Thugs

 

In response to the 10/7/2023 Hamas invasion and genocidal attacks upon Jewish citizens, Jordan Peterson, on 10/17/2023 wrote a paper that he read online. Its title: I am Pro-Muslim But Anti-Thug.

 

I took notes on and paraphrased, as best I could, what he said as he read that paper. I will comment on his reading.

 

Jordan: “I have talked to various Muslims differing in views about their faith, from atheist, ex-Muslims to moderate to conservative Muslims. I have done this because I believe Jews, Christians and Muslims share more in common than in division, and because I know there is no such thing as a world without religion, we all must do what is best with what we have been bequeathed.

 

I find myself in some serious online trouble because I encouraged Israeli authorities to give the Hamas terrorists all the hell they deserve.”

 

My response: Jordan is insightful: Jews, Christians and Muslims share the Abrahamic tradition, and they are all monotheistic faiths. As human beings, they have more in common than how they differ.

 

All religious denominations are naturally fanatical, fundamentalist, believing they are the one true faith, that only they have the key to the gates of heaven, that unbelievers and apostates should be put to death, or converted by indoctrination or by terror, force, torture, holy war or pressure. There are still fanatical Jewish and Christian fringe groups, but they have little influence and not many followers. Their encounter with reason and the Modernist Age have moderate, modernized, and demilitarized most of them.

 

Not so many Muslims. There are a few radical Islamists that are openly fanatical, violent extremists willing to run through critics, unbelievers, and apostates with the sword, and that they will go to heaven as they reward, for the blood dripping off of their wielded swords.

 

To criticize this faith is to encounter immediate anger, outrage, and claim to be offended. They will form mobs, riot, use death threats to silence any opponent so most critics are silenced. To assume and state that the one-true-Muslim-faith is perfect as it is, and is theologically always correct and always good, and that to deny that is to be killed, that fanatical reaction is to force opponents to be silenced, and to quell dissent and it works to often.

 

But I argue that what is good is moderate (one’s faith can be largely good and correct but never totally correct and totally good), and all faiths require scrutiny, skepticism, and open debate about their efficacy. To take the common Muslim response to criticism is to be fanatical, and to be fanatical is to be evil, so there is much evil in that faith that must be expunged, modernized, moderated and demilitarized.

 

Most differences are minor and along a spectrum, so fanatical purists making modest differences seem like insurmountable, monumental, black-and-white, stark contrasts or differences is a lie, and is a perfect way of keeping rival tribes or groups fighting forever. It is useful for war-makers and imperialists, not peace-making or improving relations between neighbors.

 

The core faith then will be moderated and modernized like Judaism and Christianity have been, and then the world will be much safer, and Muslims can go about setting up democracies, liberty, and capitalism so that their people can escape tyranny and taste prosperity and higher standards of living. Jordan Peterson says none of this, but I think he would agree with my argument here.

 

Muslims would consider me a racist, xenophobe and Islamophobic for this argument, but I deny these lies and absurd accusations, and, if they will receive Western criticism and reform themselves morally and perhaps doctrinally, their people would be much happier and suffer much less.

 

Jordan: “How could I say that while seeking rapprochement among people of Abrahamic traditions? Let us begin that discussion by rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. The monstrous attack by Hamas last week occurred not because Muslims and Jews must be at each other’s throats, but because Iran stirred up trouble. Iran is a country run by thugs even so deemed by their own people.

 

These thugs are concerned that Saudi Arabia was working on peace with Israel. Four Arab countries signed the Abraham Accords, a Trumpian initiative. Trump should have got a Nobel Peace Prize.

 

Behind the Arab signatories (UAR, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan) backed by the Saudis, things fell apart because, Biden, jealous of Trump, did not court the Saudis, so the latter were lost, alienated. This was a huge mistake. The Saudis would have come aboard the Abraham Accords if treated right.

 

So, there is violence again and the Saudis are angry and would not provide US with oil, and are talking to China.

 

The totalitarian mullahs of Iran worried the Accords’ succeeding would undermine and isolate them fatally.

 

Biden courts Iran. Is Iran a shining star in the distant firmament or a hag-ridden, psychological and criminal kleptocracy, religious in name only?

 

Let us turn for a moment to psychology, where psychology and psychopathy and psychic instability meet evil itself. The personality features are part and parcel of the danger to integrated psyche and state, and this danger is garnered by the nomenclature of Dark Triad.

 

The Dark Triad is a combination of machiavellianism (machiavellianism is instrumental manipulation and deceit.), narcissism (narcissism is inflated self-esteem and the desire for unearned attention and status.), and psychopathy is a malignant mixture of the criminal propensity, callousness and parasitism.”

 

My response: I am no psychologist but I am an insightful amateur of the human condition or psychic response and interaction with the world, and while I trust Peterson that he thinks the Dark Triad describes the vicious mullahs that run Iran, I caution the convergence of these malevolent personality traits arise in the parasite oppressor types living off of the suffering of millions of people. These callous, selfish narcissists and egotists are really groupist, the heads of the pack. These selfless, cruel apex predators are selfish collectivists, for whom group-living and group-orientation is their whole life. Their addiction to and obsession with accumulating unearned, undeserved power, stolen from their victims is not the honorable wielding of personal power implemented by a skilled, principled, egoistical supercitizen and individuator with a strong sense of civic duty.

 

Jordan: “The Dark Triad traits were identified by the intellectual descendants of Dr. Robert Hare who spent his life assessing and endeavoring to understand the worst of the habitual criminals that are responsible for the most barbaric and cruel misdemeanors, but the vast majority of criminal acts follow the famous Pareto Principle of talent and acquisition. This principle applies to the underworld too. As 1% of the people end up with 70% of the wealth, 1% of the criminals commit 70% of the crimes.

 

Now research has added an extra dimension to this criminal personality: sadism: the positive delight in the suffering of others, the more unnecessary and gratuitous, the better. The Dark Triad types fit well in the Cluster B personality disorders, including such delights as anti-social personality disorder borderline personality disorder (the female equivalent of the criminal tendency), histrionic personality disorder—also mostly female—and the narcissism personality disorder.

 

Those that manifest Cluster B symptomology and sins have, in addition to their other psychological and sociological dangerous tendencies, have a proclivity to claim positive virtue or outright victim status while pursuing their grandiose, self-serving, and destructive claims.”

 

My response: There is a lot of technical language being tossed around here, and it seems scientifically factual and applicable; note that the perpetrators lie about being virtuous (they are not) and about being victims (Victimizers often blame the victim to justify continuing to attack the innocent and defenseless.)

 

Jordan: “The Cluster-B types lie, cheat, steal, gossip, reputation-savage, brag, claim credit where it isn’t due, blame everyone but themselves (ED NOTE: Altruist bosses of criminal gangs blame others not themselves, but egoist individuators admit to their mistakes and clean up the messes they make—an ED NOTE.), all the while pursuing nothing but their own hedonistic self-gratification while championing their moral virtue or claimed, oppressed victim status. When they organize, they burn down society and dance orgiastically in the ruins. This happened after the French Revolution, in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany (ED NOTE: all collectivist arrangements—ED NOTE).

 

It is happening now in the West by the markedly Woke now spread by the power accessibility and irresponsibility of social media. There Cluster B nonsense propagates with none of the ordinary real-world consequences. Think now about how evil it is to extend your resentful, narrowly self-serving, juvenile, self-centered pleasure to do maximal harm to anyone skilled and conscientious enough to deserve a just reward.

 

In what guise would you treacherously cloak yourself. You could do so under a religious cover, masking the self in all that is traditional and ethical. That ruse is less effective in the West after the death of God and the collapse of religious authority.

 

 Here the Dark Triads portray themselves as the very avatars of compassion. We are for the downtrodden so then we can in good conscience punish the deservedly successful. We are for diversity because ethical unity (ED NOTE: Ethical unity is the high standard of objective morality for Peterson, I think.—ED NOTE) stands against our depredations. We are for inclusivity because our fetishes and kinks demand their full expression and to hell with everyone else. We are for equity because merit is our sworn enemy.

 

Imagine this: Queer For Palestine tear down everything in the West unifying with Hamas, a suicidal connection if ever manifested. Jews are to blame—really? Is Iran your idea of a worthy Muslim state whose citizens have been on the brink of revolution against their psychopathic masters for more than a year? Their leaders repress their own women. Iran unleashes the chains of its Hamas dogs to have a go at Israel to rile up Arabs, and if the Palestinians are destroyed, okay—all of this just so we can stay in power.

 

Muslims, who in the West back Hamas? University students demented by Wokeism and Professors that destroyed academia. The Marxists back Palestinians. Marxists hate Islam far more than the most fundamentalist Jew or Christian.

 

Marxists denounce religion as the opiate of the masses, religion that you share as Muslims with your Abrahamic brothers.

 

The LGBT are also demented allies of Hamas, uniting with the gangsters of Hamas and the mullahs of Iran, Dark Tetrad types all.

 

Israel is an oppressor state? The Palestinians in Israel are a lot better off than the Palestinians in Gaza, despite fortunes spent in that blighted area. Hamas leaders embezzle the money. Yasar Arafat took 1 billion dollars.

 

Muslims, can you trust Westerners allied with you, manipulating the endlessly repeating Muslim against Jew story? How is that allegiance better than recognizing your Abrahamic commonality with Jews and Christians?

 

Tell me how the decentralized structure of your faith so admirable in so many respects is being used by bloody psychopaths capturing it and making faith a front for criminal evil.

 

We are no better in the West. We listen to blandishments of postmodernist Marxist, Dark Triad mobs.

 

You are center stage right now with a choice to work with expanding the Abrahamic Accords among the Muslim people or allow the thugs in Iran and Palestine to prop their own miserable, tyrannical states You can go with the Accords and benefit, or follow the thugs.

 

The Hebrew Second Commandment is don’t take God’s name in vain. This does not just discount trivial swearing, but we are not to act in God’s name when acting on your own behalf or in the power of dark forces.”

 

My response: it is typical of vicious fanatics that they murder and conduct unholy wars in God’s name.

 

Jordan: “Jesus warned of public hypocrisy in three ways:

1.     Be not hypocrites being seen praying in public;

2.     Do not do your good works in public to show how noble you are.

3.     You will not get to heaven necessarily just by shouting, Lord, Lord. You better actually have done the will of the Father.

 

The mere claim that it is religious conviction that motivates personal action is no proof whatsoever that such is the case. It is very difficult to aim upwards in alliance with the spirit that wishes everything well and is in line with the truth. It is a path rife with moral hazards and the display of public virtue or high church or mosque position is not any guarantee that the God claimed to be present is actually there. Quite the contrary quite often.

 

You Muslims must remove the beam from your own eye to not take the path to righteous destruction. Rather the people of the book need a generous, wise, productive peace to heal this green orb.

 

We need a transcendental axis to revolve around, not a blinkered materialism or foolish populism to lift our eyes to the heavens beckoning.

 

You Muslims must do this, work for peace; we must all work together. This is why I am pro-Muslim and anti-thug.”

 

My response: It would be wise and good news if Muslims would moderate and many nations sign the Abrahamic Accords, but that is not likely to be.

 

Peterson does reach out to Muslims, but the online reaction is quite hostile against him. Here are some few that I looked at.

 

One young, educated Muslim man, reported by MEM (Middle East Monitor) completely excoriated Peterson for referring to Hamas as dogs. He thought Jews in Israel were colonizers who took Palestinian land.

 

Another critic denounced Peterson as not qualified to be a public speaker and celebrity, as not qualified to speak out on the subjects he speaks out on.

 

My take is that we want amateurs to have open, strong—hopefully reasonable, thoughtful—opinions stated in public about everything under the sun/ The more amateurs speak and dialogue in public, the better is our thinking, and the more knowledge and awareness humans gain. Spout off at length, Jordan.