[Conscious Pirate]

I think this Q&A is vital reading to help understand the current situation we are in, from a cultural psychological point of view. I chose not to put it into the Politics & War subform as I believe its logic is something that everyone should read.

Interview with psychologist Nicolai Sennels: “Muslims instinctively see our lack of reaction as fear, its an invitation to attack”

Quote:

1) What are the differences between the Muslim and Western man?

Nicolai: Working with Muslim clients I found four important psychological differences. Understanding these differences makes us more able to understand the psychological aspects of integration problems that the West experiences when it comes to Muslim immigrants.

The first difference concerns anger. Western cultures see anger as a weakness, and expression of anger is a way to lose social status. In the Muslim culture, where , “might is right”, anger is seen as strength. Some Muslim communities even declare “days of anger”, where they try to convince others by screaming, shooting in the air and hopping up and down. While we Westerners see such behavior as embracing or even psychiatric, Muslim culture defines our lack of aggression as weakness, that can – and should – be exploited. To avoid such invitations to exploitation, we should speak the truth, make demands, be consequent – and carry a big stick.

The second difference concerns honor and self confidence. Inside the Western culture it is generally seen as a sign of honor and self confidence, if we are able to handle criticism either with and shrug (if we disagree) or with a “I think you are right – thanks for helping me to improve”. In Muslim culture, it is honorable to defend against criticism with aggression and exhibit the courage to risk physical confrontation – no matter if the criticism is true or not. Islam can not defend, Islam can only attack. This is why we very seldom hear Muslims defend their religion through logic or reason, but almost always with intimidation and violence: It does not matter who is right, it matters who is the strongest. From the perspective of traditional Muslim culture, the Western concept of honor is dishonorable. It makes us look pathetic and fearful, and for a religion that is basically imperialistic and aggressive, it is an invitation to attack.

The third difference concerns self responsibility, and here the psychological term “locus of control” is important to understand. Western culture leans towards an inner locus of control, meaning that we think that our lives are mainly governed by inner factors, such as our own choices, our own view and our way of handling our emotions. That is why we have countless therapists, coaches etc., and countless books and magazines, which all aim at helping us to be better at helping ourselves. Muslim culture and especially Islam is strongly characterized by outer locus of control. Everything happens “Inshallah”; almost every aspect of life is regulated by Islamic law, the brutal sharia that steals away so many human rights from the people living under it; male authorities – fathers, big brothers, uncles, imams, etc. – make the rules and have enormous power over especially the women. There is very little room for personal choices and freedoms, and this naturally creates a feeling of outer locus of control: Your life is created by outside factors, and the freedom to explore and train inner locus of control is very limited. This is also the reason for the world famous, and – from a Western perspective – embarrassing and childish victim mentality, that characterizes many Muslim communities and immigrants. When this victim mentality meets with our Western compassion and questions like “what would you like to do”, integration is doomed to fail. Only now are Western authorities beginning to learn that we need to meet Muslim immigrants with demands, and consequences – “you have to do this and that and this is the consequences if you do not.” People with outer locus of control mostly have very little control and needs clear communication, a clear frame work and clear consequences if they break the rules. But even though we are starting to realize this now, it might be too late to stop the failed integration of millions of people from this very different culture from destroying our societies.

The fourth difference concerns tolerance and openness. In the West, being “tolerant and open” is considered a de facto definition of a good person. Hundred years ago, “good persons” went to church every Sunday, while today they stand with “RefugeesWelcome” signs on train stations. In Islam, a good person is somebody adhering strictly to the sharia, which is very intolerant and closed – even violent – towards outsiders. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to predict how the meeting between to such different cultures will evolve: As a cultural osmosis, the “open” culture will be consumed by the intolerant culture: The cultural exchange will be a one-way street. This is what is eating up our countries these years in the form of Islamic parallel societies that develop into small Gaza Strips with extreme dense population; radical Islam going viral; poverty, low education and dependence on economic support from outside; and a hostile and violent attitude towards their non-Muslim surroundings: A constant source of aggression that needs constant containment in order not to spill over and into its context.

While I think he does a brilliant job of laying out the cultural cognitive dissonance right there, I urge you to read the rest of the Q&A in the link. It's an opinion highly worth considering.

[Leonard D Neubache]

Great summary. Thanks for posting it.

Disturbing. I was looking for this Lenin quote to describe Islam and I just happened to come across it in an article talking about Islam.

Quote:

Lenin, speaking about moving a cause forward, once said: “Probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.”

That said, while Islamists may be primitive in their means of expanding their field of influence, other world powers are effecting the same influence on us in other more insidious ways. This is because nature abhors a vacuum, and a lack of will to defend your territory is just such a vacuum.

[infowarrior1]

(07-15-2016 03:54 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

Great summary. Thanks for posting it.

Disturbing. I was looking for this Lenin quote to describe Islam and I just happened to come across it in an article talking about Islam.

Quote:

Lenin, speaking about moving a cause forward, once said: “Probe with a bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.”

That said, while Islamists may be primitive in their means of expanding their field of influence, other world powers are effecting the same influence on us in other more insidious ways. This is because nature abhors a vacuum, and a lack of will to defend your territory is just such a vacuum.

Islam believe or not is being slowly eroded by modernity. This radicalism this expansionist violence is an attempt to re-eastablish the us vs them mentality and galvanize forces that enable them to hold onto their traditions.

Quote:

In Najran, in the most remote corner of Saudi Arabia, a state so afraid of Western contamination that it doesn’t even issue tourist visas, there is a mall. And, when I lived there, you could watch —literally watch—the conflict between Sharia Law and Mall culture, five times a day.

The mall was anchored by a huge market, HyperPanda, complete with its own cheery green and red logo. HyperPanda sold everything from camel meat to iPods.... You go in the mall and the logos of all the high-end retailers of Europe and Asia wink at you, and there are even chairs and benches for the tired grandmother to slump in while the kids try their skate-shoes on the marble floors...

All this, only eight miles from the Yemen border. It’s amazing, actually. Amazing that the regime tolerates it at all, because as jihadis know, or sense, all social change is corrosive, and worse still, unpredictably corrosive, eating away at norms that don’t seem to have any direct connection to the change itself.

HyperPanda’s most direct affront to the culture is that it provides an attractive nuisance, in insurance terms, to the adolescent population. Malls draw teens in Najran just like they do in Minnesota. But the Mutaween have taken a, shall we say, proactive stance toward that fact in Najran.

The Mutaween (“Society for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice”) has hundreds of men, and even a few women, working in Najran. Some wear the big beards and special headdress, but others are in disguise. And what these undercover morality police do, mostly, is patrol HyperPanda to see if boys are talking to girls, or looking at girls, or throwing girls little folded-up slips of paper with their cell phone numbers. That last one is perhaps the greatest threat to morality in town, and HyperPanda is the scene of most such crimes. The Mutaween mount multi-cop surveillance routines, with some disguised as Malays or Filipinos, to detect any instances of heterosexual contact at the mall.

The culture, the law, are very clear. No pre-marital fooling around, and that includes flirting at HyperPanda. Mall rules are very clear too: It’s an obvious place for boys and girls to check each other out. When mall meets culture, hijinks ensue—and murders sometimes follow, with the male relatives of the girl who’s been compromised at HyperPanda hunting down and killing the boy who accosted her.

Ten years ago, the mall didn’t exist. Cell phones, the other contributor to the delinquency of minors in Najran, have only been around for 20 years, like the internet that gives girls notions of romance, thanks to the South Korean soap operas they all watch.

Everything is tilting toward the mall, away from the old rules, and the resistance is always futile, and worse yet, ridiculous. Every day one piece of this resistance breaks away. Yesterday it was the new head of the Mutaween admitting that there’s no Scriptural basis for forbidding women to drive.

That will infuriate men in Saudi, because as devout as they consider themselves to be, this was never just a religious argument. Orthodoxy never is; it’s always what’s comfortable and familiar. It would be news to these guys, watching the old world crumble, that people in South Dakota are afraid that “creeping Sharia” is about to creep its way into Fargo, presumably on insulated booties.

Kids in Najran already hate the Mutaween. They see kids flirting on TV from the west, and cops chasing grownup criminals, and it strikes them as ridiculous that so many cops devote all their time to the prevention of flirting. Now that the King has ordered the Mutaween to be nice, hate will turn to contempt. Pieces of the old walls will start falling even faster.

It’s hard to see how defensive jihad is, when you come from the homeland of the malls. At first, when you get to a place like Najran, you notice how alien and annoying everything is, how unlike California. Slowly you begin to realize that all the ingredients of California are being added to the mix.

It’s amazing how well most people handle this very volatile, unstable mix. When people are flooded with so much alien culture and technology, you’d expect wilder upheavals than we’re getting, especially in rural patriarchies like the one that used to operate unchallenged in Saudi Arabia. It’s not a surprise—not at all—that a fraction of the young males from there joined up for jihad. The real surprise is that there are so few of them. [12]

HyperPanda delivers a blow to the traditionalists no number of crusades, sieges, Nakbahs or democratic liberations ever could. The traditional Islamic system is well prepared for their type of shock. Defending the honor of the near in-group from the faraway out-group was a fundamental moral value of the Arab tribal system; Islam hijacked this tribal frame of mind, elevating the conflict between in and out to the entire Muslim community. The tribal mindset does not fear division and conflict between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb. Pressure from the outside is business as usual.

But HyperPanda does not come from the outside. The old system is not falling apart because of anything intentional the outside has done at all. Middle Eastern women are choosing to have less children, marry outside their families, and pursue education because they want to. Arab teens are watching dreadful K-dramas and flirting in malls because they want to. The enemies of the traditional order don't come from the House of War. The threat comes from within.


.

Totalitarian regimes have it easy. They have a ready-made response when people start to lose faith in the system: round the offenders up, force 'em to write self criticisms, and send them to the Gulag -- or if that is too complex, simply kill them. Just enough should be done to strike fear in the hearts of everyone else. Fear works when faith fails.

This is not a universal solution. Totalitarian methods prove fantastically impossible in decentralized societies. Arab tribes are a prime example. There are few human cultures so overtly hostile to centralized government as that sired by the Bedouin tradition (though the most zealous citizens of the Anglosphere can get pretty close). Anthropologist Philip Salzman describes the common tribal attitude towards their governments as one of the 'central tenants of [Arab] deep culture': "Middle Easterners regard states as criminal organizations to be distrusted, avoided, and, whenever possible, defeated and conquered." [3]

Using the government to enforce social norms or ideological purity just isn't in the cards. Governments have tried to do so, but as the Saudi example suggests, this method has a poor track record. If the more radical elements are truly committed to keeping things the way they are, they must find a way to cajole, convince, pressure, or dupe the modernizers away from modernization. They cannot coerce their fellow Arabs back into the stone age.

This point is important. I will repeat it: The Arab world has plenty of people who want modernization. A small minority actively agitate for change. A much larger group cannot be bothered to agitate for anything, but are content to let history take its course. This second group are the people who keep Arabian reactionaries from sleeping properly each night. They know that letting history run its course is to declare defeat. They also know that they alone do not have power to derail history from this chosen path. Defeat seems assured.

Those most agitated by the erosion of the old Islamic order do not accept defeat. They will not accept defeat until they know with a certainty that the game is up and the rest of their society will never rise up to make a more perfect Ummah. But only if the idle majority joins in unity with the committed minority can this dream become a reality. The most committed are willing to go to extreme measures to awaken the apathetic to their senses.

This is the social context that gives birth to radical Islamic terrorism. From the radical's perspective, compromise is just another step towards defeat; moderation or apathy from inside the system pose greater dangers than pressure from outside it. Thus the central aim of radical groups is to create a political environment where moderation and compromise is not possible.

This chosen end leads easily to extremist means. An example closer to home may help us understand why this is so.

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com.au/20...pt_10.html

[Suits]

[Parzival]

(07-15-2016 04:30 AM)infowarrior1 Wrote:  

Islam believe or not is being slowly eroded by modernity. This radicalism this expansionist violence is an attempt to re-eastablish the us vs them mentality and galvanize forces that enable them to hold onto their traditions.

The fights we see today is kind of a last rise of Islam. Of the true Islam, the violent and conquering one. The elites of Islam see how information, strange customs and other things spread in seconds all over the globe, also Ideas. You see it in the middle east but also in China. Invention and technology is unstoppable. If its out, its out like the pandora's box.
Yes the west losing faith, the western societies are old. Look at the average age. Old societies don't reform, they are less open for new ideas, less risky. This leads to a dry out of innovation and ideas. But we still have all the material goods, all the stuff those outer societies want. Compare the west with its high standard of living and it's old people that fall in some kind of decadence to the young and brute societies of the middle east. They have nothing what we have but see it every day on their phones and screens, they become hungry and angry because their societies don't provide it. We talk here about the phenomena of the youth bulge.

Pleanty of young men that are hungry and rise by a culture of Islam that tell them how they are out to rule the world. Islamic societies would starve and die already if not the west would finance them over and over again. And still they can't deny the desire for the stuff we have, the freedom we have. They in an emotional rage between their Islam tradition and the western temptation. We face an invasion and our leaders either blind and ignorant or fallow this plan with evil. They bring in those people and there will be a clash of cultures. As long we are the older society against the millions of hungry and fanatic young Muslims there will be no peace. They have the manpower and the conquering ideology in their mind. All we can do is to protect what is yours and be extreme strict, we have to get rid of the wrong understanding of tolerance. We can't be tolerant with people that want our extinction. The middle east will be ripped apart in conflicts till the youth bulge is over, less young men that want a piece of our cake. And till the societies in the middle east abdomen Islam because Islam isn't the answer for a developed world, for a the desires the west has to offer but Islam can't offer. The Muslims will go on full rage because they still can't see that the stuff they desire is not there for them because of Islam. Not because of the evil west. Islam is the cancer that infect their minds and keep them down. You can't argue with cancer. So we have to isolate them and let them fight and rage. After enough rivers of blood they maybe get to a common sense and see how Islam keep them down. But till them, we shouldn't be the victims and hope for a better, we shouldn't suffer till the Muslims get to a common sense. Till they act like this, we have to fight them, keep them at bay.

[Gmac]

Islamic conquest is a like an eternal, large-scale game of whackamole... and we, the rest of the world, having been too pre-occupied and on the sidelines for the last milennia... have forgotten how to play. Islam has not, that's the difference. So those moles will continue to run rampant and gain influence in more and more countries until we, as nations, wake up, pick up that mallet, and whack them back into the dark ages.

[seniol]

very much harsh, very real truth in his words