Home The Dangers of Legitimizing Muslim Grievances
Home The Dangers of Legitimizing Muslim Grievances

The Dangers of Legitimizing Muslim Grievances

There is no surer path to Muslim violence than through the legitimization of Muslim grievance. And once you accept the legitimacy of the grievance, then you are also bound to accept the legitimacy of the violence that follows.

Violence begins with grievance. Grievance is the pretext for violence and the narrative for the violence. Liberals make a fetish of separating the grievance from the violence, emphasizing constructive means of resolving the grievance. But what do you do when the grievance and the violence are inseparable?

Grievance is the stories that Muslims tell themselves to justify their violence. To explain why they kill children and why they murder the innocent. The list of grievances is an endless as the violence. Every act of violence carries its own narrative. The endless Muslim conflicts throughout the world all carry their burden of history. But it isn't a history that can be resolved with a tolerance session.

Muslim grievances are the frustration of conquerors, the broken teeth of predators who weren't allowed to feed on the world until their stomachs burst. All the lands they couldn't conqueror, the peoples who rebelled against their rule, the inferior civilizations that pushed them back and drove them off. The swine who build skyscrapers and enjoy the fine things in life. 

The civil rights model of social conflict resolution accepts grievances as legitimate and then tries to 'heal' through them through social justice. And when that model is applied to Muslims, it turns into empty appeasement because the conflicts at the heart of Muslim violence cannot be resolved through integration or representation. Applying the word "justice" in any form to a conflict involving Muslims is wasted ink.

The problem begins with a clash of definitions. To a citizen of a secular Western state, "injustice" means a lack of representation. To a Muslim, "injustice" means a lack of Islamic jurisprudence. A Non-Muslim state is always unjust simply because it is not ruled by Islamic law.

The fundamental Muslim grievance is that they are not in power, not just in Israel where the world has accepted their demand to be in power as a wholly moral and legitimate demand, or throughout the Muslim world where Western governments have helped bring the Islamists to power with bombs and political pressure. The fundamental grievance is that they are not in power... everywhere.

If you believe that Islam is the fundamental law of mankind, that all mankind at one time were Muslims and that there is no true justice except through Islamic law-- then it follows naturally that Muslims have been cheated of their rightful power, that they are forced to live under "atheistic" regimes and that "justice" demands that the world "revert" to Islamic rule.

It's why the rhetoric of democracy falls notoriously flat when it comes to Islam. Muslims are not out for representation except as a preliminary stage to absolute power. They may route the guardianship of that absolute power power in various ways, through a dictator or some form of popular democracy, but these are only vehicles for the imposition of Islamic law.

The absolute power of Islamic law is justified by its origin in Allah and the unjust nature of non-Muslim law is equally proven by its lack of divine origin. If you take Islamic assumptions at face value, then this makes perfect sense. Therefore a devout Muslim cannot view a non-Muslim society as just. Equating an infidel code with Sharia is blasphemy. And so the logic of Islam dictates that Western Muslims must view themselves as oppressed.

Like the struggle with the left, this is a clash between the ideal and the real. Totalitarian idealists are always outraged because compared to their ideal every system is rotten, corrupt and unjust. Whether it's the ideal of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat or the Guardianship of the Jurists, it all comes down to the tyranny of the ideal against the immorality of the real. The representational compromises that make the modern Republic work are anathema to people who believe that they have the perfect system which will be absolutely just... because it is perfect.

Muslim grievances justify endless war against the real, in the name of the ideal, without ever having to deal with the shortcomings of the ideal. The collectivism of the ideal disdains the individual except as a foot soldier, a martyr in bringing about the ideal. The infidels are unworthy of life because they are immersed in the grossness of the real. And the suicide bomber rejects the real for the ideal by disdaining his own life, much as he disdains the despised earthly women, but the demon virgins of paradise who represent another ideal.

The common denominator of the cartoon controversies, Muslim wars around the world and just about every other grievance, from their claim to Spain to their demand for more mosques, is an insistence on power at the expense of others. Everyone has to keep paying a price for Muslim grievance-- either in rights and freedoms, or in blood.

Muslim violence is already a self-perpetuating grievance engine. If Muslims win a war, then they're heroes. If they lose a war, then they were betrayed, undermined from within and had what was theirs stolen from them. The grudges will fester for a thousand years and touch off endless wars until they get what they want or they lose the ability to fight those wars.

The purpose of war is conquest. Islam treats Muslim conquest as a form of justice. A failed conquest is an injustice. Try applying social justice to a mindset like that and what you're left with is Europe today.

Since no Muslim should ever have to live under the unjust rule of infidels, there is always a cause for war and a fifth column waiting to rise up and demand their right to rule over everyone else. And the war is endless-- its origins written in blood on the pages of Islamic scripture.

Innocence is the root of grievance, the "I was minding my own business until he came up and hit me and then I had to burn his village, rape his daughters and spend a thousand years enslaving his descendants" narrative of Islam. First comes the innocence and then comes the genocide.

Legitimizing Muslim grievance means accepting their narrative of innocence. Their "I was minding my own business until this cartoon offended me, until I was hauled off to Gitmo for absolutely no reason, until people give me dirty looks on the street for absolutely no reason and then I just had to kill as many of them as I could" narrative.


That narrative of innocence is a lie. People are not innocent, and the conquerors and oppressors of much of the world are certainly a long way from innocent. Historical Islam was a brutal conquering ideology that fed off blood and human misery. No amount of revisionist history will make that go away and the revisionist history is a disgusting insult to the millions killed and the cultures wiped out for the greater glory of Islam.

A religion that has never stopped practicing genocide, slavery and repression as religious mandates is the worst positioned to act out the charade of innocence, to pretend that everything was fine until the Ottoman Empire fell and the British and French colonialists replaced the Muslim colonialists and gave the local minorities civil rights instead of a spiked boot in the face.

Legitimizing Islamic grievance is dangerous not only because it feeds the self-righteous violence of Muslims, but because it convinces well-meaning Westerners that maybe they have a point. Once we accept the grievance, then it becomes hard to resist the violence, except by calling for more peaceful means of resolution. And if those peaceful means of resolution fail... then the violence is justified.

The Israeli peace process is a case study of how this process operates, how the legitimization of Muslim grievance comes to justify its violence, and how its own obstruction of negotiations disproves the peaceful means of resolution, which then doubly justifies the violence.

Rejecting the grievance also rejects the violence, it prevents the narrative from getting its foot in the door, the mosquito whine that pitifully pleads even as it's sinking its stinger into your neck. Fighting that narrative requires pulling back to see the sweep of history, the conquering armies of the Caliphs bringing slavery, destroying cultures, burning books and oppressing millions. And it requires that we see history repeating itself again.

Grievance was at the root of Mohammed's conquests. His "I was minding my own business, preaching a totalitarian ideology that said non-Muslims are inferior dogs when someone made fun of me, so of course I had them killed and fought a war and enslaved their descendants for all time" narrative. Poor innocent me.
Muslims must believe themselves to be moral, or accept that they are mass murderers fighting wars and destroying civilizations. And they need us to accept their narrative, to view them as moral actors resisting oppression and injustice-- rather than monsters spreading pain, hate and fear in formerly peaceful places. While we may not be able to prevent them from believing their lies, accepting their lies deludes us and them... and directly feeds violence.

When Americans keep repeating that Islamophobia is a major problem, Muslims treat this as an admission of guilt and a justification for violence. When Europeans accept that freedom of speech should take a back seat to Muslim sensitivities, then Muslims hold it up as proof that they don't really believe in freedom of speech and that those who insist on it are not following principles, but are deliberately agitating against Muslims.

Everyone who shouts "Blood for Oil", denounces Gitmo, rants about Israeli occupation and all the rest of it is legitimizing Muslim violence, whether or not they mean to do so. And when they perpetuate a myth of Islamic innocence, they are denying Muslims the opportunity to make a moral reckoning without which they cannot improve or change.

Wars begin as stories and end as stories. The Muslims have been telling their story for a long time. And these days we're telling their story too.

Comments

  1. Anonymous13/11/11

    Ya'll might ponder on the faaaact thet we ain't played cowboys and Muslims yit. Hit's a cummin.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous14/11/11

    Islam certainly fits the nature of man in its animal essence. I think that this is the real reason it is so difficult to reform or overcome.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Here's a partial list of Muslim grievances http://amboytimes.typepad.com/the_amboy_times/2007/02/the_list_of_thi.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. "The fundamental grievance is that they are not in power... everywhere."

    I always have fun trying to find your thesis sentence, and for today this has got to be it. You really hit the nail on the head again, as usual.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think that this is the real reason it is so difficult to reform or overcome.

    gOOD article

    ReplyDelete
  6. It's really starting to seem that freedom of religion is a self-destructive idea, unless some kind of limits are put on what constitutes a valid 'religion'. Right now I can't see any way that the West with its traditions of the past few centuries can possibly admit the need to fight Islam per se.

    This is weird for me to be saying as an Orthodox Jew, but maybe the only hope lies in some kind of renaissance of Christianity as a real power, but anyway that doesn't seem to be on the horizon.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous14/11/11

    Muslim "grievance" does not exist in Muslim countries. When they deal with the West, they adopt the language and the politics of grievance

    ReplyDelete
  8. ha! that's what I tell people - the reason Muslims complain about how "unfair" they have it is becasue they're brought up to believe they should run the world and they think it's unfair that they're not in charge.

    And when you tell people, they won't believe ye!! ;)

    As to your point re the 'moral reckoning", there are some ex-muslims who have made it. but the vast majority cannot see themselves, so embedded are they in their fantasy that weak Westerners allow them to play out.
    they need to see themselves through Western eyes and recoil appropriately.

    I should add that, as in a case recently, if a Muslims guy has been permitted to pray at work, caused no trouble, but then is bullied and disallowed, i disapprove of that.
    If a workplace can accommodate a need with no trouble, assuming the Muslim has no desire to cause trouble, then i don't see the problem with that.
    i do not include cases like the hijabbed wannabe hairdresser in the UK, the Muslims in the US who prayed without punching the time clock, compulsory Ramadan for non-Muslims (Luton) and the Muslim who gets hired in a supermarket and suddenly cannot handle pork.

    One of the first things i see as necessary is stopping Muslims from bullying Jews,women, homosexuals, draw a line at Sharia law, deport terrorists and murderers.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous14/11/11

    If we are supposed to get ready for the "real" Halocaust, THEY better get ready for Crusades 2.0. And this time, we'll finish the job.

    ReplyDelete
  10. @TBS,

    When you tolerate intolerance you've already lost.

    Muzzies are infiltrating and subverting the legislatures, judiciary and law enforcement entities of many Western style democracies and I'll bet yours is one of them. If you don't think they can be successful using these means I invite you to look at the history of Lebanon over the last 50 years.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thank you for another excellent, disturbing and depressing article Daniel.

    Considering the apathetic amorality that constitutes lieberalism today, maybe Western civilization deserves to die.

    ReplyDelete
  12. I want to officially declare that Sultan Knisch speaks for me 110 % of the time!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Grievance is always tied to a sense of entitlement.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Avital15/11/11

    fsy

    As an Orthodox Jew too, I have to disagree. If there were a resurgance of Xtianity and the Crusades, there first target would still be Israel. That was the target of the Crusades, and even though they claimed to be fighting the Moslems, they killed us too.
    A resurgance of xtianity is not the answer as bad as things seem, for if xtianity were dominant today, Israel will be the first target.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am a Christian, and I LOVE the Jews! I have no idea what sort of Christians you've encountered, but as for me and my Christian friends and family members, we support Israel and wouldn't think of trying to take it from God's chosen people. I have often told my husband that if things start getting worse between the Jews and the Muslims, that I would be willing to go to Israel and fight along side the Jewish citizens of Israel, and once it's over, I would return to my home in North America. I consider myself to be a mainstream born-again, and have only the highest regard and best wishes for the Jewish people. I believe that the Jewish people are a great gift from God to all of humanity, and that the promised land belongs to them alone...not just the little portion they currently call Israel, but the WHOLE enchilada. I am extremely irritated by your post...we Christians are NOT after Israel -- it's yours! As I already mentioned, I'm willing to risk my life for the Jewish citizens of Israel and NOT for some sort of takeover of Israel by Christians.

      Delete
    2. I am a Christian, and I LOVE the Jews! I have no idea what sort of Christians you've encountered, but as for me and my Christian friends and family members, we support Israel and wouldn't think of trying to take it from God's chosen people. I have often told my husband that if things start getting worse between the Jews and the Muslims, that I would be willing to go to Israel and fight along side the Jewish citizens of Israel, and once it's over, I would return to my home in North America. I consider myself to be a mainstream born-again, and have only the highest regard and best wishes for the Jewish people. I believe that the Jewish people are a great gift from God to all of humanity, and that the promised land belongs to them alone...not just the little portion they currently call Israel, but the WHOLE enchilada. I am extremely irritated by your post...we Christians are NOT after Israel -- it's yours! As I already mentioned, I'm willing to risk my life for the Jewish citizens of Israel and NOT for some sort of takeover of Israel by Christians.

      Delete
  15. Avital15/11/11

    Knish,

    If the Christian Right ever gained power in the USA, they nearly did under Bush Junior, there is a good chance they would want to set up shop in Israel. These are allies and they have their eye on Israel. If they could invade and take the land they would. The Catholics, if dominant today, think they they are the new Israel. Xtianity is not the answer.

    ReplyDelete

  16. Xtianity is not the answer.


    I'm not sure where you get your certainty about these things, but in any case, I find it hard to conceive of Xtianity being out to kill Jews the way the Moslems are today. As I said, I'm talking about the lesser evil.

    ReplyDelete
  17. The Catholic Church seems to have no problems whatsoever w/Islamofascism -- even as muslimes kill and persecute fellow Christians so I can't see putting much faith in them.

    Is Pat Robertson a member of the "Christian Right"?

    ReplyDelete
  18. What does a resurgence of Christianity have to do with anything?

    The crusades were called to reclaim empires that no longer exist. I don't see that being a major issue today.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Anonymous16/11/11

    I was told by a Sudanese Muslim that the southern people "started" the civil war because a Muslim girl was raped by a non-Muslim (black) man. At the time I was amazed: did this man really believe the rape story, and did he really think that an alleged rape justified the killing of millions? But how often is an alleged rape the start of Muslim rampages?

    In Australia the media are getting into the swing of things, repeatedly portraying Muslim girls as pure, pious yet delectably pretty and nubile with their colourful hijabs, in order to flatter our delightfully exotic new immigrants. In all probability, a story will eventually emerge that one of these virginal goddesses has been raped by an "Aussie" and all hell will break loose.

    Pessimism comes so easily regarding Muslims!

    ReplyDelete
  20. I've met lieberal retards who try to tell me the real threat to the world is the "Christian Right". When I invite them to move to an islamofascist state to avoid the threat of the "Christian Right" though they seem to clam up real fast.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Christian16/11/11

    Sorry, but if you respond to this article with wild claims that W. nearly set up a theocracy or that Christians want to take over Israel, you are just being silly.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Avital17/11/11

    Knish, the crusades were for control of Jerusalem. Xtians are not out to kill us today precisely because they have given up Xtianity. Guess I didn't articulate what I meant, and that is Israel is safe from Xtianity precisely because Xtianity is dead today. Someone above called for a resurgance, I didn't say you did, and if that were to happen, since they believe they are the new Israel, Jerusalem would be their first target, whether it were Catholics or Evangelicals, they would both covet Israel.

    Cornholio, the Xtian right do not control the USA, the liberals do, that is why your buddies clam up real fast. If the Xtian right did control American no doubt they would set up shop in Israel. They want to but cannot, therefore they use the next best way, missionising.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Christians are not a single unified group, no more than Jews are. The theology varies widely and so does the attitude toward Jews.

    Talk of a Christian resurgence is vague enough as to have no meaning. What does that mean, the rise of the Catholic church, the growth of the evangelical movement worldwide, or the liberal forms of Christianity that dominate the elites in the West?

    There are real tensions, which is why it's best to avoid black and white responses.

    There is an ugly history between some traditional forms of Christianity and the Jews, but then again there's a long history of alliances between the Jews and the Persian Empire. Time brings change.

    We are all confronted with the threat of Islam and we need to stand together against it, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Atheists and everyone else.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Avital18/11/11

    Knish, I prefer to look for a solution that will work and is realistic. do the Xtians agree with you? and which ones? Tell me, bout this,

    Christian Biblical ethicists claim God didn't promise Israel to Jews
    http://newevangelicalpartnership.org/?q=node/139

    atheists? as in Europe you mean who are pro islam and anti american and anti xtian if they are not xtian anti semites?

    Hindu's? didn't india support the apartheid calls against Israel and whose population is what 300mil moslem?

    I fear that the battle with islam after we all unite agianst islam is a pipe dream, as we're seeing before our eyes. It's not gonna happen, wish I could believe otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
  25. @Avital,

    The "Christian biblical ethicists"
    who penned that article are, minimally, islamofascist apologists.
    If you google their names along w/islam or muslim you'll see their ties to islamofascist apologism and really, are they any worse than say,
    Norman FINKelstein?

    ReplyDelete
  26. Cranky, what Christians? The article doesn't even talk about Christians. Did you comment on the wrong article somehow?

    ReplyDelete
  27. The real reason is not grievances. That is only the reason expressed by bin Laden to the West. See Ibrahim, The Al Queda Reader. The real motivation for Muslim violence or jihad, is the quest for world domination under Shariah law, motivated by Islamic theology. The Arabs use taquiyya or dissimulation to foster the idea that the violence is in redress of grievances.

    Ibrahim is the editor and translator of The Al-Qaeda Reader, which he published after discovering hitherto unknown al-Qaeda treatises written in Arabic that he says "proves once and for all that, despite the propaganda of al-Qaeda and its sympathizers, radical Islam's war with the West is not finite and limited to political grievances—real or imagined—but is existential, transcending time and space and deeply rooted in faith".[2]
    Bin Laden even posits the strikes of 9/11 as reciprocal responses to American-Israeli aggression against Muslims in Lebanon: “With Allah as my witness, I say to you that we had never considered striking the towers; however, after things became unbearable, and we witnessed the oppression and atrocities perpetrated against our people in Palestine and Lebanon by the American-Israeli coalition—it was then that I got the idea.”28 Following the July 2004 London bombings, Zawahiri said, “I speak to you today about the blessed raid on London that... made it take a sip from the same glass from which it had long made the Muslims drink.... So taste some of what you have made us taste.”29

    When addressing Muslims in the Arabic tracts it disseminates, al-Qaeda makes perfectly clear that its animus to the West is first and foremost based on religious doctrine, which is one of the reasons that it has been well-received by many young and devout Muslims. One of Zawahiri’s ultimate stated goals is making “Islam supreme in its [own] land and then spreading it around the world.”30 Bin Laden claims that the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims should be one of “enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility, and an internal hate from the heart” based on his reading of Koranic verse 60:40.31

    "Al-Qaeda’s propaganda largely has been successful including among Muslims long since frustrated by their governments which they view as either inattentive to society’s needs, insufficiently Islamic, or simply corrupt. Westerners are not immune to the al-Qaeda vision, as demonstrated by mainstream Western acceptance that al-Qaeda’s war is entirely fueled by grievances against the West—even when bin Laden himself asserts that the animosity between the West and the Muslim world is inherent. Even former CIA analysts such as Michael Scheuer32 and Bruce Riedel33 have accepted the al-Qaeda narrative of grievances and similarly cite the Arab-Israeli conflict as the source of all woes, despite al-Qaeda’s broader position that Muslims should be intrinsically hostile to the West."
    See Widlanski, "Battle for our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat

    ReplyDelete
  28. Hamid21/4/13

    @TBS

    "...I should add that, as in a case recently, if a Muslims guy has been permitted to pray at work, caused no trouble, but then is bullied and disallowed, i disapprove of that.
    If a workplace can accommodate a need with no trouble, assuming the Muslim has no desire to cause trouble, then i don't see the problem with that...."

    You might have no problem with that - but in a large workforce - other employees are going to expect similar entitlements. If they choose to come to the West and work here - then they should understand they should play by the existing rules - and not expect the rules to change for them.

    ReplyDelete
  29. This article was the first thing I'd read from Daniel Greenfield, a couple of years ago. And I thought it was one of the best reads regarding izlHam, that I'd ever read. He makes his point with intelligence, and keeps it interesting + understandable for dummies like myself. Even an arrogant liberal should be able to understand the truth told in this story. But I won't hold my breath...

    ReplyDelete
  30. The Kashmir problem aka the endless problems that Pakis have with India... is also another brilliant example in the above context.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Anonymous10/1/17

    fuck allah

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

You May Also Like