The Teddy Bears of Annapolis - The Long Road of Giving in to Muslim Grievances
The long road of giving in to Muslim grievances may begin with a teddy bear but it ends at Annapolis, it may begin with petty things but these surrenders gather force until they culminate in the surrender of a culture and a nation.
The road to surrender begins with the legitimization of Muslim grievances. When Muslims became outraged at cartoons of their prophets the world's media responds by suppressing their publication. When Muslims find the very sight of a pig or alcohol offensive, those two are hid away. Tolerance has been perverted into intolerance, into the suppression of other people's rights in order to accommodate Muslim grievances. But Muslim grievances never end.
The harder the West works to accommodate Muslim grievances, the worse those grievances become. This is a phenomenon that most parents understand when it comes to children, but seem unable or unwilling to understand when it comes to the childishly backward Muslim sense of entitlement.
Western accommodation of Muslim demands has not made them friendlier, but angrier and more prone to violent tantrums. That is why there are Muslim riots in Paris but none in Detroit or Jersey City. The more a nation spoils Muslim extremists, the worse they act and the more extreme their demands become.
Consider the cycle; I yell at you and demand a dollar. You give me a dollar and I berate you even louder and demand five dollars. You give me five dollars and I punch you and demand ten dollars. You give me ten dollars and I get out my baseball bet and demand a hundred.
That's the boat Europe and America are in when confronting Muslim demands. The difference is that most European countries just have their wallets open while America intersperses handing out money with occasional defensive kicks and shoves.
The flaw comes in two areas
1. Accepting Muslim grievances as legitimate
2. Believing that appeasing those grievances can and will bring peace
Muslim grievances are rooted in power, greed and the need to have excuses for their own failures.
Arab Muslim countries are generally failed countries that are blessed with a lot of oil, oil that America and British oil companies found for them, developed for them and that often continues to be run for them by American and British workers.
The average Muslim country is a dictatorship with little to offer its citizens. Muslims at home and abroad live in the shadow of superior cultures that they are unable to challenge in any useful way. Western technology, clothing, products, movies and music surround them. Those are reasons for resentment but there is one core reason for their resentment and the failure of their cultures; an inability to take responsibility.
The inability to take responsibility is a childish trait and those individuals and cultures who suffer from it are constantly forced to redirect that responsibility in the form of resentment at the injustice done to them. Responsibility frustrated becomes outrage channeled at a safe target and anyone who is willing to accept that responsibility becomes a safe target.
The Islamic relationship with the West is an abusive relationship, one in which Westerners accept responsibility and abuse for the failures of Muslims at home and abroad, for their inability to win wars, build industrial literate economies and democracies.
The Muslim gains a useful punching bag and the knowledge that everything that goes wrong is not his fault.
-- Israel's Arab neighbors began war after war which they lost. Rather than accepting responsibility for any of it, they continue to blame Israel and cry out for the injustice of it all.
-- Saddam's Arab neighbors had the ability to restrain his ambitions but chose not to. When he menaced them, they went to America for help. The problems that created are their responsibility, yet America is to blame for Iraq... never them.
-- Arabs in the West live among cultures that are enthusiastic about taking them in and giving them equal citizenship, something no Westerner receives in most Arab countries, and yet continue to manufacture claims of discrimination where there is none. It remains far safer to be a Muslim in the West than a Westerner in an Arab country.
The path of accommodating each Muslim grievance leads us from teddy bears to Annapolis. Westerners insist on subdividing legitimate Muslim grievances from illegitimate ones, yet the fact is that they are all illegitimate. Muslim culture exists in a twilight zone of grievances in which the Crusades and soccer balls with the Saudi flag on it, immoral Western culture, bombs and wars are all tied together in a giant mass spanning centuries and bridging the ridiculous with the catastrophic.
When Bin Laden's videotapes randomly change their message from using the Gulf War to the Palestinians to Globalism as excuses for his terrorism and incorporate every sort of rhetoric from traditional Islamic to modern leftist, he is simply reflecting the Muslim Culture of Grievance which does not tie itself to logic or consistency, only to the volume of outrage.
Every time we turn over ten dollars in response to a Muslim grievance, all we're doing is setting ourselves up for the baseball bat.