Sunday, November 23, 2008

What About Islam?

I WAS WATCHING the FrontLine program, Target America, and it is impressive to see the skill with which the Jihadis successfully put the United States in a no-win double-bind, one after another. When Reagan began his presidency, for example, hostages had been held in Iran for more than eighteen months and Americans felt helpless to get them back.

The U.S. had initiated an arms embargo on Iran and we had urged the world not to sell them any weapons (they were at war with Iraq at the time).

And the U.S. had been urging every government leader to make no deals with terrorists. This was the ardent stand of the United States.

Then the U.S. made a deal with terrorists by selling weapons to Iran in exchange for freeing hostages!

Why? Basically out of intense frustration. At that point, they would have tried
anything. Iran had successfully put the United States in a double-bind. If the U.S. did nothing, it looked weak and impotent, the U.S. government would be abandoning its own citizens, and the Jihadis would win.

But when the U.S. found a way to get the hostages back, the only viable option they thought up made the U.S. president look like a lying hypocrite, and America lost respect and credibility with our allies.

I was thinking of writing an article about the infuriating cleverness of Jihadis, and I was wondering what I could use to illustrate what they're doing. And then it came to me in a flash: The movie, What About Bob?

In the movie, Bill Murray plays a psychiatric patient who drives his psychiatrist crazy (Dr. Leo Marvin, played by Richard Dreyfus).

I just watched it again and the parallels are amazing. Bob uses the same techniques on Dr. Marvin that Jihadis use against the United States and Europe, and with similar results: Bob successfully fools everyone except Dr. Marvin, and Dr. Marvin becomes infuriated and helpless, but unable to stop it. Bob is able to cleverly insert himself into Dr. Marvin's life without his consent, and able to turn Dr. Marvin's friends and family against him.

As I watched, I kept stopping to write notes every time I saw a parallel. Here are my notes:

1. Bob's stand is: I am suffering. Islam's stand is: We are an oppressed people, we are under attack, we are the underdog, and we are suffering. Bob takes any and all normal events in life and he
suffers from them. Jihadis take anything their enemies do and turns it into "oppression." And if their enemies do nothing offensive, Jihadis create opportunities to be affronted.

Read any mainstream Muslim publication, like the Muslim Public Affairs Committee newsletter, and you will see a strong theme running through almost every article: Muslims are oppressed and persecuted (and therefore must "defend" themselves).

2. Bob uses every technique he can find to keep pushing for what he wants. And he uses the one tool that gives him the most leverage with normal people: Pity. Evoke genuine pity, and you can pretty much gain any concession you want.

Stealth jihad uses this principle constantly. Jihadis try to portray themselves — just as their leader Mohammad did — as innocent victims of wrongdoing. Then, having aroused pity, they seek a concession of some kind.

They continue gaining concessions and giving none. Islam is a ratchet: It only goes one way.


...I skipped a few here. Read the whole thing if you're interested...

16. Bob is skillful, but conceals it. Dr. Marvin comes up with a brilliant scheme to admit Bob into a mental institution, but the institution can only legally hold Bob for 24 hours before they let him go. They can keep him there only if the staff agrees Bob needs to be institutionalized. Dr. Marvin is sure everyone will see Bob is crazy, but they don't. Within a few hours, they release Bob. Bob completely charmed the staff, telling jokes and cracking everyone up.

Like Bob, Islam is skillful, but conceals it. The more I learn about the clever infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into mainstream American life, the more impressed I am at the long-range planning and the skillful, sophisticated understanding of the American mind. (Read more about that here.)

One branch of the Muslim Brotherhood is CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. They have successfully fooled most people in America that they represent moderate, peace-loving Muslim Americans. Read about what they are really up to.

17. Bob is in it for the long haul. Eventually, Dr. Marvin loses his mind, goes off the deep end, and he becomes violent and irrational, mainly because nobody else sees what Bob is really doing except Dr. Marvin.

Jihadis find every crack in the wall they can find and work their way in, and they twist every event and utterance to their purpose. They will not stop, they will not tire, and they have nothing else to live for. This is it. This is the meaning of their existence: Islam must win. Islam must dominate all other cultures, all other religions, all other governments. Allah wills it.

They have infiltrated our schools by giving donations to colleges and then using their seat on the board to exert influence (creating a campus culture of Islam-loving, America-hating students). Jihadis are offering the British government and banks on Wall Street money to help them through the present financial crisis, but with strings attached — the money is "Shari'a compliant" which means, among other things, that there is a built-in written agreement that a certain portion of the money goes to particular charities — charities that support jihad against the West. Jihadis have created "legitimate," mainstream organizations that lobby Washington and "represent the Muslim community" to governments and to the media, and yet have a secret agenda, revealed at the recent Holy Land Foundation Trial, of conquering America from within.

The list goes on and on. They are in it for the long haul, and they absolutely will not stop, ever. They won't grow tired or give up. If they are going to be stopped, we must stop them. And we had better do it with more success than Dr. Marvin had with Bob.

To get rid of Bob, out of mad frustration, Dr. Marvin tries to blow him up, but Bob ends up "accidentally" blowing Dr. Marvin's vacation home to smithereens, and then marries Dr. Marvin's sister!

Bob won. Dr. Marvin lost. We've got to do better.

Would you like to entertain yourself while watching a demonstration of Jihadi techniques? Watch What About Bob?

And while you're watching, see if you can come up with ideas we can use. What would you do if
you were Dr. Marvin?

Come back here and leave your ideas in the comments. This is serious business and we need all the smart ideas we can get.

3 comments:

Pastorius said...

Is there a name for this tactic? I believe I recently had someone pull this one on me in business.

By the way, one of the reasons I think this tactic might be so successful is because the perpetrator believes he really is a decent guy. And, the positive feedback he gets from those around him reassures him that it is indeed true.

However, he picks out his targets. His targets are those who have what he wants. He doesn't believe he is wrong in his treatment of those who have what he wants because they are in their position illegitimately as far as he is concerned.

Does that make sense?

I haven't seen the movie What About Bob? so I don't know if my analysis jibes with it or not.

Citizen Warrior said...

Well, part of what makes Islam work is that Muslims think they really are being decent human beings, dispensing justice as Allah has decreed it.

The name for the tactic is "manipulation." Some people do it because they are self-centered or have a personality disorder like sociopathy. And some people have learned to be like that because of their training -- like Jihadis for example.

I was just reading the book Tripoli. Great book. But it is amazing to see how the Muslim rulers of the Barbary coast treat non-Muslims. They basically just seized any ships that went by, took the ship, took everything that was on board as theirs, and sold the crew into slavery. Each ship captured was a great wealth.

If a country didn't like it, the Sultans would say, "Okay, I won't seize your ships if you pay me some arbitrary amount of money and guns."

So European countries and America were arming and funding these assholes in order to keep up their trade.

Meanwhile, America was working hard to build their navy so they could defend their shipping trade.

But last night I read this one passage that just irked me. The Bey (kind of like a king or sultan) said to the American representative, "Look, we had a fire. We lost 50 thousand rifles, and I have five countries providing me with tribute, so I'm splitting it up. From you I need 10 thousand muskets."

Just like that. And what could he do? It was "provide the muskets or we will start seizing your ships and selling your people into slavery."

There is a kind of sociopathy to Islam, driven by the duality of it. That is, Muslims are good, non-Muslims are evil. And this belief system overrides normal human empathy. It is like ideological sociopathy, not caused by a physical brain disorder, but implanted by a belief system.

It is like ideological self-centered selfishness, with no concern for anyone else, or in Islam's case, no concern for anyone non-Muslim.

Anyway, the guy you're dealing with Pastorius seems to be a sociopath. Read more about that here.

A good book on it is Martha Stout's "The Sociopath Next Door."

Pastorius said...

Yes, I think he is a sociopath. But, that's another subject which I will tell you about over a beer someday.

YOu ought to post on the book Tripoli, and specifically on that incident, when you get the time.