Do you know the difference between _superiority_ grievances and _egalitarian_ grievances? This is essential to understanding the widespread claim that insults are the source of Muslim violence.
Take the Muslim attack on American soil. Last week, Abdul Razak Ali Artan – an 18-year-old Muslim refugee from Somalia who received all the help from Catholic charities – rammed his car into an Ohio State University building. 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 had – just like so many other violent Muslim refugees before him – grievances. CNN, NBC, the Washington Post and many others quoted a Facebook post from Artan: “I am tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured ‘everywhere’.”
But despite this claim of ubiquity, he cited only one nation: “When I saw my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and murdered in Burma, it brought me to a boiling point. I can’t take it anymore.”
The question before us is simple: Was Artan driven to go on a murderous stabbing spree in America because of his anger over the treatment of Muslims in Burma?
I have for about ten years now argued that the story of ‘Muslim grievances’ is a myth, an excuse to protect Islamic teachings from critical scrutiny.
Most recently, in a message to the West , the Islamic State could not have been clearer: No matter what the West does, the real reason ISIS hates and terrorizes the West is because they are infidels.
That said, millions of Muslims – including Artan – harbor strong grievances against the West and others. The problem is that they define “grievances” based on superiority thinking that is incompatible with the Western principle of equality.
When most Westerners think of the word “grievances,” they think in egalitarian terms: X has a complaint against Y because Y does not treat X equally. For example, your boss or your teacher treats you worse – without equality. Then you have a complaint that most in the West consider legitimate: that’s because people in the West were raised with it unique idea to treat others as they would be treated.
These are not the kinds of grievances that animate many Muslims – and certainly not those who resort to terrorism.
Instead, they are animated by an op supremacism driven insult: they get angry when they see unbelievers on equal terms with Muslims. And they become murderous when they see infidels in charge of Muslims.
The Islamic doctrine, which persuades Muslims to believe that they are superior to non-Muslims – which the Qur’an compares with dogs and livestock – imbues Muslims with a sense of justice.
In Pakistan, for example, then Christian children singing Christmas carols in a church , Muslim men from a nearby mosque entered the church with an axe, destroying the furniture and altar and beating the children. “You are disturbing our prayers. … _How dare you_ use the microphone and speakers?” the enraged Muslims explained. When a Muslim hit a Christian and he hit back, the Muslim exclaimed: ” How dare a Christian hit me !” Anti-Christian violence immediately followed.
Islamic grievances are based on a “How dare you?” phenomenon. Remember that when the media tells you that Muslim chaos and outbursts of violence are consequences of insults, it is missing the rationale, which is the superior rationale of these insults.
Consider the conditions of Omar , a foundational medieval Muslim text dealing with how “infidels” under Muslim authority should behave, attributed to the second caliph and close friend of Prophet Muhammad, Omar.
It orders, among other things, that conquered Christians shall not raise their “voices during Christian prayers or lectures, so as not to irritate Muslims in the area” (hence the ax attack in Pakistan). It also orders them not to display any signs of Christianity – especially Bibles and crosses – and not to build new churches. (See Crucified again : exposing Islam’s new war against Christians , for my translation of “The Conditions of Omar”.)
If the superior nature of Islamic law is still not clear enough, the “Islamic Decrees” literally orders Christians to give up their seats to Muslims as a show of respect. Comparably, consider the moment when Rosa Parks, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus to white passengers in America. Every white supremacist at the time had genuine grievances: _how dare she _ think herself equal!
But were such grievances from superiority-minded whites legitimate? Likewise, are Muslims’ endless superiority-based “grievances” legitimate?
These are the questions missing from the debate about delicate Muslim sensitivities.
Some more examples from the Islamic world:
In Turkey, a Bible publishing house and three of its Christian employees were stormed tortured, disembowelled and eventually murdered . A suspect later said: “We did not 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 follow his Muslim teacher’s orders to cover his crotch, student by the teacher and some Muslim students murdered.
These Turkish and Egyptian Muslims were really aggrieved: as we can see, the terms of Islam make it clear that Christians are not allowed to display “cross or bible” around Muslims. _How dare_ the Egyptian student and Turkish Bible publishers disobey the terms of Islam? They were murdered for that reason.
As it becomes almost impossible for Christians to build new churches in parts of Indonesia, they often celebrate Christmas outside – only to be attacked by Muslims those cow manure and bags of urine throwing at them while the Christians pray.
In Egypt, the mere rumor that Christians are trying to build or even renovate an existing church mass riots and savage attacks on Christians . The Muslims of Indonesia and Egypt are also sincerely saddened: _how dare_ these Christians think they can build or renovate a church when _Islamic conditions_ forbid them to do so?
In short, every time non-Muslims dare to exceed their sharia-designated “inferior” status, the Muslim übermenschen become violent and enraged.
From here one can begin to understand the ultimate complaint of Muslims: Israel.
For if “infidel” Christian minorities are considered inferior and attacked by offended Muslims for exercising their basic human rights, such as freedom of worship, how should Muslims feel about Jews – the descendants of pigs and monkeys, according to the Quran – who wield power and authority over fellow Muslims in what is perceived as a Muslim country?
How dare they?!
If the grievances against Israel were really about universal justice and displaced Palestinians, Muslims would be saddened by the fact that millions of Christians are currently displaced in name of jihad?
Needless to say, Muslims [are not allowed to be].
Which brings us back to Artan’s ‘grievances’. Consider his Facebook lament: “I’m tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being murdered and tortured ‘everywhere’. Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and murdered in Burma has reached a boiling point. I can’t take it anymore.”
Note, he was sad because his “Muslim brothers and sisters” are being abused. Keyword: Muslim . He didn’t care about universal justice.
Otherwise, he would have expressed his anger at the brutal persecution experienced by a small minority in his own home country of Somalia. There is every Somali the they are discovered to be practicing Christianity, ruthlessly persecuted and sometimes massacred, especially by the popular Islamic organization Al-Shabaab – “The Youth”.
Somali Christians share the same appearance, nationality, ethnicity, language and culture as Artan. They are the most literal, are real ‘brothers’. But he didn’t care about their unjust persecution; his sympathies belonged instead to a people in distant Burma who have nothing in common with him other than being Muslim.
And what so irritated the young Somali was that fact – that “inhuman infidels” dared to abuse “superior Muslims”. Hence his Facebook rant closed with the following sentence – often omitted by the same media that cited his message as evidence of “grievances”: “By Allah, I am ready to kill a billion infidels in retaliation for a single Muslim.”
By the way, like Muslim minorities in other countries, Muslims in Burma have their Buddhist hosts for a long time – with attacks on infidels, murders, rapes, temple burnings, etc. Their current unenviable fate is largely due to this fact.
In the words of Wirathu, the leading anti-Islamic Buddhist monk in Burma: “If we are weak, our country will become a Muslim country.” His party’s theme song talks about people who “live in our country, drink our water and are ungrateful to us,” a reference to Muslims. And that “we’ll build a fence with our bones if that’s what it takes” to keep them out. His pamphlets say: “Myanmar [Burma] is currently facing a very dangerous and terrifying poison serious enough to wipe out the entire civilization.”
In other words, the next time you hear that Muslim anger and terrorism are consequences of grievances – from cartoons to territorial disputes to the treatment of Muslims in far-flung lands – remember that this is absolutely true. These “grievances” are not based on rational standards of equality or justice, but on a dictatorial Islamic worldview, purged of disbelief.