I just delivered this paper to a conference organized by Springs of Hope at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, March 6, 2015.
Reversing Humiliation:
How Jihadis Interpret the Way Westerners Treat the Victims of Jihad
I’d like to engage you all in an exercise in empathy. Mind you empathy does not mean sympathy. It means putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and thinking the way they do. If, as in this case, the people with who we empathize are thoroughly repulsive, learning to think like them hardly means sympathizing with them. Today the subject of our empathy will be jihadis, and the topic we want to understand about how they think is “how do they respond to the way that we Western infidels, treat their victims.
In order to do so we have to look at the role of humiliation in the mindset of the Jihadi. The following discussion takes its cues from Farhad Khosrokhavar’s Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide (2015). According to him, humiliation plays a key role and that on three registers:
There is the humiliation of the Muslim condition of inferiority to the West. Here are the remarks of the Saudi ideologue Youssef Uyayri:
Muslims are at war today. What distinguishes our time from other times is the humiliation and the contempt suffered by the Umma, which was unheard of in the past. At the same time, Muslims are in a state of lethargy and anemia (wahn), instead of mobilizing and fighting against this humiliation. There is a Saying of the Prophet attributing anemia to the love of this world and the aversion of death… Nowadays this is the deadly illness of which the Muslim world suffers.”
Khosrokhavar argues that whereas in pre-modern times, this was experienced
by Muslims and Christians alike as a mutual mistreatment imposed by enemies upon each other. Now… violence by a foreign enemy, militarily superior and religiously different, entails another consequence: the enemy not only intends to vanquish Muslims but wants to destroy Islam itself, with the aim of uprooting Allah’s religion— not simply to fight against specific groups of Muslims.
Khosrokhavar argues that the main source of this sense of humiliation as annihilation is not so much the actual, as the televised: a kind of proxy humiliation.
This attitude, paradoxically, is less characteristic of the people who are exposed to direct humiliation in their confrontation against occupying armies (Palestinians, Chechnyans, Iraqis, Kashmiris) and more often seen among other Muslims who, through new media and communication networks, interpret this humiliation as intended to uproot Muslims from the face of the earth. Humiliation becomes vicarious; it is felt and internalized by proxy— by Muslims all over the world.
In other words – and this is typical of honor-shame cultures – the image of Islam being dominated and subjected by modern, technology-empowered infidels, the image of impotence that’s reflected back when they look in the global mirror infuriates many Muslims, especially triumphalist Muslims, in a condition of permanent infuriation.
To understand this, one must understand a key element of honor-shame culture: as long as others don’t talk about it, it doesn’t matter. A man’s wife may be cheating on him; the whole village can know; but as long as it’s not discussed, the matter can continue without violence. But as soon as the shameful matter is uttered, it becomes unbearable. Similarly here, Islam may have been militarily inferior to the West for centuries, even defeated in various places around the world (starting with Napoleon’s victories in 1798). But with global communications sending images of Islam’s inferiority and suffering perceived humiliation at the hands of Westerners deep into Muslim societies the world over, the situation becomes intolerable: it becomes an existential threat to Islam itself. Any Westerner who does not understand that Jihadis are fighting for the very existence of Islam fails to grasp the stakes: it is, for them, exterminate or be exterminated.
Notes Khosrokhavar:
From the predicament of a victim, the new Jihadist actor intends to transform the other to a victim. He breaks down the barriers of confinement into indignity, declaring the other inhuman. Death looms large in this metamorphosis. The European “infidel” is humiliated by the Jihadist, who imposes on him the ultimate ordeal: confrontation with death. The European becomes inferior because he fears death, unlike the Muslim, who is fearless and accepts death as a martyr. The former is a coward, whereas the latter is valiant. Death transforms the Muslim’s situation from “slave” to “master.” The Westerner is superior militarily and economically; he is inferior when confronting the test of death. Absolute victimization is subdued by reducing the other to the situation of absolute victim. Within this framework, martyrdom, in its symbolic meaning, is the process of moving the victimized to the envied position of victimizer. This transformation confers a new dignity and a sense of pride that are the opposite of the former indignity and low self-regard.
This reversal of humiliation is the key to Jihadi victory. It is at once part and parcel of honor-shame culture. As David Pryce-Jones puts it in a discussion of Arab uses of lying: the goal is “to convert shame into honor on their own account, and vice versa for their opponents.” And, within the framework of global humiliation, Jihad gives this dynamic cosmic proportions.
With this understanding of matters, let us return to the implications of the Western response to the victims of Jihadi violence. When Jihadis pursue their cult of death and engage in the most heinous crimes against infidels, they are, above all, testing and humiliating the West. When we distance ourselves from their victims, we affirm their scenario, in which we lack the courage to defend ourselves. Christians who don’t wish to make a fuss about their fellow believers in the Middle East may think they’re avoiding conflict, but they’re actually encouraging it, reaffirming the view of the Jihadis that we lack the courage to defend our own. They essentially say to Muslims that we don’t care about their victims – or better yet, that we lack the courage and the solidarity to defend our own.
The same is true of the Yazidis and the Israelis who are victims of Jihad. When, in the case of Israelis, the US forces Israel to release prisoners who have killed Israelis, and the Israeli government, however reluctantly concedes, and, in order to keep dissent down, treats the objections of the families of the their victims badly, again the message goes out: Western infidels are afraid to confront us; they have no honor; they are victims of precisely what Muhammad PBUH denounced among passive Muslims – they are too attached to their own life to fight. In this case, we Westerners show ourselves willing to throw other infidels’ lives under the Jihadi bus to buy some tranquility.
Which brings me to the situation in Europe today. When, in February 2006, an anti-“Cartoon” rally took place outside of the Danish Embassy in London, in addition to grotesque signs calling for a European Holocaust and a man dressed in a mock suicide bomb outfit (this 6 months after the suicide attacks in London), someone filming the events recorded the following rant:
This was a (relatively) early warning sign. It told those paying attention that tribal warfare had come to Europe, and that an awakened Muslim triumphalism was now burning in their midst. The real men will take the wives and the daughters of effeminate, castrated men, and treat their women as war booty. Instead, authorities looked the other way, lest it arouse hostility to Muslims. Policemen at the event who protected this “free assembly” tried to stop observers from photographing the man with the suicide belt.
So let’s briefly follow the story: rape had not merely a predatory sexual meaning, let’s call it tribal testosteronic, but also a religious one: my defiling the infidel women, one at once asserted one’s superiority, and when the infidel men failed to protect their women, dar al Islam, the realm where Muslims dominate, was spread.
Abu Waleed on how to make infidels convert
In tribal cultures, especially among Arabs, nothing is more shameful than the inability to protect and control one’s women. So when, for over a decade, Pakistani Muslims degraded and humiliated the daughters of British infidels, and the British authorities – out of a fear of “rocking the multi-cultural boat” – refused to do anything about the parents’ complaints, the showed themselves to be utter cowards, effeminate and impotent. They behaved as good dhimmi should, allowing their dominators to do as they wish with their women. In the same way, the media has shown extensive fear of reporting on Muslim aggression against the West within the West – like the Cologne Saint Sylvester taharush, which like the Rotherham rape-grooming case, turns out to be representative rather than unique.
All of this registers on the minds of Jihadis as a form of submission, surrender. The journalists who don’t talk about it, the officials who urge women to dress differently and deny any connection between the refugees and the rapists, the activists who shout down anyone who complains as an Islamophobe, all tell the Jihadis that they are anticipatory (proleptice) dhimmi: they do not even need to be conquered in order to act according to the demands of triumphalist Muslims.
Whatever we do to defend the West and the decent values of tolerance, fairness, and freedom upon which they are based, treating the victims of Jihadi aggression with such disregard, has to be one of the most disastrous. We fail to maintain our integrity, and we surrender to people who hate our values. They’re so smart cause we’re so stupid.
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