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Home A Nigerian Prince Called Islam

A Nigerian Prince Called Islam

Say that you get a tempting offer from a Nigerian prince and decide to invest some money in helping him transfer his vast fortune from Burkina Faso or Dubai over to the bank across the street. The seemingly simple task of bringing over the 18 million dollars left to him by his father hits some snags which require you to put in more and more of your own money.

Eventually you have invested more than you ever would have ever done up front just trying to protect the money that you already sank into Prince Hussein Ngobo’s scheme. And to protect your self-esteem, you go on believing that no matter what Prince Ngobo does, he is credible and sincere. Any failings in the interaction are either your fault or the fault of some third party. Anyone who tells you otherwise must be a Ngobophobe.

Now imagine that Prince Ngobo’s real name is Islam.

That is where Western elites find themselves now. They invested heavily in the illusion of a compatible Islamic civilization. Those investments, whether in Islamic immigration, Islamic democracy or peace with Islam have turned toxic, but dropping those investments is as out of the question as writing off Prince Ngobo as a con artist and walking away feeling like a fool.

Western elites, who fancy themselves more intelligent and more enlightened than the wise men and prophets of every religion, and who base their entire right to rule on that intelligence and enlightenment, are not in the habit of admitting that they have been played for fools.

The Arab Springers who predicted that the Muslim uprisings would bring a new age of secularism, freedom and an end to the violence between Islam and the West; are busy writing up new checks.

It’s not insanity; it’s the term that rhymes with a certain river in Egypt. The Brotherhood’s victory discredited the Arab Spring, which discredits the bid for Arab Democracy, which discredits the compatibility of Islam and the folks on Fifth Avenue. Follow the river back along its course and suddenly the Clash of Civilizations becomes an undeniable fact. It’s easier to give up and let the river of denial carry you further along until, five years from now, you find yourself explaining why Al-Qaeda ruling Libya is actually a good thing for everyone.

In 1993, Israel cut a land-for-peace deal with a greasy Egyptian bloke named Yasser Arafat. The Cairo-born Arafat would turn his gang of terrorists into a government and police force, and rule over an autonomous territory, in exchange for ending the violence. Clinton smiled beatifically as hands were shaken and a new era of peace was upon us.

The era, however, has yet to show up.

Over two decades of terrorism have not shaken the belief of the American or Israeli establishments in the “Two-State Solution”, which has solved absolutely nothing, except perhaps the problem of how to make the Middle East into an even worse place. As the violence increased and the pathways to peace decreased, American Presidents and Israeli Prime Ministers redoubled their concession offers and their faith in the Two-State Solution—now an article of faith in most circles. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt; it also laps at the shores of Tel Aviv, flows out to the English coast and floods cities across Europe.

Ask a Eurocrat for the time of day and he’ll calculate how much to charge you for the subsidies to the artisanal clock farmers that it will take to answer that question. Ask him about Islamic integration and he will instantly tell you that everything is going smoothly and the problems only exist in the minds of a few bigots and the pages of a few sensationalized tabloids.

Muslim integration into Europe is going swimmingly, much like the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the Arab Spring. It’s going like a house on fire, not to mention a bus, a lot of cars and two towers on fire—on the other side of the Atlantic. Whatever problems there are, as with the peace process and the spring process, are undoubtedly the fault of someone who isn’t a Muslim.

The Arab Spring, the Palestinian Peace Process and every similar bid to transform the region  presumed that disempowerment was the cause of Muslim violence and that, conversely, empowerment was the solution.

Give the poor dears some weapons, a country, a ballot box, free and open elections, and they’ll be less likely to blow themselves up while seeking 72 virgins on the downtown express. Instead, empowering people who were violent while disempowered; only made them more violent.

Some of the best minds in two hemispheres are engaged in seeking a solution to this paradox, which isn’t a paradox at all but rather a straight-line projection.

If Abdul is beheading people when all he has to work with is a sword then, if you give him a gun, he will start shooting them instead. If he’s blowing up buses when he only has a terrorist group, he will blow up countries when he has a country.

Empowering Abdul does not diminish his grievances, because his grievances are a function of his capacity for violence. Increasing his capacity will increase his grievances until the entire world is on the wrong end of his empowerment scimitar.

The liberal projection that “Abdul + Power + Money + Bigger Guns = Peace” made as much sense, as Prince Ngobo’s story about his transfer fees being cursed by witches, but, as the song goes, “You gotta have faith.” Some of the things that we have faith in are bigger than us and some are just us. Those who put their faith in Prince Ngobo and in the benign nature of Islam are really putting their faith in their own instincts, trusting that they are right, even while looking into the eye of the wrongness.

We rarely know a thing for what it is. For the most part we know it only for what we want it to be. Our knowledge of the world is inseparable from our worldview which casts the shadows that project our inner world on the outer world. The only way to avoid that trap is by studying consequences, by creating theories based on actual events, rather than manufacturing events based on theories.

Most people project their own desires and motivations on to others. Americans assumed that Muslims just wanted democracy, free enterprise and apple pie. Muslims assume that Americans are conspiring to destroy them through a byzantine series of plots and conspiracies, because that is what they would do in our place… and that is what they are trying to do.

The Eurocrats assume that Muslims wanted to be good multicultural socialists, because that is what they want them to be. They assumed that the Arab Spring was the equivalent of Europe’s own socialist  movements, after having wrongly assumed the same thing about Arab Socialist movements generations earlier. They assumed those things, because just like Prince Ngobo’s business partners trying to figure out how to call up Lagos, they saw in the Other the mirror of their own desires.

The sunk cost of the free world into the illusion that Islam is benign, that it is a positive influence and that it can be coexisted with is enormous. The cultural cost is even greater.

The mechanism of denial is that sunk cost. That faith which our political, cultural and academic superiors have in themselves—in their probity, their insight and their rational tools of scientific governance. Muslims dare not question Islam because they fear Allah. Liberals dare not question Islam because they fear being fools. If they were completely wrong about Islam, then what else were they also wrong about? Pull at one thread and the whole coat of dreams dissolves leaving behind a very naked emperor.

The longer the fraud goes on, the more impossible it is for them to admit that they were wrong. What could have been tossed out after a year is an article of faith after twenty and undeniable after forty. To admit that you made a mistake right away is bearable, but to admit that your policy for generations has been senseless madness is inconceivable.

The trouble with naked emperors is that everyone knows they are naked. Give people permission to point out the obvious and they will commence pointing and laughing. The only way to keep from being made a mockery is by desperately maintaining the consensus that everyone knows the pants are there; even if you can’t see them. Everyone knows that Islam is violent in the deeper parts of their minds, where common sense observations directly gathered from experience go. Give people permission to point out the obvious and they will turn angrily on those who lied to them and manipulated them for decades. Worse still, they will brand them incompetent fools who cannot be trusted with the reins of government.

Most insidiously, the left likes the imaginary world that that it has created. The multicultural utopia with jolly Pakistanis adding spice to London, Saudis putting up little mosques on the Canadian prairie and sassy Shiites bringing diversity to Dearborn, isn’t just propaganda—it’s the imaginary world that they want to live in. The new world order that they have imagined of a friendly multicultural democratic is their idea of the world as it should be-- a utopia created and maintained at our expense, and in the face of all reality and reason.

The illusion of Islam has, like the banking system, become too big to fail. It cannot fail because it would take too much else down with it, leaving behind a harder world. No matter how unintegrated Muslims in Europe are, the Eurocrats must insist that, aside from a few exploding bumps in the road, everything is going according to plan. Any day now a lesbian Imam will be preaching the virtues of secularism in Finsbury Park. It must be that way because the alternative is unthinkable.

In Israel, the Two-State Solution must still be the solution, because the alternative is eternal conflict. In the rest of the region, Arab Democracy must be viable, because otherwise there is nothing left but despair over an irredeemable barbarism.

We gotta have faith, not in any deity, including the chief deity of Islam, but in our leaders. Muslims believe that Allah is infallible, while we are expected to believe that the politicians and professors, the diplomats and journalists, are. That they are right, even when the continuing violence proves that they are wrong.

The people who shape our half of the world have fallen for the Nigerian Prince scam of Islam and they need to believe that they know what they are doing and they need us to believe it too. And when the check from Lagos doesn’t clear, when the bombs go off, the cars burn, the children are murdered in schools and the rockets fly, then they don’t blame Prince Hussein Ngobo, the car bombers, terrorists and throatslitters—they blame us for ruining the illusion by not believing in it too.

It would have all worked if only we had been as willing to be lied to as our gullible masters.





Comments

  1. Our self appointed cultural elites run on the belief that all cultures are equal, with the unstated but assumed idea that human nature is benign. If they admit that this is not true in one case it weakens the whole doctrine. And so they end up locked into their current views on Islam not only for the always present tendency we all have to not admit that we are wrong, along with the risk of an ideological breakdown. Which is to say a loss of authority along with perhaps being forced into an unpleasant paradigm shift shift in their world view.

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    1. Imagine the dismay at having to admit that immigration is not the vindication of all in Western civilization that is noble, true, and metrosexual.

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  2. Anonymous28/9/14

    Yes, you have the uneducated like George W and Laura who made stupid proclamations, and now you have the current crop whose very agenda is complicit with the Islamic agenda. And all of the conservative voices say "We need our president to act more like a successful president." Duh! He is very successful....in doing what he promised to do.....transforming the USA.

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  3. Anonymous28/9/14

    Brilliant. Needs a wider audience. It is so true that when the liberal elite finally does get to understand reality it might be too late for the rest of us. They must be driven from power and soon.
    Dave S

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  4. Anonymous28/9/14

    Did not Herodotus (5th Century BC, and the so-called "Father of History") proclaim that the strive between the West and the Middle East was going to be a lasting feature of humankind's existence on this globe?! And that was waaayy before Islam, but the Middle Eastern mind was set! Ignorance is the disease of the uninformed. For the modern sophisticate, history is so pre-2014-ish! (see Kerry proclaiming, that we just don't do things that way anymore in 2014!). Learn-ed ignorance can be found among Ph.Ds, and lawyers, and doctors, and professors, and politicians. The world is messy! Daniel you are a treasure, and I thank you for the light you bring! L'Shana Tova!

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  5. Anonymous28/9/14

    Multiculturalism, Global warming, Immigration reform, Welfare, the list goes on and on and on... Every "solution" imposed by our learned Liberal elites has made the problem they are supposed to address far worse, yet when anyone dares point out these failures, the most intelligible thing they will say (utterly false, but intelligible) is that the solution would have worked if their hadn't been so much resistance from the racist rich rightwingers, and all they need is more money to prove it.

    Daniel is very much right about this, and he is correct to point out that regardless of how stupid the policy, how utterly dismal the results, the Leftists will never retreat an inch from any of their visionary pronouncements because to question one, would leave them all open to question, and the cascade of failure would destroy their world just like pulling out a single card will collapse a multi-story house of cards.

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    1. Excellent point. That is why Sweden is becoming more and more authotitarian. Free speech MUST be shut down and so what if our AntiFa friends crack a few Nazi skulls?

      Sweden is becoming very brittle.

      And then there's Cameron's comment that Britons need to adapt to Islamic culture, not the other way around. The mind reels in attempting to grasp how the Prime Minister can utter such flapdoodle. It illustrates perfectly the extremes to which the elites must go to preserve the illusion of their analytical prowess and their good judgment.

      I am similarly stunned by each news item detailing how the Italian navy - at great expense - is tasked with rescuing (underlined, bold, red 24-point) illegal "migrants" and escorting them to the sub-Sahara equivalent of Bali Hi.

      Denial I think is the right concept. Anyone can make a mistake and it's easy (though not exactly fun) to correct it promptly. Failing that, the coverup becomes the full preoccupation, as Mr. Greenfield notes.

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  6. Anonymous28/9/14

    I never did like any of the Bush family or their sycophants. They stabbed Reagan in the back and believe as much in the "new world order"/"Islam is a religion of peace" as Clinton, Obama and Prince Charles.

    Andy Texan

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    1. W made a nitrotoluene-fueled, muffler-less, rocket sled ride to the Islamic Center of Washington the day after 9/11 to kiss the hem of the resident subversives and intelligence officers. It was a sight to behold - our president groveling. Pres. Twinkletoes outdid him later.

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  7. Common 'tater29/9/14

    Very graphically described and thoroughly analyzed. However, I suspect that a lot of the proponents of this nonsense do this for very banal reasons. Follow the money as well as the river of denial.

    The fallacies of the equivalency between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian systems and the benefits of multiculturalism are not grass roots phenomena. These have been foisted upon us by so-called intellectuals, politicians, the main stream media, self-appointed "leaders", and bureaucrats. Again, follow the money.

    In my opinion, the great rush of both the self-appointed and the popularly elected "leadership" into multiculturalism and the moral equivalency with islam is actually the great rush for OPEC petrodollars. The OPEC despots and monarchs are willing to fund anything/anyone that puts a positive spin on them. They also have the financial and political clout to punish those that speak or act contrary to the script.

    As for the king and lack of clothes, the reason no one speaks the truth is that the king will detach the heads of those that dare to speak contrary to the official line. The reasons that so many in Islam do not speak out against the violence is partly fear of the jihadists as well as the reality that jihad is islam.

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  8. Anonymous29/9/14

    as you can see by the comments , we are doomed. this is NOT a libs vs dems issue. This is the potential end of western civilization sneaking up on us whilst we squabble about it. First put out the fire, then try to figure out who started it if you must.

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  9. Anonymous29/9/14

    Our elite leaders bear a strong resemblance to the latest group of nuts who jump into the zoo cages of wild animals. The most recent victim, I believe, dropped in on the cage of a polar bear, who did what wild bears do.
    Yes, they can be cute, and no, they don't drink Coca Cola, but looks are deceiving.
    Common sense is unknown in some circles.

    sophie

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    1. Your last line reminds me of a Park Ranger at the Chicamauga National Battlefield who related that one time a visitor had asked him why so many Civil War battles were fought in national parks.

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  10. I actually wrote an article on that theme

    http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3367/us-europe-integration

    In the Bronx Zoo, David Villalobos was rescued from a tiger den after leaping inside to, in his own words, "Be one with the tiger."

    Being "one with the tiger" is a popular goal in the modern world, and our leaders are forever leaping into tiger dens in the hopes of becoming one with the beast. These leaps of faith end about as well as they did for Villalobos who was mauled by the tiger, but like Villalobos they never seem to draw the proper conclusions about the dangerous nature of tigers.

    British, French and German leaders did not hop into tiger enclosures in the London Zoo, the Parc Zoologique de Paris and the Berlin Zoological Garden. Instead they turned these cities into open air safaris where the natives were encouraged to mingle with the tigers. The multicultural safari has not been going well, with the tigers mangling the natives, burning their cars and chewing on their police officers. The European Union zookeepers have been wondering loudly what they can do to fix their oneness integration project, while releasing still more tigers into the streets of London, Paris and Berlin.

    The United States did not jump into a tiger den in the Bronx Zoo. That would have been fairly sane compared to its leap into Libya. With the Arab Spring, the tigers were freed and men like Christopher Stevens jumped inside. The bloody marks on the walls of the Benghazi consulate are a grim reminder of what tigers eventually do to the men who move into their dens.

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  11. I don’t know. Perhaps gullibility is part of it. Rose colored Pollyannas in this the best of all possible worlds. But revolutions, especially failed revolutions don’t stem from well wishing and ignorance. They stem from a desire to kill people and overturn society and remake it according someone else’s rules. They stem from a desire for power and the need to slaughter people in the prosecution of that goal. While I’m sure there were and are today a few dead end communists who claim that Stalin wasn’t that bad because the goal was worth it. But mostly their ranks were filled with tyrants, fascists, crooks and murderers who loved the communists not spite of who they killed but because of it. This is why we find them today flocking to Islam. It likes to wage genocide, it likes to crush all comers, it worships naked power and it rewards the people who wield it. Utopian socialist workers’ paradise never meant anything to them. That was for the cheap seats. What mattered, how they kept score was brutality. Islam is purpose-built for this. A ‘religion’ of sorts that elevates repression in the name of repression for the sake of the limitless power of a few. It’s like the old joke “How do you think a man like me got to be a man like me?” The elites, for lack of a better term, are political victors in a nasty game. They climbed over the skulls of everyone else to reach the pinnacle of where they are. Of course they’re going to adopt a philosophy that furthers that aim. Multiculturalism is a brand that goes by. It’s a handle, a bellwether that the groundlings find useful embrace. It doesn’t mean anything though, any more than any other slogan in a book by Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot.

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  12. roger in florida29/9/14

    Mr. Greenfield,
    As "Common 'tater" says above; all you say is true but it would be unwise to discount pure greed and corruption as the major driving force behind the statements of our leaders. In a way I find that comforting, a corrupt politician is one thing and will always be with us, however, political leaders who actually believed the crap they spout about islam would be terrifying indeed.

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  13. Unlike in cartoons, evil rarely knows it is evil in real life. Evil justifies itself by determining it is ‘right!’. Further, evil is driven to be proven to be right by forcing everyone else to lock step. Ironically and historically speaking, evil in control always seems to live very well while all those forced to comply to what is ‘right!’ struggle to survive. And yet, brainwashed, they allow it to continue, make excuses for the elite, and pledge devotion to the lie because...you know...it is ‘right!’.

    I recommend a book by Alexander Boot - How the Future Worked - Russia Through the Eyes of a Young Non-Person. Boot, born and raised in Cold War era Communist Russia in the 50s/60s/70s tells it like it was and is moving toward being here. To believe it could never happen here is a foolish Utopian pipe dream. The foundation has already been laid. The population has been sufficiently dumbed-down and distracted. Ripe for the picking off.

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  14. Anonymous29/9/14

    "If Abdul is beheading people when all he has to work with is a sword then, if you give him a gun, he will start shooting them instead. If he’s blowing up buses when he only has a terrorist group, he will blow up countries when he has a country."

    Case in point the partition of India to create the Islamic state of Pakistan. Did it give India peace with its Indian Muslims? No it gave those fanatical Indian Muslims a state with an army and nukes with which to attack India through wars and terrorism without end.

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  15. Anonymous29/9/14

    DP111

    By the way, have you heard that “Nothing to do with Islam” is the leading cause of beheadings worldwide.

    From Rick Stein

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  16. I have a young niece. She loves traditional fairy tales, so yesterday we logged on to You Tube in order to watch some. I asked her what were her favorite stories. She replied that she liked the ones where everyone lived happily ever after but, she continued, she wanted to skip the parts where there were witches.

    I would say that she has the mentality of a modern liberal. However, in her defense, I would add that she is only three years old. I remain hopeful.

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