated Jews.
Yet still some Westerners, enthralled to their own materialist
assumptions and multicultural “we are the world” sentimentalism, wave
away this evidence and reduce this destructive behavior to any and
every cause except the one that counts: spiritual belief. So we hear
that the violence is caused by a lack of jobs, or a lack of
liberal-democratic institutions, or “frustration” and insecurity about
the dismal backwardness of most Muslim states, or wounded pride in the
face of Western success, or resentment of Western imperialist and
colonialist sins, or oppressive autocrats, or . . . take your pick.
The same therapeutic mentality that thinks destructive behavior in
teens results from a “lack of self-esteem” reduces the religious
values of Muslims to mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxists see it,
symptoms of some underlying condition rooted in material deprivation,
political impotence, or psychological trauma.
The problem with Islam, however, is not a lack of self-esteem but too
damned much. This is a faith fanatically certain of its truth and
righteousness, the culminating vision of God’s relations with
humanity, the ultimate meaning of human existence on every level,
including the social and political. As such, its destiny is to spread
over the whole world until the benefits, both in this life and the
next, of submission to God are bestowed on all humans, and the
dysfunctional man-made values–– including democracy, materialism,
“equal rights,” and freedom–– are swept away. For however alluring,
these do not deliver true happiness or true freedom, but mere hedonism
and license that create misery and degradation in this world, and put
the soul at risk in the next.
If, then, you are in possession of this truth that you are absolutely
certain holds the key to universal happiness in this world and the
next, why would you be tolerant of alternatives? Why should you
tolerate a dangerous lie? Why should you “live and let live,” the
credo of the spiritually moribund who stand for everything because
they stand for nothing? And why wouldn’t you kill in the name of this
vision, when the infidel nations work against God’s will and his
beneficent intentions for the human race?
This is precisely what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries
of Islamic theology and jurisprudence tell us, what the Koran and
Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain of our own superior
knowledge that human life is really about genes or neuroses or
politics or nutrition, condescendingly look down on the true believer.
Patronizing him like a child, we tell him that he doesn’t know that
his own faith has been “hijacked” by “fundamentalists” who manipulate
his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about his faith is a
delusion, and that the true explanation is one that we advanced,
sophisticated Westerners understand while the believer remains mired
in superstition and neurotic fantasy.
And of course, it doesn’t help that the Westernized Islamic apologists
and propagandists, having taken the measure of the West’s own
superstition and fantasy, speak in our terms and manipulate our
materialist causes. So we hear that Western support of autocrats is
really to blame for terrorist discontent — but overthrowing Saddam
Hussein, one of the most brutal murderers of Muslims ever, and
creating for the Iraqi people an inclusive, law-based government, earn
us absolutely nothing other than more hatred and murder. Ah, but the
neo-colonialist Zionists are responsible, we are told. Yet billions of
Western dollars given to the Palestinian Arabs, decades of obsessive,
fawning attention on the part of the Western media and the U.N. even
as millions have suffered and died elsewhere, have not moved us one
inch closer to resolving the crisis or removing the existential threat
to Israel. Give us jobs, we are told, an excuse echoed recently by
Thomas Friedman, and we will be happy. Yet the terrorists in the main
are not poor or dispossessed. Their leaders are billionaires,
surgeons, engineers, and the college educated. But the West
disrespects Islam, they cry, all the while our apologetic gestures of
admiration for Islam do not stop the persecution and murder of
Christians, do not elicit reciprocal apologies for the vile insults to
Judaism that appear in state-run media throughout the Muslim world.
Meanwhile, all our attempts to bolster Muslim self-esteem, our
desperate protestations of respect for their wonderful religion, our
groveling apologies for exercising our own rights and values, our
donning of the hair-shirt of racist, colonialist, or imperialist
guilt, do nothing more than convince the jihadist that his spiritual
superiority is justified. He looks at our appeasement, our fear, our
rationalizations, our self-doubt, our unwillingness to defend the
values we preach to the world, and sees the craven inferiority of the
dhimmi, the conquered infidel who must acknowledge by his public
actions the superiority of Islam, and who must pay the jizya, the
“poll tax” that purchases his trembling security. Only we call the
poll tax “foreign aid” or “welfare payments,” and the gestures of
submission “respect for diversity.” We think our submission buys us
affection and gratitude and respect for our interests, but in fact it
purchases nothing except more contempt for our spiritual bankruptcy,
more scorn for our belief that money and material comfort trump
spiritual truth.
The true measure of our failure adequately to respect spiritual
motives can be taken from the Bush administration’s steadfast refusal
to put the crisis with Islam in these terms. The materialist left, of
course, has been taught by Freud and Marx that religion is an
“illusion,” so obviously we can’t expect them to grasp how powerfully
spiritual imperatives can move people. But when a self-proclaimed
born-again Christian either can’t or won’t see the clash of spiritual
goods underlying the conflict, then we know how thoroughly the
materialists have done their work of marginalizing religion in the
West.
Perhaps the best example of this contempt for our spiritual
foundations came when the President apologized for using the word
“Crusade.” The demonization of the Crusades is a historical distortion
that acquiesces in the jihadist rewriting of history in order to
exploit Western self-loathing and spiritual emptiness. Whatever the
sordid or brutal motives and actions of the Crusaders, they were still
for the most part driven by a spiritual imperative to restore the Holy
Land to the Christian civilization that had defined the Middle East
for six centuries before being violently transformed by the armies of
Allah. For the most aggressively imperialistic culture in the history
of the world to whine now about Western imperialism — and be taken
seriously by Westerners — testifies to the intellectual corruption
endemic in the West.
If we continue down this road of appeasement, apology, and blackmail,
then our outlook is indeed grim. A culturally weaker and ruder Europe
turned back the Islamic tide because it was united by its Christian
faith, the spiritual strength of all those before us who died and
killed so that this prosperous, free world we enjoy could exist. But
what unites the West now, when our credo seems to be that juvenile
sentiment from John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “Nothing to kill or die for,
and no religion too”? Is this the belief that can resist an enemy who
knows with absolute certainty what is worth killing and dying for?