The Pathological Roots of Islam

The Pathological Roots of Islam

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-pathological-roots-of-islam?f=must_reads

by EDWARD CLINE March 27, 2014

This is not a new subject. It would be to the mainstream media. To the dhimmitudal denizens of this particular subject of enquiry, Islam, as a "religion of peace" and a belief system, is above reproach, even when its true believers and activists are blowing up non-believers by the dozens, hundreds, and even thousands, or machine-gunning them or taking machetes to them. Islam is untouchable. To question its nature leaves news media denizens with dropped jaws one can hear thud on the floor. It leaves them aghast and in horror.

To them, Islam can do no wrong. There's nothing wrong with it that a little patience and interfaith dialogue can't resolve. It's a needless cultural clash that can be reconciled peacefully. A negotiated settlement is possible. Muslims just want to be left alone and not be stereotyped or mocked or defamed. All the mullahs and imams need to do is put a leash on Islam's hotheads to curb their youthful - and oft times middle-aged - exuberance, and then everyone can grab a ribbon and dance around the Maypole of Diversity to the tune of a Tiny Tim song.

But the pathology inherent in doctrinal Islam - and that which inhabits its passive and aggressive adherents - has been discussed in the past in non-mainstream media, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. For example, Soren Kern, in his Gatestone article of March 24^th, "UK: Child Sex Slavery, Multiculturalism and Islam," takes to task both the idea of multiculturalism and the British authorities on the sex-grooming Muslim gangs that have apparently been preying on non-Muslim school girls for at least twenty years.

Kern's article is mostly a discussion of Peter McLoughlin's exhaustive report, "Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery," which details how officials in England and Wales were aware of rampant child grooming - the process by which sexual predators befriend and build trust with children in order to prepare them for abuse - by Muslim gangs since at least 1988, with the knowledge of the authorities. The report is 333 pages long and worth reading - as long as you have a supply of Valium on hand and are not susceptible to high blood pressure. Kern writes:

Rather than take steps to protect British children, however, police, social workers, teachers, neighbors, politicians and the media deliberately downplayed the severity of the crimes perpetrated by the grooming gangs to avoid being accused of "Islamophobia" or "racism."

But the festering, metastasizing problem couldn't be contained and hushed up for much longer.

The conspiracy of silence was not broken until November 2010, when it was leaked that police in Derbyshire had carried out an undercover investigation-dubbed Operation Retriever-and arrested 13 members of a Muslim gang for grooming up to 100 underage girls for sex.

Shortly thereafter, the Times of London published the results of a groundbreaking investigation into the sexual exploitation and internal trafficking of girls in the Midlands and the north of England. In January 2011, the newspaper reported that in 17 court cases since 1997 in which groups of men were prosecuted for grooming 11 to 16 year old girls, 53 of the 56 men found guilty were Asian, 50 of them Muslim, and just three were white.

The overwhelming number of sex-grooming gangs are Muslim in makeup.

One of the defining features of child grooming is the ethnic/cultural homogeneity of the gang members, and the refusal of other members of their community to speak out about them or to condemn their behavior. According to the report, the gangs are often made up of brothers and members of their extended family, many from Pakistan, who take part in the grooming and/or rape of the schoolgirls.

The report states that grooming gangs target young girls, aged between 11 and 16, because the gang members want virgins and girls who are free of sexual diseases. "Most of the men buying sex with the girls have Muslim wives and they don't want to risk infection," the report states. "The younger you look, the more saleable you are."

I left this edited comment on Kern's Gatestone article. It raises the issue of the criminal pathology of the perpetrators and of their "ethnic/cultural homogeneity":

One must ask oneself: If Islam and Muslims consider women the lesser sex, and infidel women as uncovered meat to be consumed by men in the crime of rape, and that "that 'women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground,'" why are Muslim men in these gangs attracted to them? Shouldn't these Muslims, if they are "true believers," be revolted by the prospect of such a physically close proximity as it must occur in sex? Has any one of these barbarians ever asked himself that question, or asked it of others of his ilk? The answer to those questions I think can be found in the fact that Islam is merely a rationale for the criminally minded. Islamic ideology inculcates in the unquestioning a sense of pseudo-superiority of the faithful over anyone outside its boundaries.

The alleged inferiority of women, Muslim or non-Muslim, which doctrinally sanctions especially rape, allows these criminals to put a "moral" cast on their actions. They claim they are acting out the tenets of their religion, when, in fact, their motives are more insidiously pathological and have nothing to do with the creed and ideology. It goes beyond these criminals' taste for the "forbidden."

Whether these criminals can be deemed sociopaths or psychopaths, is a moot question. Islam inculcates and fosters the pathology. It is the only major creed I am aware of that sanctions crime. The murderers of Lee Rigby claimed they were being consistent with Islam. There's no reason to doubt them on that count. The child rapists of these Muslim grooming gangs are also being consistent, but because sex is the object, their libidos have been twisted out of all recognizable human shape.

In "grooming" and raping these young women and children, they are making a statement: We're criminals, and we're conquering your country by raping your women. Islam says it's okay, it blesses our criminality, but it's what we want to do anyway.

No excuses should be admitted in the prosecution of their crimes. Religion should not be admitted as a defense. It isn't in Western law, but that seems to be changing in Britain, given the news that Sharia will now be considered a legitimate means of settling disputes and inheritance issues in British courts.

Islam, horrific an ideology and creed as it is without recalling its 1,400-year-old catalogue of crime (call it a "rap sheet"), serves as a convenient mask of piety for the recidivist criminal. Instead of claiming, "The Devil made me do it," he says, "Allah made me do it. Allah expects me to do it. Allah commands me to do it. So, I am beyond moral judgment. You have no right to judge or punish me."

Treating the systematic assault on non-Muslim women in Britain, Sweden (Stockholm has the highest incidence of Muslim rapes), Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Germany, among other European or Western countries, as an expression of Islamic pathology is beginning to seep into the thinking of individuals searching for an explanation for the phenomenon.

For example, one reader of Daniel Pipes's July 2006 column, "Arabs Disavow Hizbullah," edged closer to a pathological explanation:

As with most cults, research indicates, progressive disassociation with reality is a common trait. To the rational mind, words on paper contain no power in themselves, but are assigned significance by the observer. One may call the book a "Bible" or a "Manifesto" or a "Koran" or the "Times of London", all are simply words on paper. To the mind of the cultist, it is the document itself that has power. To an Islamist, such as yourself, the internalization of the Muhammedian dogma and the "Koran" motivates and animates your life to the exclusion of rational thought processes.

Criminal actions, after all, are not symptomatic of rational behavior or rational thinking. A rational quest for the causes and effects of criminal behavior is not going to discover "rational" causes. But this does not stop some observers from painting irrational Muslim behavior in subjectivist terms. Criminals and their apologists always have an excuse for crime. To wit, Discover the Networks profiled one apologist, Natana DeLong-Bas, an apologist for Saudi Wahhabism, who explained why Islam has a "bad rep":

In a similar vein, DeLong-Bas contends that "extremism does not stem from the Islamic religion," but rather from "the political conditions in the Islamic world, like the Palestinian issue ... [the issue of] Iraq, and the American government's tying [the hands of] the U.N. [and preventing it] from adopting any resolution against Israel." These, the professor maintains, "have definitely added to the Muslim youth's state of frustration, which then pushes them to-as they understand it-help their brothers do away with the aggression against them, in the various Islamic countries.... That is why I believe that religion has nothing to do with this."

This is the "academic" version of the "Officer Krupke" number from West Side Story. Jihadists are "depraved because they're deprived," and haven't been raised in a "normal home." "They're "misunderstood." And etc. Islam has nothing to do with the violence; it's unfair to ascribe to Islam all the murders, rapes, assaults, and destruction committed in its name - as a Koranic imperative.
Barbara J. Stock, in her November 2005 article, "The pathology of an Islamic Mind," which discussed why an unsuccessful female Muslim suicide bomber was willing to kill Muslim children as well as infidel children:

This abnormal mind is the mind of our enemy. It is the mind of a woman who can place herself next to playing toddlers and attempt to blow them up and tear their bodies apart with a bomb containing ball-bearings. It is the mind of a man who can drive a car filled with explosives into a crowd of children eating ice cream with their fathers and kill them. Muslims say that this must be done in the name of Allah for the advancement of Islam....
These warped minds are unable to accept that it is Islam that is responsible for the bombings and the slaughter. Always able to put the blame elsewhere for all of Islam's crimes and problems, Muslims eagerly accept any and all excuses for the sins of Islam, no matter how illogical those excuses may be. If their warped minds can't accept the fact that their "religion of peace" is to blame, the blame is pushed off on the Jews, or justified by claiming it was Islam that was attacked first. Denial is their first line of defense....
Sadly, this is what happens to the human mind when it must be constantly bent and twisted to accept the unreasonable.

But suppose one accepts the unreasonable because it comports with one's unreasonable expectations in life, such as sex with anyone one wishes to have it with, regardless of the other party's willingness or consent? Islam is eminently "unreasonable" - that is, irrational - and if one is told from infancy on up through adolescence and adulthood that Islamic logic is incompatible with infidel or Western logic (in the buffet of relativist philosophy, there's Musim logic, and capitalist logic, and Nazi logic, and two dozen more brands of logic), it "justifies" one's criminal behavior. One's wanting the unearned is justification enough to just take it.

An anonymous blogger on Hesperado also comes closer to a pathological explanation. In his April 2012 article, "Understanding Islam Anthrologically," he noted:

Islam, Allah, Mohammed, the Koran (among other things) are thus in the Muslim psyche to be an inviolable circle of sacred objects to be protected from anything perceived to be negative, whether it's a physical attack or a critique or mockery, or even thoughts. Anything perceived this way is physicalized as an enemy, and the response is biochemical, pre-rational defense.
With Muslims and their Islam, we are thus not dealing with a rational mind here, but with the pre-rational mind.

A "pre-rational mind" is that of a prehistorical farmer who ascribes to deities the success or failure of his harvests and the vagaries of the weather. He is seeking a comprehensible reason for why things happen. His descendents will discover reason and rationality and science and discard the deities and establish a fealty to reality. A criminal mind, however, is not only not "pre-rational," but non-rational and anti-rational. Things just happen, things just exist, and such a mind fundamentally isn't interested in crediting cause-and-effect to anything. Reality is incomprehensible, but that doesn't worry him. Reason? Reality? Free will? Rights?

Perhaps the best extirpation of Islamic metaphysics and how it affects the Muslim mind is offered by Robert R. Reilly, who was interviewed by WND in "Islam: "Spiritual Pathology Based on Deformed Theology,'" in February 2013. Reilly is the author of The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist. Reilly said in the interview:

The closing of the Muslim mind... is rooted in Ash'arite theology, which denies the God-given human powers of reason and free will. This is precisely the opposite of Christian doctrine, which says that personhood is defined by the powers of reason and free will.... (Italics WND's)

"When I read the account of creation in the Quran, the first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that man was not made in the image and likeness of God. In Islam, it's blasphemous to suggest in any way that man is like God or can be compared to God," said Reilly. "The closing of the Muslim mind occurred over a struggle concerning the role of reason in Islam, its relationship to revelation and ultimately to Allah...."

Reilly then introduces the metaphysical chaos inculcated by Islam metaphysics and cosmology.

"What made this worse," explained Reilly, "is that the metaphysics behind the delegitimization of reason is the thought that Allah is not only the first cause - the primary cause - but He's the only cause for everything." According to this school, there are no secondary causes for creatures or actions. This means fire doesn't burn cotton, God directly burns the cotton; acorns don't grow into oak trees; animals and human beings don't beget offspring; man-made machines don't heat or cool our buildings; and no human persons can choose their own actions.

"Denying cause and effect in the natural world makes the world incomprehensible - unintelligible," said Reilly. "But anyone who would suggest that natural law has a role in the world would be accused of shirk blasphemy, of somehow demeaning God's omnipotence.

"In addition to that, the world is constituted by these time-space atoms that in themselves have no nature, but they are agglomerated in any instant directly by the will of God to make something. The fact that acorns grow into oak trees has nothing to do with the nature of an acorn or oak tree," said Reilly. "This process and all other acts are discreet and independent acts by God and anyone who says that an acorn grows into an oak tree because of its nature would, again, be committing blasphemy."

So, if God - if Allah - is directly responsible for all acts, then several premises follow for the classical Western thinker: (1) No human acts could be morally wrong; (2) God is directly making some persons Jews, some Christians, some Hindus, others Mormons, still others atheists and so on; (3) Therefore, humans who don't convert to Islam must be doing God's will; (4) God would have to be the cause of all conflicts; and (5) God would have to be the author of contradiction, confusion and chaos.

To these objections, Reilly replied, "Ah, but see, you are applying logic to Allah, Who's above it all.

"And since God is above reason and acts for no reasons, neither can one understand what God does and God Himself becomes unintelligible. Therefore, reality recedes from the Muslim mind. This is what accounts for the dysfunctional cultures you see primarily in the Middle East," said Reilly. "This is a product of the Ash'arite Kalam, the school of theology for the majority of Sunni Muslims. It predominates in the Middle East, Pakistan and South Asia. So if you wonder why there's so much unreasonable behavior, it's simply because reason has lost its status as a normative guide to ethical action."

As an atheist, I cite this remarkable exposition without endorsing Reilly's Christian premises. However, Reilly has made what I think is a key identification of what moves Islamic jihadists of all stripes: from the killer jihadists to the grooming gangs. Muslim criminal minds - of the members of the Muslim grooming gangs of Britain and other countries - act on what they rationalize is Allah's will, and that is just fine with them, because it is what they want to do anyway. They have been taught - and they never bothered to question what they've been taught - that there is no such thing as the earned or the unearned, just things that people have for no comprehensible reason and which they want and whose origins they don't wish to fathom. To them, the necessity of thought is a fiction.
Their metaphysical modus operandi is to evade reality and the trader principle that governs most human relationships, a principle that recognizes the reality of those relationships. They know what they do is evil, but evil is what they think universally governs men's thinking and actions, so they attach no moral disapprobation to their own actions, and don't think anyone else should, either, especially not their victims. The women and girls they rape exist for them to fulfill Allah's ends, that is all.

Their minds are neither slothful nor lethargic. They can plan their crimes. But their intelligence is feral. A predator detects and exploits its prey's weaknesses. This can also be said of the "cultural and civilizational" jihad being waged against the West, as well of the grooming gangsters.

Knowing that they are evil - while at the same time claiming that Allah determines what is evil and what is good - and that what they do is evil, these gangs wish to humiliate, degrade, soil, pervert, and ultimately destroy the good. That is their claim to the efficacy of their Islamic evil. That is the claim of every mullah and imam and jihadist killer. It is the will of Allah; he puts the uncovered meat before them, and they take it. It is unspoiled. We shall spoil it.

Islam reduces all Muslims to ciphers, to interchangeable manqués. The definable criminal among them consequently occupy a rung below that occupied by the passive manqués; they are literally and definably subhuman. Can they be deemed sociopaths, or psychopaths?

One of the outstanding lines from the film Gladiator is spoken in the beginning, before a Roman army attacks a tribe of barbarians: "What we do in life, echoes in eternity."

I would add: What we don't do - such as think - also follows us in life.

Is there a clinical name for the pathology of men who refuse to think?

Edward Cline is the author of the Sparrowhawk novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period, of several detective and suspense novels, and three collections of his commentaries and columns, all available on Amazon Books. His essays, book reviews, and other articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Journal of Information Ethics and other publications. He is a frequent contributor to Rule of Reason, Family Security Matters, Capitalism Magazine and other Web publications.