Cartoons and the secret of Islam's excess - policy implications for the US?

Abdul nails the “moderate” Muslim position on the cartoon crisis: it isn’t merely that depicting Mohammid is wrong, it’s insulting Him and the Ummah - the collective body of all Believers as well that's morally wrong.

“We Muslims are forbidded from insulting any prophits….Prophet Mohammed is the last Messenger from Allah, and for those who don’t belive in him, that is fine, but do not insult his followers or believers if you believe in freedom and democracy!” (http://positiveliberty.com/2006/02/quick-takes-on-the-mohammed-cartoons.html)

This is the voice of Honor hurt and insulted (and parodied mercilessly here in words http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3565 and in images in The Netherlands http://retecool.com/comments.php?id=13539_0_1_0_C), and the verbal protest - unlike the more radical violent protesters - seeking its restoration NOW. There are no personal or individual boundaries for the respect demanded; it is Universal and Collective hurt which the West does not grasp. Why? Because theirs is the “superior culture” with the one True Religion.

The truth is we are in conflict with a deeply shame driven culture, much as WWII brought the US in conflict with Imperial Japan, we fail to see their fundamental differences. Just as then, the Islamic and especially Arab speaking middle East exhibits suicide bombing (relabled “sacred explosions” in “martyrdom operations” in the service of Jihadism), and killing of innocents (especially family but also kidnap victims) to restore Honor and rectify shame.

Psychiatrist Pat Santy outlines the cultural psychodynamics involved in the cartoon crisis, including the rationalization, denial, avoidance, and radical impression management that utterly defies our notions of their obvious hypocrisy*, irresponsibility, incivility and violence - transgressions that define the West’s individualized guilt conscious norms. The good Doctor avers that further civilizational collision is inevitable (I’m thinking of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad first off) in her blog-post “SHAME, GUILT, THE MUSLIM PSYCHE, AND THE DANISH CARTOONS:”

“The conundrum facing the West in dealing with Islam is that if Islam backs down from its demands, the resulting humiliation only increases the entire culture’s sense of shame (which has been high for some centuries now) and brings it closer to the reality of a ticking time bomb that can blow up the rest of the world.

“And sadly; the reverse situation–if the West, out of guilt and a sense of justice and fair play, backs down and permits Islam to restore its honor over the Danish cartoon issue at the expense of the West’s cultural values; Islam will perceive such appeasement as the ultimate weakness and will be encouraged in thinking that it is the superior culture that will conquer and dominate the world. Hence even that scenario offers no relief for the world from the ticking time bomb that is Islam.
“In other words, there appears to be no way to avoid a final confrontation.” http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2006/02/shame-guilt-muslim-psyche-and-danish.html (For more on cultural shame and Arab culture, see “The Closed Circle” by David Pryce-Jones, and “The Arab Mind” by Raphael Patai.)

WHICH is why Bush’s bold war for Iraq’s democratization is so bold, ambitious, and necessary, given the region’s exploding youth demographics, exteme poverty and oil wealth, and the increasing literacy which makes young frustrated men vulnerable to Jihadism’s reactionary-utopian appeal (see “Understanding Jihad” by David Cook, 2005 and “Islamic Imperialism: A History” by Efraim Karsh, April 2006).

Dr. Santy also sees the practical importance of empirical politics in the Islamic world (see http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1139215388.shtml). “It is my hypothesis that as the freedom increases in a ’shame culture’ it will have a greater liklihood of evolving into a [motre emotionally mature and peaceful] ‘guilt’ culture. [Complimentarilly, i]t has been noted in several studies that a shame culture works best within a collectivist [like Iranian or Syrian] society, although it can exist in pockets even within a predominant guilt culture.”

Which leads me to the pragmatic Truth about American foreign policy debates: the eventual outcome of the above realities, combined with the uncertain length of our inevitable conflict which neocon Norman Podhoritz calls “World War IV,” means that something similar on the Left to the Nixon-Carter doctrine of Detente with the Soviet Union must evolve - if the Left ever gets tired of losing national elections - to compliment Bush’s Reagan-like policy of “preventive war” against Jihadist terrorism. It might be non- or anti-militaristic and replace Bush Doctine with economic aid but must embrace the defense of nascently free nations like Afghanistan and Iraq. The trouble is that our democracy does not enjoy or easily enbrace the short-to-medium term pessimism of this option - despite the fact that the goal of nurturing cultural change Bush embraces requires it.
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*Hypocrisy like a self-declared "Religion of Peace" that beheads innocents, kidnaps the vulnerable, and bombs civilians by the thousands - yet Muslim's protest this criticism as "unfair," and yet remains a religion so weak this barbaric mentality CANNOT be marginalized. This the West reviles as the self-inflicted destruction called "hypocrisy," which looms large among our values of logical moral consistency. (See The Bible, Book of Mathew 23:14-38, http://www.christiananswers.net//bible/mat23.html The Church is made up of true believers; hypocrites are "pretenders" who sit among God’s people, undeserving of either our respect or God's love and protection.)

 

And "just as then", the only solution to this issue will be the total annihilation of one culture or the other. I much prefer to see the West win this battle. I assume most posters here would agree, in their "heart of hearts".....

 

He´just a troll, a nazi troll