Only a Liberal…

There are two types of Islamic apologists: liars and deniers. The former is less common than the latter. I will spend no time addressing the liars… they knowingly support the enemy with no remorse. This is an analysis of the deniers.

Let me be clear… I do not assume all Muslims are suicidal, homicidal religious nuts who want to kill all infidels. But the notion that there isn’t a pattern of Muslim males ages 18-39 blowing themselves up in statistically significant numbers is childish denial. I call it Battered Muslim Syndrome.

Battered Wife Syndrome:

In lay terms, this is a reference to any person who, because of constant and severe domestic violence usually involving physical abuse by a partner, becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance. Often sufferers will even seek out their very abuser for comfort shortly after an incident of abuse.

The battered muslim “denier” constructs strange logical paths to pretend the abuse isn’t happening. The abuse they get comes from both those radicals they feel are giving their good religion a bad name, and the critics who points out the obvious. The denial takes on many forms:

• Islam=Religion of peace, ergo any non-peaceful act renders perpetrator “not Muslim”
• The “so what?” argument - other religions have produced violent radicals, therefore religion has no relation to the terrorism, therefore Islam has nothing to do with terror (Rosie O’Donnell’s attempt at violent religion “match-play”)
• Backlash against critics: instead of being mad about a Muslim radical murdering people, the denier attacks the critics

I had a discussion with a Muslim female where she said the Quran does not preach violence and the violence of Muslim terrorists was not derived from the Quran. So I quoted various passages from the Quran:

“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”

“So when you meet in battle those who disbelieve, then smite the necks until when you have overcome them, then make (them) prisoners”

“the Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah”

No matter how many passages, she claimed they were “out of context.” The phrase “out of context” to a person in denial, as we learned during the Jeremiah Wright controversy, is simply the argument used by Jim Carrey’s character in the movie “Liar, Liar” when he was unable to tell a lie:

Carrey: “Your honor, I object!”

Judge: “Why?”

Carrey: “Because it’s devastating to my case!”

I asked her to explain the context… she ignored me. She loves her religion… I respect that. I have no doubt she is a peace-loving Muslim who is no direct threat to me because I don’t kiss Allah’s butt. What I don’t respect is her denial of the overwhelming evidence that her religion is responsible for a lot of cavemen type violence.

How any woman, especially an American, could be Muslim is beyond me. The violent sexism and approval of wife-beating is disgusting. Any mention of this caused this woman to tell me that the people perpetrating those atrocities are not “true Muslims” but evil people committing evil acts in the name of a non-evil religion.

The Bible and the Quran are both violent, uncivilized books. The only difference is Christians as a group have pretty much dismissed the violent nonsense and only practice the peaceful parts of the Bible. Muslims, for some reason, have decided to stick with the whole book… unabridged Islam is the choice of the Middle East. I submit that unabridged Islam is incompatible with a free society, and it must be destroyed. Abridged Islam, on the other hand, is as welcome as abridged Christianity. Welcome abridged Muslims!

The battered Muslim denier is not your enemy, per se. Sure, if there are too many of them, they enable Muslim liars and Muslim terrorists. Every day they remain in denial is another day we waste trying to reason with these psychos. I take solace in the fact that one day, most of the deniers will wake up, and wake away from their abusers. They’ll accept the advice of the critics who told them “He doesn’t love you… he is not a good person at heart.” Unabridged Islam will kill us all, or convert us all.

As Dennis Miller said, “There’s no al-Kinda.”

Why did an earthquake in California only kill 63, while a similar earthquake has killed over 100,000 in Haiti?

The News media keep referring to what has happened in Haiti as a “natural disaster.” This could NOT be further from the truth. This is a poverty disaster.

Now why would I bring this up now in Haiti’s time of need? Even if you agree with me, you may be thinking, “why can’t we talk about this later, after we stabilize the devastation?” Because every dime we spend on ineffective aid is a dime wasted, and I find it to be despicable. Haitians are not helped by billions of our tax dollars being sent to their country. In fact it probably hurts them.

While we have sent no money to China over the last few decades, they have made gargantuan leaps and bounds in their economy and the quality of life for a billion people. Why is Haiti still awful, while China is booming?

The reason is not as complicated as you think. We cannot fix these countries; they must fix themselves. All we can do is hand them a crutch, in the form of billions of dollars that do nothing but teach them how to walk on a crutch. To run, they must reform their infrastructure to foster an environment where each individual can reach their full potential.

Political bottom-feeding opportunists

Now if you can believe it, there are people who strongly believe, or pretend to strongly believe, that capitalism is the culprit in the Haitian disaster, not the solution. I would generally dismiss such nonsense as unworthy of acknowledgment but I will use it as an illustration of why countries like Haiti never get fixed. This was written by Tanya Golash-Boza at the Dissident Voice.

The story of Haiti — a nation that broke the rules from the beginning by standing on its own two feet — is the story of how global capitalism works to keep most people in poverty.

Tanya Golash-Boza is on the faculty at the University of Kansas. Here’s another quote from Golash-Boza:

The earthquake in Haiti is a prime example of how unbridled capitalism kills.

Slum in Jakarta, Indonesia

In the same article, Ms. Golash-Boza cites the Bay Area earth quake of 1989 where only 63 people died, yet she still identifies capitalism as the CAUSE of over 100,000 deaths in Haiti. This woman is a highly paid educator at an American university who hates the very system that provides her with her way of life and career.

Look at this building… what planet do you have to live on to believe capitalism is the cause of this? Buildings like this don’t exist in capitalist societies.

The real problem caused by capitalism

You want to know what the real problem with “unbridled capitalism” is? It makes a country so rich, so prosperous, that intellectuals get bored being prosperous and think up pseudo-compassionate, ineffective techniques to waste their money in pursuit of social status. Start a charity, collect money, and then send it to a poverty-stricken dictatorship, and reporters will write soaring articles about what a nice person you are. The results of your work will never be evaluated. The money will never be tracked to see where it ended up or if it had any positive, long-term effect.

People like the capitalism-hating Professor are the negative side-effect of capitalism and free speech. They live in a country with so much wealth, they can produce feel-good movements that can politically pressure legislators to send other people’s money to countries less rich than us. Whether that money makes a difference or not does not matter… assuaging their own guilt is more important than actually helping. If those good intentions result in more poverty and weak building construction that causes thousands of structures to collapse on their inhabitants, that can’t possibly be placed at the feet of the people who had good intentions. They convince themselves, and unfortunately others, that the problem is they didn’t send enough money.

On top of that, they wriggle around with cockamamie arguments that their ideology combined with capitalism attempting to intervene in the socioeconomic progress of these poor countries is proof that capitalism has caused their plight rather than their own ideology.

Direct aid still doesn’t help

Even if you manage to magically ensure every penny makes it to the people instead of the coffers of the rich dictator, it still doesn’t help. Poverty-stricken people don’t know what to do with lots of money. They don’t use it to change their situations. It doesn’t help them learn economic best practices that Americans don’t even realize they know. It doesn’t change social or religious hurdles that live on in those countries.

The dominant religion in Haiti is voodoo. While voodoo is probably most widely known in America from an Indiana Jones movie, the fundamental issue with it is when bad things happen to Haitians, they believe it is the will of god and they must accept it rather than deal with it. This is not conducive to progress.

Can we fix problems like this? Should we fix problems like this? The latter is a much tougher question, while the former is slightly simpler. No one can fix the economic problems of Haiti until the Haitian people remove the relevant social obstacles. Every year we send them more useless money is another year their people don’t move in the direction necessary for change.

And frankly, as much as I think voodoo is superstitious nonsense, it is not my right nor my business to determine the beliefs of other people. If we as Americans believe that Haitians are entitled to their religious and cultural practices, and we can also determine these same beliefs will hinder their progress, then we must learn to accept the situation. Spending time and money pretending to help them is not for their benefit, but for the benefit of our own egos.

Accepting reality

Alcoholics Anonymous learned long ago that forcing people to attend is futile. The alcoholic must choose to make a change, or else any advice and counseling given will not help in the slightest. The problem is not that we aren’t spending enough money on helping alcoholics deal with their problem. Continuing to send money to Haiti is like deciding you’re going to fix alcoholics by giving them more money to spend on getting themselves help. They will spend it on booze.

Please, send your money to the Red Cross if you’d like in an effort to help rebuild parts of Haiti, but don’t convince yourself you are changing anything. Only the Haitians can do that.

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The United Nations organization has been a farce for a long time, but for those that were unaware, perhaps this situation will illustrate it clearly and forever. The United Nations is holding a two-day conference on religious tolerance, and they are allowing the king of Saudi Arabia to preside over it. Perhaps the Chinese should preside over a conference addressing the problems with workplace conditions. Or Iran could preside over a sexuality tolerance conference. President of Iran at Columbia University: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country.”

If you read the Washington Post article, you’ll find that the forum was the idea of the Saudis. Now a liberal, trial-lawyer logic, offend-no-one-except-conservatives person would accept that at face, praising the commendable effort of the Saudis to change their policy of forbidding the public practice of anything but Islam. A normal person would remember they have not changed their intolerant policies at home, and until they do, forums like this are just Public Relations stunts to temporarily convince the world they are nice people.

This is the pitfall of liberalism: a combination of self-loathing and infinite tolerance of other’s intolerance in the pursuit of appeasement. The liberal praises King Abdullah more than he will praise George W. Bush. Even if you’re a democrat, this is insanity. The liberal trusts King Abdullah when he says he wants religious tolerance, but will scoff when George W. Bush talks about… anything. This is childish nonsense, and potentially dangerous. A liberal is convinced he cannot convince George W. Bush to change his ways, but welcomes the chance to sit down with Iranian President Ahmadinejad and have a rational discussion, let alone change his worldview.