From Elsewhere: When Islamic grievances turn lethal

 

There are many different groups including religious and cultural groups in this world. Sometimes members of these groups have grievances about how they are treated by others. A person may have a grievance because they feel that they have been passed over for promotion at work because of their race, religion, sexuality, gender or political view. In nearly all these cases where there is a justifiable grievance the matter can be dealt with peacefully and calmly or at the very least can be examined to see if there is any substance for the grievance. The exception to this are Islamic grievances. Many of these grievances have no basis in reality, are based on a feeling of Islamic supremacism or have the capacity to spur Muslims onto carry out violent acts. Islam justifies violence against those outside of Islam to a far greater extent than any other monotheistic faith.

A week or so ago there was a really excellent article published on the Front Page Magazine website about a particular Islamic grievance turned violent and resulted in students at Ohio State University being injured in a jihadi knife attack. It shows just how dangerous Islamic grievances are and how incompatible they are in societies based, like the United States, on the concept of liberty.

Raymond Ibrahim writing for Front Page Magazine said:

Do you know the difference between a supremacist grievance and an egalitarian grievance? This is the key to understanding the widely held claim that Muslim grievances are the source of Muslim violence.

Take the latest Muslim attack on U.S. soil. Last week, Abdul Razak Ali Artan — an 18-year-old Muslim refugee from Somalia, who was receiving aid from Catholic charities — rammed his car into a building at Ohio State University. He then got out and stabbed people with a butcher knife. He was eventually shot and killed by a guard; 13 people were hospitalized.

Why did he do it?

According to the “experts,” Artan — like so many other violent Muslim refugees before him — had grievances. CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, and many others cited a Facebook post by Artan: “I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim Brothers and Sisters being killed and tortured EVERYWHERE.”

Yet despite this claim of ubiquity, he only cited one nation: “Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma led to a boiling point. I can’t take it anymore.”

The question before us is simple: Was Artan provoked to go on a murderous rampage in America because of grievances concerning the treatment of Muslims in Burma?

For about a decade now, I’ve argued that the “Muslim grievance” narrative is a myth meant to shield Islamic teachings from scrutiny. Its logic goes like this: if Islam is a religion of peace yet Muslims everywhere are behaving violently, then the explanation we must all cling to is that they are really, really “pissed off” about something being done to them.

Most recently in a message to the West, the Islamic State, instead of disseminating and taking advantage of the “grievance” claim, could not have been clearer: no matter what the West does, the true reason ISIS hates and terrorizes it is because we are infidels.

That said, millions of Muslims — including Artan — do harbor strong grievances against the West and others. The problem is that they define “grievance” in a manner incompatible with liberty.

When most Westerners think of the word “grievance,” they think in egalitarian terms: X has a grievance against Y because Y doesn’t treat X with equality. For example, your boss or your teacher treats you worse — without equality — than other employees or students. You then have a grievance which most in the West would say is legitimate: that’s because the people of the West were raised on the unique idea of treating others as they would be treated.

This is not the sort of grievance that animates many Muslims – and certainly not those who resort to terrorism.

Rather, they are animated by a supremacist-based grievance: they get angry seeing infidels on an equal footing with Muslims. And they get murderous seeing infidels actually lording over Muslims.

Islamic doctrine, which persuades Muslims into believing they are superior to non-Muslims — who are even likened to dogs and cattle — imbues Muslims with this sense of entitlement.

Do you know the difference between a supremacist grievance and an egalitarian grievance? This is the key to understanding the widely held claim that Muslim grievances are the source of Muslim violence.

I think that this article by Mr Ibrahim sums up the difference between justifiable egalitarian grievances and the wholly unjustifiable Islamic grievances. It’s a state of the Islamic mind that is behind many of the problems the West faces with Islam today. It’s at the heart of the ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a mile’ pisstaking and demands for special treatment. It’s also why in the Israel/Palestine conflict genuine concessions for peace made by the Israelis are not seen by the Arab Muslims as such, but are instead seen as weaknesses to exploit.

Mr Ibrahim added:

Islamic grievances are based on what I call Islam’s “How Dare You?” phenomenon. Remember it the next time media, politicians, and other talking heads tell you that Muslim mayhem and outbursts of violence are products of grievances. Missing from their rationale is the supremacist basis of these grievances.

Mr Ibrahim is correct in this assessment. Islamic grievances do appear to me to be based on a ‘how dare you’ phenomenon. We see it all the time ‘How dare you mock Mohammed’, ‘how dare you teach our children about different religions’, how dare you question our right to lock women up in mobile canvas prisons’ and so on and so on. This article succinctly explains just why we should not treat Islamic grievances with the care and consideration that we would treat grievances expressed by members of other groups because they are based on different premises. Egalitarian grievances are expressed because members of one group are not being treated equitably whereas Islamic grievances are based on an annoyance by Muslims that Islam is not deferred to or pandered to by non-Muslims. This article, which is well worth reading in full, shows exactly why Islamic grievances can never be fully assuaged or appeased and why every concession made to the ideology of Islam will be met with yet more and more demands for advantageous treatment.

Link

Original Raymond Ibrahim article from Front Page Magazine

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265103/ugly-truth-about-muslim-grievances-raymond-ibrahim

2 Comments on "From Elsewhere: When Islamic grievances turn lethal"

  1. Hi, agree completely with the post but there seem to be at least 3 copies of the same section. A Cut and Paste problem?

    • Fahrenheit211 | December 23, 2016 at 1:19 pm |

      Thanks for that heads up. Has now been corrected. Serves me right to combine feeding toddler with writing at the same time

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