From a cultural and religious point of view, many Muslims have been relentlessly brainwashed against all non-Muslims and empowered to express themselves, often violently, when they feel shamed or dishonored. Systematic, normalized, but hotly denied child abuse within Muslim and Arab families may also lead to a “paranoid” world view in which The Other is always blamed for one’s own suffering.
From a psychological point of view, most Muslims have been raised in shame-and-honor societies in which they have learned to blame others, preferably outsiders, never themselves. Their cultural skins are very thin; they do not have the habit of self-introspection and they do not tend to take individual responsibility for their own mistakes. Above all, they have been trained to never criticize their own leaders, but to scapegoat Jews and westerners for Arab and Muslim suffering.
Muslims and Arabs are not always used to hearing or telling the truth. The blessed exceptions are usually imprisoned, tortured, and murdered either by their own families or by the state. Finally, too many Muslims have been deeply “Palestinianized,” i.e., empowered to unleash verbal and psychological intifadas, as well as actual riots and suicide terrorism on behalf of a presumably noble cause.
A Muslim (former) friend of mine glanced at the names of those who endorsed my new book (Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz, Amir Taheri, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, etc.) and exclaimed: “I don’t want to read this. You are working with known racists.”
But how are we to understand leftists, including feminists, who also allege “racism” where it does not exist?
I recently had a wonderful talk with two pioneer Second Wave feminists. Both had dropped out of the movement in the early 1970’s after observing and experiencing the abusive and destructive ways in which feminists treated each other. One has remained a leftist, the other has not. One woman said, “I have a good friend who is a left feminist. She is an innocent – not malevolent in any way, but simply incapable of changing her point of view, not even after 9/11. It is psychologically too much for her to begin to think “out of the box.” She is so used to blaming America for everything that she needs to keep blaming America, even for 9/11. To this day, she has not been able to blame the jihadists.
The other woman said, “Some people can’t live with ambiguity, doubt, competing claims, the unknown. They need Total Answers, even when that particular boilerplate doesn’t fit reality anyway.”
I think they are both right.
The terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11 were all Arab Muslims. Saying so does not make one a “racist,” but an objective reporter of the facts.
Al-Qaeda is composed only of Muslims. It is a terrorist network. Saying so does not make one a “racist.” Blaming 9/11 on the Mossad or the CIA, as many Islamists and leftists do, is an example of culturally licensed “paranoid” thinking. Saying that the Palestinians systematically engage in barbaric behavior such as lynching, honor-murdering, dancing in the streets, and handing out cakes and candies on 9/11 and more recently when they heard that Prime Minister Sharon had suffered a stroke, does not make one a “racist.”
Today, Truth is held hostage to the charge of “racism.” It is important that each and every one of us free her.