Excellent spot by a Biased BBC reader here. Matt Frei, that stalwart of B-BBC, ponders what turns someone into a suicide bomber. He reviews the cases of several suicide bombers and wonders what they all have in common. Clue – he misses something rather obvious and it begins with the letter I….!
SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH I…
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Islamikaze.
BBC journalists (with very few exceptions) are a wilfully blinkered bunch on Islamic jihad.
In contrast, Professor Raphael Israeli wrote an exellent book on the very theme which Frei is unsuccessfully grappling with, its title:
“Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrdom”
Here’s a complementary article on that theme, which Prof. Israeli wrote about 5 years ago:
Raphael Israeli’s warnings went unheeded”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/07/raphael-israelis-warnings-went-unheeded.html
Brief extracts from his book are available here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/reader/0714683914/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link
No! No! No! David, don’t you understand? In the words of one Gavin Esler about the Fort Hood murderer, they just “happen to be Muslim”. Happen. Just happen. Got it? 😉
Funny the BBC don’t point out that despite America having its first President with a MUSLIM name, Barry’s weakiness and “I want to be friends with every towel head” approach, the Muslims are still trying to murder every american and westerner they can?
I don’t agree with the criticism that he should be blaming Islam for this, full stop. He’s trying to speak in meta-terms. The same thing Frei’s saying here could be said for why youngsters join street gangs, or any cult or fundamentalist religious group. Jim Jones’s ideology killed hundreds of people, and they weren’t Muslim. Granted, I can see how this can be interpreted as yet another attempt to shift blame from this particular ideology for the cause of today’s problem of terrorism.
Having said that, it’s a very basic concept dressed up as clever analysis. This is what passes for profound insight at the BBC. In the real world, it’s about the level of a high school essay. But I guess Frei Boy spent so many years wrapped up in the “It’s Bush’s fault” mindset that he never looked for other causes. So this must be genuinely new concept for him, even if he supposedly suspected it in 2001.
I do not know if you have read ” Wind Sand and Stars” by Saint- Exupery.
He , writing of the Sahara tribesmen in the 1920s, goes to the heart of the matter of how different the Muslim world view really is.
“When they met us in the region of Juby or Cineros, they never troubled to shout abuse at us. They would merely turn away and spit, and this not by way of personal insult but out of sincere disgust at having crossed the path of a Christian. Their pride was born of the illusion of their power. Allah renders a believer invincible. Many a time a chief has said to me “Lucky it is for France that she lies more than a hundred days march from here”
In the 1920s the Islamic world was powerless. This is a different time and we no longer have distance or overwhelming power to protect us.
They fight us because they must and because they sense our weakness of spirit.
Demonizing Islam, full stop, simply isn’t helpful.
I did grant that Frei’s essay could be construed as yet another BBC attempt to shift blame away from Islam. But his intent was really to show how insightful he is. Now that the Left’s poverty narrative has been discredited, he has to find something else. And he congratulates himself that he’s always suspected as much. In fact, his essay can be read as an admission that his bias caused him go with the wrong idea for years, and to overlook such an obvious concept.
Frei is, at the most basic level, correct that these mass murderers were caught up in an ideology with seductive elements they found lacking in their normal lives. But that means these elements were lacking in their Muslim upbringing.
The real problem is the caveman version being preached and spread around. Their fundamentalist death cult stylings come from a caveman mentality, and these people would behave the same way no matter what their religion was. Everyone here can gripe all you want that Islam is vile, full stop, but it’s simply not the real story.
The Undie-Bomber was born and raised a Muslim. If Islam in all forms was so vile and dangerous, Abdulmutallab would have wanted to kill infidels all his life, and would not have needed to be radicalized at the UCL. I submit to you that it’s precisely because non-caveman Islam doesn’t have the kind of seductive ideology that Abdulmutallab was looking for. He found it with the radicals at the UCL. Sure, already being a Muslim makes that a shorter trip than if he were not born one. But that’s as far as I’m willing to go to blame Islam, full stop, for everything.
So Frei is correct on a very basic level. But this is isn’t any particularly profound or even useful insight. He’s not saying anything new. It’s the same theory taught in Sociology 101, and by every talking head explaining why teenagers join street gangs or dopey New Age cults. The unwashed angry types who engage in acts of violence in the streets during IMF summits have a similar mentality.
At this very basic level, the underlying belief system is irrelevant. Abdulmutallab (like the rest of them) was already a Muslim, so it really cannot be said that Islam itself made him into a mass murderer. It was the caveman version, preached by people from a caveman culture. Frei Boy is never going to say that, of course, because it’s not PC. But he’s not trying to do anything here other thanact like he’s found some profound insight that can get beyond the details of the problematic ideology.
Incorrect
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/WWMD.htm
Islam is the Middle Eastern version of Nazism
Yawn.
Interesting. I hope you don’t think I was demonizing Islam. But I think we need to recognize that Islam is different. The Koran is not a book, in the sense that the NT is, but the literal word of God. Hence it is eternal and unalterable. It is the Truth and those of us who are not Muslims are therefore wrong. It is this certainty that Saint Exupery writes about ( in Wind Sand and Stars) and is l the driver of what we call fundamentalist Islam today. Although I very much doubt they see themsel;ves as fundamentalists but rather as simply devout Muslims.
It is for this reason that I espouse the separationist viewpoint. Us is the Christian West and Islam in their lands with the most minimal of contact and why I regard the concept of Eurabia as doomed to bring us all to disaster both Christian and Muslim.
The differences between our world view and theirs is unbridgeable.
Perhaps after many years have passed things will change.
In the NT story of the woman taken in adultery Christ overturns the tablets of stone commands of the old testament law and ushers in our world. It was a key moment in our history. Islam belongs to the times before that moment and is trapped there. We cannot go back so we must hold fast to our way.
The Koran is not a book, in the sense that the NT is, but the literal word of God. Hence it is eternal and unalterable. It is the Truth and those of us who are not Muslims are therefore wrong.
The same thing can be said for the Torah and believing Jews. The Torah is the literal word of God, as dictated to Moses, nothing else is the Truth like that, etc. Same again for the Book of Mormon and the Latter Day Saints. In and of itself, such a belief is not the issue here. As I said, the Undie-Bomber was born and raised as a Muslim. Yet, he did not want to be a mass murderer until he was encouraged to a second level of belief (the West is at war with Islam, full stop, all infidels must submit or die, etc.) at his local Islamic Society. So I still say there is a difference between the kind of Muslim he was and the kind of Muslim he is now. There’s a reason for that, and it’s the kind of clash of civilizations we’re both talking about.
You seem to more or less agree with what I’m getting at, but from a different perspective. When you say that there are unbridgeable differences between our world and theirs, that’s basically the kind of caveman problem I’m talking about.
The Reformation and the hows and whys of the Christian Wet’s growth beyond religious wars are something best left for history class. So too are the reasons why Western Civilization in general no longer treats women as chattel, condones rape as a means of punishment, the killing of women to protect family honor, or that religious belief can render one person’s life as more valuable than another’s. But I think we all know that this is what separates modern civilization from the cavemen I say are the problem.
That caveman behavior is still in existence in Muslims in Britain and Europe because these people come from cultures which have not advanced in the same way we have. Further, they are not even remotely encouraged to advance, and in fact have many of their caveman behaviors either legally protected or quietly tolerated.
The thing is, there are plenty of cultures around the world which I would also describe – uncharitably, I admit – as caveman societies. Most of them have no connection to Islam. They were cavemen before Islam ever existed, and remain so.
I still say it’s the caveman attitudes which predated Islam that are the problem. But I have no problem with saying that we are at war with what I refer to as the caveman version of Islam. Blaming Islam, full stop, misses the point.
Again interesting. What you call a “caveman culture” is unfortunately that form of Islam that is wreaking such havoc in our lives.
There remain only two alternatives. Islamic societies have to themselves deal with this as we cannot or we must separate ourselves from them as best we can.
I favour separation as it is within our power to do so if we so will it. Waiting for Islam to change itself is fraught with too many imponderables.
OFF SUBJECT: There may be a need for an extention to Biased BBC called Biased C4. C4 news has always been a bit lefty, but now the election and the gloves have come off. Items showing the cons in a bad light seem to have taken off. Tonights was about an aide to Cameron called Alex Hilton.
Why is Matty boy so coy ? Just come out and say it, they are all damn Buddhists.
Fred
Yes I saw it but thought it was so trivial and going back to 2008, Labour must be getting really desperate.
Look forward to the BBC follow-up though !
Frei should really not try to write creatively, since a ridiculous image like the following is the result:
None of the recent suspects are high school drop-outs or desperate refugees who have nurtured hatred of the West in the frayed lining of an empty stomach.
But this really threw me:
I first came across this phenomenon when I went to visit the family of one of the 9/11 hijackers a few days after the attack.
I find that casual admission quite extraordinary. How did the BBC know so soon that Ziad Jarrah was on that plane and where to find his family?
(This apart from the sickness in the BBC that leads its reporters to flock to fraternise with Islamic terrorists and their families.)