Re: Misconceptions on Islam, Muslims

Why are Muslims hated in the West ?

Last time I wrote a post on Misconceptions about Islam, hopefully the first of a series in order to clear misconceptions about Islam that are rather common in the West. My main motivation behind it was to create a centralized place where I could redirect willing people when I see retarded stuff written about Islam online. The secondary motivation was to try to dispell the ideas behind Islam by trying to refocus more of the criticism of people in the West from Islam to Muslims which find their source in my opinion in the post-9/11 world and Salafi Islam’s dominance on the online discourse. The main consequence of this is that Islam (and thus Muslims) have a worse reputation than it should have, in my opinion.

Given this, I thought just listing a series of misconception and developing them to be too dry and preferred to give an introduction about part of why the misconceptions developed online and their respective context. In this endeavour I failed on 2 counts:

• I had a wrong idea/information/mental model of the direct post-Bush era, notably linked to the Iraq war which damaged the veracity of the argument that developed afterwards and the trust a read could put into the rest of the article. I dealt with this on the original post with a footnote and striking the concerned part.

• The unskilled writer I am unwittingly planted the idea under the form of “Muslims are disliked (mainly) because people don’t understand Islam, if I clear Islam’s misconceptions more people will like Muslims” which was not my main objective. Yet from what I gather in the comments a big part of the commenters understood as that, and that is mainly my fauly.

The other comments were dealt with in the original threads, are planned in the future (notably all the Jihad, apostasy and other questions) or were counter-arguments to specific tangents on original points to be revisited on some future.

Thus if we put my clumsy introduction aside, the main gist of the serious commenters was:

You're answering the wrong question, people don't dislike Muslims over doctrine, they dislike them over what Muslims do

These opinions are best represented by Daniel, Delia, AEIOU, Baruch Hasofer (in his usual abrassive way) and Kean DuHelme

Fair enough. But if we're going to take this seriously, and the commenters deserve to be taken seriously because they're largely right, we need to be precise about what we're discussing. I intended this series to be focused solely on Islam, because I have already in the past pointed at dysfunctional properties of the Maghrebi and other Muslim diasporas in Europe. Islam, the religion, is an actual fixed object as the Quran is the literal word of God that hasn't changed a letter in fourteen centuries, armed with a corpus of (ideally evolving) jurisprudence to interpret it and a set of obligations you can look up. It sits there, indifferent to whether or how anyone follows it well.

Muslims, on the other hand, are around a billion actual human beings, shaped by their geography, their class, their tribe, the other books they read, their national history, their genetics, and their own individual capacity for being a decent person or a complete waste of oxygen. If the religion is the Platonic Form, then Muslims are the smudged, badly photocopied instantiation on parchment. And the problem lies in between.

For example, a rather notable group of enlightened gentlemen, of whom an interesting percentage shares my haplogroup¹, decided some 10 days ago to break shops, burn cars and commit all types of destruction because their favorite football team won the Champions League for the second time. This ended up with 2 dead people, around 200 injured, a few hundred arrests, a similar number of burned cars and looted shops. Now, I have read the Quran a certain number of times, and despite many whacky fatwas I have seen in my life, I don't remember "loot all the Foot Locker and Nike shops you can find, burn all the Citroëns you see when 11 millionaires kick a ball into a net" as being part of any Surah. Nobody, not even Robert Spencer on his most caffeinated day, came out to claim Islam caused the PSG riots, because everyone understood instantly and correctly that this was feral underclass behavior from specific groups (French Maghrebis, French Blacks and French Wiggers). Tellingly, many who loudly condemned the looting were other French of immigrant background and Imams, who recognised their own and were embarrassed by them.

So the commenters' bill of indictment under the form of the clannishness, the welfare-milking, the ghettos, the bloc-voting for whichever left-wing party promises the most while being relaxed about pride parades and general moral rot, describes Muslims, the people.

It does not describe Islam, the religion, because Islam in theory prescribes none of it. There is no verse commanding you to vote Mélanchon or Sunnah of refusing to learn the local language. The Prophet (ﷺ) did not instruct anyone to deal hashish outside the métro or to pack thirty people into a flat in Saint-Denis while lying about your income to get public housing. These are facts about the selected population and its circumstances, its class, its selection, the state that imported them — and they would be just as true if you swapped the religion out entirely. Which is exactly why I can't deal with them in a series about what the religion says: the religion just doesn't say this.

The question that follows is why the religion gets the bill for the community's dysfunction regardless. I think the answer is boringly structural. In the West, you cannot comment on ethnic or genetic differences without incurring severe social or legal penalties, but as a heritage of the Enlightenment you can criticise religion. It's a belief system freely chosen, so it becomes fair game. You can go after Islam and you're a brave critic of bad ideas. What you are absolutely not permitted to do, on pain of social death, is say that a specific ethnic or national group imports specific behaviors. No no no, that is racism monsieur, and you know who was racist, Hitler.

So the average European looks at his local ghetto, clocks the dysfunction, and reaches for the one word he's allowed to say out loud, which is muslims. It is the respectable version of a thought about a people that would otherwise get someone fired. Though fret not, Muslims got smart and managed to rebrand the religion into a virtual ethnicity anyways (thank you Jews) in many European countries, closing the loophole.

Added to this a small % of young Muslim men looked at ETA and found them so cool they started copying their tactics and going boom randomly in order to “kill the infidels”. This has a very long, complex and serious answer that I will delve into in due time, but the summary is that:

• Muslims in Europe and the world carry a cognitive dissonance that comes from belonging to what they believe is the superior religion and people while being the material, scientific and technological underclass both in their host countries and worldwide.

• Layered on top of this is a deep post-colonial inferiority complex, shared with all formerly colonized peoples, whereby they cannot structurally understand how they got so weak as to be dominated by a handful of François and Johns who ran their countries for anywhere between 50 years and 2 centuries.

• Islam has been in genuine intellectual crisis for roughly 3 centuries now, unable to produce a coherent, all-encompassing answer to the questions raised by Western modernity from within its own metaphysical postulates without borrowing Western underpinnings. The consequence of this vacuum has been the artificial boosting of a retro-utopian revolutionary branch (Qutbist Jihadi Islamism) which is uniquely enticing to young, purposeless lumpenproletariat Muslim men because it offers the simplest shortcut: kill infidels, become a shahid, go to heaven, collect your houris, done.

These reasons mix into an explosive cocktail that ends up hurting a lot of innocent bystanders, in great quantities in the Islamic world and in less harsh but more spectacular ways in the West, especially since 9/11. Islam has a small part of blame here, and a quick argument for why it's small is that Islam has not been going boom for 1300 years, so there is clearly something else in play.

The proof that it's the people and not the faith is even simpler than that: hold the religion perfectly constant and watch the dysfunction evaporate the moment the selection changes. American Muslims are, by Pew's most recent numbers, more educated than the average American (around 44% are college graduates, a quarter of them holding postgraduate degrees) and Pew itself attributes this to the fact that US immigration policy selected for skilled, educated arrivals rather than warm bodies for the assembly line. The Gulf Arabs, who are frequently more doctrinally hardcore than any Maghrebi, turn up in Europe as students, tourists and investors and cause essentially none of the underclass trouble, because they did not arrive as an underclass. The Indonesians and Malaysians, who between them form the largest bloc of Muslims on the planet, send a small, quiet, educated diaspora that nobody has ever written a panicked thread about. Most Muslims in Japan come from these two groups, and I would bet serious money no one has heard of Indonesians committing crime sprees in Tokyo.

Which brings me to what I think is the actual core of the matter and why people dislike Muslims in Europe on average, and you people know how much I hate gypsies, so this is not easy to say. A chunk of European Muslims behave like gypsies, and then cry when someone notices.

I mean this exactly as it is said and not as a cheap insult. Gypsies have been in Europe for the better part of 7 centuries. They are nominally Christian of various Catholic, Orthodox and Pentecostal flavors, take your pick. And they post elevated numbers on essentially every metric Europeans complain about with Muslims: clannishness, endogamy, welfare dependency, criminality, contempt for the host society's rules, a stubborn refusal to integrate across generations. Hand a European the list of grievances without telling him who it describes, and half of them will say "Gypsies" before they say "Muslims". But nobody, anywhere, has ever once blamed the Gospel of Matthew for how the Roma behave. The behavior is attributed, correctly and without controversy, to gypsy culture, because that is plainly what it is. The religion is treated as irrelevant because it is irrelevant.

Now, the European Muslim lumpen acts exactly as a fucking gypsy would, but he has an advantage over the common gypsy: a billion-strong global religion to hide behind. So let's say Jean-François points out that a lumpen is acting like a parasite. The lumpen doesn't need to defend himself, doesn't need to account for his shameful ways, doesn't need to concede some cultural deficiency. He can just repackage the criticism as an attack on his faith. ISLAMOPHOBIA. ISLAMOPHOBIA. And just like that, by magic, an ordinary complaint about a man torching cars and milking the CAF becomes religious bigotry, hate speech and a moral failure on the part of our poor Jean-François, who now has to apologize for having eyes.

The gypsy, hated as he deservingly is, has no access to such a shield and just gets called a gypsy and that's the end of it. Maybe he calls his 50 cousins and they beat you up, but there is no institutional apparatus rushing to his defense, no real NGO drafting a press release or parliamentary motion condemning gypsophobia. The Muslim lumpen launders the identical critique into persecution and walks away clean. It is genuinely impressive, and it works with remarkable efficiency because the mechanism is simple: the West will let you say almost anything about a religion and almost nothing about a people.

But the ones who pay for this racket are not the ones running it. The ones who do are first the average Europeans, for whom I have sympathy since they didn't really choose for any of this to happen and who are understandably losing patience. The second of sorts is the religion itself, billed for actions it never really prescribed on behalf of populations who are sometimes its worst representative. And lastly the ones who pay are the millions of other European Muslims who loot nothing, live in no ghetto, don't go boom on a random Tuesday and quietly go to work, yet who nonetheless get handed the invoice every time some banlieue halfwit decides the correct response to a football result is arson.

So the conclusion of why are they hated, it’s because (a % of them) act like entitled gypsies who cry in pain as they strike you.

Now this said, the rest of the series will focus on Misconceptions on Islam and not Muslims, so if you feel the urge to comment again the same kind of arguments I will either kindly link you this post or enact the comment policy below.

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Now, related to this post and the whole series of Islam. I have decided that given I will engage in more controversial topics namely Islam, I will enact a stricter comment policy going forwards summarized by the content of this note.

I will have no patience for retards and if you cannot contribute anything meaningful to the discussion other than “you mudslime” then you will just get banned, the Internet is a big place so you can go bust the balls of other people. If you repackage it with arguments and examples I promise to not censor it, even if it I dislike the comment and hurts my ego. Such is the contract I offer here.

Last point, if you dislike my content, or me, or my existence I recommend you to unsubscribe. Otherwise you are implicitly abiding by these rules and the ones I more permanently put on the reply section.

1. Guess which one