Psychological Projection, "The Shadow" And American Conservatism's Hatred Of Islam

Yusor Abu-Salha, A Victim Of Chapel Hill's Triple Murder: In Her Own Words

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/yusor-abu-salha-victim-of-chapel-hills.html

Alan: It is difficult (verging impossible) to conduct a political conversation if, at the outset, we recognize "the elephant in the room."

Many people - perhaps most - have such deep need to vent murderous feelings that they have grown comfortably habituated to selecting (serial) scapegoats to afford some place -- any place -- to "park" their malice. 

Most often individuals let politicians "park" their malice on their behalf which is why most belligerence -- in hindsight -- is seen as ill-advised ego display by putative leaders currying favor with constituents. 

Vietnam, Iraq and Reagan's Contra War in Nicaragua are egregious illustrations.

"Bush's Toxic Legacy In Iraq"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/06/bushs-toxic-legacy-in-iraq.html

Hans Blix' Fruitless Search For WMD And Bush/Cheney's Rush To War In Iraq

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/hans-blix-fruitless-search-for-wmd-and.html

Cheney's Lucid 1994 Rationale For NOT Invading Iraq. Conservatives "Must" See This

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/cheneys-lucid-1996-rationale-for-not.html

"Terrorism And The Other Religions"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/terrorism-and-other-religions-juan-cole.html

Major General Smedley Butler: Do Wars Really Defend America’s Freedom?

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/11/do-wars-really-defend-americas-freedom.html

It is easier to rally large groups of human beings around perceived evils than actual goods.

The outcome of rallying around evil is usually evil.

Notably, the least sermonized words of Jesus are: "Resist not evil."

To a significant extent, conservative contempt for Sharia Law arises because conservative Christians (and their secular affiliates) want to impose (or at least "say" they want to impose) such a strict moral code that birth control would be illegal. 

Consider the former penalties imposed by Christian culture for marijuana use, sodomy or same-sex intercourse.

Or ponder conservatives' passion for posting "The Ten Commandments" in public places even though 90% of American conservatives live their lives knee deep in greed, envy, wrath, lust, false witness (i.e., Faux News) and, often as not, gluttony. The only Deadly Sin that does not afflict American conservatives is sloth and even that character flaw is on the rise.

When all is said and done, fundamentalist Christianity is the mirror image of jihadist Islam.

Psychological Projection, "The Shadow" And American Conservatism's Hatred Of Islam

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/psychological-projection-shadow-and.html

Psychological Projection: Who's The Idiot?

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/psychological-projection-whos-idiot.html

Oklahoma May Scrap AP History For Focusing On America's "Bad Parts"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/oklahoma-may-scrap-ap-history-for.html

The Evangelical Persecution Complex (Projection's Finest Hour?)
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-evangelical-persecution-complex.html

Psychological Projection

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/projection-psychology.html

Psychological Shadow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)

"What ISIS Really Wants" And How The Patriarch Abraham Appears To Be The Instigator

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants-and-how.html

"The Politics Of Horror In Conservative Evangelicalism," '09 Outstanding Academic Title"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-politics-of-horror-in-conservative.html

"The Paranoid Style In American Politics," By Richard Hofstadter
paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/01/paranoid-style-in-american-politics-by.html

The GOP's Islamophobia Problem

Will conservatives confront rising anti-Muslim rhetoric in the Republican Party?

PETER BEINART 

FEB 13 2015

Did Craig Hicks murder Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha yesterday in Chapel Hill because they were Muslim? We don’t yet know for sure.

But we know this: In America today, the level of public anti-Muslim bigotry is shockingly high. Politicians and pundits, usually on the right, say things about Muslims that they would be immediately fired for saying about Christians or Jews. And they’ll keep doing so until prominent conservatives express the same outrage when Muslims are defamed that they summon when the victims are Christians or Jews. In the 1950s, National Review founder William F. Buckley ran anti-Semites out of the conservative movement. It’s time for his successors to do the same with Islamophobes.

In 2016, for the second straight presidential election, the Republican primary field will include at least one candidate with nakedly anti-Muslim views. I’m not talking about candidates who denounce “radical Islam.” I’m not talking about Newt Gingrich, who in 2011 absurdly claimed that “Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States.” I’m not even talking about Bobby Jindal, who kept repeating the lie that Europe contains “no-go” zones where non-Muslims are not allowed, even after it was repudiated by Fox News.

Related Story

Is Jeb Bush Buying the Nomination?

I’m talking about candidates who don’t cloak their prejudice at all. In 2012, the prime offender was Herman Cain. “I happen to side with the people in Murfreesboro,” Cain said, after the residents of that Tennessee town tried to block the building of a mosque. Cain explained that while banning churches or synagogues constitutes religious discrimination, banning mosques does not. Because “Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Sharia law,” Cain explained, “that’s not discriminating based upon religion.” When asked whether he would feel “comfortable appointing a Muslim, either in your cabinet or as a federal judge?” Cain replied, “No, I will not,” because “there is this creeping attempt, there is this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government.”

There’s not much subtlety here. Had Cain said communities should be able to ban churches because Christians impose their sexual morality on others, or that he would not appoint a Jew to his cabinet because Jews are loyal to Israel, he’d have been hounded from the race. But because Cain made his comments about Muslims, he felt no real pressure to drop out from his own ideological side. To the contrary, he continued to rise in the polls after he made those comments, only leaving the race in the wake of an unrelated sex scandal.

That was last time. This time, the most naked bigot in the emerging Republican field is Mike Huckabee. Earlier this week, Huckabee said that “Everything he [Obama] does is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel. The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community.” There’s no artifice here. Huckabee’s not condemning Obama for being soft on ISIS or even “radical Islam.” He’s condemning Obama for caring about Muslims. If you don’t see the bigotry, try flipping it around. Imagine if Huckabee had said that Obama “is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Muslims in the Middle East. The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Jewish community.” Republicans would be, rightly, calling for his head.

Because Cain made his comments about Muslims, he felt no real pressure to drop out from his own ideological side.

There’s a pattern here. In 2011, Huckabee said Christians shouldn’t rent space in their churches to Muslims because “Muslim group[s]” say “that Jesus Christ and all the people that follow him are a bunch of infidels who should be essentially obliterated.” Huckabee wasn’t talking about al-Qaeda. He accused ordinary American Muslims, who might need space to pray, of wanting to see Christians “obliterated.” Then, in 2013, he called Islam “a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet in their so-called holiest days.” Not al-Qaeda or jihadists or terrorists, but Islam itself. According to Huckabee, in other words, Muslims want Christians “obliterated” and Islam promotes murder. He went on to say that “the Muslims will go to the mosque, and they will have their day of prayer, and they come out of there like uncorked animals—throwing rocks and burning cars.”

Uncorked animals. Not very subtle. Yet if there’s a single prominent conservative who has said Huckabee’s anti-Muslim slurs disqualify him as a presidential candidate, I haven’t come across them.

Muslims are not Latinos. They don’t have the numbers to punish Republicans for demonizing them. But that just makes the party’s moral challenge all the more stark. Tolerating Islamophobia is unlikely to hurt the GOP politically. It may even help. But it’s still a disgrace, and whether or not the murders in North Carolina were a hate crime, rhetoric like Huckabee’s and Cain’s will spawn hate crimes sooner or later. Let’s hope decent conservatives begin speaking out before it does.

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Pertinent Quotations:


"Why of course the people don't want war... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought along to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander, at the Nuremberg trials, 1946.


By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven...The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one... All this was inspired by the principle - which is quite true in itself - that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.  Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler


        The loud little handful--as usual--will shout for the war. The pulpit will--warily and cautiously--object--at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, 'It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.' 
Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out-shout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. 
        Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers--as earlier--but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation--pulpit and all--will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. 
       Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. Mark Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger," 1910




In Shakespeare's Henry IV, the dying king confesses to his son (who will inherit the throne) that his foreign war in the Holy Land has been completely unnecessary and has been carried out for a particular political purpose. He created this foreign war to increase and concentrate power, and to silence his critics. Henry's advice to his son is that he too should "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels."


O my son,
God put it in thy mind to take it hence,
That thou mightst win the more thy father's love,
Pleading so wisely in excuse of it!
Come hither, Harry, sit thou by my bed;
And hear, I think, the very latest counsel
That ever I shall breathe. God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
To thee it shall descend with bitter quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth. It seem'd in me
But as an honour snatch'd with boisterous hand,
And I had many living to upbraid
My gain of it by their assistances;
Which daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed,
Wounding supposed peace: all these bold fears
Thou see'st with peril I have answered;
For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument: and now my death
Changes the mode; for what in me was purchased,
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort;
So thou the garland wear'st successively.
Yet, though thou stand'st more sure than I could do,
Thou art not firm enough, since griefs are green;
And all my friends, which thou must make thy friends,
Have but their stings and teeth newly ta'en out;
By whose fell working I was first advanced
And by whose power I well might lodge a fear
To be again displaced: which to avoid,
I cut them off; and had a purpose now
To lead out many to the Holy Land,
Lest rest and lying still might make them look
Too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
More would I, but my lungs are wasted so
That strength of speech is utterly denied me.
How I came by the crown, O God forgive;
And grant it may with thee in true peace live! 


"Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus, the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brother's enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others."  Simone Weil, Politics, Spring 1945 


"The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus hqs no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their deaththe war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people." Simone Weil, Politics, 1945 


"The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy."  Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General, Carter Administration


"The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody talks about them." Harold Pinter