Below is a German opinion writer’s acerbic take on the politically correct madness of the West as uncovered by last weekend’s jihad massacre in Orlando.
Many thanks to JLH for the translation from Die Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung:
We Were the Ones — Who Else?
How the West originally made Muslims gay-haters, what the Thais have to do with Auschwitz, and what idiots we are.
Week in Review
by Hans Heckel
June 18, 2016In overheated situations, it is especially important to differentiate. We must be on guard against hastily drawn conclusions, which could lead to general condemnations.
We refer, of course to the massacre in Orlando in the US state of Florida. At the moment, there is some confusion over whether the radical Islamic terrorist acted out of religious delusion or just out of pure hatred for gays. That was the day-long theme on all channels and in almost all newspapers. At this time, it seems to be the most explosive question of all. An interesting guessing game. By the same logic, we could put the labored question of whether the murderers of Jews in the 1940s acted out of the ideological delusion of Hitlerism, or just plain Jew-hatred.
You ask: What is this idiotic distinction supposed to accomplish? Yes, we’d like to hear the answer to that, too. But we are not being quite honest here — because we already know the answer. It’s the old saw about “Nothing to do with Islam.” Even the Gutmenschen can hardly fail to recognize that hatred of gays is especially thick on the ground in Islamic countries, which is a dilemma for the “Has nothing to do with Islam” faction.
A writer for Die Welt offers an elegant solution. To be sure, there is a particularly well developed homophobia in Islamic countries. However, its tradition is not a long one. With a display of knowledge, she presents proof in the form of examples of homo-erotically tinged literature of the Muslim Middle Ages.
And then, not until the 19th century does uptightness make an appearance and — you guessed it — in a work of the colonial powers. In other words, we are the guilty ones. As evidence, our commentator proffers a work from the 13th century which was published anew in Damascus at the end of the 19th century. In this edition, the passages in question are relegated to the end of the book, so that “the reader at need may do away with them.” When the work was published in Beirut a few years later, the passages were no longer a part of it. The Welt writer attributes this to the “censorship regulations of colonial powers,” which would lead the reader who had already heard of the unhealthy influence of the “Victorian” West to think of the English, the French, or the like.
But who was the “colonial power” in Beirut and Damascus at the end of the 19th century”? It was the Ottoman Empire, whose sultan also had the title “caliph.” You can’t get any more Islamic than that. Well, maybe. Right there, in the Arabian Peninsula, the rulers, then as now, were the Saudis, under whose reign Wahhabism has become a religious guideline. This is that stream of radical Islamism whose adherents outside of Saudi Arabia are known as Salafists. They are those shaggy Koran distributors you recognize from the pedestrian zone.
Never in their history did the Saudis have a “Western colonial power” over them. Before the discovery of their oil resources, no one had the slightest interest in the waste they called a homeland. Only the coastal areas of the present-day kingdom were ruled by foreigners — and those were not Europeans, but Turks. In their dry-as-dust hinterlands, the Saudis were largely untouched, and could calmly and in isolation brew a radical version of Islam, whose excesses today horrify the whole world. So, enough of “the guilt of the West.” What impels the Welt writer to such remarkable contortions, which are so easy to refute? Apparently, it is the obtrusion of an obsession which you may have encountered frequently. She is pressing the victims into service to represent — in all the evils of the world — the Guilt of the West, of the European, of the White Man or, ideally, of the German. If this guilt cannot be proved, then it will be constructed, no matter how sloppily it is put together.
As to the guilt of the Germans, the overriding narratives are again achieving an apogee. The Green chief Cem Özdemir[1] accuses Germans of being accomplices to the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, so now we have taken on the guilt of complicity.
Brief overview: At the time (1915), Germany was fighting for survival. A rift between Berlin and Constantinople could have caused a catastrophe on its southeast flank. What could the Empire have done to stop the Turks? That is the ploy of the hyper-moralist. They measure the accused against standards that they cannot accommodate, no matter how they contort. So they are caught in the trap of the miscreant. What gives this an especially shrill tone is that the accusation is being made by an ethnic Turk.
Just imagine a German representative in the Japanese parliament. I know, there are none. Just assume there were, and he accused the Japanese of complicity in Hitler’s murder of the Jews, because they were allies of Berlin. How long would it be before his party (whichever one) advised him to stand down and make a full apology to the Japanese people? A quarter of an hour? Three minutes? Anyway — weren’t the Thais also allies of the Axis powers? Did they know about their complicity in Auschwitz? I am afraid they don’t even know about it. It’s high time for Cem Özdemir to give these Far Eastern pharisees a clue.
Of course, he will not, and we know why: Being-Universally-Complicit only applies to certain groups and peoples. It is especially good with Germans, because they are so eager to sit up and beg, and then come up with a nice little gratuity.
Other peoples react to such harassments more basically, laugh at the accuser, or pound him a good one. Who could imagine making the Americans or British complicit with the actions of the Red Army and the Stalin regime against German civilians and many East European peoples, just because the Western powers were their allies at that time? Nobody.
The standards change with lightning quickness, depending on which people is being judged. So much for the highly touted “equality of all peoples.” It really wasn’t meant that way. And also, there is this painful question of what exactly “German” is. For decades now, we have been learning that we are basically a diverse, mixed race people. Since Caesar’s time (at the latest!), all kinds of ethnicities have been moving in with their baggage, so that there never really was anything like “German,” let alone “pure German.”
And now that isn’t true anymore either. With an astonishing reach into ethnic hereditary theory, Wolfgang Schäuble[2] has discovered “inbreeding” — an unhealthy excess of “thoroughbrededness” — that bespeaks a pressing need for a massive alien refreshment of our bloodlines. What a turnaround that is! The pollsters are always asking what we Germans think of our politicians. Maybe they should try it the other way around — what the politicians think of us, the German citizens. They seem to take us for utter fools.
Notes:
| 1. | He was born in Germany. Both parents immigrated to Germany from Turkey, in 1961 (father) and 1964 (mother). His father belonged to the ethnic minority Circassians. | |
| 2. | Longest-serving member of Bundestag (CDU), holder of various ministerial posts. |
In the American South, you still sometimes hear the argument that the Civil War was not really about slavery, but States Rights, taxation, and mercantile policy. It is stated, correctly, that the vast majority of the members of the Confederate military were both dedicated to the Cause, and not slave owners. While there is certainly some validity that there were other issues at play, the argument collapses when you ask whether there would have been a war if slavery had not existed? QED
The same applies when discussing the Religion of Peace. There have been other mass shooters, such as the Olympic Park Bomber who was nominally a Christian. He would have almost certainly done something very similar without that consideration. Another example would be the Virginia Tech killer. By comparison, if you remove the Islamic component from each of the major tragedies of the past 20+ years, they would have been very unlikely to happen.
Yes. Try this thought experiment: Imagine that Islam mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth forty years ago. How many massacres would have occurred during those four decades, compared with the actual death toll? How many bombs would have blown up buses full of civilians? How many mass shootings and stabbings would there have been? How many fratricidal wars?
There will always be mass homicides committed by deranged people, but only Islam encodes such behavior as its principal raison d’être. I suspect it raises the incidence of such atrocities by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.
More so. We forget so much of the knock-on effect. In the Americas most notably with import of a Christianity savaged by 800 years of Islam. Who knows what the face of Christian Spain might have been without it. In South Africa, the Zulus have been unrelentingly shamed by the Muslims they work for for 200 years. But only the British get the blame. I’m sure if you research China you’ll find similar effects. Certainly Hindusim has had to adjust. Why did the Brits find such a proud, ancient civilisation so easy to kick under the boot?
And the Sikh religion rose out of Hinduism as a militant response to the Mughal (Muslim) invasions; that’s another one.
The awful thing is that if as you say “Islam mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth forty years ago”, the world would be a safer, happier and richer place — richer especially for all the waste on military and other forms of defense necessitated by Mohammedan aggression.
I don’t claim to have run the numbers, which would be a biggish project. But I’m pretty sure that 1 billion Mohammedans amount to a net loss for our species.
Namonai – PLEASE read more carefully. He is not talking about Muslims. He clearly says “islam” – you know, the political, juridical supremacist ideology that demands death or submission to anyone outside its walls – and anyone within its walls who might want to leave.
Not to mention the frequent cleansing of Islam by Shi’ites and Sunnis who believe the other faction to be mortally wrong. That’s why ISIS got stalled: first it had to kill all the rilly, rilly bad Muslims – those nasty Shia adherents in Iraq – before they could begin slaughtering the Christians and Yezidi.
So how do they tell the difference? I mean it’s not like picking out the Jews in a crowd – you don’t get any information by pulling down their trousers. Instead, here’s how they do it:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/middle-east/4-questions-ISIS-rebels-use-to-tell-Sunni-from-Shia/articleshow/37257563.cms
I realize the whole issue is confusing, but I’m rather annoyed that you would see us as EVER advocating death for belief. I almost deleted your comment for suggesting such a thing, but I will assume your good faith in asking such a question, even as I question your assumption that we would advocate what you’re so carelessly assuming.
There. I didn’t say dim-witted. But should you ever suggest such a thing again, I will say it very loudly as I put your comment in the circular file, where such a conjecture deserves to be. Sheesh.
I really don’t understand.
So are you saying ‘Islam’ is some mysterious free-floating state of mind that cannot ever be defined and pinned down, world without end, so any sort of defense is impossible. If ‘Islam’ disappeared then is only meant that if the ideology magically disappeared, but for that to happen the ‘people’ who continually recreate it, promulgate it, and enforce it have nothing to do with its continued existence.
So really its hypothetical disappearance is just a fantasy, a wish for what the world might have been. If this was 1942 and we hypothesized the disappearance of Nazism which let us say had been in existence for 1400 years and launched genocide after genocide. And we hypothesized the imaginary disappearance of the ideology of Nazism 40 years earlier so the most recent genocide and series of attacks it inflicted had not occurred.
But it’s all moot, isn’t it? Because the West has decided that any sort of robust defense cannot be allowed. The West might as well roll over and die in the coming generation b/c the rules of engagement against Islam appear to be ‘no deaths of Muslims allowed’. Our survival can only occur magically, with no messy killing, or not at all.
Well then, it’ll be not at all. This is precisely why the West is so doomed, so utterly abysmally doomed b/c we can’t even imagine & discuss the necessary measures. The terrorism will just escalate until there are attacks every week in every non-Muslim country, 100’s of cars set on fire in every city (1000’s of cities) every night, 10’s of 1000’s or rapes in every city, sector fights & entire blocks on fire in every city across the world. And we’re defenseless. How do you think Islamic War on the West will be won. El Ingles’s articles weren’t kidding. All war is total war.
Islam is in fact a belief system that demands of its adherents to kill those outside the belief system. So what is fighting Islam if not death for belief? We’re fighting Muslims b/c they adhere to a belief that requires they kill us for our beliefs. War with Islam is in fact ‘death for belief’, how could it be anything else? Unless you’re imagining a magical solution with no killing.
I’ve been massively depressed over the past week b/c across Europe and the USA there’s this calm acceptance of routine Islamic attacks resulting in 100’s of deaths. And there’s no solution. That seems to be where we’ve arrived as a culture. How can we ever survive with this sort of thinking?
I have noticed no outrage about the attack in Orlando except among those people with traditional western type cultural values. I also notice that Die Welt’s writer appears to be blaming traditional western culture FOR the attack in Orlando.
Curious that the people who have sufficient morals and ethics to object are the ones targeted for blame.
I suppose Die Welt is a leftist newspaper. Rendering morals to absurdity could be a means to get morality and ethics out of the picture. Morals and ethics make the little guy potentially the equal of anyone, including those who have power. I have heard much said by the left about equality but I have seen little done by them except mockery. I have never seen reason to think that equality or ethics of any kind beyond mockery was ever part of their plan.
So, those who are not troubled at all by the mass killing in Orlando can blame those who are outraged about it. It is the way of the western left and of their islamic allies of the moment.
Muslims are taught that women rank somewhere between camels and dogs. They must experience a massive disconnect when they find themselves sexually attracted to a women. That alone probably accounts for a lot of their psychosis.
@ Stephen Carter (that thread ran out of room, so I had to take it down here:
So are you saying ‘Islam’ is some mysterious free-floating state of mind that cannot ever be defined and pinned down, world without end, so any sort of defense is impossible. If ‘Islam’ disappeared then is only meant that if the ideology magically disappeared…
I don’t think I was saying that. At least that was not my meaning. What I proposed is more in line with Bat Ye’or’s ideas about the way that European leaders (particularly de Gaulle) saw the Middle East with all its petroleum as the linchpin of power. Thus, to control MENA was to have access to the fuel of the engine of progress – if Europe could do that it would be more powerful than the U.S., its great rival.
As a thought experiment, consider this: (1)vast reserves of oil are discovered FIRST on the European continent. (2)In addition, MENA has no mineral resources that the world wants. Nothing at all but desert, just as it had been from time immemorial. (3)Would Islam have had any influence or would it have remained the ruined desert that visitors like Mark Twain described when he visited in the 19th century?
There are two writers whose ideas influenced my thinking in this.
(1) The first can be seen in a video by Bill Warner:
“Why We Are Afraid”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Qpy0mXg8Y
(2) The second is Emmet Scott’s book (still on our sidebar, where it will remain as long as we are extant) . In “Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited”, Scott proves definitively (to my thinking) how thoroughly the Western psyche was invaded by the utter brutality of the Arabs who appeared in the Mediterranean and rapidly took over North Africa.
First, Egypt, once the breadbasket of the Med, supplying grain for food and papyrus for the easy transmission of literacy (which was necessary for the rapid growth of trade that occurred) became a permanent basketcase instead.
Then North Africa, with its ties to Rome and to the transmission of Greek and Roman philosophy and political administration (again, a need for literacy), not to mention its wealth of the superior clay from which much of the Med’s slipware was made. The importance of Hippo, the city where Augustine wrote the first Western autobiography (among other things) was destroyed by the hordes of Arabs who over ran the area.
The destruction of both was quite rapid. And unlike most wars of aggression to that point, it wasn’t “raid and leave” – Arabs took over the land. What was once rich farmland (think of the Egyptian’s complex engineering that tamed the floods of the Nile to allow predictable agricultural production) in North Africa shortly became desert. Dhimmis couldn’t object when the goats and sheep of the tribal marauders destroyed those centuries of engineering.
Where they could, non-Muslims fled to the mountains and cities began to be enclosed for safety. But much of the population was enslaved and taken away. In succeeding waves of desolation, the coast became desert-ified too.
In a rare mechanism for humanity, rather than moving forward, some ideas began to disappear from folk knowledge. For example, because Muslims dominated, they simply took things like carts from the indigenous cartwrights and wheelwrights who’d made them. It became pointless to build another cart since it, in turn, would be stolen. Those desert tribes who invaded and took over looked down on manual labor (they still do) so carts disappeared in MENA, along with the knowledge of how to make them.
In Egypt today, the few remaining Copts are either prosperous, running businesses (like the cellphone industry) or they are the despised Zabbaleen, “the garbage people” in Cairo who make their living collecting the trash and garbage and recycling it. A few years ago, because of the growing persecution of Copts, including the Zabbaleen, the latter went on strike. No Islamic Muslims attempted to start a business in their place – instead, the stink just piled up in huge mounds.
BTW, the whole mess started bec the Egyptians wrongly believed that the pigs kept by the Z’s were the cause of swine flu and destroyed the animals responsible for consuming the garbage, thus the Zabbaleen had no motive to collect. What a complex system.
I could go on, venturing into Spain’s conquest, but you get the idea. The relatively peaceful early coastal Europeans were invaded and destroyed. Thus, the beginning of our “Dark Ages” – where no memory of the Arab slaughter remained…a culture-wide ‘forgetting’ of what the mind couldn’t bear to consider.
Watch Dr. Warner and you’ll see what I mean: the Western mind has NEVER been able to comprehend the totally destructive nature of Islam when it is dealing with outsiders. “No quarter given” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Not only that, but its intramural cruelty is breath-taking. ISIS has risen to remind us what it was like and why Islam succeeded the first time.
Soo…as a thought experiment, if there had been nothing of worth under those desert sands, what would the world look like now??
@ Stephen Carter:
Sigh. I spend an hour or so on a reply to your comment bec you said “I really don’t understand” and what do I get in response for all of that? *crickets*
Looks like I’ll have to make my verbiage into a post. But not until I’ve killed off a few hundred Japanese beetles. They are very early this year…sadly, I don’t think it means they’ll leave early.