Pro-Muslim and Anti-Thug

Hello everyone. From time to time, I write something when there's something particularly complex happening, and I have to get my thoughts in close formal order. So I did that this week. I wrote an article for The Telegraph. I'm going to read it here. It's called "I'm pr-Muslim but anti-Thug."

Over the past few years, I've engaged in a continual dialogue with people across the spectrum of Islam, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who left her religious upbringing behind, through moderates such as Mustafa Akyol and Hamza Yusuf, and with forays into the more conservative side with Muhammad Hijab, for example—a rather temperamental young Muslim, not without his influence in the UK. I have done this because I believe that Jews, Christians, and Muslims share more in common than in division, and because I know that since there is no such thing as a world without religion, we all must do what is best with what we have been bequeathed.

I find myself in some arguably serious online trouble this week. Nonetheless, although I realize I'm far from alone in this, because I indicated my desire that the authorities in Israel give the terrorists who invaded their land and tortured and killed their citizens the hell that they most truly deserve. How could I say such a thing while simultaneously maintaining my desire for harmony between the peoples of the Abrahamic tradition?

Let us begin that discussion by rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. The attack on Israel last week by the monsters of Hamas occurred, as far as I am concerned, not because Muslims and Jews must by religious necessity be at each other's throats, but because Iran, a country run by thugs, and deemed so even by its own people, has become very concerned that the rulers of Saudi Arabia will continue in their laudable attempts to formulate a productive peace with Israel.

Four Arab countries recently signed the Abraham Accords, a Trump-era initiative that should have garnered, that exited for all his manifold faults, a Nobel Peace Prize—at least in a world where the efforts of Barack Obama were deemed worthy of such an honor. Behind the Arab signatories, who were essentially the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, stood the Saudis, without whose tacit agreement no such steps would have been taken—and everyone knew it.

Joe Biden and the Democrats had a historic and unparalleled opportunity to bring the Saudis into the fold soon after they took power from Trump. Instead, demonstrating an almost miraculous shortsightedness, they alienated that sometimes troublesome Middle Eastern power almost immediately after adopting office, choosing instead of peace the opportunity to deny to the previous president of the United States any of the honor he most truly deserved for his revolutionary breakthrough—one that had been deemed utterly impossible by the blinkered fools who ruled the State Department for decades.

To say it again, the Saudis would have come aboard the great ship of the Abraham Accords two years ago had Biden seized the opportunity. Instead, he and his fellow Democrats downplayed the significance of the Trump administration's cardinal achievement just to score the cheapest and most expensive of political points. And here we are again, in consequence, drowning in the blood of many Israelis and Palestinians alike, despite being snubbed in a truly provocative manner and their consequent and justified anger.

Remember the Saudi unwillingness to provide the U.S. with additional oil when Biden asked? Remember their recent flirtation with China? The Saudi leaders have been strongly considering the continuation and extension of the Abraham peace process. In consequence, the totalitarian mullahs of Iran have been driven to desperation, knowing full well that such an agreement would undermine and isolate them fatally. This is the same Iran, by the way, that the Democrats under Biden have utterly failed to resist and control, continuing a pattern well-established by the aforementioned Nobel Laureate Obama.

And what of Iran? Is it a shining star in the Islamic firmament, or is it a country hagridden by a pathologically self-serving criminal kleptocracy, religious in name only? Let's turn to psychology for a moment to answer that question. There is a form of psychopathology well detailed in recent years—the veritable place where psychological instability meets evil itself. The personality features that are part and parcel of that danger to integrated psyche and state alike first acquired the nomenclature of the dark triad: a combination of Machiavellianism, instrumental manipulativeness, and deceit; narcissism, inflated false self-esteem and desire for unearned attention and status; and psychopathy, a malignant mixture of criminal propensity, callousness, and parasitism.

The dark triad traits were identified and measured by intellectual descendants of the Canadian Dr. Robert Hare, who spent his life assessing and endeavoring to understand the worst of the habitual criminals responsible not only for the most barbaric and cruel of misdemeanors but also for the vast majority of criminal acts. The famous Pareto principle of unequal distribution of talent and acquisition applies to the underworld as well. Just as 1% of the world's inhabitants hold something approximating 70% of the wealth, so 1% of the criminals commit 70% of the crimes.

But all that's not bad enough; bad as it is, more recent investigators of the structure of the darkest of temperamental propensities found it necessary to add an extra dimension to the measurement matrix: sadism, positive delight in the suffering of others, the more unnecessary and gratuitous, the better. So now we have the dark tetrad. Dark tetrad types fit well into what is known as cluster B of the personality disorders, which also includes such delights as antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder—the female equivalent of the criminal tendency, histrionic personality disorder, also mostly female—and narcissistic personality disorder.

Those who manifest cluster B symptomatology or sins have, in addition to their other psychologically and socially dangerous tendencies, the proclivity to claim positive virtue or outright victim status while pursuing their utterly self-serving grandiose and destructive claims. The cluster B types lie, cheat, steal, gossip, reputation-savage, brag, claim credit where none is due, and distribute blame to everyone but themselves, all the while pursuing nothing but their own immediate, immature, hedonistic self-gratification, all the while trumpeting their moral virtue and/or brandishing their identity as unfairly oppressed innocents.

When they organize—and this happens from time to time—they threaten the integrity of the entire society within which they operate, hoping to light everything aflame and dance orgiastically in the ruins. This happened after the French Revolution, it happened in Soviet Russia, it happened in Nazi Germany, and it's happening now in the West with the rise of the woke. It's something markedly facilitated by the power, accessibility, and irresponsibility of social media, which allows for cluster B misbehavior to propagate with none of the usual real-world consequences—and we haven't plunged far enough into the abyss yet.

Think for a moment, use your imagination for evil if you dare. If you were hellbent on doing nothing but maximizing your own resentful, narrowly self-serving juvenile pleasure, hoping as well to do maximal harm along the way to anyone skilled and conscientious enough to have deserved a just reward, in what guise would you cloak yourself? If you were the least bit treacherously wise, you would adopt a religious cover. How better to camouflage yourself than in the robes of all that is traditional, just, merciful, and ethical? That is less effective in the West post-death of God, in consequence of the collapse of religious authority.

So here, the dark tetrad types portray themselves as the very avatars of compassion. We're for the downtrodden because we can then, in good conscience, punish the deservedly successful. We're for diversity because an ethical unity stands against our depredations. We're for inclusivity because our fetishes and kings demand their full expression, and to hell with everyone else. We're for equity because merit is our sworn enemy.

Ask yourself this too: how else are you to explain the staggeringly incomprehensible spectacle of, for example, Queers for Palestine? Perhaps the most egregious example of the union of the desire by progressives to tear down everything in the West that is worthy, even at the cost of formulating an alliance that would, in an instant, be suicidal if it ever made itself manifest.

And for those Muslims thinking that it's the evil Jews—trademark registered; is Iran your idea of a worthy Islamic state? The very Iran whose citizens, Muslims all, have been on the brink of revolution against their psychopathic masters for more than a year and dreaming about it for much longer than that? The very Iran whose hypothetically religious leaders have to oppress their own women because that's the only way they can control those stupid enough to have a go at them?

The Iran that has, in recent weeks, decided to rattle the chains of their Hamas dogs, stating in the background, explicitly or implicitly, "Unleash the crest of your minions—send them to Israel to do their worst. The Jews will respond as they must. Turn the opinion of the Arab world against the Hebrews before we lose our grip, and if that means that the Palestinians unite everyone reasonable in the world against them, at their great cost, so be it."

And has that not happened? Muslims, ask yourself this: who in the West has allied themselves with the hypothetical cause of the oppressed Palestinians in the days since the Hamas invasion? University students, demented by the same idiot left radical professors who have destroyed academia? The former president of Harvard University itself, Lawrence Summers, said as much last week.

Who else? Marxists, whose hatred for Islam exceeds anything that the most committed perverse fundamentalist Christian or Jew might muster. Remind me once more: what is it that the opiate of the masses, Muslims? What is regarded as the essential and absolute enemy of the communist utopia? Nothing but the very religious practice you share with your Abrahamic brothers.

Who else brings up the rear? The increasingly delusional alphabet brigade—the LGBT2SQ+ community, foolish and blind enough to assume that commonality of hypothetical oppression is enough to unite it somehow with the mullahs of Iran and the gangsters of Hamas—dark tetrad types all, who would have their blue and pink heads on a pike in the street in a moment if they were only granted the opportunity. Useful idiots—this is useful idiocy on a scale undreamed of by the most extreme of Leninists and Maoists alike.

And what if Israel, as an oppressor state? Well, the Palestinians who live in Israel proper are certainly a lot better off, by any standard, than the Palestinians who live in Gaza, despite the fortune that has been sent to that blighted area, all of which, for all intents and purposes, has been funneled into the secret and not-so-secret bank accounts of the dark tetrad religious leaders who parade their lying virtues so successfully.

It was CBC News itself that announced in 2003 that Yasser Arafat had squirrelled away $1 billion in his hidden portfolios. Anyone who doesn't think the same thing is happening now—and that goes for Ukraine too, folks—is a fool whose blindness is leading them into the proverbial pit.

Tell me this honestly, angry Muslims desirous of genuinely practicing your faith: do you really think you have anything in common with those who have aligned themselves with you in the West in the past week? Are those the brave and forthright comrades in arms whose support lends credence to the eternal and endlessly manipulable Muslim against Jew story?

And tell me again how that alliance is better for your faith and your people than recognition of your Abrahamic commonality with the Christians and present-day descendants of the ancient Hebrews? And tell me too, how the decentralized structure of your religion, admirable in so many regards, protects it against capture under situations of duress by the bloody psychopaths who make a faith nothing but a front for criminal evil?

I'm not saying we're any better in the West; our susceptibility to the blandishments of the postmodern Marxist dark tetrad mob is a weakness of equivalent danger. But it's your people taking center stage right now, and your people who have to make a wise decision—or else. And it's a big or else.

The Saudis and the other signatories of the Abraham Accords have a stark choice in front of them, as do the dispersed people of the Islamic world. They—and you—can allow the thugs, particularly those in Iran and Palestine, to triumph in their propagandistic efforts to prop up their own dismal, miserable, and tyrannical states. They—and you—can, in consequence, battle the new peace treaty signed with Israel, forego all the obvious benefits for the Muslim world offered by that agreement, and acquiesce to continued rule by the crest of hypocrites misusing faith in the worst possible of ways.

What is the famed second commandment of Moses? "Do not use God's name in vain." What does that mean? It does not mean, "Do not swear," or if it does, that is its most trivial warning. It means much more fundamentally: do not attribute to yourself the virtue of the Divine when acting on your own behalf, let alone when acting in the thrall of the forces of darkness themselves.

This sentiment is reinforced at least three times by Christ himself in the Gospels. First, when he says, "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets that they may be seen of men." Second, pointing to the moral hazard in doing good works other than privately: "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." And third, when he says, "Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."

Once again, the mere claim that it is religious conviction that motivates personal action is no proof whatsoever that such is the case. It is very difficult to aim upward in alliance with the spirit that wishes everything well and in keeping with the truth. It is a path rife with moral hazard, and the public display of virtue, including the adoption of high church or mosque or synagogue position, is not any guarantee that the God claimed to be present is, in fact, there.

Quite the contrary: all too often the Saudis and you in the Muslim world, more generally, could instead remove the beam from your eyes, as we should equally in the West, see what is so starkly manifesting itself in the world, turn away from the terrible tempting path of righteous destruction, continue the work already begun in uniting the people of the Book, and thereby bring a productive, generous, wise, and lasting peace to this blighted but still not yet doomed and even potentially wonderful green and blue orb.

We need a transcendental access to revolve around to move us beyond a blinkered materialism, to protect us against a foolish populism, and to lift up our eyes to the eternal heaven beckoning above us. In the West, we have that for all the faults of the followers of the creeds, and even with the creed themselves as currently understood in the form of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

We need our Abrahamic faith, lest the hedonistic pagans and worse prevail, and we need to stand united behind it. And that is why I'm pr-Muslim but anti-thug. And if you are a true follower of Allah, that is the decision that is incumbent upon you in equal measure, and that goes as well for the Christians and the Jews.