Iranian immigrant sentenced for sprinking feces in grocery store

Iranian immigrant Behrouz Nahidmobarekeh, a legal resident in the U.S. since 1978, has been sentenced to five years in prison for sprinkling dried feces on pastries in a Dallas, Texas grocery store. He said he did it to get back at the store because the employees had been rude to him. He would dry his own feces, then grate it up with a cheese grater, and then go to the store and sprinkle it on the food. After customers complained, a camera was set up and he was caught in the act. He expressed no remorse for what he had done, saying he was seeking to insult the store, not harm anyone.

I think Nahidmobarekeh is speaking the truth about his motives. For Arabs and Muslims (and since 98 percent of Iran’s population is Muslim, it’s overwhelmingly likely that he is one), shame and honor are everything. When Muslims kill, behead, and blow up people, they’re not doing it to harm their victims; they’re doing it to shame their victims and thus restore their own honor that was violated by the victims’ supposed wrongful acts against them. And this is not just a matter of individual shame and honor. All of us non-Muslims, simply by the fact of our existing as non-Muslims, are rejecting Allah and the Prophet and thus insulting Islam. Therefore when jihadist terrorists attack and kill us, they’re not doing it to harm us, they’re doing it to insult us and so win back their lost honor, and so restore justice to the world.

I realize this sounds far-fetched. How can Muslims imagine that when they are destroying or maiming a non-Muslim they are not harming him? It is because under Islam, a non-Muslim has no right to life. Therefore the notion that a Muslim can harm a non-Muslim, i.e., commit an injustice against him, makes no sense to the Muslim mind. Since the non-Muslim simply deserves death, to kill him is not to do him an injustice, and therefore is not to harm him. The calculus of revenge is centered entirely on the Muslim’s own state of honor or shame. If his honor has been violated, he can win it back by shaming the person who did it.

A reader writes:

Yes, but there is more to it. The racial-ethnic component here is just as strong as the religious one. If the man were a Zoroastrian from Iran, it’s likely his response to a perceived insult would have been in the same loon category. If he were a Mexican, he might have responded with bullets rather then feces. On the other hand, if he were a Bosnian (i.e. Slav) Muslim, it’s likely he’d have screamed his head off at his insulters and left the store, never to return. If he were a Norwegian Muslim convert, he’d have just quietly taken his business elsewhere.

The lesson of the Iranian shredder of feces is, to me, a confirmation of what we had always known until the multiculti brigade has put to use on us its textbooks, law edicts and government policies: races, nations and cultures are different and not equal. The emotional and self-esteem rheostat of people who, prior to 1965, had little access to U.S. residence and citizenship, is set at a much lower trigger point than is the case with the European descendants in blood or cultural fealty who used to constitute the fabric of our society. The more of the third world we import to the United States, the more shame-honor-retribution savagery we’ll experience.

The reader makes a worthwhile point that certainly adds to what I said. However, as suggested in my post, no matter how different, unassimilable and troublesome members of various immigrant groups may be, Muslims are on a different level altogether. In the case of the other groups the reader mentioned, their anger or violence threshold is determined ethnically/racially, and it’s generally a personal rather than a collective matter. With Mideast Muslims, we’re dealing not just with an ethnic/racial temperament, but with an undying hostility mandated by their holy book on the whole Islamic community, a God-ordained refusal to concede the right to exist of anything or anyone outside Islam. And so they are much more dangerous than other groups.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 29, 2005 06:20 PM | Send