Paranoia Creation and Its Implications
A Followup to Creation of Paranoia
by Karl Ericson
I hope that I will live long enough to see American
politics return to vigorous debates
where we argue who's right and who's wrong, not who's good and who's bad.
Former President Bill Clinton at the unveiling of his
and his wife's portrait at the
Whitehouse (6/15/04).
Unfortunately in politics each side generally tries
to create as much paranoia as possible to the opposing side.
It is ironic that President Clinton made this very praiseworthy statement
in the presence of his wife who, when accusations
were made that he was philandering announced
that a (bad) vast right wing conspiracy
was making
false accusations in order to discredit her husband.
An enemy is required by every would-be
totalitarian
Frank Gaffney, Putin’s
Ploy, The Washington Times, 6/15/2007
“educating the children to Jihad and to hatred of
the Jews, the Christians, and the infidels” is “what is needed now.”
Sermon
of Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Al-Munajjid in Al-Daman, Saudi Arabia
You cannot teach people hate and then ask them to
practice peace
British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a speech
at the United States Congress on July
17, 2003
in regard to Muslim indoctrination of
children to hate Jews.
IB2 Hatred of the non-Believer
II Reasons for Religious Antisemitism
2)
Desire to keep believers from being led away from the religion by nonbelievers.
3) Finding a scapegoat for the failures of the religion. (Protecting self esteem by blaming others)
IIIA2 Religion's Creation of an External Enemy for Internal
Stability
6) Islam’s Need to Create Paranoia to Sustain Jihad
4) Creating Paranoia to Create Pride
IIb Religion's Creation of Oppressors
IIB Use of Religion to Create Paranoia
IIC Creation of Paranoia to Reduce Shame
IID Creation of Paranoia to Avoid Facing a Threatening Reality
IIE Creation of Paranoia to Prevent Terror
IIF Creation of Paranoia to Prevent War
IIG Creation of Paranoia To Feel in Control
IIIm1 Creation of Paranoia to Gain Power and Control
III Creation of Self-Humiliation and Paranoia to Gain Power and Control
IIIA Creation of Paranoia to
Maintain Power and Control
IIIb Creation of Paranoia to Make Money
IIIc Assumption that if a Group is Persecuted they must be Guilty
IV) Assumption that Others are Evil Leads to the Assumption they are Guilty
V) Creation of Paranoia to View the Side One Identifies With as Good
VB) Creation of Paranoia to Obviate Guilt
VI Terrorists View those they
are Fighting as Terrorists and Justify their Terrorism that Way
VIb Creation of Paranoia Because of Boredom
VII Creation of Paranoia
because of Greed
VIIa Creation of Paranoia Because of Hate
VIIb Creation of Paranoia by Academia
VIII Creation of Paranoia by the Media
4 Misplacing the Source in the Cycle of Violence
4a Reporting Unsubstantiated Allegations as Truth
4b Creation of Paranoia by the Islamic Media in America
5 Impact of Creation of Paranoia by the Media
IX Creation of Paranoia To Justify Aggression and Terrorism
IXA Creation of Paranoia and Delusion to Encourage Aggression and Terrorism
IXAA Creation of Paranoia to Hide Motives of Conquest
IXAB Creation of Paranoia to Avert Catastrophe
IXB Creation of Paranoia To Prevent Conflict and Violence
IXC Creation of Paranoia to Protect Civil Liberties
X Denial of Contradictory Evidence
XB Creation of Paranoia to Explain Away Contradictory Evidence
XC Creation of Paranoia to Gain Status
XI Creation of Paranoia to
Overcome Opposition
Xib Creation of Paranoia to Overcome Competition
XII Creation of Paranoia to get Revenge
XIII Creation of Paranoia to Divert Hostility and Shift Blame
XIIIb Creation of Paranoia for Unknown Reasons
XIV Self Feeding Nature of Paranoia Creation
XVI Creation of Paranoia By the Jewish Left
XVII Funding Paranoia Creation
XVIII The Cause of Secular Anti-Semitism
XVIIIA Cross-Infection of Other Religions with Anti-Semitism.
XVIIIB Creation of a Power Myth
XIX Who are the Greedy Conniving Jews That Everyone Hates so Much?
XX Creation of Paranoia by the Chinese
XXI Creation of Paranoia in America
XXIB Creation of Paranoia in Latin America
XXIII Creation of Paranoia as a result of seeing oneself as entitled when one is not:
XXIIIB Eco-extremist Creation of Paranoia
I Why Understanding Paranoia Creation is Important
In
most conflicts both sides have grievances against the other. Those who wish to resolve those conflicts
attempt to get each side to compromise so that those grievances are met. The Palestinian Arab/ Israel conflict is a
classic example of this. The
Palestinian Arabs claim that the evil Jews violently took away their land and
expelled their people and occupied their land took away their freedom and
forced them to live in misery in refugee camps. The Israelis have diverse opinions on the conflict. One of these opinions is that the land
historically belonged to the Jewish people long before conquering Arab hordes
invaded and that the Palestinian Arabs, through the corruption of their leaders
and their constant attempts to destroy Israel and to kill Israelis bring
poverty and misery on themselves. According to this argument Arab hatred and
violence make it necessary for the Israelis to control Arab occupied areas of
Biblical Israel in order to prevent terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.
Those Americans who have attempted to resolve the Middle East conflict
such as Dennis Ross, tend to attempt to
address the grievances of both sides.
The Israeli grievance is terrorist attacks and the Israeli concern is
security so the Bush administration keeps talking about the right of Israel to
be secure and the need for the Arabs to stop terror. The grievance the Arabs have is that they are occupied and so the
United States demands that Israel withdraw from lands such as Judea and Samaria
that the Arabs say are theirs. The
assumption being made here is that both sides grievances are the cause of the
conflict.
What if some of those grievances are created and not the root cause of
the conflict? What if the root cause of
the Arab/Israel conflict is Islamic paranoia toward and hatred of the Jew? The Koran is full of statements about how
evil the non-believing Jew is and how the Muslim must fight the Jew until
he is subjugated. Could grievances such as “the Evil Jews violently
and unjustly took away our land” originate from such apparently unrelated
statements in the Koran?
There is evidence that concern for the refugees is not the root of the
Arab Israel conflict but rather that the refugees are seen as useful tools to
perpetuate the conflict. Mizra Khan, in
an article titled The Arab Refugees – A Study in Frustration, Midstream,
included some quotes that I include here that demonstrate this:
“It is perfectly
clear that the Arab nations do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want
to keep it as an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations, and as a
weapon against Israel. Arab leaders
don’t give a damn whether the refugees live or die” Mr. Galloway, former UNRWA representative in Jordan
to an American study group meeting in Amman in 1952
“We shall be most
insistent in perpetuating the Palestine problem as a life question… The Palestine war continues by dint of the
refugees only. Their existence leaves
the problem open.” Abdullah Nawass, member of Jordan’s Parliament
on June 6, 1952
The existence of the
refugee problem “is an important harassing factor vis-à-vis the Jews and the
West. As long as it remains unsolved,
Israel’s political and economic existence are acutely endangered” Member of
Jordanian Parliament quoted in Falastin, June 3, 1952
“Those human
beings, whom political ambitions and intrigues turned into cave-dwellers
overnight- what have the Arab rulers done for them these past eight years?” Falastin
August 26, 1955
“We refugees have
left our homes merely to enter a world of intrigue on the part of those who are
our own flesh and blood…” Difa of September 10, 1953
Palestinian TV airs shows that make the Jews
out to be bloodthirsty sadistic monsters.
Is this because the Jews are bloodthirsty sadistic monsters or is this
creation of paranoia that has its roots in the paranoia created toward Jews in
the Koran? Does this creation of
paranoia have roots in a desire to subjugate the Jews in order to score points
with Allah? Does creating a grievance that
the Israelis stole Arab land stem from the desire to fuel hatred among the Arab
masses toward the Jew in order to conquer and subjugate him? Did the loss of freedom that Arabs
experience in part result because of their efforts to subjugate the Jews and
take away the freedom of Jews. Would
addressing the grievance that the Arabs are occupied bring more or less freedom
to the region? If it enables the Arabs
to take away Jewish freedom it is taking away freedom. Part of Jewish freedom is the right to live
where they want in their homeland. That
was taken away. Is there truth to the
statements of President Bush that radical Islam seeks to take away our freedoms
and is that playing a role in the Middle East?
The answers to these questions are clearly important when it comes to
attempting to solve conflicts. If the
grievance is only that a region of land is occupied than unoccupying the land
should resolve the conflict. If on the
other hand this is a manufactured grievance and to justify conquering the Jew,
then addressing this manufactured grievance simply furthers the goals of those
who manufactured it and encourage further paranoia creation and violence. This is exactly what occurred when the
Israeli government under pressure from the U.S. as well as it’s own internal
pressure, forcibly removed Jews from Gaza and turned their land over to the
Palestinian Arabs. The creation of
paranoia toward the Jews continued and the Palestinian Arabs fired rockets
towards Israeli cities such as Sderot and Ashkelon from the areas of Gaza from
which the Israelis withdrew.
The efforts to mediate conflicts without taking into account the role of
paranoia creation has led to disastrous foreign policy mistakes by the United
States.
Paranoia Creation in Society
There are incentives to be and to create paranoia. A conspiracy theorist who believes he is
uncovering a sinister plot feel brilliant and excited, he feels like a great
man who sees what the other fools don’t see, he feels he is helping save the world
by uncovering the sinister plot. A
paranoid person in a mental institution may feel the same way. Member of society who want to overcome an
enemy may incite the rest of the population by creating paranoid accusations
toward the “enemy”. This article
discusses many of the different incentives to be paranoid and to create
paranoia.
Paranoia is considered to be a
symptom of individuals who are suffering from mental illness. Paranoia is
actually pervasive among "normal" people and among groups of people.
Groups can be considered to suffer from mental illness. Dr. Abd Al-Khaleq
Hussein an Iraqi reformist, wrote
an article about the insanity of Arab society called , Arab Society and Schizophrenia
(translated by memri.org June 22, 2006),
which makes this argument.
Richard
Hofstadter wrote an article in 1964 in Harper’s Magazine called the Paranoid
Style in American Politics in which he applies the term paranoia to groups
of “normal” people. He wrote:
In fact, the idea of the
paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance
or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed
minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal
people that makes the phenomenon significant…
The paranoid style is not
confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon.
Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth
century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that
corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of
certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the
Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the
attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to
accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such
as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral;
the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always
gross and often grotesque.”
Just as we can derive lessons about social madness from the madness of an individual, we can derive lessons about the madness of an individual from the madness of societies. When we study paranoia in society we find that it is deliberately created for a variety of reasons some of which are discussed on this web page. This suggests that perhaps individual may have reasons to create their own paranoia. I have written an article about this called Creation of Paranoia (Part 1, Part 2) which was published by the International Bulletin of Political Psychology. I encourage the reader to read the article before reading the rest of this web page.
Today there is massive creation of paranoia toward the infidel which is funded by the huge oil revenues of Saudi Arabia. Rachel Ehrenfeld wrote that (Jihad on the American Mind, frontpagemag.com 3/11/05):
Saudi Arabia according to various Saudi official publications, has spent somewhere between $70-87 billion on the spread of Wahhabism around the world since the oil boom began in the mid- 1970’s.
Lt. Col Gordon Cucullu, wrote about how Saudi Arabia is creating anti-Western hatred in the large immigrant Muslim population of France as follows: (France: A Nuclear Proliferator? FrontPageMagazine.com 3/4/05).
Into this fertile, disaffected immigrant soil came Saudi Arabia with its proselytizing, aggressive Wahabbist ideology. Wahabbism is vitriolic, anti-Western, xenophobic, and jihad-oriented. It encourages hatred of and actions against those defined as "infidels" and "non-believers." The Saudis continue to pour uncounted hundreds of millions of dollars into Europe, including France, to promulgate this offensive ideology. The result is that Muslims in France are highly radicalized, anti-French, anti-Western, and bent on ultimate conquest of their hosts. Texts from mosques in France -- issued by the Saudi public affairs office -- refer to Muslim residents in France as "living behind enemy lines" and "representing a force for the ultimate conquest by Islam of the infidels." Muslims are taught to hate their Christian, Jewish, and secular neighbors and to work assiduously to undermine the government. More than one thousand of these Muslim enclaves exist in France. It is said that French police will not enter 400 such communities.
An outstanding book that discusses Saudi funding of hate was written by Dore Gold and is called Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism. This paranoia is being spread via mosques in the West. In July 2004, German authorities raided a mosque in Frankfurt after a nine-year-old girl said that she had been shown graphic videos there calling for “a holy war against unbelievers.” Modern technology is spreading this paranoia creation into the Western world. One of the example of this was the broadcast of Al-Shatat, a 29-part series, based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which depicts among other scenes the killing of a Christian child on the orders of a rabbi so the blood can be baked into matzot for Passover. This was broadcast in France through the Paris-based satellite operator Eutelsat (Jerusalem Post 8/5/04). Another example was a disturbing home movie circulated widely on the Internet in June 2004, showing four Muslim children in Sweden playfully reenacting the savage beheading of American contractor Nicholas Berg. An online clip about the creation of paranoia by the Palestinian Authority and its consequences called Seeds of Hate is on the Coalition Against Terrorism Web Site.
The well known consequence of paranoia creation against the infidel West include the suicide attacks against the United States of September 11th 2001. This paranoia is likely to lead to more attacks against the United States some of which may be deadlier than the attacks of 9/11. The most obvious way to fight this is for the Western world to stop giving foreign aid to countries that incite hate. David Bedein in an article titled "An Unquiet Peace" (frontpagemag.com 2/14/05) wrote how after Mahmoud Abbas became leader of the Palestinian Authority the incitement continued yet president Bush requested an additional $350 million dollars for the Palestinian Authority despite the fact that it won't even stop its media calls for killing Israelis.
Another way to fight Islamic incitement is to cut our dependence on foreign oil. One way to achieve this would be to tax oil coming from Saudi Arabia, Iran and other states that create paranoia and/or sponsor terrorism. I think the tax increase on oil could be offset by a tax decrease on other goods especially alternative energy sources such as nuclear power. I subscribe to the theory of true cost economics in which the government should tax items according to their true cost to society when it is very clear that their true cost is higher than their actual cost.
There is vast paranoia creation in the European media against Israel and America. Reasons for this paranoia creation are discussed later in this web page.
IB What Makes a Madman:
Are paranoid people mad mentally ill individuals? What Makes a Madman? This question was asked by Jacob Sullum in a column in the New York Post (7/15/02). Here are excerpts of his column:
It's clear to me that Zacarias Moussaoui (The 20th Hijacker) is a raving lunatic. But then, so are Michael Jackson, Lyndon LaRouche, and a certain percentage of the people who e-mail me each week....
The defense team's consultants are right when they say "there is considerable evidence that Mr. Moussaoui's thinking is dominated by irrational and unrealistic persecutory beliefs." They are also probably right to suggest that he qualifies for a psychiatric diagnosis. He seems to fit the criteria for "paranoid personality disorder," for instance.
But so what? Under this heading psychiatrists have gathered a set of characteristics that would describe just about any conspiracy-minded extremist, especially in hostile surroundings.
Putting these traits on a list and giving them a scientific-sounding name does not make them symptoms of a disease, let alone a disease with the power to dictate someone's legal strategy. If the capacity to believe ridiculous things is a brain defect, it's one shared by the whole human race.
This topic is discussed further on the What is Madness web page.
IB2 Hatred of the non-Believer
A pervasive motive to create paranoia toward someone is to discredit them if they do not share one's viewpoint. This is not only done by religions but also by people with differing ideologies. During the campaign between Kerry and Bush, I saw several signs with Bush and a Hitler Mustache and a swastika painted on it. To some Kerry supporters, Bush the non-believer in progressive Kerry causes, was the equivalent of Hitler.
A friend of mine who is a Republican graduate student told me a personal story which is a classic example of non-religious hatred of the non-believer. He saw a female student friend of his campaigning for Kerry. He went up to her and started to argue with her. He said "Here are the facts" and gave her a long list of facts and she responded "Facts are not important. You and I have to different moralities. We have two different consciences". My friend complained to me that she won't talk to him and that they used to be friends.
I explained to my friend that she is doing what extremist fundamentalist Muslims do, to her he is a non-believer and therefore must be bad. It's interesting that facts are not important to her. She has the truth as far as she's concerned, to hell with facts, and anyone who doesn't believe in what she believes must not be as moral as she is.
This young woman is not an
anomaly. Hatred of the non-believer originating in ancient religious
texts is alive and well today and not just among Islamic terrorists. Turkey is an example of a country that has
been considered moderate but the Milli Gazete, a Turkish daily produced
by Erbakan’s National Salvation Party since January, 1973, published articles
in February and April of 2005 which were toxic amalgams of ahistorical drivel,
and virulently antisemitic and anti-dhimmi
Qur’anic motifs: 181 One paragraph of this drivel that clearly demonstrates
modern hatred of the non-believer is: (Andrew
Bostom, frontpagemag.com)
It is a mistake for so-called professors, writers, thinkers, and famous intellectuals to make “sympathetic” statements about Christians and Jews. Particularly, to say that “they too will go to heaven” is an even bigger mistake…Christians and Jews, who have rejected our Prophet and refuse to recite “Muhammad is the Messenger of God” belong forever in Hell…In the eyes of God, there is only one religion, and that is Islam…There is only one book, and that is the Qur’an…For so-called “dignitaries” to present Christianity and Judaism as “godly religions” is terribly wrong.
Andrew
Bostom wrote a book called the Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism which describes
the results of hatred of the Jewish non-believer. The cover of the book is a painting of a Jewish woman who was
martyred because she would not become a Muslim. The tragic story can be read here.
IC The Desire to Be Paranoid
For any event there is more than one explanation. In general the most likely explanation is the one that requires making the fewest assumptions. Lets say Joe was at a party last night during which he imbibed an excessive amount of alcoholic beverages and this morning he woke up with a headache. Joe might explain his headache as being the result of too much to drink. Or Joe might believe that some hostile individual or organization slipped something into his drink to make him have a headache. Or Joe might believe that the mysterious guy in the corner slipped a knockout drug in his drink so that after he passed out the mysterious guy could make a move on Joe's girlfriend. The explanation that requires the least number of assumptions and so is the most likely one is that Joe had a headache because he had too much to drink. Some people however, might chose the paranoid assumptions in spite of this. Why choose a paranoid assumption? One would think that it would be preferable to believe that one's headache is simply the result of overdrinking than believing that someone is out to hurt oneself.
On Christmas of 2003, the United States went on a very expensive code orange alert against terror and suspended some flights from France and Britain to the United States due to fears the planes would be used in terrorist attacks. A journalist in the French weekly, Le Point, did not believe this explanation for the flight suspensions and in a special section entitled “France punished by the US.” wrote an article called “Diktat on Air France,” in which he argued that the terrorist threats against Air France flights during Christmas were just an excuse for the US to bankrupt Air France as revenge for France opposing the U.S. war against Iraq (Blame it On America, frontpagemagazine 1/19/04).
Why did the French journalist choose the paranoid explanation? The explanation given by the United States of concern about a terrorist threat was a very reasonable one in light of the September 11 attacks and the expensive code orange alert as well as the stopping of the British flights. The paranoid explanation does not explain why the United States stopped British flights or paid to go to code Orange. The American explanation requires fewer assumptions. Why choose the unpleasant and less likely explanation which makes American an enemy out to get France?
The book, 9/11: The Big Lie, from the French author Thierry Meyssan was a best seller in France for over a year. This book supposedly proves how no plane ever crashed on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. It also states that Bin Laden was a US agent paid by Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the World Trade Center. Why believe this explanation instead of the one that Al Qaeda attacked the United States. Thierry's explanation requires believing that the United States murdered thousands of American citizens for some evil reason. Why believe that the United States is evil?
I don't know why the French choose paranoid explanations of American behavior. I do know reasons that people choose paranoid beliefs and can extrapolate those to guess as why the French choose these explanations. If the French were to believe that America was good and that for good reasons they overthrew Saddam Hussein that would require admission that the French were in the wrong and perhaps even cowardly when the opposed the United States. If the French make America out to be bad than they can feel better about opposing America. Also if they acknowledge that French planes were a terrorist threat to the United States that would imply that terrorists have infiltrated France, not a pleasant belief at all and one that shines a very unfavorable light on French policies that allowed this to happen.
America's superpower status may give the French a nagging feeling of inadequacy that they are not a superpower as well. If they regard Americans as bad, then they can view themselves as morally superior and feel better about themselves. This may be one of the reasons why so many French embrace paranoid beliefs toward the United States. Other factors such as their large anti-American Muslim population probably plays a role as well in infecting non-Muslim Frenchmen with anti-American attitudes.
Just as French Paranoia gives rise to French hatred, French hatred may be giving rise to French paranoia. Frontpage Magazine interviewed several prominent Frenchmen about French hatred of the United States(.The death of France? By Jamie Glazov FrontPageMagazine.com | June 9, 2003.) One of the interviewees Milliere ascribed French hostility to envy. He said:
France is a very sick country. Many French still dream about the time when France was the main power in the Western world. It has been over for three centuries now, and so they are full of envy when they think about the countries that became more powerful than France after the death of Louis XIVth. Great Britain first, then the United States. For the French, the United States has no past, no legitimacy, no culture and if they are the first power in the world it's really unfair.
For years, France has searched to create alliances against the United States. Now it's a conscious alliance with Islamists and Arab dictators. The French dream to see the United States defeated. Just by envy. .. The French love leaders that give them the appearance of strength, even if it brings them to disaster, and in front of a strong enemy, they surrender very easily. They surrendered to the Nazis in six days; they have already surrendered to radical Muslims thirty years ago. The people I meet in France are not ready to fight: they say "soon our women will have to wear scarves, that's life"... I am finishing a book in English about this French sickness. I think it has to be fully explained...
Everybody in France knows Chirac and Villepin acted as they did, not because they disagreed with the US, but because France too had a lot to lose if Saddam was toppled. Anti-Americanism is rising in the world because large parts of the world are very sick and full of envy. France acted as the leader of the axis of envy, it's the reason why I think she has to pay the price. France is not an ally of the US anymore.
Jean-François Revel another interviewee and the author of L'Obsession Anti-Américaine (The Anti-American Obsession) also argued that envy was behind French hatred: He said:
France is the prey of an anti-American obsession. For the French, Americans are the enemy they have to hate in every circumstance. They have to hate Americans because Americans are successful, because Americans are powerful, because the French prefer resentment to achievement. They are so obsessed by their hatred of the United States they do not see anymore the real dangers confronting France. It's a very dangerous situation. I do not know how we could go out of this situation. I honestly don't know if it is even still possible.
Frontpagemag interviewed John J Miller (Our Oldest Enemies, 10/18/04, frontpagemag.com) co-author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. who explained:
The French suffer from a very bad case of wounded national pride. Three hundred years ago, they ruled a globe-spanning empire. But ever since their defeat in the final French and Indian War--known in Europe as the Seven Years War--they’ve traveled on a downward trajectory. Napoleon provided a brief and bloody interruption to this relentless decline. At the same time, the French have watched the United States grow in power. Our gains mirror their losses. This has resulted in a tremendous sense of jealousy that embodies itself, nowadays, in a distinctly anti-American geopolitical outlook.
John Miller quoted Francois Mitterand as saying shortly before his death:
“We are at war with America,” he said. “A permanent war ... a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans--they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world.”
and French Prime Minister, Jean Pierre Raffarin as saying:
“The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies.”
French hatred may be at
the root of the French desire to paint the United States in as black colors as
possible and to be paranoid of the United States. Envy may be the root of
French hatred and the desire to eliminate low self esteem, which is associated
with envy may be a motivating factor in being paranoid.
Philippe Karsenty, the founder and president of Media-Ratings, was interviewed by Frontpage
Magazine (5/16/06) about the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism of
France. He said
Anti-Americanism
is also very present in the French political and intellectual life. Never
forget how our actual prime minister, Villepin, travelled all over the world to
fight American diplomacy before the Iraqi war. Another thing interesting
to think about: not one French newspaper or magazine supported the US
in the war in Iraq. Not even one. And when you asked French diplomats or
intellectuals why America was going at war against Saddam, they answered that
it was because Bush was receiving marching orders from Ariel Sharon…
As I
said, the Iraqi war was launched, according to most of the French people, in
the name of Israel. And if you look at the nuclear bomb in preparation in Iran,
you see that the French media only focus on the Israeli supposed interest. They
just forget that if Iran provides terrorists with dirty radioactive material,
it’s Europe that could be affected very soon. They also forget to recall that
Europe has no missile anti-missile as Israel has with the Hetz. This means
that, objectively, Israel is less endangered by a nuclear Iran than Europe.
But, if you hear French media, the only country is danger is Israel and French
people don’t want to fight a billion of Muslims to defend 6 million Israelis.
The
phenomena described by Mr. Karsenty is one in which those who stand up to evil
are considered evil because the world is a less threatening place that
way. Israel is the enemy of Iran. Iran is the country whose nuclear weapons
threaten France yet the French prefer to blame Israel. The United States is the enemy of Iran and
the best chance the world has of militarily disarming Iran yet the French see
the U.S. as making the world a more dangerous place by supporting Israel. The world becomes less threatening when
viewed this way because then that is required is that the United States stop
supporting Israel. If the French were
to view the United States and Israel as doing the right thing and standing up
against the looming Iranian threat then they have to face that the threat won’t
just go away by sacrificing Israel and that they have a moral obligation to
help fight Iran a very unpleasant thought.
The desire to sacrifice Israel in order to save France creates a desire
to demonize Israel, otherwise the French would have to face that they are
sacrificing good in order to appease evil.
We have here a motivation to create paranoia toward a target, in order
to feel good about one’s own immoral behavior toward that target.
The French and Europeans in general prefer to believe that if they’re
just nice to the Muslims the Muslims will leave them alone. They know that if the United States strikes
at Iran, Iran is likely to strike them and they are afraid. So they are hostile to the U.S. because of
fear that U.S. actions will endanger them.
They are unwilling to face the reality that Islam will strike at them no
matter how nice they are to Muslims and no matter how much they appease the
Muslims and no matter how much of their freedom they sacrifice to the Muslims. They are unwilling to face the threat that
they face because it means that they have to fight.
Bruce Bawer, author of While
Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within was
asked by Jamie Glazov about European anti-Americanism. His answer sheds light on motives to be
paranoid. He said:
It’s very strange. I
never get used to it. It’s kind of schizophrenic, actually. On one
level there’s an enthusiasm for America. America is sexy, exciting.
Europeans love American TV, American pop music. They wear Yankee caps and
t-shirts with Old Glory on them. If you’re out someplace for the evening
and somebody hears you’re an American, they want to talk to you and hear about
your life. It’s thrilling for them. But the very same people will
then turn around and tell you how horrible your country is – everybody in
America is overweight, nobody has health insurance, they’re all idiots, and so
forth. This is what they’ve been taught in school and heard in the
media. Weirdly, it’s their very enthusiasm for America, I think, that
feeds their eagerness to believe this nonsense. They’re so in awe of
America, so drawn to it, that they need to believe that there’s something
horrible at the heart of it in order to be content with their own lives in
their own societies.
Besides, buying into the
idea that America is the #1 problem in the world – the #1 threat to world peace
and so on – is a good way of distracting themselves from the genuine problems
facing their own countries. After all, in Europe, there’s a lot of
pressure not to address those problems. To criticize any aspect of immigrant
communities or immigration policies is to risk being called a racist. In
Norway, there’s been a rash of cold-blooded murders by rejected asylum seekers,
who, after being rejected, incredible as it sounds, are simply allowed to roam
free in the streets of Oslo. Recently, one of them walked into the
downtown Oslo office of somebody I knew, a wonderful doctor, and stabbed him to
death with a huge knife he’d brought with him. On the day it happened, a
mutual friend of ours, who was despondent and in shock, said, “Something needs
to be done about these asylum seekers.” And as soon as the words were out
of his mouth, he added, “Oh, I shouldn’t say that, it sounds racist.” He
hadn’t said anything racist. But this is how people have been trained to
think. It’s paralyzing. So it is that the frustration and anger
over the crisis in their own societies is deflected to a safe target –
America. You can say anything you want about Americans and nobody will
call you a racist.
FP: What is your perspective on
what we could call European
dhimmitude and the reflexive European appeasement mentality?
Bawer: Americans and Europeans
both learned a lesson from World War II – but we learned different
lessons. America learned that evil should never be appeased. If
Britain and France had not caved in to Hitler at Munich, the war and the
Holocaust might never have happened. Europeans, however, have been taught
that the lesson of WWII is the evil of war, pure and simple. War should
be avoided at all costs. Dialogue is always better than armed
conflict. This mentality feeds anti-Americanism – instead of admiring
America’s willingness to defend its freedoms in war, which after all is what
made possible the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis – duh! –
Europeans see Americans as people who simply love to make war. We’re
primitive, bloodthirsty warmongers. They see themselves, by contrast, as
the preachers and guardians of a new, more noble and sophisticated era of
peace. And they’ll make any compromise in order to preserve that
peace.
The Europeans fail to realize that if they keep yielding to Islam they
will become Islamicized and part of the army of Islam, if they don’t fight
Islam now, they will fight for Islam later.
This web page and the article, Creation of Paranoia (Part 1, Part 2) discusses how low self esteem can give rise to paranoia and other possible reasons why people create paranoia or desire to be paranoid.
The idea that the September 11 attacks were staged by the Pentagon is believed by one in five Germans and is common throughout Europe. (Menace in Europe, frontpagemag.com 4/7/06)
One of the most pervasive examples of mass paranoia is anti-semitism and in order to understand mass paranoia it behooves us to examine anti-semitism.
ID Sources of Antisemitism
We can learn a lot about the cause of the cause of anti-semitism from the history of Gaius Caligula of Rome. Caligula wanted people to erect statues of him and worship him. Every people subject to Rome erected statues of Gaius in their cities along with their gods, except for the Judaeans. The Judaeans declared that they were forbidden to place an image of God, and certainly not that of a human being, not only in their Temple, but anywhere in their country. They would never transgress the laws that they had received from their forefathers, even if that meant all the Judaeans - men women and children - would have to be killed.
This was a recipe for disaster. Solomon Zeitlin wrote about what happened in his book The Rise and Fall of the Judean State.
When Gaius declared himself a god, the heathens were able to accept him as such, and they erected statues of him and worshipped them. The Judaeans, who believed in one God alone, could not do this... When the Judaeans refused to allow the erection of statues in their proseuche, house of prayer, a disastrous progrom took place in Alexandria...
When the heathens of Jabneh (a town in Judaea) learned that Gaius considered himself a god, they erected an altar to the emperor... and the Judaeans promply destroyed it. Gaius became greatly enraged at this sacrilegious act. He decided to destroy the Judaean "superstition" and if necessary, wipe out the entire people. He ordered Petronius, the legate of Syria, to erect an enormous statue of himself in the guise of Zeus, and place it in the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, using force to crush any resistance.
In order to avoid the annihilation of the Jews, Petronius delayed the erection of the statue on the grounds that to create a statue worth of Gaius would take time. Ultimately the assassination of Gaius saved the Jews.
Gaius hated the Jews because they would not worship him. Similarly believers of other religions have throughout history hated Jews because the Jews would not worship their deities and believe their beliefs. This hatred gave rise to creation of paranoia against the Jews including the Christian slander of deicide against the Jews.
II Reasons for Religious Antisemitism
Most of the problems of the world today have their seeds in creation of paranoia that occurred thousands of years ago. About two thousand years ago the Christians blamed the Jews for killing the son of God an accusation that religious historians such as Dr. William Nicholls argue is false. The belief that the Jews killed Jesus leads people today to hate the Jews and to assume they are the guilty party in the Middle East.
One example of this is a statement of Professor Eugenio Chahuan, a member of the University of Chile's Center of Arabic Studies to the daily La Hora,
If the Jews killed, the Messiah, we can expect that they may kill any people.
Jostein Gaarder, the author of Sophie’s World, in a letter
published in Aftenposten, Norway’s leading newspaper in the summer of
2006, claimed
that “the first Zionist terrorists started operating in the time of Jesus.”
Mike Evans a Christian minister in an article titled "Christ Killers" (worldnetdaily.com 2/20/04) wrote:
I am a Christian minister. My father was a Christian, my mother an Orthodox Jew. I was raised as a Christian, but still, I was physically attacked as a child in "Christian America." I was called a "Christ-killer" hundreds of times. I pushed my mother's grocery cart down the street while self-professing Christians threw eggs and tomatoes from their vehicles, and shouted obscenities – including "Christ-killer" and "Jew-witch." I remember waking one morning to the words "Christ-killer" spray-painted on the front door.
Mr. Evans asked his mother
Why am I being beat up for killing Christ?
He writes:
my mother sat me down and told me the story of her grandfather. He was a rabbi. Russian Orthodox Christians burned him and his entire congregation to death inside the synagogue. She said to me, "They did it while screaming, 'You crucified Christ, you Christ-killers.'"
I can still see the pain in her eyes as she told me of loved ones who were thrown into the ovens of Auschwitz. "The last words many of them heard," she said, "were 'Christ-killers.'"
Mr. Evans tried to get Mel Gibson to put a pro-Jewish message at the end of his Passion film which he didn't do. Instead he appears to have based his script partly on anti-semitic visions of a German nun by the name of Anne Emmerich and included scenes in which Jewish children transform into demons and Satan walks among the Jewish crowds as they clamour for Jesus's death. Predictably the Passion is leading to anti-Jewish hatred and anti-semitics acts.
For example, in one incident at the Rehoboth Beach area in Delaware (The New Journal 5/2/04) a group of people approached a person at a mall and said, "You're Jewish. We hate you. You killed Christ."
According to My Way News (4/5/04)
Hanan Nsour, a veiled, 21-year-old Muslim in Jordan, came out of "The Passion of the Christ" in tears and pronounced her verdict: Mel Gibson's crucifixion epic "unmasked the Jews' lies and I hope that everybody, everywhere, turns against the Jews.
The Quran, though, says Jesus's crucifixion never happened...
Kuwait bans any movies depicting any of the prophets recognized by Islam, but one of its top Shiite clerics, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Mehri, has urged an exception for "The Passion" because it "reveals crimes committed by Jews against Christ."...
When the 1998 animated movie "Prince of Egypt" reached Cairo, censors banned it. One reason given: Islam reveres Moses as a prophet, and many Muslims recoil at seeing their prophets portrayed as flesh-and-blood characters.
Jesus is also a prophet to the Muslims, yet "The Passion" was OK'd by Egypt's censors with no changes.
According to a Muslim Hadith a Jewess from Khaybar poisoned Muhammad and
this poison ultimately led to his painful and protracted death.
Michel Gurfinkiel ("Frances Jewish Problem", Commentary July-August 2002, p38) gave two examples of how religion is currently creating antisemitism. He wrote about how Liberation a left of center French newspaper, carried a cartoon published the day after Christmas 2001, showing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon standing next to a cross with a hammer in his hand and nails in his mouth. The caption: "No Christmas for Arafat, But he is welcome on Easter." This was an obvious reference to the crucifixion of Jesus which is blamed on the Jews. Two days earlier, at midnight mass in Montpellier, a Catholic priest had handed out the text for a humn in the Occitan language that read: "He was born in Bethlehem, Palestine. He was born in Bethlehem, poor and innocent. Sharon shot him down." The implication is that Sharon shot Jesus.
In April 02, La Stampa - a liberal Italian newspaper - depicting the infant Jesus in a manger, menaced by an Israeli tank and saying "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."
In 2001, the founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center the Anglican Rev. Canon Naim Ateek, wrote that, “Jesus is on the Cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him…The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily.”
Aren't the Jews guilty of oppressing the Palestinians you may ask. How do I know it's not the oppression of the Palestinians that creates anti-semitism? My answer to that question is another question which is "How do you know the Jews are oppressing the Palestinians"? That's absurd you say, "I read it in the newspapers, I see it on on the news, I hear it on the radio." "But how do you know what you hear on the radio and see on the news and read in the newspapers is impartial and objective?" I respond. "If religion creates bias against the Jews than one would expect that bias to distort reporting about the Middle East and the biased reporting to create even more bias against the Jews". I give some examples of how the media distorts the news about the Middle East in the Creation of Paranoia by the Media section of this web page.
One would expect the historical aspect of the bible regarding the Jewish presence in Israel to create support among Christians for Jews in the Middle East and probably it has to some extent. However, there are Christians in the Middle East who promote replacement theology, a revivial of a medieval church doctrine that states that Jews have been replaced by Christians in God's favor and that therefore any promises to the Jews, including their historic links to the holyland, lack any validity. One of the main proponents of "Replacement Theology" is the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah abu el-Assal.(Response Spring 2002)
The Friday, January 17 2003, edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that: "Anti-Semitism is widespread among America's young adults, with a fourth believing Jews control the media and Wall Street, according to a survey released this week...Another key finding is that 37 percent of American adults, or 65 million people, continue to believe Jews were responsible for killing Jesus." More: "The Christ-killer charge remains a pervasive belief."
About 1400 years ago Muhammad wrote
into the Koran how the infidel must be killed or pay for protection and live as
a Dhimmi (person with inferior status). He also slandered the Jews
in the Koran to create hatred against them.
According
to the hadith, the Jews caused Muhammad’s protracted, excruciating death from poisoning. (frontpagemag.com
5/15/2006)
The anti-semitism that led to the Holocaust occurred in this century partly because of what was written into the Christian Bible and what was written in the Koran. The Grand Mufti, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini encouraged Hitler to annihilate the Jews. The anti-semitism that leads to wars in the Middle East against Israel are largely a result of what was written in the Koran. William Nicholls in his book Christian Antisemitism, A History of Hate, wrote that:
Anti-Judaic hostility, contrary to what is often said by Arabs and their apologists, has deep roots in Islam, going back to the life of the Prophet himself and to the words of the Quran.
An example of Islamic Creation of Paranoia
Toward Jews Through Images.
One of the causes of
anti-semitism and for that matter hatred of another group is the "evil
gene delusion". This is the delusion that if a group of people did
something wrong a thousand years ago, that means their modern day descendents
are evil as well. There is one way that evil can progress through generations and
that is through beliefs. If a group believes a religion such as Islam that
preaches that the non-believer is evil, the evil in that paranoia is
transferred through generations of believers. However, if a tribe 1000
years ago betrayed a treaty with another tribe and that was not part of their
religion, then the modern descendents of that tribe have not culturally
inherited any of the wickedness of their ancestors. To assume that the
modern descendents are wicked would entail the assumption that they inherited
wickedness through their genes. The Nazis assumed that all non-Aryans
were inferior and evil due to their genes. The Moslems hate the Jews
partly because they believe that Jewish tribes betrayed Mohammad and that
therefore the Jewish descendents of those tribes and all other Jews are
treacherous as well. A diatribe against the Jews in the Milli Gazette, a
Turkish newspaper that illustrates this is included below. (Andrew
Bostom, frontpagemag.com)
Judaism is synonymous with treason…They [the Jews]
even betrayed God…When God told them to bow their heads while entering Al-Quds
[Jerusalem], they entered with their heads up. The prophets sent to them, such
as Zachariah and Isaiah, were murdered by the Jews…In fact no amount of pages
or lines would be sufficient to explain the Qur’anic chapters and our Lord
Prophet’s [Muhammad’s] words that tell us of the betrayals of the Jews,
Steven Stalinsky in an article titled Jihad by Satellite (frontpagemag.com 5/20/05) quoted Muslims with the evil gene delusion. He wrote:
In August on Saudi Arabia 's MBC TV, Saudi Sheikh Abd al-Qader Hammad said, "From the day civil strife began in Islam, the Jews were behind it. There is no evil in the world that the Jews are not behind. Search in the depths of history ... and you will find the finger of the Jews behind it."
"Jewish treachery is the nature of this race. It runs in their blood and passes from generation to generation," 'Adnan abu Al-Qattam said in an official Friday sermon that aired on Bahrain TV July 30. "The Jews proved to history ... they are a corrupting people ... History clearly attests to their... despicable behavior," he said. He then cited a Koranic verse calling Muslims "to kill Jews."
That would imply
that there are genes for treachery and that our morality is governed by our
genes and not by choices that we freely make. The truth is that there are good
and bad people of all races and that politics, culture, religion and
personal choice are the predominant factors in determining the morality of a
group toward other groups.
Additional reasons for religious antisemitism include
1) Anger by religious leaders at those who
reject their religion and at who they can't control with religion.
2) Desire to keep believers from being led away from the religion by
nonbelievers.
3) Finding a scapegoat for the failures of the religion. (Protecting self
esteem by blaming others)
1) Anger by religious leaders at those who reject their religion and at who they can't control with religion:
Jews experienced hostility from their neighbors well before Christianity came on the scene. William Nicholls in his book Christian Antisemitism, A History of Hate, writes that:
Pagan hostility toward the Jewish people was aroused, above all, by the refusal of the Jews to join the ecunemical consensus of paganism, that the Gods of one people could be satisfactorily equated with those of another...Pagan calumnies against the Jews seem to be outgrowths of this central rejection. If the Jews would not worship the Gods their customs must have been inhuman and barbaric.
In my article Creation of Paranoia (Part 1, Part 2) I quote Luther condemning the Jews because they rejected Christianity. Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer, claimed that if he must stand arraigned for his views on Jews, so should Martin Luther. He was right.
The paranoid myth that Jews killed God was born as a result of Christian hatred of Jews for rejecting Christianity and that myth led to further hatred against Jews. This hatred was expressed by the so called "saintly" Christians, two examples of their saintliness are given below:
In 379 A.D. Vicious St. Ambrose in Milan said (Anti-Semitism What is it) :
The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy, rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worship the Devil. Their religion is a sickness. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.
In 395 A.D. St. Gregory of Nyssa in sermons and writings characterized Jews as assassins of the Prophets, companions of the Devil, a race of vipers, a Sanhedrin of Demons, enemies of all that is beautiful, hogs and goats in their lewd grossness.
I recently experienced paranoia toward me as a result of my rejection of Jesus. I was walking through a subway tunnel when I heard a man preaching about Jesus. I said to him "Jesus does not exist". He said to me:
You have allowed your mind to be infiltrated by the Devil.
Muhammad created paranoia toward those who rejected Islam. In the Koran 62.5 he said:
Evil is the likeness of the people who deny the revelations of Allah.
Initially Muhammad sought to gain the support of, and legitimization from, the Jewish tribes of western Arabia for religious, financial and military power reasons. However, Muhammad was rebuffed by the Jews who refused to see in him a Prophet. Rejection of Islam turned Muhammad against the Jews. According to the Religious Persecution of the Jews by Arabs web page:
It was the Prophet Muhammad himself who attempted to negate the positive titage of the Jew that had been prevalent earlier. According to historian Bernard Lewis, the Prophet Muhammad's original plan had been to induce the Jews to adopt Islam 1 when Muhammad began his rule at Medina in A.D. 622 he counted few supporters, so he adopted several Jewish practices-including daily prayer facing toward Jerusalem and the fast of Yom Kippur-in the hope of wooing the Jews. But the Jewish community rejected the Prophet Muhammad's religion, preferring to adhere to its own beliefs, whereupon Muhammad subsequently substituted Mecca for Jerusalem, and dropped many of the Jewish practices.
Three years later, Arab hostility against the Jews commenced, when the Meccan army exterminated the Jewish tribe of Quraiza.2 As a result of the Prophet Muhammad's resentment, the Holy Koran itself contains many of his hostile denunciations of Jews 3 and bitter attacks upon the Jewish tradition, which undoubtedly have colored the beliefs of religious Muslims down to the present.
Muhammad's growing armies prevailed and the struggle for the fate of Arabia ended with the slaughter and defeat of the Jews. The rejection by the Jews may be the reason Muhammad had the following written into the Qu'ran [9:29-30].
Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day... Allah (Himself) fighteth against them. How perverse they are!"
Muhammad instructed Moslems to torture nonbelievers. Quotes of his on this are on the Islamic Hell web page. Islam considers belief in any God other than Islam an "insult" to Islam. One illustration of this was the fatwah (religious edict) issued by the Taliban's spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, on Monday February 26, 2001, calling for all statues to be smashed including two Buddha images that soar 125 feet and 174 feet above the village of Bamiyan. (This was reported in CNN.com March 2, 2001) Mohammad explained:
Only Allah, the Almighty, deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else.
In the Excessive Kindness of Islam web page Muhammad's conquest of Quraiza is described as follows:
In 627 A.D he raided the Jewish tribe of Qurayza. The Jews were defeated in the fight and many prisoners were taken. They were either sold or assassinated in the name of merciful Allah. In one place alone, approximately 800 Jews were beheaded in cold blood. In 629 A.D after the battle of Khaybar, and the defeat of the Jews, the same play was enacted. All the Jews were put to the sword. The raids undertaken by the prophet and methods followed became the guidelines for the Caliphs and other leaders who followed him.
The revenge taken by Muhammad on the non-believer is discussed in more detail in the revenge section of this web page. Before destroying the statues carved into the rock face near the central town of Bamiyan the Taliban explained that the statues were:
Insulting to Islam
They also planned to destroy all statues and religious artifacts in their museums as well. For a fundamentalist Moslem anything and anyone who is not a Moslem is an insult to Islam.
Osama bin Ladin in an interview with John Miller of ABC news in May 1998 explained that Allah's orders are to fight the non-believer. He said:
Allah has ordered us to make holy wars and to fight to see to it that his word is the highest and the uppermost and that of the unbelievers the lowermost.
In an interview with al-Jazira in 1999 Osama bin Laden, boasted that he had created:
The front of the Islamic Nation
to fight the Kufar (non-believers).
Balint Vazsonyi wrote an article in the
Washington Times (9/18/01) called "The People's
Right To Know" in which he wrote the following about the intolerance
of the Saudis to the American non-believers during the Gulf War.
It is Thanksgiving 1990. Hundreds of thousands of
Americans are spending it in Saudi Arabia, invited by its rulers to protect the
country -- not against the infidel, but against a fellow Arab Muslim, Saddam
Hussein of Iraq. Having raped Kuwait, Iraqi forces were poised to storm
Saudi Arabia, a country unable to defend itself.
U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush arrived
to share the Thanksgiving meal with the armed forces whose commander in chief
he was. Upon arrival, the Saudi hosts informed him that the sight of a banquet
connected in any way, shape or form with Christian traditions, giving thanks to
God, was so hateful to Muslims that the president and his lot would have to
repair to the high seas, far from the shores that would be soiled, defaced,
desecrated by their act and presence...
Here then is a question Americans are entitled to
have answered. When Arabs and other Muslims arrive and settle in America, when
and how does the miraculous transformation occur whereby the Christianity -- or
Judaism -- that surrounds them ceases to offend?
Robert Spencer in his book Onward Muslim Soldiers wrote about how many Muslims considered non-Muslims contaminated. He wrote:
Many Muslims believe that the impurity that Christians are considered to have by the standards of Islamic ritual laws "will be passed on by physical contact with them. A young Christian journalist found that a female Muslim typist would not eat with her for this reason. An elderly Christian man who staffed the press lounge at the National Assembly was banned by the National Assembly staff from touching any canteen utensils or even carrying a tray. A Christian student of science at the Islamia College in Karachi was forbidden by his fellow students to drink from a tap. Five Christian schoolgirls from St. Mary's School in Gujrat, who were taking a Home Economics practical examination on February 25, 1997, found that the Muslim examiner would not test or mark the food they had cooked. She ordered the Christian's food to be put into the dustbin, but tested the food of their eight Muslim classmates in the normal way.
In Pakistan two Christian brothers tried to buy ice cream from a vendor who insisted they not use his utensils which were reserved for Muslim customers. They protested and he accused them of "desecrating the Koran and blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed." Both received thirty five year prison sentences and fines of $1,500 (U.S. Dept. of State Bueau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor "Pakistan," Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2000 Feb 23, 2001).
Professor Laurence Loeb in a book titled (“Outcaste- Jewish Life in Southern Iran,” 1977), wrote that:
Fear of pollution by Jews led to great excesses and peculiar behavior by Muslims.
Water was considered the most common agent of pollution, therefore Jews were not permitted to use the public baths…The possibility that rain-water might splash off a Jew onto a Muslim led to the prohibition of Jews walking in public during the rain. One informant from Shiraz told the following anecdote:
‘When I was a boy, I went with my father to the house of a non-Jew on business. When we were on our way, it started to rain. We stopped near a man who had apparently fallen and was bleeding. As we started to help him, a Muslim akhond (theologian) stopped and asked me who I was and what I was doing. Upon discovering that I was a Jew, he reached for a stick to hit me for defiling him by being near him in the rain. My father ran to him and begged the akhond to hit him instead.’
Jonathan Foreman in his column "Islam's Cruel Crusaders"(New York Post 10/31/01 p37) wrote the following about the Saudis:
This U.S. "ally" actually banned Christmas carols from Armed Forces Radio during the Gulf War.
2) Desire to keep believers from being led away from the religion by nonbelievers.
The existence of a non-believer is a threat to those promoting belief. Especially if the non-believer is powerful and successful, afterall, God is supposed to reward the believer and punish the non-believer. If the believer is convinced the nonbeliever is bad, better yet, if the believer kills the nonbeliever, than the believer is less likely to be influenced by the nonbeliever. To much of Islam, the United States represents the powerful successful non-believer.
Daniel Pipes when asked why Islamic radicals attacked the United States (CNNfn: Moneyline News Hour August 29, 2002) answered:
You know, it's in the nature of all totalitarian movements, all radical utopian movements, like the Fascists, the Communists, and now the Islamists, that sooner or later they get the United States in their sights as the most dangerous enemy they have. And we're dangerous by virtue of who we are, not necessarily what we do. By our democracy, our individualism, our consumerism, our commercialism. And totalitarians can't abide that because, among other things, it is an enormous temptation for their own people. So they have to get rid of it.
Mosques teach the faithful that the practices of the non-believer are
evil. For example the Khalid Bin
Al-Walid Mosque of Toronto has a web site in which it is written:
"Allah and his messenger have warned us against
following or imitating non-Muslims in things which are characteristic of their
religion or beliefs. This is more emphasized in the case of their eids
[festivals] or occasions, which always hold some religious or ideological
non-Islamic meanings, and on which the kuffaar indulge in many evil
practices."
What are these evil holidays
in which the Kuffaar (non-believers) engage in “many evil practices”? Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years,
Halloween, birthdays, New Years are among them. (National
Post 10/4/07)
Christians called those who disagreed with their doctrine heretics and created paranoia toward them. The following paragraphs about this are from the Catholic Encyclopedia.
Heresy, in the sense of falling away from the Faith, became possible only after the Faith had been promulgated by Christ. Its advent is clearly foretold, Matt., xxiv, 11, 23-26: " . . . many false prophets shall rise. and shall seduce many. . . . Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him. For there shall rise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. Behold I have told it to you, beforehand. If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not. "Christ also indicated the marks by which to know the false prophets: "Who is not with me is against me" (Luke, xi, 23); "and if he will not hear the Church let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican" (Matt., xviii, 17); "he that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark, xvi, 16). The Apostles acted upon their Master's directions. All the weight of their own Divine faith and mission is brought to bear upon innovators. "If any one", says St.Paul, "preach to you a gospel, besides that you have received, let him be anathema" (Gal., i, 9). To St. John the heretic is a seducer, an antichrist, a man who dissolves Christ (I John, iv, 3; II John, 7); "receive him not into the house nor say to him, God speed you" (II John, 10). St. Peter, true to his office and to his impetuous nature, assails them as with a two-edged sword: " . . . lying teachers who shall bring in sects of perdition, and deny the Lord who bought them: bringing upon themselves swift destruction . . . These are fountains without water, and clouds tossed with whirlwinds, to whom the mist of darkness is reserved" (II Pet., ii, 1, 17). St. Jude speaks in a similar strain throughout his whole epistle. St. Paul admonishes the disturbers of the unity of faith at Corinth that "the weapons of our warfare . . . are mighty to God unto the pulling down of fortifications, destroying counsels, and every height that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God . . . and having in readiness to revenge all disobedience" (II Cor., x, 4, 5, 6).
What Paul did at Corinth he enjoins to be done by every bishop in his own church. Thus Timothy is instructed to "war in them a good warfare, having faith and a good conscience, which some rejecting have made shipwreck concerning the faith. Of whom is Hymeneus and Alexander, whom I have delivered up to Satan, that they may learn not to blaspheme" (I Tim., i, 18-20). He exhorts the ancients of the Church at Ephesus to "take heed to yourselves, and to the whole flock, wherein the Holy Ghost hath placed you bishops, to rule the church of God, . . . I know that, after my departure, ravening wolves will enter in among you, not sparing the flock . . . Therefore watch, . . ." (Acts, xx. 28, 29, :31). "Beware of dogs", he writes to the Philippians (iii, 2), the dogs being the same false teachers as the "ravening wolves". The Fathers show no more leniency to perverters of the faith. A Protestant writer thus sketches their teaching (Schaff-Herzog, s. v. Heresy): "Polycarp regarded Marcion as the first-born of the Devil. Ignatius sees in heretics poisonous plants, or animals in human form. Justin and Tertullian condemn their errors as inspirations of the Evil One; Theophilus compares them to barren and rocky islands on which ships are wrecked; and Origen says, that as pirates place lights on cliffs to allure and destroy vessels in quest of refuge, so the Prince of this world lights the fires of false knowledge in order to destroy men. [Jerome calls the congregations of the heretics synagogues of Satan (Ep. 123), and says their communion is to be avoided like that of vipers and scorpions (Ep. 130).]" These primitive views on heresy have been faithfully transmitted and acted on by the Church in subsequent ages. There is no break in the tradition from St. Peter to Pius X
The punishment for heretics is described by the Catholic Encyclopedia as follows:
The burning of heretics was first decreed in the eleventh century. The Synod of Verona (1184) imposed on bishops the duty to search out the heretics in their dioceses and to hand them over to the secular power. Other synods, and the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) under Pope Innocent III, repeated and enforced this decree, especially the Synod of Toulouse (1229), which established inquisitors in every parish (one priest and two laymen). Everyone was bound to denounce heretics, the names of the witnesses were kept secret; after 1243, when Innocent IV sanctioned the laws of Emperor Frederick II and of Louis IX against heretics, torture was applied in trials; the guilty persons were delivered up to the civil authorities and actually burnt at the stake. Paul III (1542) established, and Sixtus V organized, the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition, or Holy Office, a regular court of justice for dealing with heresy and heretics (see ROMAN CONGREGATIONS).
It is interesting to note that from the Jewish point of view Jesus was a heretic. Many Christian antisemites hate the Jews because of the belief that the Jewish leaders reported Jesus to the Roman authorities yet the Christians killed and tortured heretics. At least the Jewish leaders had the excuse that they were supposed to report all sedition to the Roman authorities and would have been killed by the Romans if they did not report Jesus. We don't know with certainty if the Jewish leaders reported Jesus to the Romans at all, the Romans must have known about him because of the large following that he had. In fact when the Romans killed him they called him the "King of the Jews".
3) Finding a scapegoat for the failures of the religion. (Protecting self esteem by blaming others)
According to Yossef Bodansky, in his book Islamic Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument:
The Jewish conspiracy is the most effective excuse and justification of Islamist leaders about the backwardness of the Muslim World-the loss of power and economic failures vis-a-vis the West. All of these calamities, they argue, are because of a Jewish-dominated global conspiracy aimed to eradicate Islam. Being a divine way of life, Islam is expected to have an answer to everything. Therefore, the troubles from which the contemporary Muslim society is suffering must be due to nonbelievers and to plots-primarily by Zionists.
Ralph Peters in an article called "The Tragedy of the Arabs" (New York Post 3/30/03) wrote:
Without the United States - and, of course, Israel - as excuses for Arab political squalor, Arabs might have to engage in self-examination, to ask themselves, "How have we failed so badly?"
They prefer to blame others, to sleepwalk through history, and to cheer when tyrants and terrorists "avenge" them.
On one level, Arabs know that Saddam Hussein is a monster. They know he has killed more Arabs than Israel ever could do. Saddam has been the worst thing to happen to Mesopotamia since the Mongols razed Baghdad. But Arabs are so jealous and discouraged that they need to inflate even Saddam into a hero. They have no one else.
Many Christians reacted to criticisms of Mel Gibson's Passion movie with paranoia.
Rabbi Benjamin Blech in an article titled "The Passion, The Movie and the Aftermath" (3/9/04?) wrote how after he saw the Passion a woman asked him what he thought of it. He replied that the movie was very violent. She angrily said to him: "You must be Jewish. Jews are always going to find fault, with a story that tells the truth about our Lord!" There have been numerous Christian articles claiming that those who attack the Passion are really against Christianity. Although that may be true in some cases, in some cases the criticisms are out of genuine concern. One case in point is that of Sister Mary Boys, a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, who was part of an ad hoc group that was asked to read an early screenplay, and who publicly warned that it could inflame anti-Semitism. Rabbi Blech wrote about the Christian reaction to her as follows:
The result? Sister Boys said that not only was Gibson furious but since the group made those criticisms, she and other members have been attacked by supporters of the movie as "anti-Christ, the arrogant gang of so-called scholars, dupes of Satan, forces of Satan and other terms that I cannot use in polite company.
Recently created religions show the same disturbing tendencies as Christianity and Islam. For example Scientology calls nonbelievers the "enemy". In addition religions often inculcate a feeling of superiority toward the nonbeliever. Part of Christian doctrine was that God rejected the Jews and chose them instead because the Jews killed Christ. Scientologists derisively term people outside Scientology "Wogs" or as Hubbard defined them, "common, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, garden-variety humanoids." (See, Tom and Nicole Split, a Question of Faith).
The motive to create paranoia to
those who challenge the faith extends to those who challenge the faith of
others in oneself. For example paranoia was created to Israeli
journalists who reported Palestinian criticism of the corruption of a local
Fatah leader in Bethlehem (Palestinians: We'll kill Israeli journalists who
enter Bethlehem, by Arieh O'Sullivan and Lamia Lahoud Jerusalem Post Feb 13,
2001). Following the report, the Bethlehem Fatah movement published an
announcement intended to clear Hamid's name, saying that the corruption charges
were planted by "external agents interested in splitting the Palestinian
street and the Fatah leadership." The Bethlehem Fatah movement created
paranoia to the Israeli journalists in order to discredit them. This also
falls under the category of creation of paranoia to remove a threat which is
discussed in my article.
6) Islam’s Need to Create
Paranoia to Sustain Jihad
Nonie Darwish in a speech to the Heritage
Foundation which can be viewed
online said:
Jihad is defined by Al Azhar University which is the oldest Islamic
University in Cairo over a thousand years old this is the definition of
Jihad. It's a permanent war instition
against nonbelievers Jews Christians and Pagans. Permanent war institution.
To maintain this permanent Jihad a villain must always exist as a reason
and motivation. Thus we get a culture
dominated by anger hatred pointing fingers and being constantly offended.
Islam
promises men the reward of virgin beauties in paradise if the kill the
non-believer. In order to provide
additional motivation for Muslims to kill they are shown videos depicting tortured and
slain Muslims that are now on
the internet. Although Muslims are slain in conflicts with
non-Muslims I have not heard reports of torture of Muslims other than by other
Muslims it is likely Muslims are
accusing the United States and the Jews of committing these atrocities. Videos of Muslims committing atrocities can be seen here.
4) Creating Paranoia to Create Pride
Mark Juergensmeyer in an interview by the New York Press (Jihad 101 11/28-12/4/01) said how Dr. Abdul Rantisi, the political head of Hamas told him:
Don't think we're fighting for land. We're fighting for pride.
In the same interview Juergensmeyer writes how Mahmud Abouhalima told him the story about a lion who was raised by sheep. One day the lion went to a pond and saw his own reflection and then he suddenly realized he wasn't a sheep he was a lion. He said that is what Islam taught him -- that he wasn't a sheep, he was a lion. This exhilarating sense of empowerment came with feeling he was part of a great struggle. He was a warrior. A fighter.
IIb Religions Creation of Oppressors
Religions such as Islam command their adherents to subjugate or kill the non-believer. Non-believers are not going to walk like lambs to the slaughter at least not all of them. Some will fight back with the result that there will be dead Muslims. An unfortunate but very common human trait is to forget one's responsibility for disasters. So Muslims are likely to forget their responsibility for the violence that led to the defensive action of the non-believer that led to the dead Muslims. That would be hard on their self esteem. They are much more likely to view the defensive action as an aggressive action of the non-believers against them. Then they become the heros fighting the evil non-believer oppressor. That much better for the self esteem. This is illustrated in a cycle diagram on this web site.
This cycle to a large degree explains the view of many of the Arabs that the Israelis and the Americans are the evil oppressors. The Arab propaganda directed toward the West doesn't argue this of course and instead argues that the Israelis are brutal oppressors and that they are fighting for their freedom. The falsity of these claims is discussed on the Arab Propaganda page of Americans For A Safe Israel.
IIB Use of Religion to Create Paranoia:
The accusation that the Jews were planning to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque has been used to repeatedly incite Arabs to violence against the Jews. In August 20 such incitement led to assaults by Arab gangs which included massacres in Hebron, Safed and Jaffa where elderly, defenseless people were tortured and murdered. (Years of Wrath, Days of Glory, Yitshaq Ben Ami 1983)
According to the Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin (Aug. 26, 2004):
On
Aug. 21, 1969, a non-Jewish Australian named Michael Rohan set fire to
the podium of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Israel arrested and tried the mentally
deranged arsonist.
For years, the PA has been portraying this as a Zionist attack on the
mosque. This week, a special program dedicated to the issue described the
incident as a premeditated attack by the Israeli government. According to this
broadcast, Israel conspired with the arsonist, then deliberately allowed the
fire to spread by delaying the arrival of fire engines and cutting off water to
the site.
The PA version of events -- this week and in previous years -- also states
that then-Prime Minister Golda Meir referred to the fire as both the
"hardest" and "happiest" day of Israel's history: the
hardest because she feared the incident would lead to an attack by neighboring
Arab countries, and the happiest because such an attack never occurred. One
account from 2001 even claimed that Meir "laughed" when there was no
attack.
The Saudis post online sermons that incite according to Dore Gold author of Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism. (Response summer 2003 V24 #2)
The sermons advocate ongoing religious conflict with Christianity and Judaism, described as the camp of blasphemy and polytheism.
IIC Creation of Paranoia to Reduce Shame
I read an interesting hypothesis for one of the causes for Nazi anti-semitism on a website called All the Emperor's Men which was that blaming Germany's defeat on a Jewish conspiracy reduced the shame of having lost. Garry Greenwood the author of the web page wrote:
Possibly the most frightening and devastating facet of Adolf Hitler's blueprint for world power had already come into his possession as early as 1919. For it was around then that the supposed records of the proceedings of the World Congress of Jewry, held in Basle, Switzerland, in 1897, had been recently smuggled out of Russia, where they had been secretly kept till then, and published in Germany and other countries. These published proceedings are known as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion", and purport to be the resolutions and plans of a Jewish conspiracy for world domination....
The recently defeated German nation soaked up the contents of "The Protocols" like a dry sponge, since they explained, to them at least, why their powerful nation had suffered such a bitter defeat in World War I. From "The Protocols" they perceived how they were the victims of a global world conspiracy, and this allowed the Germans to place the blame for every conceivable woe rightly upon the shoulders of the Jews.
The Japanese school system hides from Japanese children the atrocities Japan committed before and during World War II. Garry Greenwood wrote:
Immediately upon their surrender, the Japanese army, which was in charge of the education system, totally erased all reference to and information regarding Japanese aggression, occupation and atrocities committed during the war. All documents and films recording their recent holy war were confiscated or destroyed. Nowhere, particularly today, will you find any Japanese reference to what their army did in the years leading up to 1945. This means most Japanese born after that year, which probably amounts to around 75 percent of the population, are almost totally ignorant of these facts. No Japanese under 50 will have any knowledge of the infamous "Rape of Nanking", the Baatan and Sandakan death marches, and so on. I have asked several Japanese Mahikari members if they are aware of the infamous "Rape of Nanking", and they have all answered in the negative. However, the Japanese have been told of their struggle to halt foreign imperialism, and how this struggle resulted in the fire-bombing of Tokyo in which 200,000 people were incinerated, plus the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the use of atomic bombs.
Thus the Japanese erase their shame and create paranoia to the rest of the world, paranoia that some day may lead to war.
When the hero of the Arab world, Saddam Hussein was capture in a hole after not firing a shot this was a day of sadness and intolerable shame for the Arab world. As a result they generated conspiracy theories such as Saddam having been drugged before he was captured so that he couldn't resist and so on. Perhaps the most creative conspiracy theory was written about by Robert Spencer in frontpagemag.com as follows:
Have you heard? Saddam Hussein is in Tel Aviv. He has been an agent for the U.S. and Israel since 1980, and followed instructions given him by George W. Bush himself in a phone conversation last winter about how to behave when American troops entered Iraq. The capture of Saddam was an elaborate charade designed to bolster the flagging morale of American troops in Iraq. The bearded, broken man who was captured wasn’t Saddam; any keen observer would know that Saddam had a mole or wart on his cheek, but that the crude double in the hands of the Americans has no such mark. What’s more, in the footage of Saddam’s hideaway, the foliage is from late summer! Clearly the Americans are trying to fool us with months-old archival footage that has nothing to do with Saddam at all!
Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, meanwhile, are in Monte Carlo, continuing to live the high life. American troops spirited them out of the country and staged their deaths in order to demoralize the Iraqi resistance.
There apparently is shame in the
Arab world that Muslims are fighting Muslims and that their heroic role model
Al Qaeda is attacking other Muslims. How does a Muslim rid oneself of
this shame? By blaming the Jews of course. This may explain why the
Palestinian newspaper, Al Quds ran an
article on March 23rd which quoted a Saudi official as saying that "world
Zionism" was behind Al Qaida. Salah Zahrani, chairman of the Saudi
Consultative Council's security committee told a lecture in Riyad that world
Zionism has fueled Al Qaida attacks throughout the world.
The idea being promoted is that the Zionists
sowed confusion among the Al Qaida leadership when they killed Al Qaida's real
leader, Abdullah Azzam. The Mossad killed him because he wanted to bring
Islamic holy war from Afghanistan to Palestine.
Since then, world Zionism has supplied Al Qaida
and deceived its membership into attacking Islamic countries. Zahrani pointed
out that Al Qaida has never conducted a major attack against the Jewish state.
He also said Saudi security forces have found a Mossad link with Al Qaida,
which has received weapons supplies from Israel. (Palestinian
Clan Battles, Frontpage Magazine.com 3/28/2006)
The Islamic faith says that Muslims are to be dominant to infidels. Muslims feel shame when they do not achieve the dominance they are commanded to achieve. Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist who authored the Oslo Syndrome Delusions of a People Under Siege, said that the impulse to Islamic indoctrination of the Jews:
which is also directed to a lesser degree against Christians and other groups, lies largely in Arab xenophobia and the dominant self-perception - advanced by both Islamist and secular regimes - of being a people whose rightful superior place in the world has been stolen from them by the evil machinations of others. (Purifying Allah's Soil, Frontpage Magazine 1/27/06)
David Gutmann, in an article titled The Arab Lie Whose Time Has Come (frontpagemag.com 4/21/04) wrote that many Palestinian Arabs fled in 1948 and about how they've rewritten history to make it appear that they were brutally driven out of their homes. He wrote:
The Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women... To relieve their shame they stridently and continually demand that their unsavory history be rewritten and reversed.
After Al Qaeda bombed Jordanian hotels and killed many Muslims including the fathers of a couple having a wedding many Jordanians blamed Israel even though Al Qaeda took "credit" for the bombing. They didn't want to believe that Muslims would do such a thing. (New York Times, 11/12/05) On Nov 13, an Iraqi woman confessed to being part of the suicide plot on Jordanian TV (Excite News 11/14/05).
IID Creation of Paranoia to Avoid Facing a Threatening Reality
Korea:
South Korea faces a very threatening situation from North Korea. North Korea has enough conventional weapons
trained on Seoul to annihilate it and has exploded a nuclear bomb. The United States is probably the only
barrier preventing war with the North. Many
South Koreans would like to believe that the North really isn’t that bad and
that the problem is the United States and if the South just helps out the North
economically and perhaps merges with the North into a single Korea all will be
well. One can speculate that blaming
the United States is desirable because the United States is a lot less
threatening and also because it’s easier on the self esteem to blame the
Caucasians then their people of their on race.
In an article titled Cracking the Hermit Kingdom, Gordon Cucullu and
Joshua Stanton wrote: (frontpagemagazine.com
10/24/2006)
To their everlasting shame, many in South Korea choose to live in cognitive dissonance and outright denial about conditions inside their northern neighbor. Many South Koreans dismiss reports of grave human rights abuses as “U.S. propaganda,” and dispute reports of conditions within North Korea’s gulag, to include the reported experimental