Why Westerners can’t allow themselves to acknowledge the self-evident truth of the Islam threat, and how they avoid acknowledging that truth

In January 2007, in the entry, “D’Souza’s latest twist,” reader Jonathan L. offered this cogent summary of the West’s suicidally bent and delusory position vis à vis Islam:

Because of the legacy of the Holocaust, almost all Westerners have internalized the norm that it is evil to hold enmity toward an entire organic identity group (i.e. one composed of not just potentially violent adult males but also of women, children, the elderly, etc.) and that doing so makes one a potential accomplice to genocide.

In order to obey this stricture (i.e. retain one’s own self-image as a decent human being) and still resist the jihad, it is necessary to adopt some sort of false coping mechanism. We’re all familiar with the one where jihadist aggression is blamed on “extremist”, or “Islamist” or “Wahhabi” Muslims, who are purported to be not only a tiny minority among their kind but also “inauthentically” Islamic.

The other common coping mechanism is to blame Western societies for provoking Muslim hostility by doing the sorts of things the speaker was against in the first place. For leftists this means Western societies retaining their capitalist economies and not ceding more and more of their sovereignty to Third World-dominated international organizations. For libertarians it means blaming unrest among Europe’s “ummagrants” on sclerotic, high-unemployment Western European labor markets. And for a certain strain of conservative it means asserting that Muslim hostility is really a reaction to the West’s toxic and immoral popular culture, which should be reformed in any case but by so doing will also protect us from further jihadist attack.

That was very well put by Jonathan L. Of course, it’s not just the truth about the unassimilability of Muslims that is suppressed by the post-World War II dogma that a critical or unwelcoming view of an entire organic group is Nazi-like. The same goes for our view of all non-Western groups and of their mass immigration into our midst. As a result of the Holocaust, Westerners believe that it is morally wrong to say no to any such immigration. And there’s the path to white Western suicide in a nutshell. It is not some sinister external force (e.g., Cultural Relativism, Multiculturalism, the Frankfurt School, Political Correctness) that has us in a death grip, but our own liberal convictions, convictions that are held by the great majority of conservatives as well as liberals. Murdering lots of professional liberals, as Anders Breivik did and would like us to follow in his footsteps, is not going to change that by one iota. Only a turnabout within the minds and souls of a sufficient number of Westerners can change it.

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In a related post, see The Thinking Housewife’s quotation of me on Why Race Matters.

- end of initial entry -

August 4

Mark P. writes:

Your commenter wrote in 2007:

“Because of the legacy of the Holocaust, almost all Westerners have internalized the norm that it is evil to hold enmity toward an entire organic identity group (i.e. one composed of not just potentially violent adult males but also of women, children, the elderly, etc.) and that doing so makes one a potential accomplice to genocide.”

This is strange. I thought the Holocaust was wrong because the Jews were not a threat.

LA replies:

But under liberalism no group—that is, no minority or non-Western or nonwhite group—can be a threat to society or be legitimately thought of as a threat to society. According to liberals, the only threat to society are those members of the majority group who think that some minority group can be a threat to society.

Mubarak

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 02, 2011 04:57 PM | Send