Psychology of Muslim extremists

Dalrymple likens Islamists in both Europe and the Middle East to

the inhabitants of our ghettoes who demand something that they call ‘respect’, which they extort by fear — for lack of any other means by which to earn it.

Muslims, he writes,

are not deceived by pusillanimous apologies or the odious, unctuous, and fatuous expressions of sympathy and understanding for their feelings that have emerged from official circles in Britain and America, in a vain and cowardly attempt to defuse the situation by a precipitate though insincere abandonment of the best values of the Enlightenment. Would Voltaire have caved in so cravenly?

The Islamic fundamentalists

know perfectly well that the West does not respect them, and that the only way they can cut a figure in the world is by terror. Technologically, scientifically, artistically, philosophically, economically they are nullities: but they know how to be vicious, and that makes up for every other defect. If the world will not listen to their tedious religiose lucubrations, it will at least pay heed to their bloodcurdling threats. Each expression of pseudo-understanding is music to their ears: they know that threats of mass decapitation and killing in the streets have worked. It is an open invitation for more of the same.

The Western democracies, says Dalrymple,

have demonstrated a lack of resolve comparable only to that of Chamberlain and Daladier in the face of Hitler, though without the extenuating circumstances (Chamberlain, at least, had a genuine and humane horror of war).

The problem for Muslim countries is even worse.

Whatever the doctrines of Islam, it is a fact that there are countless Muslims who are content to live and let live, and who are by no means religious fanatics. In the Islamic world, I have been met almost everywhere with kindness and hospitality. In some respects, Islamic societies are notably superior to our own. People behave in a more dignified manner than among us. There is very great poverty in Cairo, for example, but not the willful degradation, at least in public, that you see almost everywhere in the West.

Islam

seems to allow no way of institutionalizing moderation, beyond repression. Muslims, especially those in power, find it difficult to admit to enemies claiming religious purity, for fear of being branded anti-Islamic.

No Islamic country

will allow even closely argued intellectual public criticism of Islam of the kind that Christianity has now had to withstand for hundreds of years.

If you can’t criticise Islam publicly,

there can be no moderation founded upon anything except force, which is not only susceptible to counterforce, but intellectually and emotionally incoherent. It is surely emblematic of the extremely fragile existential position of Islam that a scholarly book such as Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim is not widely available in Muslim countries, to put it mildly (unlike The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for respect is a strictly one-way street in the opinion of many Muslims).

What we are seeing, Dalrymple explains,

is the confrontation of a society with a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking with a society with a post-Enlightenment way of thinking. And however much we may criticize the Enlightenment, as being in some respects shallow, or as leading to the destruction of any transcendent meaning to human life, the irreducible fact is that we are all children of the Enlightenment, and when — as now — we see the freedom that the Enlightenment wrought challenged in so intellectually primitive and thuggish a way, we realize for once how very much we owe to the Enlightenment. You don’t really appreciate something until you have lost it, or at least are in danger of losing it; and no philosophical critic of the Enlightenment has ever really wanted to live in a pre-Enlightenment society.

The fundamental problem of the Muslim world is that

it wants the material fruits or benefits of the Enlightenment without the Enlightenment itself. A considerable proportion of the large migrant population from Islamic countries to Europe has wanted this too, which is why many such migrants are notably less successful in their adopted countries than their Hindu, Sikh, and Chinese counterparts. Muslims have been trying to square this circle for well over a century, since they first became aware of just how retarded they were by comparison with a civilization that theirs once more than equaled. Like the inhabitants of the ghetto, they want the respect of the rest of the world without wishing to do the things necessary to obtain it.

Cowards these attackers were not

François Hollande, the French president, called the November 2015 Paris attacks cowardly. Dalrymple comments:

If there was one thing the attackers were not (alas, if only they had been), it was cowardly.

The attackers were, writes Dalrymple,

evil, their ideas were deeply stupid, and they were brutal: but a man who knows that he is going to die in committing an act, no matter how atrocious, is not a coward.

With

the accuracy of a drone, the president honed in on the one vice that the attackers did not manifest.

This establishes, Dalrymple writes,

that bravery is not by itself a virtue, that in order for it to be a virtue it has to be exercised in pursuit of a worthwhile goal.

Barack Obama, the US president, referred to the values we all share. Dalrymple says:

Either he was using the word ‘we’ in some coded fashion, in spite of having just referred to the whole of humanity, or he failed to notice that the attacks were the direct consequence of the obvious fact that we—that is to say the whole of humanity—do not share the same values. If we shared the same values, politics would be reduced to arguments about administration.

Bono, the Irish pop star, said that the attacks were an attack on music. Dalrymple:

Bono might as well have said that this was an attack on restaurants, or on Cambodian cuisine.

The Guardian, the London newspaper, said the vast majority of Muslims abhorred the attacks. Dalrymple:

I do not exclude the possibility that this is so, but we do not know, and can probably never know, that it is so: for if Elizabeth I had ‘no desire to make windows into men’s souls’, we have no ability to do so, certainly on this question. But the Guardian wanted it to be so, and therefore, to its own satisfaction, it was so. This is a kind of magical thinking that persists in a supremely scientific age, and is dangerous because completely ineffective.

 

Islam has nothing to say to the modern world

For the second time in living memory, writes Dalrymple,

we find ourselves obliged by historical circumstances to examine doctrinal philosophies that, from the abstract intellectual point of view, are not worth examining. They belong, rather, to the history of human folly and credulity: which is itself, of course, an inexhaustibly interesting and important subject.

The first was Marxism; the second Islamism. Which of us, Dalrymple asks,

would have guessed thirty years ago that an inflamed and inflammatory Islamic doctrine would soon replace Marxism as the greatest challenger to liberal democracy? The vacuum left by the collapse of one totalitarian doctrine is soon filled by another.

Dalrymple hopes that Islamism

will pass from the world stage as quickly as it arrived on it. In the meantime, however, it can cause a great deal of havoc, and will not disappear spontaneously, without opposition, much of which must be conducted on the intellectual plane.

Yet

Western intellectuals have failed to examine Islam and its founder in the same light as they would examine any other religious doctrine of comparable importance.

Dalrymple believes that all forms of Islam are

very vulnerable in the modern world to rational criticism, which is why the Islamists are so ferocious in trying to suppress such criticism. They have instinctively understood that Islam itself, while strong, is exceedingly brittle, as communism once was. They understand that, at the present time in human history, it is all or nothing. They are thus more clear-sighted than moderate Moslems.

The problem with Islam may be rooted

Image (latterly effaced) of Mohammed on frieze, Birch Memorial Clocktower (1917), Ipoh, Perak

in its doctrines, its history and its founder.

Mohammed

connived at armed robbery, mass murder and the abduction of women. Of course, autres temps, autres mœurs, and it may be that, on the whole, he sometimes behaved better than his peers.

He was

a political genius: he understood what motivated men, and he developed a system of belief and practice, of social pressure and ideological terror, that meant that Islamisation once established was irreversible, at least until the present day. Leonid Brezhnev’s doctrine was that a country, once communist, could not become non-communist; how puny, historically, was the communist achievement beside that of Islam!

Part of private quarters (1578) of Sultan Murad III

Islamic civilisation has many attractive qualities . At least at its summit, the Ottoman civilisation was

exquisite, and in the decorative arts was Western Europe’s superior for centuries.

But the quality of a civilisation

does not establish the truth of the doctrines current in it, nor the suitability of those doctrines for living in the modern world.

Judged by the abysmal standards of fifteenth century Europe, Islam

looks quite tolerant; but judged from the modern, post-Enlightenment perspective, it looks primitive.

Its attitude towards polytheists and atheists is

doctrinally abominable.

Islam

has nothing whatever to say to the modern world, and as yet has no doctrinal means of dealing constructively with the inevitable diversity of human religion and philosophy, beyond the violent imposition of uniformity or second-class citizenship.

Can Moslems of moderate temperament find some way of reconciling their faith with the exigencies of the modern world?

The problem is that this reconciliation cannot be a mere modus vivendi; it has to be intellectually coherent and satisfying to last. Personally, I am not optimistic. Islamism is a last gasp, not a renaissance, of the religion. But last gasps can last a surprisingly long time.

The weak and vacillating West

Evil: the threat

And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out….slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers. (Qur’an, 2:191)

Dalrymple writes that Islam, which was

the basis of great civilisations in the past,

has emerged

as the next potential totalitarianism.

Weak: the West’s response

Islam in the modern world may be

intellectually nugatory,

but a large proportion of humanity is Muslim and

an aggressive and violent minority has emerged within that population with apparently very widespread, if largely passive, approval.

The leadership of western countries has, of course, shown itself to be

very weak and vacillating in the face of this, or any other, challenge.

Showdown with the kuffār

Just as Marx says that

a showdown between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is inevitable, leading to the triumph of the former and the subsequent establishment of a classless society,

so the Islamists think that

a showdown between believers and infidels is inevitable, leading to the victory of Islam, which will eliminate all religious conflict.

A brittle edifice

Dalrymple notes, however, that behind all the Islamic bluster about

the certain possession of the unique, universal and divinely ordained truth for man

is an anxiety among Mohammedans

that the whole edifice of Islam, while strong, is brittle, which explains why free enquiry is so limited in Islamic countries. There is a subliminal awareness — and perhaps not always subliminal — that free philosophical and historical debate could quickly and fatally undermine the hold of Islam on various societies.

Doctrine that points the way to revenge

Imagine yourself, writes Dalrymple, a youth in Les Tarterêts or Les Musiciens,

• intellectually alert but not well educated
• believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into
• permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you
• surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence, and crime

Is it not possible, he says, that you would seek a doctrine that would

• explain your predicament
• justify your wrath
• point the way towards your revenge
• guarantee your salvation

Might you not

seek a ‘worthwhile’ direction for the energy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good?

Les Tarterêts

Islamism-Leninism

The dictatorship of the proletariat, writes Dalrymple,

has given way to the establishment of the caliphate as the transcendent answer to the personal angst

of certain persons. Had they grown up a generation or so earlier, their kind

would have become members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang rather than Islamic extremists.

Rote Armee Fraktion (Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe); الدولة الإسلامية في العراق والشام‎ — Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

Muslim men bent on evil

Those who become terrorist murderers cannot, of course, be satisfied with what Western society offers them, for they are, Dalrymple points out,

in the grip of a utopian ideology.

So were many successful people in the West once attracted to communism,

another ideology that would have destroyed their own freedom.

Fertile ground for Muslim ‘martyrs’

The outlook in France and the rest of the West is grim, says Dalrymple. He identifies the factors which, he writes,

ensure fertile ground for the recruitment of further ‘martyrs’ for years to come.

These are:

• a highly secularised Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so
• the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society
• the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual inferior status in the economic hierarchy
• the extreme insufficiency and unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value
• the readiness to hand of an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient, and yet in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity
• an oscillation between feelings of inferiority and superiority, between humiliation about that which is Western and that which is non-Western in the self
• the grotesque inflation of the importance of personal existential problems that is typical of modern individualism

Popish unctuousness and cowardice

Less a shepherd, more one of the sheep

Pope Francis’s speech to Congress, writes Dalrymple, resembled that of

a politician seeking re-election. It was like the work not of a man intent upon telling the truth, however painful or unpopular, but that of a committee of speech-writers who sifted every word for its effect, appealing to some without being too alienating of others. If Bill Clinton had been elected pope, he might have made the same speech, so perfect was its triangulation, so empty its high-sounding phrases.

Interviewed after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Francis let it be known that if someone insulted his mother he could expect a punch, making a physical gesture to illustrate his point.

This is not exactly the doctrine enunciated in the Sermon on the Mount; and one could not imagine John Paul II or Benedict XVI making so foolish or crude a mistake under the complacent impression that he was charming.

Francis’s

propensity to run after false gods, most of them fashionable in the constituency to which he evidently wants to appeal, no doubt accounts for his popularity. He is bien pensant; and where he does not yet feel able to alter doctrine in a liberal direction he is evasive and even cowardly, afraid to court distaste or opposition by clear expression of what he means.

Dalrymple asks to whom and at what these papal weasel words are directed:

It is my wish throughout my visit that the family be a recurrent theme. How essential the family has been to the building of this country! How worthy it remains of our support and encouragement! Yet I cannot hide my concern for the family, which is threatened as never before, from within and without. Fundamental relationships are being called into question, as is the very basis of marriage and the family. I can only reiterate the importance and, above all, the richness and beauty of family life.

Dalrymple:

Who and what are calling fundamental relationships into question? Fundamental relationships do not call themselves into question: someone must do it in the name of some doctrine, some belief. The Pope’s resort to the passive mood is indicative of his moral cowardice in confronting the opponents of what the Church believes in. Those opponents he knows to be militant and aggressive, and to confront them openly would lead to his fall in the popularity polls.

Francis

evades the issue with vague and oily declamation. It is one thing to be peace-loving and conciliatory, another to surrender by means of avoidance of the issue.

Such avoidance was evident when Francis said:

We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism.

Dalrymple:

This may be true in the abstract, but the wholesale persecution of religious minorities, and the perpetration of violent acts in a host of locations, is confined to Islamic extremism. It would have been better for the Pope not to have broached the subject than to have dealt with it in so pusillanimous a fashion.

The Pope’s secularist outlook is evident in his abolitionism:

I am convinced that this way is best, since every life is sacred, every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes. I also offer encouragement to all those who are convinced that a just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation.

Dalrymple:

There is nothing here about mercy, forgiveness, repentance, redemption or salvation. Rehabilitation is a purely secular concept, suggesting that the wickedness of crime is a form of illness, to be treated by the psychological equivalent of physiotherapy; sin, or even vice, doesn’t come into it.

Francis’s words

are indistinguishable from those of the European Court of Human Rights, when it ruled that it was a breach of fundamental rights that brutal repeat murderers should be sentenced to whole-life terms because such sentences exclude the possibility of their rehabilitation (even if, in practice, they would never be released). But while God may forgive Himmler – under certain conditions – surely Man cannot. The irreparable exists in the sublunary world.

At every point, Dalrymple points out, Francis

evaded specifics and resorted to unctuous generalities. No one ever courted unpopularity by denouncing injustice, but many risked much by being specific about what they considered, rightly or wrongly, unjust.

Francis

was against poverty in the way the preacher in the Coolidge anecdote was against sin. But while no secularist will speak up for poverty, the religious attitude has traditionally been more nuanced.

Francis spoke of the unjust structures that exist even in the developed world. This, says Dalrymple, is to

make a fetish of wealth.

Moreover, he was

exciting one of the seven deadly sins, envy.

Francis, Dalrymple concludes, prefers to court popularity while rocking no boats. He

plays to the gallery, wanting to be liked by everybody. There is nothing of timelessness in what he says but only of the temporal, the contingent, the fashionably platitudinous.

Zemmour’s opposition to France’s Islamisation

Éric Zemmour, writes Dalrymple, is

a ferocious opponent of what he believes to be the creeping Islamisation of France (with the connivance, willing or unwilling, of the political and intellectual elite).

Zemmour has been sacked from the TV programme on which he has appeared for years because of the following remark in response to a question about whether Muslims could or should be deported:

Je sais, c’est irréaliste mais l’histoire est surprenante. Qui aurait dit en 1940 que un million de pieds-noirs, vingt ans plus tard, seraient partis d’Algérie pour revenir en France? Ou bien qu’après la guerre, 5 ou 6 millions d’Allemands auraient abandonné l’Europe centrale et orientale où ils vivaient depuis des siècles?

Éric Zemmour

Dalrymple comments:

While Zemmour (who is of Berber Jewish origin) could claim that he was not actually advocating the kind of violent ethnic cleansing that the pieds-noirs and Germans suffered, his words could certainly be construed as encouraging or at least as wishing it. Nor is it true that his dismissal by the TV station was censorship, as he and many supporters claimed. A man’s right to free speech does not entail the duty of any particular publisher or broadcaster to disseminate his views.

In France, Dalrymple points out,

on the one hand there is a cowardly denial that there is any problem; on the other, more and more people dream of a radical or even brutal solution to it. I am reminded of the description by the Tsarist minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, of the situation in Russia in 1915: The paralytics of the government are struggling feebly with the epileptics of the revolution.