Part VII. Islamophobia: Facts and Fictions

T. Belman. This is Part VII of the series, ISLAM, Our Deadliest Enemy: Time is Running Out. I have been posting one Part every day for the last week and will continue for the next week til done. These articles written by VIPs and renowned scholars devastate Islam more comprehensively than anything in print. It is intended that this series come to the attention of Trump’s committee to Study Islamic Terrorism, when formed.

ISLAM, Our Deadliest Enemy: Time is Running Out

By  Prof. Paul Eidelberg, President, Israel-America Renaissance Institute, Jerusalem and Philadelphia

CONTENTS
Part I. Introduction
Part II. Identifying the Enemy
Part III. A Former Muslim Shows How to Combat the Enemy
Part IV. An Insider’s View of ‘Moderate’ Muslims
Part V. Beyond Multicultural Relativism
Part VI. The Theological Basis of Today’s Crisis
Part VII. Islamophobia: Facts and Fictions
Part VIII. Islamic Bellicosity and Blood Lust
Part IX. Blood Lust (cont’d)
Part X. Iran and Necrophelia
Part XI. Islamic Imperialism
Part XII. Islam: A Cult of Hatred, Especially of Jews

Part VII. Islamophobia: Facts and Fictions

Lest the reader draw erroneous conclusions from our admittedly provocative exposé, a word of caution is in order. Islam is not a race, and Muslims—be they Sunni, Shiite, or Sufi—do not constitute a race, no more than do Jews. There are Caucasian and Oriental and Black Muslims, just as there are Caucasian and Oriental and Black Jews. The Danish writer and historian Lars Hedegaard, who was wrongly accused of racism, rightly said that since Islam is not a race, criticism of Islam cannot be a manifestation of racism or of “Islamophobia.” Besides, fear of Islam, far from being a phobia, is not at all irrational given the murderous attitude of Islam toward non-Muslims, as the reader already knows from the diverse sources cited above. There is also the mysterious character of Islam, as Lars Hedegaard points out:

Some say that it is a religion, others that [it] is an all-encompassing ideology that contains a religion; still others emphasize its cultural norms, its culturally transmitted customs and practices. Some even maintain that Islam is so multifaceted that it is impossible to describe it. But regardless of one’s approach, it must be clear that Islam is not a hereditary human attribute. If our Western freedom means anything at all, we must insist that every grown-up person is responsible for his or her beliefs, opinions, culture, habits and actions.[i]

Another cautionary note: In the sixteenth century, the Ash’arite school of Islam, inspired by the anti-Hellenist Persian philosopher al-Ghaz?l? (1058–1111 C.E.), eventually gained ascendancy over the Hellenist-oriented Mu’tazilite school of Islam. Note well, however, that the Ash’arites reject not only the primacy of reason, but also the Genesis conception of man’s creation in the image of God (Gen.1:26-27). This Ash’arite theology, which now dominates Islam (and so-called Islamists) regards the Judeo-Christian concept of Imago Dei as blasphemous! Hence, the reigning school of Islamic theology denies free will and the primacy of reason and thus stands in direct opposition to the concept of personal responsibility intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian ethos. This is not to suggest that the moribund Mu’tazilite school can be revived or that its revival would dissolve the militant imperialism and authoritarian doctrines of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. which means that Islam is diametrically opposed to the nation-state pluralism and the value of personal freedom cherished in the West.

It must be emphasized that the conflict between Islam and the West should be understood as an intellectual as well as a moral conflict, rather than as a merely political or ethnocentric conflict. Although this conflict is the gravest issue of our time, it certainly has nothing to do with race or genetics, as we already know. The reader should bear in mind that at stake in this conflict is nothing less than the survival of Western civilization. But inasmuch as various Muslim leaders scream “Death to America” and have vowed to “wipe Israel off the map,” and further, since countless men, women, and children have already paid the supreme price in this conflict the world over, we disdain academic euphemisms, and, for the sake of moral clarity, truth, and justice, we shall use stark judgmental language to elucidate the nature of civilization’s deadliest enemy as attested to even by former Muslims.

Now let us examine the unique research of the eminent Arabist scholar Raphael Patai, whose 1976 classic, The Arab Mind, is not at all engagé. His research will convince any candid reader that the quest for genuine and abiding peace between Muslims and Arabs on the one hand, and Israel and the United States—hence Western Civilization—on the other, has no rational, no empirical, no psychological, no ideological, nor any theological foundation. Statements to the contrary by commentators—however respectable their titles or affiliations—are delusional or manifestations either of effete benevolence or of willful self-deception (if not of intellectual dishonesty), as the reader will see for himself. The essay shall  We begin with the candid observations appearing in the 2002 post-9/11edition of Raphael Patai’s book.1976 classic The Arab Mind (revised in 2002). Our conclusions apply to literate people who are not ignorant of the 9/11 destruction of the New York World Trade Center and the gleeful response of Islamdom—the world of Islam—to the horrible deaths of almost 3,000 innocent men, women, and children resulting from that infamous and unprovoked attack on the United States. This attack, if understood in terms of what the Twin Towers represented, was an unprovoked attack on the cherished values of Western civilization, an attack that merited, in the opinion of some thoughtful Americans, the leveling of Mecca and Medina.

Accordingly, the present essay utterly rejects the mindless and mendacious character of academics who color Islam, or the theology of its Scriptures, as a “religion of peace.” This belief, which leads academics well as politicians and diplomats to conclude that peace between Islamdom and Judeo-Christian civilization is possible, has no rational or realistic foundation. Referring to the Arab inhabitants of Palestine before the Second World War, Middle East expert Phillip J. Baram writes: “[W]hat often struck observers was the extraordinary, often suicidal destructiveness, and not merely in terms of vivid oratory, expressed even during local intra-Arab quarrels: bloody vendettas for generations, uprooting of trees, burning of grain stocks, destroying of wells. Great envy, superstitions, talent for dissimulation mixed with ignorance and arrogance were the concomitants.”[ii]

Even in an infidel-free world, Muslims would continue bloodying one another as they have since Islam’s inception. Hence, the present writer shall argue that current events across the globe, as well as the 1,400-year record of Arab-Islamic genocide and politicide documented by scholars and statesmen from diverse nations, and even by intellectually liberated Muslims and Arabs themselves, makes fools and liars of Arab-Islamic apologists. This conclusion will be confirmed even graphically as we proceed in this exposé—deliberately provocative to shock readers out of the timidity, obscurantism, and mendacity of so-called Islamic scholarship. However, to start with facts and ideas of urgent significance to the survival of civilization in general and of Israel in particular, I shall begin with the unabashedly worldly, uncomplicated, and germane research of Dr. Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind. (Pagination will appear in the text.)

Dr. Patai Writes:

The old pre-Islamic heritage of the lex talionis is still alive [in the world of Islam], and it works on the individual as well as on the collective plane [of Islam]. For the latter, there is no greater shame than defeat by an enemy, and especially an enemy such as Israel, the Jews, who ever since the days of Muhammad have been looked down upon by the Arabs as dhimmis, a people brought low and subjected … If it is Allah’s will that the Arabs be defeated by such an enemy, or any enemy, it is up to them to plan patiently for the revenge which alone can restore their honor, even if they have to wait for it for years or, if need be, decades. When the attainment of such s supreme value is the goal, the pressure to achieve it mounts until it is strong enough to overcome the threat-inaction pattern. Examples of such occurrences abound in past Arab history, and the determination to restore Arab honor by gaining a victory over Israel which culminated in the October War [of 1973] is but their last one [to say nothing of Israel’s American ally, presaged by Islam’s 9/11 attacks on the American mainland] (xxiii).

Patai’s understanding of the Arab mind is based primarily on historical studies that emphasize anthropology and social psychology. Accordingly, and like most commentators including the dean of Western students of Islam, Bernard Lewis, Patai ignores or avoids sustained analysis of the theological influences of Islam on the “Arab Mind.” This leads him to employ a liberal or morally neutral mode of thought to elucidate the mentality of countless Muslims who are anything but liberals, which does not mean that much cannot be learned about the Arab mind beginning with the otherwise sophisticated study of Raphael Patai.

Patai rightly emphasizes a most notorious aspect of the Arab mind, its bellicosity, and he traces this bellicosity to the Arab method of child-raising Arab males. He notes that “a boy is breast fed for two to three years; a girl for one or two” (p. 34). Demand breast feeding—instant gratification—is common for boys, such that a boy and his mother have an almost marsupial relationship. “A male infant who cries is picked up immediately. This comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals [in the belief it will ‘help him become a man amongst men’] ….This motherly caressing of the penis may go on at an age from which the boy retains distinct memories throughout this adult life….. [Indeed,] erotic pleasure is something that Arab male infants in general experience and that predisposes them to accept the stereotype of the woman as primarily a sexual object and a creature who cannot resist sexual temptation. The most frequently stated purpose of female circumcision (clitoridectomy) which is practiced in many parts of the Arab world, is to ‘calm down’ the women, that is, to diminish their libido” (p. 34). But this Islamic practice also induces in male children masculine dominance. (p. 52).

Patai offers the fascinating observation that the masculinity of Arab males is magnified by the extraordinary efforts Arab parents take to render Arab males eloquent in Arabic. For the Arab, “Eloquence is … an achievement akin to the attainment of masculinity” for it facilitates not only exaggeration but also (tawkid) or ego “assertion” (p. 52). Moreover, eloquence magnifies an Arab tendency, that of identifying what he wishes or imagines with reality, a tendency that conduces to exaggeration and prevarication.

Furthermore, eloquence provides Arabs with “a readiness to express superficial agreement and fleeting amiability which is meant to conceal the situation and hide the true feelings” of Arabs (p. 114). Conversely, Patai points out that “the Arab custom of trying to intimidate an adversary by verbal threats is such a prevalent feature of the Arab personality that it could not escape the notice of either foreign or native observers” (p. 63). The reader will readily discern that these characteristics of the Arab mind, which foster masculinity, thereby foster the desire to outdo and dominate others. In other words, the Arab exaltation of masculinity cannot but foster bellicosity and a lust for superiority.

Patai emphasizes that “conflict proneness is intrinsic to Arab-Islamic culture.” Indeed, “internal fighting is so abundantly attested in all parts of the Arab world that one must accept the truth of the general situation described. For it is a fact that the internal history of each Arab country consists in the main of struggles between two opposing parties on all successive levels of social organization…. Examples illustrating the fighting mentality without and between villages are so numerous that to cite them would soon become monotonous” (p. 232). “In between [conflicts], there were long series of meetings convened for the purpose of ironing out differences and formulating resolutions on issues of common interest to all Arab states, but ending in most cases with more disagreements than they started with” (p. 235).

Patai informs us that the former and domestically admired Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser went so far as to denounce the illiberal and contentious tendency of his own countrymen. “He had never heard,” he writes, “an Egyptian speak fairly about another Egyptian, nor seen an Egyptian who had opened his heart to pardon, forgiveness and love for his Egyptian brethren,” or who did not “devote his time to tearing down the views of another Egyptian” (p. 235). Amil Imani, the Iranian-American writer, who was born in a Muslim family, offers a personal example of the contentiousness to which Patai refers:

My relentless search [to understand Islam] took me to numerous sources, with all kinds of explanations. Some praised, Islam, specifically Shiite Islam, to high heaven and presented their evidence in support of the adulation, never mind the fact that even Shiite Islam is fractured into no less than one hundred different sects. I found the house of Muhammad fractured so extensively that there was no way any one of them could represent what Muhammad launched. The Sunnis, for instance, consider all Shiites as infidels and the Shiites label Sunnis as betrayer of Muhammad’s faith and his household.[iii]

Patai concludes that this rivalry and resulting belligerency has been part of Arab personality since pre-Islamic days. At every level discord has always been present, either actually or potentially. At the slightest provocation, the fighting propensity has been part of the Arab personality since pre-Islamic times (p. 238). Once fighting has begun, “older psychological mechanisms come into play, making it virtually impossible for either side to stop fighting, unless totally and hopelessly defeated, or unless mediation can bring about a [not long-lasting] settlement of the dispute” (p.239). The obvious reason is this: “What reigns in Arab-Islamic culture is persistence in seeking revenge, a craze about honor, and a readiness to kill for that purpose” (p. 224); or, to put it more simply, conspicuous among these people is a relentless lust for superiority.

Viewed in this light, the Western notion of “conflict resolution” is utterly foreign to Arab culture. Islam’s bellicosity and overweening desire for superiority are nonetheless ignored by Western statesman, whose intellectual or political fixation on peace is futile and fatal if not infantile. Indeed, as the philosopher Lee Harris observes—and we shall discuss him later—given the ruthless bellicosity of Islam, the only rational response is an even greater ruthlessness, and this mandates—for peace-loving people—an ironic moral imperative, “kill for peace”!

As already indicated, Patai, like most Western scholars, does not focus attention on Islamic theology as the quintessential and magnifying cause of Arab bellicosity.  Nor does he subject to critical analysis why Islamic theology is an intrinsic cause of Arab decadence. However, having raised the subject of theology, I must caution the reader that I am referring to the dominant Ash’arite school of Islam, not the Mu’tazilite school which was suppressed after the ninth century. The Mu’tazilite school, which was influenced by Greek philosophy, did not deny the primacy of God’s rationality and the significance of man’s free will. This subject has been brilliantly explored by Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, to which the present writer is greatly indebted, notwithstanding my starker but no less accurate language.

Since Patai does not provide meticulous analysis of Islam’s regnant Ash’arite theology as crucial to in-depth understanding of the Arab mind, he does not attribute Arab bellicosity and decadence to the Ash’arite suppression of the Mu’tazilites after the ninth century. Rather, he traces this decadence of Arab culture to the beginning of the sixteenth century (p. 262), long after the ascendancy of Ash’arite Islam—the Islam that reigns to this day. This may explain Patai’s dismal view of the Arab world, a view based not precisely on Islamic theology but imprecisely on what he calls the “low state of Islam in every field of human endeavor” (p. 257). He thus portrays an Arab mentality and culture steeped in “the age-old Arab virtues of manliness, aggressiveness, bravery, heroism, courage, and vengefulness, which have been extolled by [Arab] poets for more than thirteen centuries and survive in the Arab consciousness, predisposing him to conflict even though he [fondly] believes in Arab unity and brotherhood” (p. 239). Patai therefore avoids questioning the rationality of Islamic theology, a subject raised in Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind. I dare say, moreover, that Patai’s casual or typically Western diminution of the theological factor, and, conversely, Reilly’s accentuation of this factor, is what divides superficial from profound understanding of the conflict between Islam and the West! To put this another way: Whereas Muslims are notorious for their overweening pride, Jews regard humility (anava) as the highest virtue.[iv]

Going beyond Patai’s otherwise informative analysis of the Arab mind, I will now present what may be termed a Hebraic understanding of Arab-Islamic bellicosity. Although I exclude any genetic origin of this bellicosity, I nonetheless wonder whether this bellicosity has been biologically magnified by Islamic culture or behavior, and without lending any credence to the discredited geneticism of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko. I categorically reject any form of racism. Indeed, I want to emphasize the fact that seven centuries ago the outstanding Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) dared write that Arabs are a savage people, and that “savagery” describes their nature or inherent character (21). If so, this means that the horror of bloodshed and therefore the sanctity of human life are foreign to Islam. This will be graphically illustrated below to clearly illustrate the folly and futility of Israel’s century-long efforts to make peace with the descendants of Ishmael, especially those animated by Islamic theology.

[i] See http://www.radicalislam.org/news/danish-historian-prosecuted-private-speech-against-muslim-honor-violence.

[ii] Phillip J. Baram, The Department of State in the Middle East 1919-1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 46.

[iii] See http://amilimani.com/2012/05/a-perspective-on-islam/#more-1734.

[iv] See Paul Eidelberg, Beyond the Secular Mind: A Judaic Response to the Problems of Modernity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), ch. 9.