Some Thoughts about Arab Mind, Jihadist Terrorism and Western Values

”Responsibility against Victimisation”?

It all comes down to victimization. Using innocent women and children as human shields is a good example. Muslims have learned the art of how to evoke world sympathy. "Look what the bad Americans and Israeli's have done to us. They have destroyed our mosques and schools." The LA Times has even been coerced to referring to them as "Courageous Victims (1/8/08, p1). Al Jazeera uses such phrases as "war crimes" and Palestinian Holocaust."

This resorts back to the primitive mind because Arabs have been brainwashed through dogmatic verses paralyzing the capacity to think. They know how to play the shame/blame game. The Muslim ego never admits to defeat, even if they lose they pretend they won or else blame the Americans or the West. To preserve the group's identity away from shame the preservation of self becomes a more pervasive force than life itself.

In sum, terrorism is designed not only to brutalize their victims but also to threaten freedom, democracy and safety. Thus we have beheadings and mutilated genitals. If, as has been suggested, Islamic terrorism is a product of an Islamic culture devoted to overcoming the sense of humiliation. Not an easy task: the Islamists hoard their shame: they still remember, bitterly, the crusades, and their loss of Spanish Andalusia to the Catholics in the fifteenth century.

Nevertheless, the United States has successfully fought and tamed Shame/Honour societies in the past. The Confederacy, the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, all paradigm Shame/Honour societies, were all overcome in total wars, and all became either part of our nation, or our trusted Democratic allies. And it now begins to appear that Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan will join their company.

There appears to be a uniquely American approach to war – one combining ruthlessness and mercy - that can lead to such unexpectedly good outcomes. Thus, as with the Germans and Japanese in WWII, we first ruthlessly firebombed and A-bombed their cities, destroyed their air forces, sank their fleets, demanded unconditional surrender, and decapitated their wartime leadership.

But then, against all precedents, as victors we did not pilfer their industry, turn their men into slaves or their women into whores. Instead, in peace-time we showed a quality of mercy that could not have been predicted from our practice of total war - the mercy that a humiliated enemy would not expect from a triumphant conqueror. Thus, we sponsored the rise of hitherto suppressed moderate leaders, we helped to rebuild the enemy’s shattered cities; and under the Marshall Plan we encouraged their economies to the point where the Germans and Japanese became, for awhile, our major competitors for world markets.

The Dalai Lama recently admitted that "non-violence" against terrorism is useless and will not work because their minds are "closed." One cannot negotiate with closed minds.

IHS