🤣 🔪 The deradicalisation farce 😂 ☠️

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic and deadly

Dalrymple writes that the ease with which Kujtim Fejzulai was able to deceive psychologists, police, and other supposed experts into believing that he had abjured Moslem extremism

would have been funny had its consequences not been so terribly tragic.

It is during their youth, he notes,

that men such as he, who are attracted to violence, are most likely to commit it. But a sentimental view of youth prevailed.

Arrogant technocratic mindset

So many Western authorities and governments

suppose not only that there is a technical solution to all problems, but that they have found it. They imagine that, since they are representatives of the most advanced societies, they have techniques to change the ‘primitive’ mindsets of Moslem extremists. Surely it is not possible for people with an outlook that belongs more to the 7th than to the 21st century to fool people with doctorates, who have access to the latest technology and all the information in the world?

But the fact is that

any ignorant and stupid 7th-century-minded extremist is more than a match for any number of psychologists, criminologists, sociologists, computer scientists, etc.

While Dalrymple cannot of course sympathise with the Moslem fundamentalist outlook to the slightest extent,

in a sneaking or convoluted way, I am glad that he is up to the task. His ability so easily to deceive means that technocracy is still not triumphantly successful — as I hope that it never will be. Our humanity is preserved by the fact that so-called deradicalisation is a charade. What Fejzulai needed was not a technical procedure but 30 years or more in prison to cool his heels: for society’s sake rather for than his.

The technocratic approach according to which Moslem extremism is a quasi-medical or physiological problem, to be ‘treated’ as if it were an illness,

is applied to crime in general. Crime is not a choice of the criminal but a problem of physiological development, such that punishment is a kind of moral orthodontics.

The Fejzulai case

shows how easily those who devote their whole professional lives to the ‘assessment’ of such people may be deceived. One might have thought, a priori, that it was obvious that feigning repudiation of terroristic ideas was not very difficult; indeed, only someone with an exaggerated and even arrogant belief in his own powers to penetrate the minds of others would suppose otherwise.

A rotten fruit

Dalrymple observes that the early release of such as Fejzulai has another effect, that

it is further proof of decadence and weakness in the West, which is a rotten fruit whose tree only needs a bit of a shake for the fruit to fall. If a society is so sentimental about its enemies as it was in the case of Fejzulai, what powers of resistance against determined attack could it have?

The very idea of deradicalisation is an encouragement of Moslem terrorism.

The technocrat in general, and the psychologist in particular, is the unwitting ally of the machete- and Kalashnikov-wielding fraternity of fanatics. In what contempt must they hold those who claim to be able to reform them: a contempt that in a certain sense is justified.

The hackneyed all-our-thoughts formula

Usman Khan

Dalrymple points out that whenever high-profile murders take place in the West,

someone in high authority is bound to say something like All our thoughts are with the victims (or the relatives of the victims).

He points out that

this is a lie, and by no means a noble one: all the high authority’s thoughts ought not to be with the victims or with the relatives of the victims. The authority ought rather to be thinking of whether there are means to prevent similar attacks in the future. It is perfectly possible to express decent condolences without resort to obvious and insincere exaggeration.

Presumption of guilt

Dalrymple was very unfavourably impressed by Tariq Ramadan on the single occasion that he met him.

He seemed to me the Jimmy Swaggart of Islamism, or at least the kind of man from whom one would certainly not buy a second-hand car. He had the affability of a carpet salesman in a souk, but without the charm; his affability struck me as sinister.

Ramadan is known for

his way of talking in one register to a certain kind of audience and in a completely different register to another kind of audience.

In order that that we, his readers, do not have to endure them, Dalrymple has actually read a couple of Ramadan’s books. They bear

the same relationship to scholarship as football commentary does to playing football.

Contempt of court

Sans scales: Crumlin Road Courthouse

All the same, says Dalrymple, Ramadan’s arrest for alleged rape, and his subsequent questioning by the police, raises disturbing questions.

Here was a man who so far had been found guilty of nothing.

Ramadan was,

de facto, being described publicly as guilty.

Dalrymple points out that Ramadan has not been proved guilty. It is, he reminds us,

wrong that information intended to be damning should be paraded before the public prior to a proper trial and verdict.

Islam’s omnisufficiency

Dalrymple writes that for young Muslims,

an ideological and religious solution that is flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient

is ready to hand. The problem is that this religio-ideological solution

is in unavoidable conflict with a large element of each individual’s identity.

So you want to be a suicide bomber

A convict tells Dalrymple of his wish to kill innocents. He is

more hate-filled than any man I have ever met.

The offspring of a broken marriage between a Muslim man and a female convert, he

has followed the trajectory of many young men in his area: sex and drugs and rock-and-roll. Violent and aggressive by nature, intolerant of the slightest frustration to his will and frequently suicidal, he experienced taunting during his childhood because of his mixed parentage. After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and has become convinced that any system of justice that takes the word of a mere woman over his own is irredeemably corrupt.

The underlying emotion is hatred

Dalrymple notices one day that his mood has greatly improved.

He is communicative and almost jovial, which he has never been before. I ask him what has changed in his life for the better. He has made his decision, he says. Everything is resolved. He is not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he previously intended. Suicide is a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he gets out of prison he will not kill himself; he will make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he can.

Enemies, Dalrymple asks; what enemies? How can he know that the people he kills at random will be enemies?

They are enemies, he says, because they live happily in our rotten and unjust society. By definition, they are enemies—enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it—and hence are legitimate targets.

Dalrymple asks him whether he thinks that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalls him, not because it is yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he cannot conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumes a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wants to attack and destroy.

The ‘potential space’ of Islamism

With its ready-made diagnosis and prescriptions, writes Dalrymple, it

opens up and fills with the pus of implacable hatred for many in search of a reason for and a solution to their discontents.

According to Islamism, Dalrymple notes, the West can never meet the demands of justice, because it is

• decadent
• materialistic
• individualistic
• heathen
• democratic rather than theocratic

Only

a return to the principles and practices of 7th-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time.

This notion, he points out, is

no more (and no less) bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century: that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men.

The suicide bomber bears no mark of Cain

Ideology makes all the difference

It is unlikely, writes Dalrymple,

that any characteristic or group of characteristics will prove to be pathognomonic of the condition of being a suicide bomber.

Certainly, says Dalrymple,

there are characteristics that appear in quite a proportion. We think of such bombers as second-generation immigrants in search of a cultural identity, who may have led a life of modern dissipation until, in a fit of self-disgust, they give up that life in favour of violent, arrogant and self-important puritanism.

The trouble is that

any characteristic that is found among suicide bombers is likely to be found among many people who are not suicide bombers. The number of dissipated young men who turn arrogantly pious is likely to be a hundred times greater than that of suicide bombers.

Nevertheless,

a religious ideology, vile and impoverished as it might be, is an important cause. Whatever the travails of Moslem immigrants to Europe, they are not objectively different in kind from those of other immigrants from far-off lands. It is ideology that makes the difference.

Dalrymple adds that discrimination between asylum-seekers is very much

in accordance with that unspeakable thing, the national interest.

Islamism in Britain is not the product of Islam alone

Dalrymple notes that some British Muslims succeed in life, a fact which is interpreted backwards:

not that Muslims can succeed, but that generally they cannot, because British society is inimical to Muslims.

In coming to this conclusion, Dalrymple points out, young Muslims

would only be adopting the logic that has driven Western social policy for so long: that any difference in economic and social outcome between groups is the result of social injustice and adverse discrimination. The premises of multiculturalism do not even permit asking whether reasons internal to the groups might account for differences in outcomes.

This sociological view is peddled consistently by the poll-tax-funded British state broadcaster, which states, for example, that Muslims ‘continue to face discrimination’. Thus,

• if more Muslims than any other group possess no educational qualifications, even though the hurdles for winning such qualifications have constantly fallen, it can only be because of discrimination—though a quarter of all medical students in Britain are of Indian subcontinental descent. It can have nothing to do with the widespread—and illegal—practice of refusing to allow girls to continue at school, which the Press scarcely mentions, and which the educational authorities rarely if ever investigate
• if youth unemployment among Muslims is two-and-a half-times the rate among whites, it can be only because of discrimination—though youth unemployment among Hindus is  lower than among whites (and this even though many young Hindus complain of being mistaken for Muslims)

Dalrymple comments:

A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on ‘social justice’, the negation of which is ‘discrimination’, can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice.

Islamism in Britain, Dalrymple emphasises, is

the product of the meeting of Islam with an entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems.

It makes you nostalgic for Marxism

Perhaps in earlier times, writes Dalrymple, Salman Abedi

would have found a Marxist groupuscule providing the total explanation of all the ills of the world that troubled youth so often seek, and suggesting to them the total solution. But the downfall of the Soviet Union destroyed the prestige of Marxism, so Abedi sought his total explanation and solution elsewhere. The obvious place was Islam, for he was of Muslim descent and heritage and there were no other contenders for possession of his soul, both little and grandiose.

Of interest to psychopathologists

Dalrymple comments:

I never thought I would lament the demise of Marxism, but I have recently begun to remember it rather more fondly. By comparison with Islamism, it was intellectually compelling; Marxists could have interesting things to say, however mistaken they were, which Islamists never can and never will be able to do. At most, they are interesting to psychopathologists.

The ideology of the caliphate, he notes,

is so absurd and intellectually vacuous that to try to refute it is to do it more honour than it deserves or is capable of supporting.

But, he says, history proves that

absurdity is no obstacle to acceptance, even (or perhaps I should say especially) by the intelligent and educated.

Cherchez les Saoudiens

Moreover, Islamism in Europe, Dalrymple points out,

can count on the financial support of, or sustenance by, the Saudi, or Wahhabi, state, which has spent untold millions in spreading its version of rigourism, on creating the atmosphere in which it flourishes and without which it would not survive.

Canting humbugs in their hundreds of thousands

Hard feelings in the East Indies

The sentencing of the Christian governor of Jakarta to two years’ imprisonment for blasphemy might, writes Dalrymple,

seem like a throwback to mediæval intolerance,

but, he says,

it is more than that. It is a reminder that the suppression of the freedom of others is more fun than the exercise of freedom.

The Muslim masses who demanded the prosecution of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama

enjoyed their virtuous anger,

which is

among the pleasures that their religion does not deny them.

Islamic humbug

Dalrymple notes that although intellectually primitive, the condemnation and sentencing of Ahok, as he is known,

was in one respect modern. One of the judges said that punishment was justified because the governor had hurt the feelings of Muslims—which must have been as delicate as those of Western students who need safe spaces and teddy-bears to hug if they hear something that contradicts their preconceptions.

The desire not to have one’s feelings hurt

has been erected into a right increasingly enforceable at law. Not everyone’s feelings are treated with the solicitude that we show a nice fluffy colourful species of animal that is on the verge of extinction. But treating people’s feelings with this solicitude tends not only to preserve them but to cause them to flourish.

Dalrymple avers that

we have a duty to control our indignation, for most of the time it will be liberally admixed with humbug.

He does not expect his message to be heard in Jakarta,

to judge from the pictures of those hundreds of thousands of canting humbugs in the city’s streets.