JLH has translated an excellent op-ed by Christian Ortner from the Austrian daily Die Presse:
So What Does Islam Actually Have to do With Islam?
by Christian Ortner
Brutally excluded, marginalized: there is nothing left for young Muslims in Austria except to become jihadists. Really?
Baffled, our country has been wondering for weeks… What is causing young Austrian Muslims from Favoriten [Vienna, 10th district] to travel to Syria to make war on infidels? Carla Amina Baghajati (herself a convert), speaking for the Islamic Religious Community, has a well-worn explanation. Islam the religion is not the cause of this development, but “the exclusion of the young people, who have no prospects for their lives and are being marginalized.” (“Im Zentrum,” [on ORF, Austrian national broadcasting] Sept. 14).
But who really is excluding these young people, making sure that they have no prospects and marginalizing them? Apparently, only the interculturally unempathetic, non-Muslim majority population can be responsible for the terrible misery being inflicted on young Muslims here, leaving them no other choice but to finally seek their prospects on the battlefields of Syria, and thus no longer feel excluded. A little beheading here, a little crucifying there, and a person feels valued and accepted.
In a word… The basis of modern European jihadism is not the religion nor the medieval canon of values in segments of the immigrant milieu, but the dominant, local Western lead culture. We are at fault. Who else?
The idea of perpetrators who are actually victims is a theory that is widely spread among Western leftist intellectuals (unless, of course, the perpetrators are rightist extremists). The well-known Islam scholar Reinhard Schulze has recently explained to us that one of the four Muslims who carried out a massacre in the London subway in 2005 had previously been rebuffed by a white British woman in a disco, and that was the reason for his “resentment” of “the West,” and had led to the terrorist attack. The affinity for violence of young Muslims, according to a relevant study, can be traced “to individual experiences of violence and emotional neglect in childhood.” And, as another German Islam expert, Jochen Müller, recently explained, these ultra-violent videos that are such a turn-on for some young Muslims, are… “the ultimate form of protest, rebellion and aggression against the world they are dissatisfied with.”
We get the point. If Islamophobic sluts in the disco tell young Muslims to get lost, or if Muslim parents are not sufficiently anti-authoritarian in raising their children, then there is nothing left for these traumatized men but to embrace the noble pursuit of jihad. If for no other reason, then because they don’t have to stand around stupidly chatting up the local women they want to have sex with. They can just go ahead and rape them, and no one will look askance.
This therapeutic formulation from countless European connoisseurs of jihad gives rise to fitting suggestions for solutions. Mrs. Baghajati urges “social preventive measures,” “continuing education for teachers” and all the other placebos prescribed so energetically when the intent is to cloud unpleasant facts.
And one of these facts is that people celebrate blood orgies and high terror masses, as they do in the Islamic State, because they can, and because they want to and because they enjoy it. And the idea springs to mind of a “religion of war” — as Elias Canetti characterized Islam in “Crowd and Power” — this destructive tendency of the human being which culture can contain only with difficulty, but not really defuse.
Another fact, expressed by the Dutch author, Leon de Winter is: “After the leftist fascism of the Soviets and after the rightist fascism of the Nazis, Islamism is the fascism of the 21st century.” This fascism will not be controlled by methods like teacher training, roundtable conferences and inter-religious dialogue.
Yes — let’s all retire the use of “medieval” is a synonym for “barbaric.”
islam cannot be compared to religions; apples and potatoes. Western civilization must rid itself of the blight. But progressives stand in the way. I predict there will be massive violence before this is resolved.
This song is dedicated to islam and progressives!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydBD-6izYfE
Well, if it’s the case that young Muslim men cannot take rejection, then we can’t have young Muslim men in free society where rejection is normal.
So, if they can’t do “normal,” it’s to our detriment that we encourage abnormal as the new norm.
As with JBP, I cannot see any route around “massive violence” either. Furthermore, I resent being forced into a position I’d rather reject, but because Islam has given us ultimatums of mortality, as only a zero-sum ideology can, the road ahead is ugly, chaotic, violent, but ultimately passable.
Good essay all in all; the Leon de Winter quote is unfortunate, however: Nazism was not “rightist fascism” — it was Leftist.
See:
Hitler was a Leftist: Fascism is Leftist
http://constitutionalistnc.tripod.com/hitler-leftist/id9.html
that is NOT the narrative, Hesperado. A FAIL at consensus – even though historical reality agrees with you re the leftist leanings of the Nazis, that is not what the chattering classes say.
The problem is multiculturalism. They are told that they can live, dress, and behave in the same way they would do back in the Muslim country from which they or their parents fled because it was a pit of vipers. Unemployed vipers, I should add.
Then, when they do that, they find they are not readily accepted in Europe just because they want to, or do, kill their sister because she dated a European. If they cannot integrate into 21st Century European society and accept its customs, of course they will face problems and rejection. And it looks like the problem is not just theirs.
They’ve been taught that Muslims have a rightful claim on whatever they find better about life in Western societies, and that non-Muslims have acquired those advantages not by their own efforts but by some cosmic injustice.
They’ve also been taught that Islam is the answer to every problem in life, so the relative paucity of Islam in Western societies in no way explains their superiority; on the contrary, whatever Muslims find unsatisfactory about their lives in Western societies must be a result of too little Islam.
It all flies in the face of observable facts, but Muslims aren’t known for rational, fact-based thinking.
“After the leftist fascism of the Soviets and after the rightist fascism of the Nazis, Islamism is the fascism of the 21st century.”
Leftist relativism at the end of an otherwise decent piece.
In what way was the leader of the National Socialists, Adolf Hitler, a “rightist?”
Indeed. The myth that Hitler and Nazism were “rightist” didn’t materialize out of nowhere; it was purveyed by cunning Communists. Shame on Leon de Winter for swallowing it.
You are absolutely correct and this is a common argument I have with the lemmings. How can the National Socialist Workers’ Party be right wing? No support at all from the business or upper classes. Hitler and his fellow scoundrels called themselves Socialists. More Marxist lies.
Well about that, at least Nazi sympathizers in the US definitely included the upper classes and businesses. Read “Undercover” by John Roy Carlson for examples.