Is The Status Quo In The West's Best Interests?

Submitted by Bill Narvey (Canada), Dec 27, 2005 at 20:02

Dr. D. Pipes concludes in his December 27th, 2005 article, "Winning the Propaganda War" that "More than facts, the Muslim world needs to understand the basics of what makes the West thrive – and thereby be inspired to emulate it."

While that is easy for a Westerner to say and understand, it is anything but easy for a great many in the Muslim world to comprehend.

So many in the Muslim world have bought into the Muslim delusion of victimhood and humiliation at the hands of the West which provides them with both a simple all encompassing and understandable reason for their failings and also an unending fuel supply for their Jew/Israel/Western hatreds which have become ingrained in their psyche.

Muslim leaders, imams, institutions and their media that support the Islamic political structures, to avoid scrutiny and their being held to account, have appealed to the Muslim sense of self esteem and encouraged and supported both an unquestioning faith in the superiority of Islam over the West and the belief that the West is solely to blame for Muslim failings, thereby victimizing and humiliating Muslims.

Thus far Muslim political and religious leaders have been successful in convincing their Muslim flock that their message is a full and complete explanation for Muslims to accept as an article of faith, the superiority of Islam, that only the West is responsible and therefore accountable for Muslim failings and that there is therefore no need to look or introspect further for answers.

Those efforts have also succeeded in convincing many in the Muslim world of the big lie that Western news and opinion sources cannot be trusted and only Muslim sources speak the truth that Muslims need to hear and which is all that Muslims need to know.

The consequence is that a great many in the Muslim world lack the ability and capacity to even begin to question what they have been indoctrinated to believe, to understand what makes the West successful and to determine what Muslims need to change within themselves, if they ever hope to emulate the reasons for the West's successes.

An argument can be made however that it is in the West's interests that the Muslim world continues to think as it does, regardless of how noxious that thinking is and that the gap between Western success and Muslim failures be maintained if not widened.

If the Muslim world were to open their eyes and their minds to the reasons for Western success and begin to emulate the West in that regard, the success gap between the West and the Muslim world would quickly narrow.

If however, in gaining knowledge and sophistication, the Muslim world maintained their faith in Islam's manifest destiny to dominate the world and their culture and psyche of Jew/Israel/Western hatred remained as immutable as ever, such Muslim world would be an immensely more dangerous and deadly enemy of the West than it is today.

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