A RECIPE: HOW TO MAKE A MUSLIM

A lot of us really enjoyed the various Star Trek series on TV. Remember the one with the Borg? 

The Borg, a massive colony of entities who were as much machine as living, swept through the universe, gobbling up every civilization it found. It changed all surviving members of the newly-conquered species into “Units.” These Units were no longer able to think on their own; their minds were paralyzed and any “thoughts” they had emanated from the Borg collective. Their minds communicated with each other so that they functioned with a singleness of purpose – to conquer all those who were “not-Borg” and to “assimilate” them into an ever larger, more powerful Borg. “Resistance is futile,” the Units told the newly conquered members of non-Borg species, and nothing could dissuade them from their purpose. They were intransigent. 

The Borg created its newly acquired Units by altering the brains of their newly captured species in a way that made it impossible for them to act independently, as individuals. They operated as a syncitium, a fusion of individuals that functioned the way slime molds do, with millions of “individuals” moving and living as a single entity. 

To the Units, the Borg was all that mattered. There was nothing else, no other purpose, no other raison d’etre. 

There’s another, somewhat similar story line in another sci-fi series that is still on TV. It’s “Stargate SG-1”, where the clerics of an intergalactic religious group, the “Priors of Origin,” called the “Ori,” are hell bent on converting every other species in the universe to their belief system. Like the Borg, they have a “do-or-die” attitude. The Priors, a very powerful lot, go from planet to planet, intimidating the inhabitants into converting to Origin. The intimidated inhabitants rarely put up any serious resistance for fear of unpleasant consequences such as enslavement or death. Only the members of the Stargate Team and a few brave souls among the indigenous inhabitants try to help the targeted populations avoid forced conversion.  

In slightly different ways, both programs exhibit startling similarities to Islam. Origin is Islam; the Priors are the mullahs and the rest of the Islamic clergy; the Borg is the ummah; the Units are Muslims, and the species on the unconverted planets are, for the most part, “dhimmi” infidels. 

Today, it is as incredibly frustrating to try to debate most Muslims as it would be to debate a Unit. No matter what evidence you present, what proof, what well-reasoned logical arguments you offer on any given subject, if what you have to say conflicts in any way with Islam, they remain unpersuaded. They cannot be convinced, no matter how objective your presentation is. Arguing with them is a lot like trying to argue with your computer when you’ve hit the wrong button; if Islam, the Koran, the Hadith, or the mullah said it, then that’s that. Period, point finale. 

It seems incredible to most of us in the West that entities who look so much like real human beings think so much like Units of the Borg. When we try to talk with them, it’s almost as if their bodies have been invaded by an alien species that has taken over their minds, sort of like in the old movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” It seems as if they are no longer human beings at all, but just some sort of vehicle carrying out the wishes of some non-human entity. 

What happened to the people known as “Muslims”? How can you take a normal newborn baby human being, and turn it into a such a creature? 

Repetition 

Step One is: Repetition. 

 Let’s start with a normal newborn. In many Islamic lands, there is a custom of uttering a prayer into the ear of the newborn at the moment of birth; the process of turning him into a Muslim begins right away, and from that time on, it is relentless. 

Remember, the newborn, is primed to learn new material. Learning brand new material is the “specialty” of the newborn brain. Since humans are born tabula rasa with respect to knowledge, they have to be awfully good at organizing and making sense out of things they have never been exposed to before, otherwise, they’d be stuck, unable to leave the starting gate, much less run in the race. 

The newborn brain has far more cells than the adult brain does, but the cells are anatomically and physiologically immature at birth. These cells have made very few connections with each other, so, to the newborn, everything “out there” is disconnected, and nothing “makes sense” yet. 

Then the neurons begin to mature; with each experience, some cells begin to communicate with other cells. If the experience is repeated often enough, the connection between the cells becomes permanent. After a while, the unused cells begin to die off, and eventually, the total number of cells levels out at the average adult number.  

These, then – neuronal numerical superiority and “unused” neural circuitry – are the “secrets” to the steep learning curve we see in very young children. 

Early in life, we learn through repetition. That’s how the permanent connections between brain cells are established. An immense amount of this kind of learning takes place before we are five, and virtually all of it is quickly “automatized” - the neuronal circuitry for individual intellectual tasks becomes so well established that retrieval of the information becomes effortless. 

We recall very little about the learning that takes place before about five years of age, even though it is during this very time the learning curve is the steepest. Cognitive psychologists think that this is because we can’t store memories in a form we can retrieve easily. In order to store memory that we can retrieve very efficiently, we have to have language, which isn’t very well developed until around five.  

In addition, while the part of the brain that is so important in all memory formation, the hippocampus, matures quite early in life, the neocortex, where long-term memories are stored, is quite immature until pre-school age, around four to five years. When the hippocampus forms memories and sends them off to the toddler’s neocortex, they don’t get saved very well, especially complex memories, so the ones we have before about five are generally pretty sketchy. Something that we learn at one or two is difficult for us to recall at six.  

However, something very important happens around the time we turn five or six. By then, we have acquired a huge data bank of simple facts, and now, we can begin to learn how to evaluate them. It’s around that time that we begin to understand things like “death,” and the fact that pain is something others feel too. We begin to understand that “good” or “bad” have meaning beyond the idea that Mommy gets mad at us for some things; we begin to understand that pain and death are not good things.  

In short, we’re now primed to begin to learn the broadest, most elementary fundamentals of philosophy, especially ethics. 

We really need to get going on it quickly, though. Between about five years and puberty is the time when the basic ideas about good and bad, whether the world is a nice place or not, whether other people can be expected to treat us fairly or not, and so forth, are becoming established. Attitudes and emotional responses become ingrained during this time too, and like other kinds of learning, they become automatized. This kind of established, habitual, automatized way of thinking and responding emotionally is often called a “mindset.” A well-established mindset is hard to change after puberty, when, under the influence of hormones, the brain “crystallizes” into the adult organization it will carry with it through the rest of life. It doesn’t mean that someone with a particular mindset can’t change – it just means it isn’t easy, and many find the work too hard.  

Martin Luther understood how important it was to reach young children with his beliefs when he broke from the Catholic Church. He wrote to the leaders of the German states and asked them to establish a tax-supported school system where attendance and curriculum could be controlled. That way, in just a few years, entire generations would grow up “Lutheran,” even though many of their parents didn’t agree with him. In fact, Luther’s government-run school system was the model for the American system established by Horace Mann.  

Seeing the success of the Lutherans and their government school system, the Catholics responded by establishing an entire monastic order, the Jesuits, devoted just to teaching. They didn’t have government schools, but the program the Jesuits developed, the Ratio Studiorum, was widely recognized as the best and most innovative up to that time, so parents were eager to have their children attend. The Jesuits also acknowledged the importance of reaching children with their ideas while they were still young when they said, “Give me your child until he is six, and he will be ours for life.”

How do the Muslims fare with respect to repetition when it comes to their children? Are they able to establish a mindset so firmly that it remains unchanged throughout life? 

They get an A+.  

They are experts at reminding the child that he is a Muslim. At first, he hears his parents praying five times a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, every year, and before long, he joins them, continuing with the habit for the rest of his life. 

He attends services at the mosque at least once a week, where he hears the imam telling him about Islam. 

He takes part in many festivals and ceremonies. Some, like Ramadan, last a full month. He tries to make at least one hajj to Mecca during his lifetime, a major undertaking in which he joins millions of his fellows. 

The Koran, the scripture of Islam, is the only significant textbook in some schools. In other schools, all coursework is heavily infused with Islamic religious tenets, and any deviation from them is considered a sin.  

In Palestine, the elementary curriculum includes physical education where young children practice throwing grenades and mimic other kinds of combat.  

In a study of religious curricula in Saudi Arabia by a former Saudi judge, Al-Qassem, and a journalist, Al-Sakran, it was shown that middle and high schools in Saudi Arabia have three religious curricula. One is Al-Hadith, a general curriculum on Islamic traditions; a second is Al-Fiqh, a curriculum on matters of religious law and ritual; and a third is Al-Tawid, a curriculum on matters of belief.  

The curricula consistently teach hatred for non-Muslims. “Unbelievers” – infidels – are feared and hated because they introduce forbidden innovations into Islam. These curricula make sweeping accusations of “takfir” (unbelief) which permit the killing and taking of the property of “mushrikun,” a term that in early times referred to any religion with a belief in more than one god, but which today refers to any non-Muslim (or even to other Muslims). Even statements such as “Medical progress will eliminate disease” is regarded as an example of “unbelief,” since it attributes events to causes other than Allah’s will. Even the use of alternate names for Allah is considered “unbelief.” 

The study stated that these teachings fill pupils with the constant fear that they will become unbelievers because religious deviation is a danger that can lie in wait for anyone, at any time, in any place.  

There is a heavy emphasis on the dangers coming from the “Others.” Unbelief is spreading in the Muslim world, Islam is being flooded with forbidden innovations, and society is undergoing moral disintegration. 

Only the clerics are called “scholars,” while scientists and engineers are not.  

The list of principles being taught is long. A few examples include:

• The infidel must be conquered; the world-wide caliphate must be established;

• the Jews and Christians are especially dangerous and nasty, although no unbeliever is ever “good” or “innocent.”

•  Any land where a Muslim has set foot is Muslim land.

• The spread of Islam is a religious obligation.

• There can be no law or government that is not derived from the Koran, because the Koran comes straight from the mouth of Allah, and so it is perfect as it is.

• Anything man-made, any law or government NOT derived from the Koran, is false, invalid.

• Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth.

• Killing an infidel is OK, especially if the infidel refuses to convert, or if it is in the service of Islam.

• Women are stupid.

• Most of hell is populated by women. If a woman displeases her husband even one time, she cannot enter paradise.

• It is a religious obligation to substitute the Koran for other kinds of constitutions.

It goes on, day after day, relentlessly, from the time a child enters school until he leaves it. When he leaves school, he becomes part of a society where this kind of thinking has become automatized, and where the drum-beat is unending. Movies, television, radio, newspapers, sermons in the mosque–-you name it, this message never stops.  

It isn’t just their public lives where Islam reaches out with its stranglehold; there are detailed instructions for private life, as well; how to cut your nails, how to go to the bathroom, how to get rid of stray dog or cat hair on your clothing, how to wipe yourself after defecating, how to have sex, which hand to eat with, etc. etc. ad nauseam. Every moment of every hour of every day is governed by some micro-managerial rule. There is no escape.

Tribalism 

Many species, be they fish, birds, or mammals, live in groups. Living in groups has much to recommend it in terms of survival. Not every species lives in groups; some, like wolverines, come together only to mate (an occasion which is so rough that sometimes one party or the other does not survive the experience). To make up for the protective advantage of group living, they have become very, very, tough and dangerous animals, striking out viciously at anything they regard as a threat, which is almost everything. 

We human beings are among the group-living species. That has had profound effects on the way we deal with each other.

In pre-Islamic times, as now, conditions were very harsh, and resources were very limited. Competition for resources was very intense; the whole desert culture developed as a warrior culture, where the acquisition of resources, whether by killing, stealing, lying, or deception were considered valuable skills.  

Members of a person’s tribe were also his genetic family, with occasional dilution taking place when a man of one tribe reproduced with a woman from another tribe. 

In those days, a larger tribe had a better chance of survival, so leaving the tribe was considered a particularly heinous act. 

By the time Islam appeared on the scene, very little had changed. Tribes were still the most important social group, competition for resources was still very serious business, and the most important status within a tribe was the ability to acquire resources the old-fashioned way, often on caravan raids or in battles against other tribes.  

The paradigm shift, if you can call it that, was that under Islam, tribes were united as a single large family, the “ummah,” or “community of Islam.” Islam took extraordinary advantage of the fact that we humans are “groupies” who are disposed to live among our own kind, and institutionalized membership of the “tribe” of Islam as a virtue, a moral issue.  

All human beings adopt means of identifying themselves as part of a particular group. Maybe it’s the membership in a club, maybe it’s by cheering for a certain team, maybe it’s as a member of a particular profession or political party. Islam heavily emphasized the virtues of belonging to the same “family,” just as the tribes of antiquity did. They call themselves “brothers” and “sisters” to emphasize the sense of belonging to a “family,” with all the ancient tribal feelings still intact.  

Islam is the “tribe,” the “family” with which they identify, to the exclusion of all others. The old attitude among ancient tribal society of regarding the “Other” as the enemy is still instilled in every child. 

Even when born or raised in a non-Muslim country, Islam teaches that association with the unbelievers, the “Others,” is not only dangerous, but immoral. The teachings of the Muslim society that they came from are brought with them and passed on to their children; when children deviate from traditional practices, they are often severely punished, even killed, by other family members. The result is that there is little or no assimilation with the surrounding population.  

There are other peculiarities that are a part of the intellectual rhythm of Islamic society too, and that exaggerate all the differences between Islam and “Others.” 

Philosophical Differences 

The formal philosophy of Islam is just plain weird, and it goes a very long way towards explaining their behavior.

In ancient Greece, “philosophy” used to mean “the study of everything.” Today, while it still has a profound effect on absolutely everything we study, it has become more specialized, with five main branches.  

Traditionally, the function of philosophy isn’t to teach facts per se. For example, philosophy isn’t responsible for teaching spelling or the times tables - that is a function of other disciplines - but rather, it is to teach us how to think about, assess, and deal with facts.  

The five branches are these:  

1) Ethics, the branch of philosophy that studies the question of what makes something good; we discover what values are, and how they direct our lives. 

2) Epistemology, which studies how humans acquire knowledge;  

3) Metaphysics, which studies the basic nature of the universe – existence – what it’s made of, how it behaves, and why; 

4) Esthetics, which studies the question of what we find to be beautiful, why we think so, and why art is so essential to humans; and finally,  

5) Politics, which is the application of ethics to social behavior, which helps us to determine how we should live together.  

Islamic philosophy and ours are 180^o apart.  

We’ve already touched lightly upon Islamic “ethics.” Ethics is the source of someone’s moral code. A moral code is a set of values that we choose to guide our thoughts and behavior. Ethics helps us to decide how to choose the values that we need to guide our thoughts and behavior. It is especially important in helping us decide what to choose as the most important value, the one by which all others are measured, the so-called “standard” of the good. 

The term “chosen” is exceedingly important when it comes to understanding the differences between Islam and the West. Not understanding these differences in our moral codes has led to very serious mistakes in dealing with them, mistakes that will be hard to recover from.  

Our moral code is based on the idea that “life,” as appropriate to the nature of human beings, is the “standard” by which we measure whether something is good for us or not (that this is valid can be demonstrated, but it would take too long to do that here; for the sake of argument, please accept it for now). Because we have chosen “life” as our “standard of the good,” we believe that those thoughts and behaviors that tend to promote life are “good,” while those things that tend to threaten it are not good. 

Islam, on the other hand, has chosen “the spread of Islam” as its “standard of the good.” It teaches that anything – anything - that promotes the spread of Islam, up to and including murder and mayhem, is “good.” That’s why people like Zarqawi think that it’s just fine and dandy to torture and kill by the thousands or millions, provided it is in the service of spreading Islam. That’s why terrorists can look at themselves in the mirror and smile after they’ve killed men, women, and children shopping in the market. According to their moral code, they have done something good. 

Our epistemology is based on reason. While the capacity for reason is something we are born with, the proper use of it is not. Just as we are born with a capacity for language and mathematics, it is something we have to learn.  

We in the West strive to acquire knowledge through the use of reason. We make observations, gather evidence, and eventually confirm whether something is consistent with reality or not.  

Islam, on the other hand, teaches that everything worth knowing has been “revealed” by Allah to Mohammed, and recorded in the Koran (and to some extent, the Hadith). The Koran is the literal word of Allah, and that’s that. To question it is a sin.  

Our metaphysics teaches us that the behavior of everything in existence is governed by natural laws based on what something is.  We know, for example, that the characteristics of living creatures are passed from one generation to the next by genes, and that a lion will not give birth to poison ivy. We know that the tides are due to the effect of the moon’s and sun’s gravity on the oceans, and that depending on where the moon is in relation to the sun and earth, they will be high or low. We know that earthquakes and some volcanic eruptions are caused by geologic forces such as subduction of tectonic plates. We know that certain microorganisms can cause disease. We know that certain substances burst into flame when exposed to heat, and so on.  

Our metaphysics teaches us that because existence follows natural laws, and because these natural laws are discoverable by us, the universe is a place where we can plan for our futures. As a result, we are generally content with it.

Not so the poor Muslim. The metaphysics of Islam (this is wild) teaches him that everything, at every moment, is under the control of Allah, and furthermore, Allah can change his mind at any time. The universe doesn’t obey natural law; it’s subject to Allah’s whim.  

Consider this actual, real example of Muslim “thought”: When a flame is placed in contact with a cotton boll, nothing will happen unless Allah decides to make it happen. If Allah wills the cotton to burn, then voila, it burns. If Allah doesn’t will it to burn, though, it won’t burn, no matter how close or hot the flame. Most of the time, though, Allah wills the cotton to burn, so we have become ACCUSTOMED to seeing the cotton burn when it comes into contact with a flame. We are in the HABIT of expecting it to burn, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that this will happen every time. 

And so it is with everything in the universe. If something happens, it’s only because Allah wills it to happen. Anything can change at any moment. The universe is unpredictable, we can’t depend on anything happening the way we expect it to, we’ve always got to be on our guard against the unexpected. Our minds are incapable of understanding a universe that is like the shifting sands, with no permanence, no predictability. We can’t plan our lives, and we are always afraid of the next moment. Our lives are spent on pleasing Allah at every moment, no matter what he demands, because without Allah, we are helpless, set adrift in a universe we can never hope to understand. 

“…if Allah wills” is a very serious utterance in the world of the Muslim, not a mere social convention or mark of respect. When the Muslim says that, he means it. 

Esthetics is the study of what makes something beautiful, and it’s a potent means of communicating values. The values that are communicated extend to everything from reproductive health (a healthy human being is more attractive than a sick one) to the most exalted intellectual achievement. 

Art is the selective recreation of reality according to the artist’s metaphysical values. If the artist views existence as benign, he will probably paint a pretty picture, sculpt a lovely statue, write a stirring poem, write a play or a story where good wins over evil, etc. If the artist is in a bad mood, he might paint “The Scream,” or one of the lower levels of hell. 

We are free to express ourselves esthetically. We can choose any value we want and express it through art.  

But in Islam, as in any totalitarian society, such is not the case. Since art is such an effective and important means of communicating values, even without words, it is considered very dangerous. Totalitarian societies like Islam place severe restrictions on it. The Soviets, for example, regulated art very heavily; only paintings or sculpture that glorified the collective, the group, the Soviet ideal, were permitted. Art had to conform to the notion that the collective was good; artists who depicted anything else were often put in prison. 

Islam is even more restrictive. Life is worthless if not lived in the service of Islam, so it is not proper for someone to illustrate life forms, especially animals or humans. The Muslim excuse is that to allow mere humans to portray life is to compete with the creative power that only Allah possesses. That’s the excuse; the real problem is that some value held by the artist that conflicts with Islamic values might sneak through and be picked up by the viewer, and that’s a serous no-no. 

There is a wider artistic expression now in some parts of the Muslim world, but it is not approved of by the purists, and the breadth, depth, and scope of artistic expression, be it in the visual or literary arts, does not begin to compare with ours. It is unlikely, for example, that if someone were to draw cartoons portraying Mohammed in an unflattering light even in the most liberal of Muslim societies that they would be tolerated.  

Politics in our world is based on reason; our society is based on the recognition that the individual is the smallest unit of society, that each individual has certain unalienable rights, and that the state may not properly interfere with our lives except to protect those rights. Rights may be violated in only two fundamental ways, either through the initiation of the use of physical force, or though its intellectual equivalent, force or fraud. 

Not so in the Islamic world; in the Islamic world, the group, the tribe, the ummah, is all-important, and the only justification for his existence is to promote the welfare of Islam. The individual is otherwise worthless. His duty is to exist not to live happily and productively, but only to promote, spread, and maintain Islam. The group, the state, Islam, controls every aspect of the individual’s life, including whether he lives or dies. Outside a maximum security prison, Islam is the most totalitarian organization in existence today. 

So, Islam begins with a rotten philosophy. It teaches its children that the greatest value possible to them is to live/die for Islam, that their own lives, lived for their own happiness, are unimportant; it teaches them that their minds are not competent to know anything, and that they must depend on what is “revealed” in the Koran; it teaches them that existence is an unreliable, unpredictable place where their lives, their hopes, their dreams, could be snuffed out without warning, and that they are helpless to do anything about it; it teaches them that beauty does not apply to human life; it teaches them that it is immoral to live except as dictated by the interpretation of the Koran as given by the clerics. It teaches that the “Other” is dangerous, and that it imperils the very existence of Islam. It teaches all this relentlessly, from birth to death. 

Inevitably, a philosophy such as this, which ultimately considers thinking to be a sin, dooms its population to failure. It puts a “freeze” on knowledge and progress. People living under this kind of system cannot thrive.

This brings up the fourth thing that makes Muslims so prone to failure. It explains why they are so enraged all the time and why they throw temper tantrums at every opportunity. 

Conspiracy 

Imagine this: The Muslim child has been taught every hour of every day, since birth, that he is forbidden to use his mind the way nature intended. Every time he deviates by thinking something “different,” he is told that he is immoral and that he will be severely punished by Allah. 

As a sort of compensation gift, he has been taught that Islam confers on him an importance unequaled by members of any other group. Muhammad, who founded Islam, demonstrated the superiority of Allah vis a vis other gods and peoples with brute strength, vast conquests, the acquisition of great riches, and millions of converts to Islam in many parts of the world.  

Some of those conquered lands, including Damascus, Alexandria, Pergamum and Persia, were brilliant civilizations and great centers of learning when Muhammad's forces continued their leader’s goal of conquest after his death and made war against them. Some Muslims, many of whom were illiterate desert dwellers, were nevertheless very apt pupils, and quickly became involved in the intellectual lives of the conquered peoples.  

All that began to come to an end between two and three hundred years later, because the most profoundly anti-intellectual forces among them, the fundamentalists, won the struggle to decide what form Islam would take from that time forward. It was they who imposed fatally flawed philosophical limitations on their followers By about 1200 CE, the Islamic world had been consigned to unremitting stagnation. Muslims were no longer allowed to create and innovate; Islam had begun its descent into a Dark Age which persists to this day. 

Fast forward to about 1400 CE. The West had slipped into it’s own Dark Age (that’s a story in its own right) about 900 years earlier, when Rome was overrun by European illiterates. Now, though, the flame of knowledge began to flicker anew (also another story), and the European Dark Age was about to come to an end. 

For centuries, during the European Dark Age, Muslims had been able to look upon the Europeans as inferior peoples. Riding on the intellectual coattails of conquered peoples, they were, for a while, advanced relative to the Europeans. 

The European Dark Age was about to give way to the rebirth of the quest for knowledge. The Renaissance (another story) was underway. 

Islam began to suffer some serious setbacks from that time forward. Spain finally ejected it completely in 1492, at the time Columbus sailed to discover the New World. Muslim expansionism into Europe was stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Imperial Islam began to crumble around its edges. The West had finally contained Islam. 

This was humiliating to the forces of Islam. It’s glory was based not on intellectual progress after its expansion into other territories, but on physical conquest. For them, the West’s success at putting a halt to physical conquest could be interpreted only one way – Islam was no longer glorious, no longer superior, no longer powerful; in short, it was no longer important. 

In the meantime, there was tremendous growth in Europe. The Renaissance soon evolved into a period known as the “Enlightenment,” so called because it was a period of thunderous philosophical growth. This period was also called “The Age of Reason.” It was the thinkers and philosophers of this age, especially in Britain, that gave humankind its first good, close look at the concept of rights, at the proper role of government in human life, and so on, and on, and on. 

But it didn’t end there. As philosophy always does, it had huge effects on the day to day lives of people. 

The mid-late 1700s CE saw the birth of the Industrial Revolution; discoveries, inventions and production were proceeding in the West at a rate never before seen in human history. Intellectual achievements were astonishing. Every field of human endeavor - science, art, manufacturing, commerce - were traveling in the high speed lane. By the 1800s, life would never be the same. Poverty, once the fate of the overwhelming majority of people, was receding as more work opportunities became available; disease was on the run; starvation was no longer a scourge of daily life; slavery, which had been present in all cultures since the dawn of time, was finally brought to an end.  

In the meantime, in the Islamic world, life was pretty much as it had been for centuries; there had been no discernable change. 

Muslims could see that the West was progressing, and that life for the “Others” was something they could only dream about. But it never happened for them. Not only did they remain poor and ignorant, but their chief claim to glory, their empire, was in tatters. 

Their sense of superiority and security vanished under the weight of Western advances in achievements of the mind, commerce, and industry. 

Whom were they to blame? What was the cause of this humiliation? 

They accepted no responsibility for their situation. Instead of instead of saying to themselves, “Well, maybe we should change,” they – as General Honore’ said during a news conference after Katrina - “got stuck on stupid.” 

They refused to point the finger at anything about themselves. Still, the pain had to go somewhere. 

The finger of blame for the Muslim failure to thrive and progress was pointed straight at the West. The West had planned it all. Worst of all, the West was under the sway of the old enemies of Islam, the Jews. The Jews had long nurtured a plan to destroy Islam; the evidence was Islam’s failure to achieve, and the “proof” of the conspiracy was to be seen especially clearly in a publication called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.”  

Although the “Protocols” were shown to be a hoax developed by the Russians around the turn of the 20^th century as an attempt to explain away their own failures, they were eagerly adopted by the Muslims as the explanation for their failures too. 

The “Jewish conspiracy” is the biggest, baddest conspiracy of all. It is basically a plan to control international finance and thereby undermine the health, family life, and morality of Muslims. These complaints are repeated every day by Muslims everywhere, and it is to conspiracies against Islam by the West, led by their puppet-masters the Jews, that their complaints are directed. 

The finger of blame is not pointed at the Muslim refusal to use reason; not at the Muslim view that work, especially physical labor, is somehow “dishonorable;” and not at their intransigence with respect to adapting to the changing demands of reality.  

No, the failure of Muslims is all the fault of conspiracies of the West. 

People who hold conspiracy theories have an amazing disregard for facts. For example, despite the knowledge gained about the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11 -  that war had been openly declared on the West and America years before, that the plan had been in development by Muslims for years, that the pilots were Muslims, that the voices aboard the planes were recorded, that the planes were videotaped flying into the Towers, that so many infidel deaths were celebrated in the “Arab Street” – all this is ignored. The REAL reason for the destruction of the Twin Towers was so that the U.S. (under the influence of the Jews), could use the destruction of the Towers as an excuse to go to war and carry out the (Jewish) plot to impoverish, corrupt, subjugate, and destroy the Muslim world. 

It is normal for people to want to be successful, and often, when we meet with failure, we engage in a process of denial of our own role in our failure. Failure is a form of grief, where a real loss is experienced. In reasoning, healthy people who are grieving, though, eventually the facts sink in and there is acceptance. So, too, in healthy people, the responsibility for whatever role they may have played in their failure is accepted, and then corrective actions can be undertaken. 

Not so among Muslims; the idea of “conspiracy” is an enormously appealing way of deflecting the painful awareness that one is responsible for one’s own failure. This is especially so because criticism of Islam, which is ultimately responsible for the failure, is prohibited.  

The use of “conspiracy” as an explanation for the failures of Islam is a recurring theme. Even Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group, was a Jewish creation, apparently to provide an “excuse” for Israel to foil Palestinian nationalism.  

According to Libya's Muamar Qaddafi, “only the naïve and simple-minded” could believe that the mission in Bosnia was something other than an excuse for Western expansionism. The real reason for it wasn’t to try to help Muslims, it was to seek revenge against the non-aligned movement.  

The attempt to deliver food to starving Somalians was also a ruse; the real reason for bringing in food was to use the mass starvation there to create more tension and to justify sending in the U.S. war machine. 

The evidence in support of the conspirator’s theory is extremely lax, while any evidence that casts doubt on it is held to a very high standard. It is all but impossible to dissuade a conspiracy theorist, to convince him that his “facts” do not stand up to close examination. 

In The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, a book written by Daniel Pipes about ten years ago, the heavy emotional investment by the Muslims in conspiracy theories as the explanation for their failures is brilliantly laid out. 

So, here is the “RECIPE FOR MAKING A MUSLIM:” 

1) Repetition: Begin at birth to establish a permanent mindset that separates the child from any sense of community with the rest of humanity; persuade him that Islam is the purveyor of all truth and virtue. Get it done before puberty ends. 

2) Tribalism: Instill in the child a sense that his only hope for survival, moral strength, and self-esteem is his membership in the Tribe of Islam and his contribution to its spread. Be sure that he is convinced that any deviation from this purpose will consign him to a fate of horrible, everlasting punishment. 

3) Philosophy: Before adulthood is reached, instill a fatally flawed philosophy, one which is in unremitting conflict with the demands of reality. This way, the child is doomed to failure, and grows hostile and frightened.  

3) Conspiracy: Blame all your failures on conspiracies by “Others.”  Since the Tribe of Islam is ordained by Allah as superior among all the peoples of the earth, and since Islam is the purveyor of all virtues and truths, conspiracy on the part the evil “Others” is the only possible explanation for the failure of Muslims. To admit to any other cause would be impossible.