Arabs and Islam: The Self-Destructive Beauty of Irresponsibility

The mindset of an entire society can be seen in what it teaches its children. In one of the broadcasts of the Hamas mouse Farfur-- Farfur is caught cheating on a school exam. Farfur excuses his actions saying, "Against my own will Abu Gazi, because the Jews destroyed my home, and when they destroyed my home I couldn't find my books and my notebooks."

The obvious thing the Arab world in general and Palestinian Arabs specifically have been teaching their children is to hate and kill Jews and Americans. The less obvious one is that they are not responsible for their failures-- America and the Jews are.

To understand the Arab mindset is to understand a culture that has yet to admit it lost a single war to Israel and treats its victories as defeats. A culture that at once takes pride in September 11th and in the next breath denies that Muslims were responsible. A culture that blames every single one of its problems from poverty, to the abuse of women and terrorism on Israel. There is a single common link in all these: responsibility.

Children in a responsible society grow up into adults who understand that actions have consequences and that our failures are ultimately our own fault and therefore that we can correct them. Children may initially view accepting responsibility for their own failures as punitive but it is actually empowering. When you understand that you are the source of your own failures, you can then position yourself to succeed. However when you are taught or come to believe that you have no power to succeed or fail-- then you sink into apathy as you cease trying to achieve.

In the West liberalism has done much to erode the success of Western nations and create cultures of dependency by teaching precisely that race and gender doom you to limitations by an oppressive system leaving you with no choice but to demand handouts in the form of affirmative action and work to "help your own". This kind of approach replaces the American work ethic with the perpetually aggrieved and clannish Third World work ethic that has made the business cultures of Africa, the Arab world and India the fantastic successes they are today.

Pushed even further it creates a welfare state, ghettos of the perpetually idle, certain that the reason they can't get a job is because they're being "kept down", a mindset ripe for explosions of violence. After all once you've been convinced that you're helpless to help yourself, violence is all that's left.

When a sense of responsibility is taken away from human beings-- their morality is also undercut. After all if you aren't responsible for your life, then right and wrong go by the wayside too. If you aren't responsible-- you aren't responsible period anymore. Without the belief in your own power to change your life for the better, all that remains is a bitter determination to keep others down by changing their lives for the worse.

From across the seas and oceans, the Muslim world comes to look like a billion Cho's, cradling guns and nursing dreams of violent vengeance-- certain that the real reason they're miserable isn't because of their own actions, but because of conspiracies against them.

The widespread belief in Jewish conspiracies in Russia and the Arab and Muslim world mark failed societies looking for excuses for their failure. Since they can't blame G-d as that would require admitting fault-- they instead blame the Jews. Whatever goes wrong, the blame can be put on America and Israel.

And Western liberals are more than happy to feed this diseased state of mind. A Human Rights Watch report on the Palestinians, dedicated entire paragraphs to accepting Palestinian Arab excuses for honor killings that blame Israel. A New York Times news report that described Arab men beating their wives, put the fault on Israeli crackdowns on the area. If Arab men beating their wives and murdering their daughters is Israel's fault-- then the sky really is the limit and Arab men never have to be responsible for anything they do. That is the self-destructive beauty of irresponsibility.

Responsibility means making a choice and accepting its consequences. Irresponsibility means making a choice and pretending you had no choice and assigning responsibility for it to someone else. Responsible societies advance the world. Irresponsible ones, whether it's Nazi Germany heaving with conspiracy theories that blamed all the world for Germany's misery but Germany itself, or Communism built on justifying a tyrannical dictatorship by blaming everything on class structure or a modern Muslim world that refuses to accept the consequences of its own failures and strive to do better-- are a poison.

The rhetoric of deflected responsibility they preach is attractive to many looking to escape living a responsible life. The grievances they nurture among their own people regularly explodes into violence. The societies themselves remain poisonous wells of hate, frustration and rage because being unable to admit responsibility, they are also unable to change.

Irresponsible societies become cancers. Expansionist irresponsible societies are virulently dangerous. Fanaticism becomes commonplace because the extreme is the sole center of authority in a world with no choices and thus no grey areas. Their members will willingly embrace death because they cannot see that life is a series of choices, rather than an abyss above an imaginary paradise. Unable to admit their choices, they are also unable to admit anyone else's choices and are driven to destroy and dismantle free societies where people may choose into totalitarian systems where no one may choose and everyone is as devoid of free will as they themselves are.