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homes"},{"term":"olmert"},{"term":"slavery"},{"term":"unions"},{"term":"ADL"},{"term":"Abortion"},{"term":"Austria"},{"term":"Bangladesh"},{"term":"Barry Chamish"},{"term":"Bend the Arc"},{"term":"Bill Gates"},{"term":"Cincinnati"},{"term":"Communism"},{"term":"DOJ"},{"term":"DeBlasio"},{"term":"Ethics"},{"term":"Fake News"},{"term":"Florida"},{"term":"France"},{"term":"GOP"},{"term":"Georgia"},{"term":"Hamas"},{"term":"Iraq"},{"term":"Islamophobia"},{"term":"Lincoln"},{"term":"Mali"},{"term":"Marxism"},{"term":"Massachusetts"},{"term":"Michigan"},{"term":"Middle East"},{"term":"Mueller"},{"term":"Muslim Brotherhood"},{"term":"Ohio"},{"term":"Omar"},{"term":"Pelosi"},{"term":"Pennsylvania"},{"term":"Personal"},{"term":"Pierre Omidyar"},{"term":"Scam"},{"term":"Soros"},{"term":"Sports"},{"term":"Star Trek"},{"term":"Steele"},{"term":"Supreme Court"},{"term":"Tlaib"},{"term":"Trump"},{"term":"USSR"},{"term":"VA"},{"term":"Virginia"},{"term":"Washington D.C."},{"term":"Whitmer"},{"term":"Zero Hussein"},{"term":"aboutme"},{"term":"amona"},{"term":"cancel culture"},{"term":"censorship"},{"term":"cities"},{"term":"class warfare"},{"term":"education"},{"term":"foreign policy"},{"term":"gang violence"},{"term":"gender"},{"term":"gun control"},{"term":"illegal aliens"},{"term":"israeli police brutality"},{"term":"judicial activism"},{"term":"photoshops"},{"term":"social justice"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Daniel Greenfield \/ Sultan Knish articles"},"subtitle":{"type":"html","$t":"Daniel Greenfield's articles and writings on the Sultan Knish blog"},"link":[{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/posts\/default"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/-\/Important+Posts?alt=json-in-script\u0026max-results=5"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/search\/label\/Important%20Posts"},{"rel":"hub","href":"http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/"},{"rel":"next","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/-\/Important+Posts\/-\/Important+Posts?alt=json-in-script\u0026start-index=6\u0026max-results=5"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"generator":{"version":"7.00","uri":"http://www.blogger.com","$t":"Blogger"},"openSearch$totalResults":{"$t":"59"},"openSearch$startIndex":{"$t":"1"},"openSearch$itemsPerPage":{"$t":"5"},"entry":[{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-4694443397094781996"},"published":{"$t":"2017-11-09T13:28:00.000-05:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2017-11-09T13:30:38.473-05:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Important Posts"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Allahu Akbar is Why Muslims Kill"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"Allahu Akbar. You hear it everywhere these days.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESpecial agent Scott Wickland said that he heard cries of \"Allahu Akbar\" before the Benghazi attack. And then the guards ran for their guns. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn Nice, France, the Islamic terrorist who killed 86 people and wounded over 400 by running them over with a truck, shouted, “Allahu Akbar”. In New York, the Islamic terrorist who was trying to imitate him, also shouted, “Allahu Akbar.” The 9\/11 hijackers had the same message, “Allahu Akbar”. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” has been present at virtually every major recent Islamic terror attack in the West. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut according to the New York Times, “Allahu Akbar” is an “innocent” and “innocuous” expression. According to one of the Times’ sources, “You see a reallу beautiful woman” and “уou go, ‘Allahu Akbar.’” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIf all those shouts of “Allahu Akbar” in Paris, London and New York are caused by Muslim terrorists encountering attractive women, their reaction of choice to an attractive woman is a killing spree. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” is not “innocent” or “innocuous.” It’s at the core of what makes Islam violent. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo understand the violent history of “Allahu Akbar”, let’s climb into a time machine and go back to the year 628 and to a place that will one day be known as Saudi Arabia. It’s hot out here in the desert. Temperatures from the spring to the fall routinely cross the hundred degree mark and keep going. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWe’re in Khaybar. It’s a desert oasis maintained by the Jews. If being in 109 degree heat has got you down, you stop by the oasis, and have a cool drink of water and some dates. Then you keep going. Out here trade runs through the desert and the oasis is a gas station. If you want to choke off major trade routes, you go after an oasis. And that’s what a cult leader whose followers today terrorize the world by attacking its travel routes, airline hijackings, pirates preying on ships, train and bus bombs, was doing. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EMuslims call what happened next, the “Battle of Khaybar”. Like most Muslim battles, it was a treacherous ambush and a massacre. And it helps explain why there are no Jews in Saudi Arabia today. Nor do Muslims regret this act of ethnic cleansing. Instead they celebrate it. Muslims still threaten Jews by chanting, “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud.” \"Remember Khaybar, Jews, Mohammed’s Army Will Return.\" \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd “Allahu Akbar?” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat’s what Mohammed shouted as he realized that his surprise attack had been successful. \"Allahu-Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed.” He boasted that any nation attacked by Muslims would suffer a similar fate. And then he “had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives”. Mohammed also picked up his own sex slave. “Safiya was amongst the captives. She first came in the share of Dahya Alkali but later on she belonged to the Prophet.” Safiya’s husband had been murdered. Like their ISIS successors, the Prophet of Islam’s band of killers and rapists took the women as slaves. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat’s where “Allahu Akbar” originated. And that’s why Muslims still shout it at terrorist attacks. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAllahu Akbar does not mean “God is Great.” It means “Allah is Greater”. What was Allah greater than at Khaybar? Allah was greater than the religion of the Jews because Mohammed was able to defeat them. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn Islam, a religious war is also a religious test. Muslim victories demonstrate the supremacy of Allah. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDespite the incessant claims that Muslims, Jews and Christians all worship the same god, the Koran tells Muslims something very different. “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. These are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!” (Koran 9:30) \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe preceding verse commands Muslims to \"Fight those who do not believe in Allah\" and “who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture until they pay jizya and submit.\" \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThose who “were given the Scripture” are Christians and Jews. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EJews and Christians had “taken Rabbis and monks to be their lords besides Allah”. The Christians had taken “Messiah, the son of Mary” when they had been commanded to “worship only one Allah.” (Koran 9:31) \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EJews and Christians were “Kuffir” and “Mushrikeen”. They had taken “partners” in addition to Allah. Christians and Jews seek to “extinguish the light of Allah” (Koran 9:32). Allah had sent Mohammed to make Islam supreme over all other religions. (Koran 9:33). Jews and Christians obstruct the “Way of Allah” (Koran 9:34) Muslims are encouraged to make Jihad against non-Muslims (Koran 9:38). Those who refuse to carry out Jihad will be punished by Allah (Koran 9:39). \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen Muslims defeat Christians or Jews, they prove that Allah is superior to Jewish and Christian beliefs. And that the teachings of Islam are superior to the teachings of their religious enemies. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” originated with Mohammed’s attack on the Jews of Khaybar. When Muslim terrorists shout it today, they are declaring that they are about to prove Allah’s superiority by killing non-Muslims. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” isn’t merely associated with terrorist attacks. It’s the reason for those attacks. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EMuslims kill non-Muslims to prove that, “Allahu Akbar”: that Allah is greater the religions of their victims. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” is the motive for Islamic terrorism. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA typical excuse is that Muslims will use “Allahu Akbar” to celebrate a good event. What this excuse misses though is that Islam is a supremacist religion. And Muslims believe that the good event that they are celebrating is due to being the only ones who truly worship “Allah”. That’s a common religious belief. And they are entitled to it. But the problem is that this relationship rests heavily on Jihad. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Islamic mission is to make Islam supreme over all other religions (Koran 9:33). If Muslims aren’t striving to defeat other religions, then “Allahu Akbar” rings hollow. Islam does not primarily offer an internal religious experience that transforms the believer, but an external collective experience that transforms the world. Jihad, the acts of terror we see on the news, are that religious experience. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” is the supremacist core of Islam. Mohammed offered a religious experience that merged desert banditry and conquest, whose sacraments were the murder of the enemies of Islam and the rapes of their wives and daughters. The horrifying Islamic rituals of ethnic cleansing, rape and torture demonstrated that, “Allahu Akbar”. That Allah was greater than the dead men and raped women. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Yazidi girls who were sold as sex slaves to ISIS fighters, as the Prophet Mohammed had done, describe their Islamic captors intimidating them by shouting, “Allahu Akbar”, and recall the Islamic rapist of a 12-year-old girl saying that it brought him “closer to Allah”, of a 15-year-old girl calling it a “prayer to Allah” and of the rapist of another 12-year-old girl describing her abuse as “pleasing to Allah.” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe official ISIS publication praised Allah for enabling its Jihadists to capture non-Muslim women. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“I write this while the letters drip of pride. Yes, O religions of kufr (non-Muslims) altogether, we have indeed raided and captured the kāfirah women, and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword. I and those with me at home prostrated to Allah in gratitude on the day the first slave-girl entered our home.” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EHow can raping children be a prayer to Allah? Because, “Allahu Akbar”. Being able to rape non-Muslim girls is a matter of “pride”. It shows that Allah, the god Muslims worship, is superior to their religion. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen ISIS Jihadists rape children or when an ISIS Muslim sympathizer runs over people in New York, Berlin or Nice, it’s a prayer of praise to Allah. And the prayer is, “Allahu Akbar.” \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe more non-Muslims are killed, abused and enslaved, the more the truth of Islam and the supremacy of Allah are proven with the screams of the wounded, the dying and the families of the dead. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThis is Islam. This is what it was in 628. That’s what it is today. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” is a mandate to kill non-Muslims. A Muslim terrorist taking a gun, a knife or a truck and attacking non-Muslims is living out, “Allahu Akbar”. He’s showing that Islam is superior. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E“Allahu Akbar” isn’t something he happens to say while killing you. It’s why he’s killing you."},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/4694443397094781996\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2017\/11\/allahu-akbar-is-why-muslims-kill.html#comment-form","title":"18 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/4694443397094781996"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/4694443397094781996"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2017\/11\/allahu-akbar-is-why-muslims-kill.html","title":"Allahu Akbar is Why Muslims Kill"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"thr$total":{"$t":"18"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-2509627459874527101"},"published":{"$t":"2016-08-12T14:23:00.001-04:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2016-08-12T14:23:50.379-04:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Important Posts"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"Moderates and Radicals in Islam and the Left"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"The core strategic problem we face is two conflicts with two ideologies that operate subversively until they are in power. That is, instead of stating their agenda openly, Islam and the left operate as false fronts maintaining a friendly moderate image while pursuing a far more radical agenda.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe distinction between moderates and radicals is at the heart of the debate about Islamic terrorism. Much as it used to be at the heart of the debate about Communism and its fellow travelers. Everyone will concede that there are indeed radicals, if only ISIS and Stalin. What they will deny is the extent of the complicity and, more significantly, the fact that the radicals were pursuing the same ends as the moderates, an Islamic Caliphate or a Communist dictatorship, only more rapidly and ruthlessly.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe thing that must be understood is that moderates do not disavow radicals. Rather they bridge the gap between the radicals and the larger society, justifying their ends, and eventually their means, while pretending to disavow them. Radicals reject any dialogue. Moderates emphasize dialogue.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EModerates will verbally reject the means with which an end is pursued. Accordingly they will reject terrorism. They may even claim to reject the ends, such as an ideological dictatorship, but they will, in good fellowship, ask you to accept their premise which inevitably leads to the acceptance of both the ends and the means.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFor example, moderates on the left and in Islam will ask you to accept that terrorism is caused by American foreign policy. Once you have accepted this premise, then you have partially justified terrorism and paved the way for accepting an \"Arab Spring\" that eliminates the consequences of American foreign policy by properly Arabizing and Islamizing the governments of the region.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ELikewise, if you accept the premise that Israel's presence in its '67 territories is driving terrorism, then you have signed on to everything from BDS to the destruction of the Jewish State.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIf you concede that crime and violence are driven by class and racial inequities, then you accept that the only way to end this \"class war\" is massive taxation and wealth redistribution through government intervention that addresses the root cause.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat is not the way it seems to most people. And that is why the \"moderate\" strategy works so well.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EOnce you have accepted the moderate definition of the root cause, you will inevitably be forced to accept the radical remedy. This is true across a spectrum of lower level policies. For example, accept that homosexuality is genetic and gay rights become the inevitable and inescapable outcome. That is how the root cause defines the outcome. And this is how moderates achieve radical goals.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EModerates convince you to accept their premise of the root cause. Then they argue for sensitivity to the radicals whose motives have suddenly become understandable. Finally they argue for a settlement in which a compromise is reached that will allow the radicals to achieve a moderate version of their ends.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Muslim Brotherhood takeovers of the Arab Spring are an example of a compromise to avert Islamic terror aimed at creating a Caliphate. The ultimate outcome is the same, but the moderates dress it up as a kinder and gentler alternative.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd this is the core strategic problem that we face.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe radicals are not any kind of serious physical threat. We could destroy ISIS easily if we chose to unleash our full force against them. The same is true for every single Islamic terror group in the world. And, for that matter, their state sponsors too.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe real threat is always the subversion of the moderates. The challenge then becomes the need to expose the false facade of the moderates. This leads to a push-pull struggle. The moderates cry that they are being unfairly victimized by hateful people. There are shouts of red-baiting and McCarthyism, profiling and bigotry. Their critics are paranoid and unhinged. The moderates even assert that there is something ugly and \"Un-American\" about asking them to account for their agenda.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd this is really the core argument made by the two allied subversive ideologies. It is \"ugly\" to expose their views, to quote them, to bring them to the surface. It is intolerant. It's not the way that respectable people should behave. And the moderates, who pose as respectable people precisely to play on the weakness of the middle class for being respectable, understand that this is the ultimate weapon.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ERespectable people do not accuse the friendly Imam on the block of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood or promoting Jihadist texts. They do not accuse the cheerful teacher in the school whom everyone likes of pushing anti-American views on her students. That is not respectable behavior.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd moderates, who pretend to be respectable, excel at pushing the respectable shame button.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt doesn't matter if it's true. It's ugly to discuss it. That is respectability simplified. It's much better to talk about how much we have in common, to speak about how we can unite and make the world a better place. And the moderates have plenty of ideas in that regard. All of them involve accepting their premise of what the world's problems are and how they can be improved by a series of proposals that would culminate with mass tyranny and murder.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThere are actual moderates of course.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe majority of those on the left aren't harboring secret plans to build gulags. They would find the idea horrifying. Likewise many Muslims in Western countries don't support Islamic terrorism.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThey are moderates, but only in the sense that they have not yet signed on to radical ideas. Not in the sense that they would fight and oppose them to their very last breath. They are mostly moderates out of a lack of conviction rather than a surplus of it.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESubversive organizations operate through incremental radicalization. The average American liberal of twenty years ago would not have supported half of what he vocally advocates for today. Even Obama and Hillary were against gay marriage when they ran for office. In a few years they moved from opposing a policy to threatening to prosecute those opposed to it. That is how the left works.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EObama and Hillary always had a consistent position. The leadership of the left had one. It was the ordinary rank and file liberal who might have been in the dark until the whistle was blown and the herd stampeded toward the next policy abyss. A year ago those same liberals might have felt uncomfortable with the notion of men using the ladies room. Today they would fight a civil war for it.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe process operates the same way across a spectrum of policies. The left keeps its more moderate followers in the dark about its real goals. Then once the stampede begins, the moderates who derive their sense that they are good people from following the ideas of the left, quickly fall in line.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe same is true of Islam. Plenty of Muslims would not be happy with an immediate transition to ISIS. But plenty are willing to back the more incremental attempts to build a Caliphate through political Islam in Turkey or through the Muslim Brotherhood. Their moderation, like that of many Germans in WW2, consists of an unwillingness to know what dirty deeds are being done.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe moderates bridge this gap both for their rank and file, and for the outsiders who have to be fooled into accepting their premise in order to accept their ends. Their greatest weapon is respectability. When cornered, they insist that they are just nice people who want to make the world a better place. And their critics are bigots, nasty people, who don't want everyone to get along and spread disunity.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd doesn't everyone just want to get along? Isn't that nicer and better? Isn't it a good thing that there are passionate young people who want to make the world a better place?\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe chief ally of the moderates is this sort of middle class respectability. The moderates paint their critics as radicals who have no solutions. When in fact they themselves are radicals with a final solution. And yet combating this sort of happy talk remains our greatest challenge.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EYet it is also a passing challenge.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EMiddle class respectability is a function of a sense of security. When that sense of security begins to implode as a society experiences chaos, the middle class stops clinging to respectability.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd then the real conflict begins.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWe may well be approaching that phase. Economic decline and Islamic terror are leading to a radical break with respectability. We are entering a radical age in which the moderates take off their masks and radicals of various stripes gain great influence and openly recruit for their cause.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThis will be a shattering experience for many. It will be a very ugly one in many ways. And yet the only way to avert it would be to expose the false moderates who are driving this process for what they are. And this is exactly what those who have the most to lose from a radical rise refuse to do.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ENone of this is a new phenomenon. History is repeating itself."},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/2509627459874527101\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2016\/08\/moderates-and-radicals-in-islam-and-left.html#comment-form","title":"28 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/2509627459874527101"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/2509627459874527101"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2016\/08\/moderates-and-radicals-in-islam-and-left.html","title":"Moderates and Radicals in Islam and the Left"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"thr$total":{"$t":"28"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-3487943822082581674"},"published":{"$t":"2016-04-13T15:58:00.002-04:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2016-04-13T15:58:09.784-04:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Important Posts"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"In the City of the Decadents"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"Civilizations go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWe can  find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty's worth of  anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the  decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West. Vigorous civilizations are a rarer breed. They change the world. But don't last.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAmerica used to be vigorous when it was moving west, producing at record  rates and becoming a world power. It is growing decadent. And decadent civilizations fall to barbarians. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  barbaric civilization is purely crude. It runs on kinship. It is pre-rational and its guiding ethos is self-esteem often misspelled as honor. It has no notion of  enduring facts or objective reasoning. It is incapable of recognizing inconsistencies in its code because truth is whatever it feels at a given time.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe barbarian has no morals. He obeys tribal codes that he does not understand, but accepts. Fairness exists only relative to his own interests. Empathy is foreign to him. He holds life cheaply and kills  casually. He loathes outsiders and obeys no universal laws. His tribe is ruled by  hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery. And he assumes the world works the same way.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EHe cannot and will not interact with a more advanced civilization on any terms other than these. Cunning barbarians may learn the languages of more advanced civilizations and even ape their values for their own purposes, but they never adopt them. When a barbarian speaks of democracy, he means power. When he talks of religion, he means the worship of his own power. When he prattles of morality, he does not mean universal laws, but anything that impinges on his own power.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo the barbarian, all values are reducible to power. They are his gods, his religions and his laws.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe decadents are obsessed with filtering hierarchies of ideas and people. Their societies have grown too complex, too full of ideas, cultures and interest groups. The management of this unmanageable plenitude occupies all the energies of their fading civilization. They are the miser with the fading memory still struggling to count his gold. Decadents have too much of everything and no idea what to do with it except to squander it in fits of misguided and destructive impulses.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  decadent civilization has a million laws which it applies selectively.  Its universal laws, inherited from a vigorous civilization, are buried between equivocation. Decadents don't believe in objective truths and so they cannot have universal laws. Instead they mire them  in so many legalisms as to be meaningless. The laws must be interpreted by a specialized caste. Everyone is  always in violation of some obscure law. Life depends on a lawless  dispensation from the law. Justice is impossible. Corruption is mandatory. The only way for the decadent civilization to function is to bypass its own safeguards through corruption, black markets and lobbying. This is true in all things.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe crucial task of the law  is interpretation that keeps everyone from constantly being punished.  This task is accomplished by lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians who  are constantly adding more laws to fix the interpretations in the old  laws creating a complex mass of contradictory information.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThis holds true in every other area of decadent life.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EInterpretation  is what the decadent civilization does best. While vigorous  civilizations discover new things, decadent civilizations endlessly  categorize and re-categorize them to accommodate intellectual fads. Decadents compulsively seek new systems of organization. The computer age is the glorious final era of the decadents who finally have infinite ways to manage infinite information.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhat they lack is any way of distinguishing what is worthwhile in both information and systems.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  decadents are great categorizers. They know where everything should  belong. They employ armies of bureaucrats to operate vast filing systems  which never quite work as planned. They spend fortunes on intricate information systems and yet the more speed and storage space they have, the less they seem able to filter worthwhile information from the morass of junk clogging up their time.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  decadent civilization is convinced that if it can amass enough  information, its interpretations will be superior, but its information  gathering techniques and its interpretative techniques are both fatally  flawed by an inability to focus, by ideological obsessions and structural\u0026nbsp; corruption. Scientists may have more rapid access to more  information, but their community is more intellectually contaminated leading  to worse results. Similarly, corruption undermines information gathering  efforts from the start.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EVigorous civilizations understand  that a process must be kept clean by open debate. Decadent  civilizations operate corrupt closed processes while convinced of their  own innate superiority. Decadents and barbarians both believe that they are always right and that the outcome will reflect that. They learn to forget setbacks or blame them on others. This is why they frequently fail.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe vigorous civilization is confident and skeptical. It understands the importance of mistakes in getting the right result. Decadents and barbarians don't acknowledge mistakes. For barbarians, it is a matter of honor. For decadents, mistakes violate their confidence in their cultlike baseless theories. Unlike vigorous civilizations, their path to truth is constricted by their own intellectual corruption.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut decadent civilizations are also less  interested in discovering new things than in disproving old things. The  middling talents at the helm rewrite history while justifying their  misrule by denouncing the achievements of their vigorous ancestors. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants, they point out their flaws to obscure their own worthlessness. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhere  the vigorous civilization disproves the old through its achievements,  the decadent civilization considers the disproving of the old  civilization to be an achievement in and of itself. Where the vigorous  civilization outside its parent, the decadent civilization is still  stuck fighting \"Daddy\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIf you examine our achievements  today, they have much to do with the supposed social progress we have made since the fifties. Much of this progress is a matter of outlook, rather  than in reality. We are better because we are morally superior. Not because we actually do more.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDespite  the disdain for the past, decadent civilizations struggle to do more  than deconstruct and then helplessly imitate the past. Chaotic  deconstruction of past creative arts is followed by retro copying of  them, first ironically and then earnestly. Nostalgia becomes the central  industry of a dying civilization mired in irony and incapable of mining its own  culture for creative energies.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe central cultural critique becomes updating  older works to more politically correct forms. A classic character is  remade black or gay. Problems with diversity or sexism are tackled. The  critic becomes a commissar whose job is to sanctify the transformation  of an old politically incorrect work as politically correct. That is the  role of the social justice warrior.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAll this energy  makes it appear as if there is cultural ferment when nothing is actually  being produced. Instead older works are being \"cleaned up\" in keeping  with new social values by a civilization that frantically chews up the  past in a desire to forget the problems of the present.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EPeople  living in decadent civilization have a greater need for entertainment  due to leisure time, extended adolescence and the breakup of the family.  But their lack of meaningful work, family engagement and adult  responsibilities leaves them less able to produce it.  Instead they become children putting together pieces of stories that  \"Daddy\" once told them while taking the credit.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDecadents  confuse criticism and curation with creativity. They develop great  sensitivity to everything from literary styles to foods. In a decadent  society, everyone is a cultivated critic, but these critics value style  over substance. Their criticism is a cultural signal rather than a  mastery of technique.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe decadent civilization is obsessed with taste  as brand. It is sensitive to subtleties, but fails to see the large  flaws in a work. Its creativity is microscopically innovative and  macroscopically a failure. Its subtle refinements cannot compensate for  the lack of vision. It has style, but no substance. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn a decadent civilization,  everyone can be a critic or a collector of something, even as no one  actually produces anything new until there are more critics and  collectors than creators.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe decadent civilization  spends much of its time and effort in a battle against apathy. It is  forever \"raising awareness\" about something or other. Its sophisticated  messaging however creates apathy as quickly as it erases it. Its  messaging becomes more short term and more hysterical. Everything is a  crisis and every message is pitched at the shrillest possible level. And the worst crime is not paying attention to its noise.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  outrage of today is quickly forgotten by the outrage of tomorrow. The  organizers dream of sustaining awareness for real change only to dive  into the next round of short-term messaging.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn a  decadent civilization, life becomes a constant political battle. Everything is politicized and nothing is personal. The individual is constantly being trampled by mobs in the forum.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBarbaric and decadent civilizations are both so dishonest that they are incapable of seeing their own lies.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  barbaric civilization simply does not understand the concept of a fixed  truth. The minds of its people are capable of understanding it as an  abstract notion, but not of holding it in their minds on a specific  subjective matter of interest to them. A barbarian can understand that  stealing is wrong, but not that robbing you is wrong.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA  decadent however can understand that stealing from you is wrong, but  not that stealing itself is wrong. The decadent civilization does not  have fixed truths. Its people are trained to apply mores to subjective  situations, much as barbarians do naturally. While barbarians can evolve  from the fixed truth to the fixed value, the decadents have devolved by  rejecting the fixed truth.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFixed truths have been  deconstructed and routed through a complex array of relativistic values.  A decadent understands that murdering this baby right here is wrong,  but can be taught that it is acceptable to trade parts of dead babies.  For decadents in an information society, definitions are very important.  Decadents and barbarians have an empathy that is triggered by cultural  signals.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFor barbarians, these signals are honor-shame  kin-based. For decadents, the cultural signals are\u0026nbsp; group-based signals that are routed through complex intellectual  justifications. These justifications\u0026nbsp; create their own  unrecognized hypocrisies. Both operate on the moral blindness of herd logic. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EGroups  are politicized and every moral code is routed through an identity  politics based on insecurity. There are no morals, only sides. Responses  are emotional to shortcut rational reasoning. Decadents function like  barbarians, convinced of their own superiority with no self-awareness of their flaws.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA major difference  between vigorous and decadent civilizations is objectivity and long term  thinking. Decadents are incapable of either while vigorous  civilizations thrive on both. If decadent civilizations could engage in  long term thinking, they wouldn't be doomed. If they could engage in  objective reasoning, they wouldn't be slaves to the media machines under  a lawless tyranny.\u0026nbsp; \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe barbaric and vigorous  civilizations speak little of sex and yet have high birth rates.  Decadent civilizations are obsessed with sex and have few children.  Perversions multiply in decadent civilizations, especially among the  elites, who have the fewest morals, the most wealth and the greatest  need for new taboos to violate. This is not a cause. It is only the  symptom.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EGay marriage, like so much else, is the  symptom of a decadent elite that confuses its own power and privilege  with civil rights, that wants to legalize its illicit behaviors even  though it only embarked on them because of their illicitness. In its  perversity, it must find new taboos to violate each time an old one  becomes socially accepted, before then embarking on a civil rights  struggle to make its latest taboo socially acceptable.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBarbarians  have large families and a tolerance for limited personal space. They  speak loudly, are more casual about the deaths of their children, and  view success in terms of power. Decadents speak softly, have a high need  for personal space, have small families while obsessively controlling and coddling them and view success in terms of their own unattainable happiness.  Vigorous civilizations have medium sized families, speak loudly, view  success in terms of personal accomplishment, are not too concerned about  personal space and value their children while allowing them to take  risks.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDecadents want emotional rewards without  commitments. As a result they are constantly unhappy. They pursue  happiness as if it were a quality that could be permanently obtained  through the right techniques, rather than a shifting response to the  rigors of daily life. The more decadents do this, the more unstable they  become, obsessively self-medicating and attempting to otherwise set the  conditions of their happiness by controlling its application, and  blaming others for their failure.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe more deranged  decadents search for those who deny them their right to happiness by  failing to accept them, reward them or otherwise please them until they  find meaning only in attacking others. Behind their venom is  narcissistic self-pity, they are searching for revenge against a cruel  world when they are the authors of their own unhappiness.\u0026nbsp; \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  decadent civilization senses inwardly that it has no future. It becomes  obsessed with apocalypses. Its people are always fixated on the next  great threat to their health individually and the next great disaster  that will bring their civilization to its knees. While vigorous  civilizations boldly stride forward into the unknown, decadents are  nervous and unsure. They veer between comfort zones and ritualized  displays of destructive behavior that accomplish nothing.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EVigorous civilizations pursue  meaningful risks. Decadent civilizations pursue meaningless ones. For a  vigorous civilization, adventure ends with an accomplishment. For a  decadent civilization, risk is the accomplishment.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe  decadent civilization obsessively manages risk. Its layers of government  are mainly dedicated to that task. Accomplishment in a decadent  civilization becomes a difficult task because of the many lawyers of  corporate and government risk management standing in the way of getting  anything done.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EFear is the true currency of the  decadent civilization. A corrupted fear that is used to expand a vast  bureaucracy that claims to manage risk, but in reality manages who is  allowed to circumvent it. Groups are stampeded into accepting new tiers  of fear government and fear authority based on the risk that something  might happen. And yet the source of the fear is never dealt with.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EA vigorous civilization rushes out to deal with threats. A decadent civilization imprisons itself out of fear.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EDecadence  in a civilization can be reversed. While the barbarian civilization  must evolve upward, the decadent civilization must undo the damage that  is devolving it. This is easier than it seems. Unlike the barbarian  civilization, the decadent civilization has most of the same  infrastructure, physical and mental, of the vigorous civilization. Only  its ideas have become corrupted. And ideas can be healed.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBarbarians advance by absorbing transformative new concepts. Decadents however must unlearn their new concepts by recognizing them for the dead ends that they are. "},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/3487943822082581674\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2016\/04\/in-city-of-decadents.html#comment-form","title":"52 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/3487943822082581674"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/3487943822082581674"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2016\/04\/in-city-of-decadents.html","title":"In the City of the Decadents"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"thr$total":{"$t":"52"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-1955892758660115080"},"published":{"$t":"2016-01-11T12:22:00.000-05:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2016-01-11T13:21:18.854-05:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Important Posts"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"The Tribal War with Islam"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"All wars are wars of equals.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat's true in the sense that each side attacks the other in terms of how it defines itself as an entity. States try to destroy other states. Religions fight other religions. Ethnic groups and races engage in genocide. They do this even when the other side does not see itself in the same terms.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe United States tried to fight guerrillas and terrorists as if they were modern states with their own industrial military organizations protecting their industrial core. This tactic made no sense in Vietnam or even Iraq because that wasn't the enemy we were facing. But states are built to fight other states. Tribes are built to fight other tribes. Religions are built to fight other religions.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe modern multicultural super-tolerant western state of this century takes stock of its strongest point, and decides that it's not the old industrial machine, which destroys the environment, its traditional heritage, which is problematic, or its problem solving skills, which are too technical, but its values of super-tolerant multiculturalism. And so it wages war on those insane terms.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe old Western model of war was brutal and efficient. Protect the industrial plant. Use it to churn out more military hardware. Smash the enemy. The new Western model of war is protect social harmony. Create more diversity. And the enemy will eventually be drawn into our global harmony.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhen liberals take every terror attack as an opportunity to lecture us on the vital importance of not losing \"our values\", they are in their own warped and useless way waging war.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIn the 20th century, war was distilled down to an industrial core. In the 21st century, the anti-industrial rebels who want to de-industrialize manufacturing while industrializing society, have distilled all that matters down to their values. In their confused world order, the terrorists are attacking \"our values\" and we in turn must attack \"their values\" with our superior \"values\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBarely half the country accepts their construct of what \"our values\" are and they have no idea whatsoever what \"their values\" are, but they assume that just as our values are \"our values\" so too \"their values\" are also \"our values\". This is the sort of thing you do if you're an ideologue.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd also it's a natural human shortcut. It's human nature to assume that people different from you are just dumber, nastier versions of yourself who have the same basic goals and organization as you do.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIdeologues are most likely to assume that everyone agrees with their premises, but just hasn't been shown the right textbooks. And these days ideologues and their textbooks dominate everything.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo the left, Islam is an inefficient sort of Socialism dependent on medieval superstition and lacking modern idea. To Muslims, the left is an inefficient sort of Islam that's missing Allah, Mohammed and the Koran. It's all just a problem of explanations and textbooks.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe left plans to defeat ISIS with \"our values\" by which it means showing how effective our social harmony is, which it isn't, by refusing to actually fight Islamic terrorism. Eventually the Jihadists will give up their reactionary ways as the ordinary Muslims realizes that he has the same interests as the rest of the great rainbow coalition does. This hasn't even worked too well in Europe. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe left is a purely ideological entity and so it has reduced our countries and cultures to the transportable \"our values\". Despite Islam's ideological reach, it's not purely an ideological entity.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAt the ground floor, Islam is tribal. The Iraqis viewed us as the American Tribe. Tribes raid each other. Their members lash out and kill each other over insults. They count coup on each other. They steal and humiliate each other's women. Tribes are nomadic and they are concerned with honor.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETribes from Iraq, Syria and North Africa can come to Europe, set up their own territories, pile up loot and then humiliate the native women for New Year's Eve. And then laugh at the impotence of the European tribal authorities.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe Islamic no-go zones are seen primarily as religious, but they are also tribal. Islam incorporates both. Islamic migration also expands tribal territories. It's always been that way.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd this is also how Muslims fight us on a tribal level. They attack the honor of the European tribes. But it's not as if the Merkel government or any of the other European Socialist governments have any concept of honor anyway.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EWhile European Socialists attempt to integrate them with \"our values\", the ungrateful integratees show that the systems have no honor on a tribal level and are not worth taking seriously.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBeyond the tribal, is the religious. In Islam, religion remains limited to the most primitive level of \"My tribal deity Allah is stronger than your deity because we beat you up.\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThis is literally what Allahu Akbar means.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo the representatives of the secular West, religion is identical with \"our values\", which is to say that it contains nothing religious about it, certainly no claims which require divine validation or unique truths. Their religion is a spiritual background noise which affirms the essential position that we should be nice to each other while providing support for any leftist position of the moment.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ENo meaningful dialogue is possible between Allahu Akbar and \"Our values\" because the two are not speaking the same language except in one sense, both insist on absolute submission. But the left's demand for submission is based on the absolute moral superiority of \"Our values\". Islam literally means submission, but its moral superiority is a revealed truth based on Islam's military victories.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIslam is right, because it won. It won, because it's right. There's your cycle of violence in a nutshell.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIslam sanctified the tribal raid as a religious act and turned the dead into martyrs. That's Jihad. Terrorism incorporates both the tribal and the religious. Islamic missionary activity in the West also targets dissatisfied minorities, potential fifth columns, in the same manner as the original Arab Islamic conquests did. Even here, Islam unites tribal and religious tactics.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe final element of the tribal war is organizational. It is here that Islam attacks \"Our values\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETribes are forever quarreling. They are weakest at their points of mutual association. This is how Mohammed originally got his start. Islam expanded initially more through clever games of divide and conquer than military strategy.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo the Muslim mind, we are a series of fragile tribal associations. That is also how we appear to the \"Our values\" left. The \"Our values\" crowd thinks of the threat in terms of \"radicalization\", but the real threat is \"integration\". Mohammed did some of his best work by undermining from within.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo undermine a tribal association, you have to be a part of it. Then you have to raise grievances, find other dissatisfied allies and eventually promise them better treatment under Islam.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat's what Mohammed did. It's what his followers are doing today.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThis is where groups like the Muslim Brotherhood play the long game while ISIS plays the short game.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe left's multicultural vision made this mess possible. It's also making it worse. The left despises tribal thinking and yet its entire political infrastructure is built on rewarding it. All Islamic organizations have had to do is built on the left's own work, joining its coalitions as Islamic groups, and then working to hijack them. The growing takeover of #BlackLivesMatter by Muslim groups is one example of the phenomenon.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EOur enemies are not states and they will not fight us as states. To the extent that they are tribal, they will fight us as tribes. To the extent that they are religious, in a primitive sort of way, they will attack us that way. But the real problem is that we are no longer states either. Instead we are in the grip of a mystical deluded cult that squawks of \"Our values\" while tribalizing and dividing us to push through discredited economic and social policies. They have opened the gates to a cruel, backward enemy.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAnd in doing so, they have brought a tribal war into our own homelands."},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/1955892758660115080\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2016\/01\/the-tribal-war-with-islam.html#comment-form","title":"23 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/1955892758660115080"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/1955892758660115080"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2016\/01\/the-tribal-war-with-islam.html","title":"The Tribal War with Islam"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"thr$total":{"$t":"23"}},{"id":{"$t":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-8859283516577138085"},"published":{"$t":"2015-12-16T23:36:00.000-05:00"},"updated":{"$t":"2015-12-17T00:32:31.630-05:00"},"category":[{"scheme":"http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#","term":"Important Posts"}],"title":{"type":"text","$t":"The Progressive Panopticon of Political Correctness"},"content":{"type":"html","$t":"\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-OmI2oiww7LE\/VnBbK-IoVwI\/AAAAAAAAPiU\/kX1nxHcGkPE\/s1600\/panopticon-image.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"216\" src=\"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-OmI2oiww7LE\/VnBbK-IoVwI\/AAAAAAAAPiU\/kX1nxHcGkPE\/s400\/panopticon-image.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAround the time that the United States Constitution had been hammered out, across the way in the UK, social theorist Jeremy Bentham was coming up with the Panopticon.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBentham had denounced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as \"subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government\". He demanded that force be used to \"teach this rebellious people\" that \"there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAfter the \"Peace of the King\" failed in the United States, Bentham turned to his obsession with the Panopticon. The Panopticon would be a prison in which all the prisoners could be watched all the time to achieve, in Bentham's words, \"a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.\"\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBentham's Panopticon never worked, but the internet has made the Panopticon and its ability to obtain \"power over mind\" a reality. In a \"quantity hitherto without example\".\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-D0_3mhJ17EE\/VnBdj1XjbfI\/AAAAAAAAPiw\/3_9ZjhqKii8\/s1600\/aa948c1dc2c1_sf_9.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"240\" src=\"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-D0_3mhJ17EE\/VnBdj1XjbfI\/AAAAAAAAPiw\/3_9ZjhqKii8\/s320\/aa948c1dc2c1_sf_9.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003ESocial media has made private discourse public. In the Wilson days of WWI, when hysteria was at its peak, people could be arrested for private conversations. But that was the exception, not the rule. It was only in the worst Communist societies that informants were so rife that private discourse was almost completely stifled. But the internet shreds the line between public and private.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe new informer doesn't file a report at the local KGB office. He participates in a social media collective which among its hobbies plucks some obscure \"problematic\" remark out of the social stream and turns its speaker into a target for a mob. A lynch hashtag is born and someone loses their job. All of this is done with the self-pitying catastrophic crybullying so typical of social justice warriors who scream that they're the victims even while they're gleefully destroying someone else's life.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIt's no coincidence that this foul habit emerged out of Communist China where morality mobs targeted petty offenders on the internet in collective shaming rituals that sometimes escalated into violence or suicide. The Communist dictatorship that gave us the Cultural Revolution helped give birth to its hideous CyberStalinist offspring which enforces political correctness through bullying. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESocial media made the surveillance society possible. Even in the early days of the internet, the metaphor of the Panopticon was revived to predict its future. Art students still continue to churn out laboriously pretentious projects involving surveillance cameras and faceless mannequins. But it's the voluntary participation in social media that provided material for surveillance.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe old internet was anonymous. The new internet was data hungry. Nearly every major dot com is built on collecting and making use of information about people. Google, Facebook and a hundred other companies offer free products in exchange for personal data. Free apps for smartphones are built on gaining access to your address book. Everyone is trying to build the biggest and most comprehensive database for selling ads and manipulating user behavior.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-R8At_9105Sk\/VnBcJJagtII\/AAAAAAAAPic\/K1JCl3-xr_c\/s1600\/Bhph-fGCEAEUFNl.png\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"239\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-R8At_9105Sk\/VnBcJJagtII\/AAAAAAAAPic\/K1JCl3-xr_c\/s320\/Bhph-fGCEAEUFNl.png\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003EThat is where the Panopticon really begins. Surveillance without intervention is voyeurism. Surveillance with intervention is tyranny. The awareness of surveillance changes behavior. That was the fundamental idea of the Panopticon. Surveillance alone was power. To rephrase Focault, \"we become the principle of our own subjection.\" The awareness of surveillance changes how we live.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAll tyrannies understood that to control people they had to follow the Panopticon's model in which the people were to always perceive themselves as being potentially under surveillance. It was the perception that mattered more than the reality, eliminated the difference between private and personal, transformed Homo Sapiens into Homo Sovieticus (or Homosos in the dissident jargon), a self-righteous hypocrite, a politically correct criminal to whom Doublethink was natural.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESocial media makes it easy to impose collectivist virtue signaling behaviors. Get a rainbow avatar to celebrate gay marriage. Retweet this social justice clickbait to show you're outraged at the thing that \"the internet\" is outraged by. Demonstrate that you engage in goodthinkful social justice thoughts and are guiltfree of crimethink.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe echo chamber, the political bubble, is also a Panopticon. Herd behaviors are rewarded. Dissent is punished. No one is quite sure who on their friend list might turn on them, denounce them for some \"problematic\" remark or lack of enthusiasm for a cause, cripple their social networking, their careers and their social life. Panic in the herd is routine. A social justice social media message is somehow wrong. A joke turns out to be offensive. The 21st century Winston Smith begins to breathe hard, apologizes for his political error and vows to educate himself on proper intersectionality principles.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EHe edges closer to the telescreen which is always watching him and always shouting at him to pay attention. It's the \"paying attention\" that matters more than the message.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe less you think, the safer you are. In a politically correct society, every idea is potentially \"problematic\". The safest attitude is to pass on approved ideas in exactly the terms which they were uttered. Any independent thinking or deviation even in support of the cause is dangerous. It may be \"Problematic\". It may be \"Doubleplusungood Crimethink\". It's safer just to retweet. To express ambiguous outrage and support for whatever is on the timeline Telescreen. To just appear to be part of the collective \"outrage of the internet\", to shame someone else for Social Justice Crimethink.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EInstead of being shamed yourself for some problematic social justice offense.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-WxiHVpadPlA\/VnBcpjxNgCI\/AAAAAAAAPik\/O4TnIyzWNsQ\/s1600\/l6stezje2pzr7yzhdmkq.png\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"245\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/-WxiHVpadPlA\/VnBcpjxNgCI\/AAAAAAAAPik\/O4TnIyzWNsQ\/s320\/l6stezje2pzr7yzhdmkq.png\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003EOrwell's 1984 envisioned the Telescreen as a Panopticon erasing the privacy of the home.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.\" But social media and social justice warriors make for a much more efficient erasure of not only personal space, but mental space.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThought Policing is the goal of Political Correctness. Crowdsourcing it makes it possible for a small number of angry activists and their amateur imitators to terrorize a large population. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe left has always understood the supreme value of controlling discourse. The media manufactured a consensus, shaping public opinion by creating the illusion that its view was public opinion. When Obama says that X \"is not who we are\", he is manufacturing our consensus and imposing his value system as our own. Push polls, personal perspective and man-on-the-street stories help reinforce this artificial consensus by personalizing it. But the media was always a basically crude tool.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EMost Americans get their news from the media, but distrust its biases. Jon Stewart and his imitators radicalized the media by making bias into the news and eliminating the line between entertainment, editorial commentary and information, even while castigating the media for exactly these habits. The media eagerly embraced Stewart's savaging by turning up the bias and virtue signaling to eleven.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EBut in a Panopticon, the guards are meant to see all the prisoners, but never to be seen. The media is always seen, but can never see in. The media could speak through its Telescreen, but its Big Brothers couldn't listen in. It could not force the public to participate in its discourse. Often the public just tuned out the more bothersome media agendas.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ESocial media can see in. It avoids the problems that the NSA and any government surveillance program faces trying to sift through a ton of data by crowdsourcing it to the activist informer. Everyone can be the KGB now. Everyone can not only love Big Brother, but be Big Brother.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EAt least for 15 minutes or so. \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-_SFwNcOzTLI\/VnBdpEZmTrI\/AAAAAAAAPi4\/tQljHyb7HeU\/s1600\/121128083420-obama-twitter-blog.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"208\" src=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-_SFwNcOzTLI\/VnBdpEZmTrI\/AAAAAAAAPi4\/tQljHyb7HeU\/s320\/121128083420-obama-twitter-blog.jpg\" width=\"320\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003EThe left's ultimate goal is the total politicization of society by eliminating personal space. The USSR originally did not want to build kitchens in homes, because it wanted workers eating in cafeterias. The kitchen is a private family space. A cafeteria is a public space that could be controlled. Even when the cafeterias failed, families were kept in collective apartments where dozens of people lived together in mutual hostility and distrust. In such a space, nothing is private or personal.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003ETo totally control the individual, it is necessary to completely eliminate his personal spaces, his capacity for authenticity and individuality. In such an environment, every man becomes a convict, a prisoner of a social collective, a drone in a hive and a cringing beast in a frightened herd.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThat is the Panopticon. It's the world that political correctness is building for us. It's made possible by technology and the eagerness of the crybully to put up a new iron curtain for his safe space.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EPolitical correctness politicizes every area of life from food to literature to entertainment to clothes. Nothing is apolitical and therefore nothing is personal. The individual cannot be allowed to exist. He must join the collective. No government has made the Panopticon work perfectly, but the collective can.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EThe left is simply the war of an ideological collective against the individual. It is the war of the political against the personal. It is the war of power against freedom. It is the war of the progressive Panopticon against the mind of man.\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cdiv class=\"separator\" style=\"clear: both; text-align: center;\"\u003E\u003Ca href=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-lWAe8gtMLwI\/VnBe3N2LVeI\/AAAAAAAAPjA\/8tdc6O0qAXk\/s1600\/tumblr_nm6lc6jaDi1u6r36zo1_1280.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\" style=\"margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;\"\u003E\u003Cimg border=\"0\" height=\"225\" src=\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-lWAe8gtMLwI\/VnBe3N2LVeI\/AAAAAAAAPjA\/8tdc6O0qAXk\/s400\/tumblr_nm6lc6jaDi1u6r36zo1_1280.jpg\" width=\"400\" \/\u003E\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/div\u003E"},"link":[{"rel":"replies","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/feeds\/8859283516577138085\/comments\/default","title":"Post Comments"},{"rel":"replies","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2015\/12\/the-progressive-panopticon-of-political.html#comment-form","title":"28 Comments"},{"rel":"edit","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/8859283516577138085"},{"rel":"self","type":"application/atom+xml","href":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/feeds\/11368628\/posts\/default\/8859283516577138085"},{"rel":"alternate","type":"text/html","href":"http:\/\/www.danielgreenfield.org\/2015\/12\/the-progressive-panopticon-of-political.html","title":"The Progressive Panopticon of Political Correctness"}],"author":[{"name":{"$t":"Daniel Greenfield"},"uri":{"$t":"http:\/\/www.blogger.com\/profile\/13575285186581875356"},"email":{"$t":"noreply@blogger.com"},"gd$image":{"rel":"http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#thumbnail","width":"20","height":"32","src":"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/-ywx0Wkms-cU\/Vm75eobzYVI\/AAAAAAAAPg0\/kAlR7rDxOIc\/s113\/picture%2Bnewspapery%2Bsmall.jpg"}}],"media$thumbnail":{"xmlns$media":"http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/","url":"http:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/-OmI2oiww7LE\/VnBbK-IoVwI\/AAAAAAAAPiU\/kX1nxHcGkPE\/s72-c\/panopticon-image.jpg","height":"72","width":"72"},"thr$total":{"$t":"28"}}]}});