PJ MediaDo you know the difference between a supremacist grievance and an egalitarian grievance? This is the key to understanding the widely held claim that Muslim grievances are the source of Muslim violence.
Take the latest Muslim attack on U.S. soil. Last week, Abdul Razak Ali Artan — an 18-year-old Muslim refugee from Somalia, who was receiving aid from Catholic charities — rammed his car into a building at Ohio State University. He then got out and stabbed people with a butcher knife. He was eventually shot and killed by a guard; 13 people were hospitalized.
Why did he do it?
According to the “experts,” Artan — like so many other violent Muslim refugees before him — had grievances. CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, and many others cited a Facebook post by Artan: “I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim Brothers and Sisters being killed and tortured EVERYWHERE.”
Yet despite this claim of ubiquity, he only cited one nation: “Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma led to a boiling point. I can’t take it anymore.”
The question before us is simple: Was Artan provoked to go on a murderous rampage in America because of grievances concerning the treatment of Muslims in Burma?
For about a decade now, I’ve argued that the “Muslim grievance” narrative is a myth meant to shield Islamic teachings from scrutiny. Its logic goes like this: if Islam is a religion of peace yet Muslims everywhere are behaving violently, then the explanation we must all cling to is that they are really, really “pissed off” about something being done to them.
Most recently in a message to the West, the Islamic State, instead of disseminating and taking advantage of the “grievance” claim, could not have been clearer: no matter what the West does, the true reason ISIS hates and terrorizes it is because we are infidels.
That said, millions of Muslims — including Artan — do harbor strong grievances against the West and others. The problem is that they define “grievance” in a manner incompatible with liberty.
When most Westerners think of the word “grievance,” they think in egalitarian terms: X has a grievance against Y because Y doesn’t treat X with equality. For example, your boss or your teacher treats you worse — without equality — than other employees or students. You then have a grievance which most in the West would say is legitimate: that’s because the people of the West were raised on the unique idea of treating others as they would be treated.
This is not the sort of grievance that animates many Muslims – and certainly not those who resort to terrorism.
Rather, they are animated by a supremacist-based grievance: they get angry seeing infidels on an equal footing with Muslims. And they get murderous seeing infidels actually lording over Muslims.
Islamic doctrine, which persuades Muslims into believing they are superior to non-Muslims — who are even likened to dogs and cattle — imbues Muslims with this sense of entitlement.
For example, in Pakistan, as Christian children were singing carols inside a church, Muslim men from a nearby mosque barged into the church with an axe, destroyed the furniture and altar, and beat the children. “You are disturbing our prayers. … How dare you use the mike and speakers?” explained the enraged Muslims. When a Muslim slapped a Christian and the latter reciprocated, the Muslim exclaimed: “How dare a Christian slap me!” Anti-Christian violence immediately ensued.
Islamic grievances are based on what I call Islam’s “How Dare You?” phenomenon. Remember it the next time media, politicians, and other talking heads tell you that Muslim mayhem and outbursts of violence are products of grievances. Missing from their rationale is the supremacist basis of these grievances.
Consider the Conditions of Omar, a foundational medieval Muslim text dealing with how “infidels” living under Muslim authority must behave, attributed to the second caliph and close friend of Muhammad, Omar.
Among other stipulations, it commands conquered Christians not to raise their “voices during prayer or readings in churches anywhere near Muslims” (hence the axe attack in Pakistan). It also commands them not to display any signs of Christianity — specifically listing Bibles and crosses — and not to build churches. (See Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, for my translation of “The Conditions of Omar.”)
If the supremacist nature of Islamic law is still not clear enough, the Conditions literally commands Christians to give up their seats to Muslims as a show of respect. By way of analogy, consider when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her bus seat to white passengers in America. Any white supremacist at the time had sincere grievances: how dare she think herself equal?
But were such grievances legitimate? Should they have been accommodated? Similarly, are the endless supremacist-based “grievances” of Muslims legitimate and should they be accommodated?
These are the questions missing from the debate about easily bruised Muslim sensitivities.
One can go on and on with examples from all around the Islamic world:
In Turkey, a Bible publishing house was stormed and three of its Christian employees tortured, disemboweled, and finally murdered. One suspect later said: “We didn’t do this for ourselves, but for our religion [Islam] … Our religion is being destroyed.”
In Egypt, after a 17-year-old Christian student refused to obey his Muslim teacher’s orders to cover up his cross, the teacher and some Muslim students attacked, beat, and ultimately murdered the youth.
These Turkish and Egyptian Muslims were truly aggrieved: As seen, Islam’s Conditions makes clear that Christians must not “produce a cross or Bible” around Muslims. How dare the Egyptian student and Turkish Bible publishers refuse to comply — thus grieving Muslims into murdering them?
In parts of Indonesia, because it is becoming next to impossible for Christians to build churches, they often congregate outside to celebrate Christmas — only to be attacked by Muslims hurling cow dung and bags of urine at them as the Christians pray.
In Egypt, the mere rumor that Christians are trying to build, or even renovate, an existing church sets off mass riots and savage attacks on Christians. The Muslims of Indonesia and Egypt are also sincerely aggrieved: how dare these Christians think they can build or renovate a church when the Conditions forbid it?
In short, anytime non-Muslims dare to overstep their Sharia-designated “inferior” status, supremacist Muslims become violently aggrieved.
From here, one can begin to understand the ultimate Muslim grievance: Israel.
For if “infidel” Christian minorities are deemed inferior and attacked by aggrieved Muslims for exercising their basic human rights, like freedom of worship, how must Muslims feel about Jews — the descendants of pigs and apes, according to the Koran — exercising power and authority over fellow Muslims in what is perceived to be Muslim land?
How dare they?!
Of course, if grievances against Israel were really about universal justice and displaced Palestinians, Muslims would be aggrieved at the fact that millions of Christians are currently being displaced in the name of jihad.
Needless to say, they are not.
Which brings us back to Artan’s “grievances.” Recall his Facebook lament: “I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim Brothers and Sisters being killed and tortured EVERYWHERE. Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma led to a boiling point. I can’t take it anymore.”
Note, he was aggrieved because his “Muslim Brothers and Sisters” are being abused. Key word: Muslim. He didn’t care about universal justice.
Otherwise, he would have been expressing his anger at the brutal persecution experienced by a tiny minority in his own home country of Somalia. There, any Somali discovered practicing Christianity is ruthlessly persecuted and sometimes butchered, especially by the popular Islamic organization Al-Shabaab — “The Youth.”
Somali Christians share the same looks, nationality, ethnicity, language, and culture as Artan. They are most literally his true “brothers.” Yet their unjust persecution didn’t matter to him; his sympathies belonged instead with a people in distant Burma who have nothing in common with him other than being Muslim.
And it was that fact — that “subhuman infidels” dared to mistreat “superior Muslims” — that so irked the young Somali. Hence why he concluded his Facebook rant with the following sentence — often omitted by the same media that cited his post as evidence of “grievances”: “By Allah, I am willing to kill a billion infidels in retribution for a single disabled Muslim/Musliman.”
Incidentally, like Muslim minorities in other nations, Muslims in Burma have long antagonized their Buddhist hosts — through the usual Muslim-on-infidel attacks, murders, rapes, temple burnings, etc. — and their current unenviable lot is in great part due to this fact.
In the words of Wirathu, the leading anti-Muslim Buddhist monk in Burma: “If we are weak, our land will become Muslim.” The theme song of his party speaks of people who “live in our land, drink our water, and are ungrateful to us,” a reference to Muslims. And that “we will build a fence with our bones if necessary” to keep them out. His pamphlets say “Myanmar [Burma] is currently facing a most dangerous and fearful poison that is severe enough to eradicate all civilization.”
In other words, the next time you hear that Muslim rage and terrorism are products of grievances — from cartoons to territorial disputes to the treatment of Muslims in distant nations — remember that this is absolutely true. But these “grievances” are not predicated on any rational standards of equality or justice, but on a supremacist worldview.
Shared.
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Yeah – the religion of “peace” – so sick of that ridiculous statement.
I got a grievance with all Muslims living or dead… preferably dead in a ditch.
“they are really, really pissed off about something being done to them.”
The article made good points, as Raymond Ibrahim usually does, but I was disappointed to see him use the phrase “pissed off,” since in the past he has – as far as everything I have ever read by him – resisted being kind of vulgar or off color.
This is why Muslims need to live with Muslims and everyone else can mix. Keep the Muslims out of the West and the Far East, protect Israel, and give the Christians and others a large swath of land in the Middle East and move all Muslims into their own zone. They are vile, wicked, cruel, ridiculously excitable and volatile.
Yeah you got that right, like a nest of Killer Bees !
wishful thinking: muslims claim once a land was muslim, it is consecrated into islam, therefore they will fight to the end to get it back should it be taken back by its original owners. your idea suggests living side by side with the cancer that threatens your body.
Good article Raymond Ibrahim.
I know it must be frustrating to keep repeating the same message without any noticeable effect on the mainstream media, which keeps on merrily attributing these jihadi attacks to “mental illness”, “oppression of Muslims”, various victimization claims and so on ad nauseum.
But you are having a worthwhile effect. Your readers, and I’m one of many, appreciate your efforts. The mainstream media may be ignoring the obvious but most of your readers have little time for the mainstream media and the mainstream media has lost its former monopoly on news distribution.
We get a lot of our information from trusted and reliable online sources and you are one of the reliable sources we trust. Keep up the good work.
Yes, excellent article. I second Mr. Blackburne words.
Thank you for persevering…you do us a great service by keeping us enlightened about this evil ideology and its works.
The “descendants of pigs and apes” are the superior people to these demons.
No different than the KKK here…and NOW the Muslims have become the BLATANT bigots! Their superiority mentality is absolutely no different that Abe Lincoln’s infamous: “I have no intentions of allowing a black superiority over a white”, {my paraphrase]…BUT! The Muslims are
Not supporting the KKK but they don’t come anywhere near islam. The KKK killed less that 4000 in their history and a lot of that could have been justified when it happened not all the victims were black either. Islam is a cancer with only one cure eradication.
Islam is vastly different than the KKK. Read a book.
determining their “grievances” on a Muslim SUPERIORITY belief system, NOT just the color of the target population.
Islam is a cult; Satan’s cult. Deception is their modus operandi.
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TERRIFIC article! This illustrates perfectly why Islam is and always will be incompatible with Western civilization.
Unlike us, they don’t want equality. The media & academia refuse to acknowledge that.
In the grocery store parking lot, the other day… I was just sitting, minding my own business, waiting for my wife to get out of the store. Then comes this lady with the ‘hijab'(?) on. Unloads her groceries, a massive load, two cartons of soft drinks, and her kid gets out and gets in the car… ok, fine. I have no prejudice, I could care less. But then, she plays around with the cart, positioning it ‘just so’, it was setup for the next driver that pulled into that slot, to slam it into the car ahead of them…. perfect! She started to get back in the car with a smile. ‘A smile’, I thought? So, being helpful, I rolled down the window and in the nicest way possible, assuming she was just a ignorant refugee or something, I asked her ‘Mamn, you need to put the cart in that rack over there so nobody else will run into it’. I was, truly trying to be helpful…
Immediately, it began, she went into full Muslim victim mode “You can no speak to me! You can no speak to me! Why you speak to me? You hate Muslim? You racist?” she yelled at me… ‘Ok then, she wanted to ‘play the card’…’ I thought. So I immediately went into attack mode, being a veteran, and a student of Islamic warfare, including the passive forms of ‘Taqiyya and Sharia’, I simply ‘Held the Line’, and raised my voice, telling her “You need to put the cart in the RACK!” At that point, her companion(mother?), and her went into a hissy fit with Arabic jibber jabber. The both came out of the car in full frontal attack posture, I exited the vehicle and simply smiled “You want to fight? Where are your men?”
Long story short, they tried to enlist a black driver, who saw my Veteran’s cap, and he cringed, told the ladies to put the cart in the rack and leave him alone, he’s a Vet’, I heard him say. Then they went around with hands in the air crying and screaming about ‘racist, muslim hater’, and I knew at that point. That I had to keep my hands to myself, or face the police, that they were now calling 911, and taking my picture with their cellphones, and, my license plate… When they came around from the back of the car, I just smiled and said “TAQIYYA, will not work anymore, this is America, not Europe!”
There was another vet there, who saw the whole thing. After my wife got back and put the groceries in the car, he told me to go on, that he ‘had my back’, since I had not ‘laid a hand them’, he would stay until the police arrived. They went into full meltdown as we backed out of the parking slot, “You cannot leave, we call police!” My only response to them was “Go to hell…”
Hold the Line, be a Meek Warrior, a Crusader, know The Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.
Nice try my friend but no brass ring. American went over there in 1953 and helped install the Shaw in Iran, and have been trying to manipulate the middle east since then, and all because of oil. We whacked a hornets nest and are now paying the price. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not like Muslims nor their supposed holy book but they had spent some time peacefully existing with Christians and Jews.
You may not believe in Karma, but both sides in this debacle are paying the price of that Karma as religious beliefs are being played out before us as war.
This YouTube link; https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tom+holland+islam is to Tom Holland’s videos about the origins of Islam. You won’t believe what he has discovered. Islam is not what you have been led to believe. He has many videos taken from his research, so take your time and view a few, and you’ll get a much different perspective of what Islam really is.
They have never happily lived peacefully with anyone but their kind of muslim. Christians and Jews are only allowed to live as Dhimmis after been suitably humiliated. Muslim also don’t like to work so they need someone to do it for them. Everyone else needs to die or convert. There is no nice islam once mohammad is in it. And without mohammad there is no islam.
Muslims have never, in their 1,400-year history, peacefully coexisted with any other religion or ideology and have been attacking the West since the early 8th century. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
muslims: they’re either at your feet or at your throat.
Thank you Raymond for a really insigthful analisis
Very well written I’ve shared it.
My post about being disappointed that Raymond used the phrase, “pissed off,” was removed? Why? Surely Raymond Ibrahim’s skin is not that thin. So why would a completely benign comment be removed?