Category Archives: Jihad

The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability

Britain, Crime, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Islam, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media

“The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

The most famous advocate of the-Camel-Ate-My Homework theory of criminal culpability is Barack Obama. Obama’s flabby assumption has it that the poor barbarians of France’s burbs have been deprived of fraternité. “Europe needs to better integrate its Muslim communities,” lectured the president.

Also guilty of a social determinism that flouts their philosophy of individual freedom are libertarians. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society and libertarian saddle the state: U.S. foreign policy, in particular. A war of aggression, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture are thus “principal catalysts for this kind of non-state terrorism,” argued Ray McGovern.

“The-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions, left and blowback-libertarian, are social determinists, in as much as they implicate forces outside the individual for individual dysfunction.

Myself, I despise U.S. foreign policy as deeply as any Muslim. But it would never-ever occur to me to take it out on my American countrymen.

In the context of free will, and in a week in which we remember the Holocaust, Viktor E. Frankl rates a mention.

Dr. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in the industrial killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize another Jews (myself): “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian fiction that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl lost his beloved young wife in Auschwitz, yet told poignantly of finding her, if figuratively, in a tiny bird that flitted close by. If this man was able to discovered the reality of free will and human agency in a laboratory like Auschwitz; so too can Muslims find the will to respond adaptively to events that enrage them and are indeed unjust: Western foreign policy.

The idea that the Brothers Kouachi and thousands of their coreligionists in the West who’ve joined ISIS were driven by “disaffection” to do their diabolic deeds conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” John Cleese’s parody of Judea under Rome. …

… The complete column is “The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability.” Read the rest on WND.

Playing Politics With The Pawns

Jihad, Politics, Terrorism, The State

The prisoner swap between the US and the Taliban, last year, trading five fierce-looking Muhammadans from Afghanistan’s Jihad Central for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was problematic for reasons other than that American administrations claim not to negotiate with terrorists. It is of a piece with the “release from Qatar, in December,” of an “al Qaeda operative held in a U.S. prison” in exchange for two Americans held in that country.

If the government intended to swap these prisoners for Americans, why not reserve some swap-worthy swarthies to save murdered ISIS captives Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff?

Likely because the returns were not that great. It’s all about optics and politics.

From The Pen Of Marine LePen

IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Media

I shared a sneaking suspicion about the media vis-à-vis the Charlies Hebdo horror: The former is running scared. Here: “The malfunctioning Media must have gotten something of a fright at the horrific events unfolding in Paris … Truth tellers who seldom get a hearing on the idiot’s lantern, Fox News included, have been called upon to shed light where media and their cyphers in skirts have shed only darkness.”

My much-missed colleague, Vox Day, concurs. He writes:

Interesting to see the New York Times run an opinion piece written by the leader of France’s Front National, Marine LePen … It would appear that events in Paris have so frightened the editors of the New York Times that they’re actually willing to countenance the discussion of immigration and Islamization. What LePen is suggesting is far from sufficient, obviously, but it is a start.

However, the fact that both the French and German governments have banned anti-Mahometan marches this week tends to indicate that some sort of democratic upheaval will be required before any serious action is taken.

MORE from the pen of LePen, who quotes Albert Camus. Neat. However, while castigating the left for refusing to name names, LePen resorts to similar linguistic trickery, writing that “France … was attacked on its own soil by a totalitarian ideology.”

A concept—“totalitarian ideology”—can attack and kill in the same way that violence hits a country, not at all.

Killers kill. Violent individual attack. … etc.

I Said ‘Sentimentality’; Steyn Says ‘Screw Your Hashtag Solidarity’

Ilana Mercer, Islam, Jihad, Media, Terrorism

It doesn’t happen often, but just this time it feels good to be able to say, for once, that my “Show Of Solidarity Or Sentimentality? Winning À La The West” (01.07.15)—a post pertaining to the pens-up “defiance” in the wake of the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo—is considerably milder than Mark Steyn’s version of the same sickened sentiment (Jan 9, 2015):

MARK STEYN: These men were exceptionally brave. Most of the people expressing solidarity with them are not that brave. … And to be honest, it makes me vomit to see people holding these Princess Dianafied candlelit vigils, and using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie – I am Charlie -and in effect appropriating these guys’ sacrifice for this bogus solidarity. It makes me sick to see all these ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ cartoons that have appeared in newspapers all over the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Australia, everywhere, from other cartoonists, again expressing solidarity with these very brave men – but not doing what they did…

These guys are dead because back in 2005, these Danish cartoons were published in an obscure Jutland newspaper, and a bunch of fanatics went bananas and started killing people over them. So a couple of publications on the planet, including mine in Canada, and Charlie Hebdo in Paris, published these cartoons… Le Monde didn’t, and the Times of London didn’t, and the New York Times didn’t, and nobody else did. And as a result, these fellows in Charlie Hebdo became the focus of murderous rage. If we’d all just published them on the front page and said “If you want to kill us, you go to hell, you can’t just kill a couple of obscure Danes, you’re going to have to kill us all”, we wouldn’t have this problem. But because nobody did that, these Parisian guys are dead. They’re dead. And I’ve been on enough, I’ve been on enough events in Europe with less famous cartoonists than these who live under death threats, live under armed guard, have had their family restaurant firebombed – it’s happened to a Norwegian comedienne I know – have come home and found their home burned, as a Swedish artist I know happened to. And all these people doing the phony hashtag solidarity, screw your phony hashtag solidarity. Let’s have some real solidarity – or if not, at least have the good taste to stay the hell out of it.

(A somewhat related critique of Steyn is here.)