A Decision To Be Unhappy

In one of my posts, I said the tears of the “Palestinians” were manufactured. I hold that many of their displays of grief we see on the TV screen are manufactured; I did not say “all”, for I do not have enough information to say such a thing—information that usually lies hidden with a man’s heart, or at best divulged only to insiders, and in Arabic.

That a great deal of their emotions are for Western Leftist eyes’ consumption is a reasonable assumption from their track record: there’s no reason why those who put children’s toys in the rubble of Hizbullah’s strongholds in Beirut (or real live children before said strongholds are reduced to rubble) should be above staging their emotions for a self-hating Western media that rewards them so richly with worldwide sympathy. Certainly there is something to be said about people supposedly lacking the bare necessities of life coming out in front of the cameras with quite nicely prepared placards in intelligible (if sometimes colored by the idiom of the area—“Jihad is the Hump of Islam”, for example) English, or throwing eggs at a building. It’s, to make an understatement, a little fishy.

However, as I said, I can’t know what goes in the hearts of people, nor am I (or ever could be) an insider in their societies. For this post I will assume that, beyond the blatant shows and stagings, there is in the Muslims a core of a real feeling of being wronged. I will take their word for it that they remember “the glorious days of the Caliphate and its prosperity”, and are grieved by the comparison of those days to the present, and dream of restoring those happy days. And I will say, frankly, that I think the resultant picture is even worse than if all of their sadness is staged.

Allow me to begin with a few analogies. No one would look down on a new programmer at a small software company who expressed a desire to become its Chief Executive Officer. In fact, such ambition, so long as no foul play is carried out in furthering it, is the lifeblood of economic progress. But if that programmer expressed a desire to become the CEO and make his company as successful as Microsoft, most people would tell him to fly a little lower. And even if that programmer expressed the desire to become the CEO of that currently small company but not bring it to the level of Microsoft thereafter, yet predicated his happiness upon being CEO, most people would tell him to change that attitude, perhaps to get professional help. For he is indeed a pitiful person who puts the fulfillment of high-flying future dreams as the condition sine qua non of his happiness!

The Muslims of today are like that programmer, only with both irrational decisions: they have decided that they could not be happy until they achieve a worldwide Islamic state (the Caliphate)—the political equivalent of the programmer deciding he could not possibly be happy until he becomes CEO of a software company of Microsoftian stature. That’s the situation we have if we assume a core of sincerity to the Muslims’ cries of oppression. Yet instead of doing what anyone would do to that over-ambitious programmer—tell him that even Napoleon wasn’t in his state before he became Emperor—the world reaches out to them in sympathy, calling theirs “legitimate grievances”, even speaking of ending their “humiliation”.

57 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, with some of them sitting on barrels of liquid gold—prosperity gained with minimal effort—and they’re still unhappy. Not just their poor, but even their affluent and well-educated, such as the 19 Saudis who flew the planes into the towers. Or perhaps their affluent and well-educated are even more unhappy, because they’re educated enough to know of their religion’s supremacist doctrines and of the non-Muslim world’s current state of still not being under Islam’s rule. It stands to reason: the Marxist narrative of “the haves versus the have-nots” makes no sense when contemplating rich, intelligent Muslims taking part in jihad, but the psychological explanation, made clear by the analogy I have given, most certainly does.

It’s all about being programmed to a feeling of entitlement, as the following Dhimmi Watch post, from November 21, shows:

A Muslim lawmaker on Monday night raged at a catering crewmember of a Chinese restaurant for serving her food with pork.

Rep. Faysah Dumarpa of Lanao del Sur reportedly slapped the crewmember, Virginia Fernando Altamirano, and held a bread knife at her.

[…]

Dumarpa even demanded that Sy fire the crewmen, and that only halal foods be made available in the South Lounge.

That was about pork. Whenever the issue of pork comes out, the Politically Correct are quick to point out that Jews too are prohibited from eating pork, so Muslims should be given the same consideration. It is not mentioned, however, that an observant Orthodox Jew would never go to eat at a non-kosher restaurant in the first place. An Orthodox Jew, if required to eat with non-Jews, would bring his own food from home, together with disposable utensils with which to eat it. He would never think of, let alone say aloud, the idea of requiring the hosts to turn their place into a kosher one. Other religionists find their own ways to accommodate their practices to the rest of society. It’s only the Muslims who think they are entitled, nay, obliged, to make the rest of the world conform to their laws. And when the others dare to resist, they regard it as “oppression”, and go crying, whether in front of the cameras or within their circles, about it all.

I’ve heard the argument that the corrupt dictators ruling most of the Muslim world are to blame for their grievances, and if they were removed, the citizens of those countries would turn them into just and prosperous places, without the grandiose dreams of the worldwide Caliphate. This argument is, ultimately, behind the Bush Doctrine of the democratization of the Muslim world. President George W. Bush set out to make that experiment on Iraq, and the results are plain for all of us to see. Were the argument true, then after the removal of the corrupt autocrat from power in Iraq, the Iraqis would have embraced the newly-installed democracy and started on the way to making Babylon as prosperous as it was in its heyday. Some, perhaps even many, but certainly not a majority, of Iraqis wanted to do that. But for most of them, democracy and the prosperity of merely one state wasn’t on their agenda at all—the religion demanded the installation of Empire, Empire, Empire all over the world, not those small-scale, near-sighted, provincial ideas of those filthy infidels from the USA, daring to tell us what’s best for us.

On the same vein, the hunger of the “Palestinians” is such that the evacuation of all the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, or of all the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (G-d forfend), cannot possibly sate, and to believe otherwise is to go against the evidence in front of one’s eyes. Do non-Muslims not understand how insulting it is for Muslims to be told to build homes for themselves and cultivate their existing lands when not all of “Palestine”, and then not all of the world the god of Islam has given to the Muslims, is yet liberated from infidel occupation? Oh, where are all those kind hearts who pride themselves on listening to and being able to understand the other side?

During the Danish Cartoons Affair there were many non-Muslims, even avowed Leftists, who expressed such taboo thoughts as, “Why can’t those people grow up?!” Precisely: that’s the same thing we would say to that programmer who predicated his happiness on becoming the CEO of Microsoft. He is childish and must be told to grow up, to be more mature in his mind as well as body. Instead, we give the political kids of the world nuclear weapons to play with. Victor David Hanson wrote an article called, “The Brink of Madness”. A good read, but I’m not sure about the “brink” part. It’s not yet too late, but we need to snap out of the self-immolating PC narrative if we’re to put an effective resistance before it is.