Is Mass Psychosis Contagious?

Some observations from Dr. Sanity:
To those multiculturalists out there who insist that cultural traditions cannot be interpreted psychodynamically; or claim that all cultures and cultural practices are equally good, I beg to differ. Palestinian culture, along with the wider Arab/Islamic culture of the Middle East, is so pathological and so unbelievably dysfuntional that I simply cannot resist pointing it out as often as possible.

Consider for a moment the supposedly educated speaker in the TV program quoted above who authoritatively comments about the priority of jihad duty over wearing a veil; and then also consider the following TV interview translated from the always enlightening MEMRI . The discussion is an attempt to explain why more Muslims have not won Nobel Prizes :

Samir 'Ubeid: "Why has the prize been awarded to 167 Jews, and to only four Arabs out of 380 million Arabs - and all four are considered traitors? For example, Al-Sadat got the prize during the normalization process, and as a price for Camp David, together with Begin, who carried out the Deir Yassin massacre, and who was in the Hagana gangs. Later, the prize was awarded to [Ahmad] Al-Zewail, in order to buy his invention, and Al-Zewail has disappeared since."

Interviewer: "You mean the Egyptian Ahmad Al-Zewail?"

Samir 'Ubeid: "Yes, the Egyptian chemist. The prize was also awarded to Muhammad ElBaradei, and in this case, it is soaked in the blood of the Iraqi children and people. [...]

"Mother Teresa was brought, along with a group of people like her…"

Interviewer: "Some say the prize was awarded to her for her missionary activity in Africa, India, and so on..."

Samir 'Ubeid: "Let’s assume she was righteous, according to the logic of the media, which is now controlled by the Jews and Hollywood. When they awarded the prize to Teresa, they were trying to award an 'artificial hymen' or 'artificial honor' to this prize.
"My colleague said that there is democracy. What democracy is there, if out of 1.5 billion Chinese, only two or three were awarded the Nobel? If you examine the Russian scientists and writers, who shook the world with their literature and their knowledge...

"What about Sakharov, what about Tolstoy? In addition..."

Interviewer: "But Sakharov was awarded the Nobel prize."

Samir 'Ubeid: "I meant Chekhov. Chekhov! Chekhov! [...]

"Are we Arabs not included in the transfer of the scientific genetic code? We, the descendants of Al-Khawarizmi, Al-Jahez, Al-Razi, Avicenna, and Ibn Al-Haytham - are we all born idiots? Is there not a single scientist among us? Are we not included in the genetic code? Is intelligence not transferred down among us Arabs?"

Interviewer: "Scientific creativity occurs in freedom and democracy, brother."

Samir 'Ubeid: "Democracy does not explain how it was awarded to 167 Jews, from among those 15 million scattered around the world, while abandoning 1.5 billion Chinese, a billion Indians, and 380 million Arabs. This is racism. [...]

"The [Grameen] bank for the poor won the prize because some of its shareholders are giants like Haliburton and others. [...]

"They infiltrated this bank, which came to be in the pocket of the Freemasons. This prize stems from the core of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Let us analyze the remarkable cri de coeur of the interviewee. His is a hearfelt and passionate exclamation that stems from his righteous outrage and indignation at the unfairness of it all: "Are we all born idiots?"

That is a very important question, indeed. Are idiots of the magnitude displayed by the two experts above born--or are they made? If the former is the case, then there is not much hope that the culture or the religion will ever be able to function normally in civilized society.

I am not aware of any research that suggests that the differences in intelligence between different religious groups is large enough to account for such a significant discrepancy in outcome regarding the Nobel Prize. And it is worth noting, that, not only is the Nobel Peace Prize not awarded much to Islamic politicians (I wonder if that could it have something to do with the fact that many of them are psychopathic tyrants, despots, and religious bigots?) or even to citizens of the rigidly controlled Islamic regimes; there is also a noticeable lack of Arab/Islamic winners in all the other categories--i.e., medicine, physics, chemistry; as well as in literature and economics. Other subtle clues that might explain this state of affairs might found here, here, and here.

According to the second interviewee, this unfair outcome has something to do with a deliberate Jewish plot/conspiracy and is likely the reason why the learned doctor in the first interview so delightfully encourages women to kill Jews with girlish abandon.

If all this Islamic intellectual discussion sounds familiar, it should. Jewish Conspiracies is another discipline (along with Genocidal Studies) that is a favorite academic field of study in the institutions of higher learning (such as they are) of the Middle East. Indeed, these complex disciplines are taught even in institutions of lower learning, so that a vast majority of the Islamic population are completely conversant with them and find them extremely helpful for explaining away the oppressive, barbaric, and primitive aspects of their culture and religion.

The ubiquitous unwillingness to look within themselves or their cultural and religious practices to understand the serious defects that keep them among the most backward and ignorant people on the planet, despite their access to great wealth, is the psychological foundation of their dysfunction.

The psychodynamic explanation has been discussed many times on this blog, and it is a psychological defense mechanism called projection--which in more extreme and bizarre forms is referred to a paranoia. And this cultural projection and paranoia serves a very important purpose for the culture: it allows them to maintain a delusional sense of grandiosity and superiority, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary in the real world. Thus, they never have to confront their own inadequacies and failures. If everything is the fault of the Jews, then the solution is to eradicate the Jews and all will be well!

SC&A once observed:

By the year 2020, the projected Arab population will reach 400 million. Currently, there are less than 100 universities in the Arab world. Of that number, at least 10 are 'Islamic' universities that do not teach anything other than theology. Notwithstanding the obscene wealth generated by these oil rich nations, there is not a single Arab institution of consequence. There is no major research and no important scholarship that originates in the Arab world. In fact, the greatest scholarship concerning the Arab world and Middle East, originates outside the region, in America or Europe.

This is but one example of the consequences of the cost of dysfunction and repression.
...
Indeed, the total number of books translated into Arabic during the 1,000 years since the age of Caliph Al-Ma’moun [a ninth-century Arab ruler who was a patron of cultural interaction between Arab, Persian, and Greek scholars—WPR] to this day is less than those translated in Spain in one year.

The abysmal backwardness found in this culture and region of the world has been studied and several explanations just seem to leap out at the investigators :

The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness.

Or here:

The oil wealth is matched by social backwardness, and the only other region of the world with an income level lower than ours is sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is decreasing, scientific research is virtually nonexistent, thzione region is suffering a brain drain, and illiteracy afflicts half of Arab women.

Or here:

The report mentions a number of factors that block the dissemination of knowledge. Among these factors are authoritarian and over-protective child rearing, the deteriorating quality of education in many countries in the region, curricula in schools that encourage submission, obedience, subordination and compliance rather than free critical thinking, the lack of autonomy at universities and the poor state of university libraries.

Note that nothing in these three separate reports implicates the fictitional Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the cause of Arab/Islamic intellectual stagnation! Nor do they provide any evidence of a Zionist conspiracy to restrict the development of Muslim IQs.

Yet, I would venture to say that a significant number of Muslims, like the good "doctor" who exhorts women to be suicide bombers and the gentleman interviewed by Al-Jazeera, are unwilling to consider their own cultural and religious beliefs and practices as causative and find it completely "logical" to blame Jewish conspiracies for their impoverished status in the middle east and elsewhere.

No, the members of this culture and this religion are not born idiots...rather their idiocy is carefully and deliberately crafted and molded by the societal and religious dysfunction so rampant in the Islamic world. Ignorance, stupidity, violence and blind obedience are rewarded; clear thinking is not particularly valued and often punished.

"Intellectual" debates about whether women should wear a veil when blowing themselves to kingdom come; or how grateful they should be to Allah that her sacrifice of her son has been accepted are not the hallmark of a sharp cognitive capacity, but rather indicative of a societal brainwashing that is so deep and totally pervasive that it has stripped women not only of their individual identity, but also separated them completely from their brains.

The stupid and the willfully blind are never willing to confront the true malignancy within and will forcefully denounce anyone who exposes their self-delusion, since that self-delusion is all that stands between them and a complete collapse of their basic assumptions about themselves as a culture or religion (i.e., that they are "religion of peace" is one, often-mocked self-concept).

To maintain the psychological denial, projection and paranoia on a cultural level takes quite a bit of group psychic energy. Constant vigilance must be maintained to prevent reality from undermining the fantasy. Consequently, there is little encouragement of independent thinking (too dangerous) or autonomous functioning (rules must be developed for even the most simple interpersonal interactions). Reality, truth and reason are the natural enemies of delusion, and all the cultural institutions must strive to eradicate any fertile ground for these to develop.

SC&A again:

This is the kind of environment that allows for and justifies ‘honor killings.’ This is also how many young women are recruited into terror. If they are thought to have shamed the family, an act of terror serves as act of redemption for their family as well as themselves. The higher ‘morality’ of indiscriminate killing of innocents makes up for their transgressions.

This highlights another reality. In Arab cultures, there is no real reward or recognition for loving the sanctity of life. Those who profess a desire for real peace, non-violence, less corruption and less oppression are considered reformers.

In societies and cultures where increased violence is often seen after religious services (unique in the Abrahamic faiths), little emphasis is placed on self improvement, the betterment of society (the ‘real jihad,’ we are told) or humility. Rather, worshipers are whipped into a murderous frenzy directed at non- members. Each week, the hate is elevated.

These realities have brought Arab nations to their knees. Repression, oppression, terror, genocide and hate flourish. Entire populations are groomed to know only hopelessness, and not hope. There are failed economies, failed civil infrastructures and failed educational infrastructures. A child born in the Arab world today has little hope of achieving success on his own. There is little in the way of opportunities or a way out if the bleakness. There is no bright future to look forward to. The only promise and guarantee that child can count on, is being taught to hate.

The only equality a woman in this sick culture can aspire to is as a suicide-bomber (and do they also get 72 virgins for their trouble? Inquiring minds want to know). Death, death, wonderful death is drummed into them during practically every waking moment because life is impossible when there is so much psychopathology. I can only imagine how the poor bastards--male and female alike, but perhaps specially the invisible women-- raised in such a pathological and dysfunctional environment must absolutely long for death after a lifetime of being hit over the head repeatedly by this cultural garbage.

The indoctrination into cultural idiocy starts young and continues throughout life, but the good news is that there is little evidence that the rampant idiocy found in Islam is biological or genetic. On the contrary, all evidence points to the fact that the underlying ideology of Islam as it is now practiced in many places around the world deliberately ensures the "dumbing down" of the intellectual and moral functioning of its adherents.

So developing just a teensy bit of psychological insight into the denial, projection and paranoia that has run amok in the dysfunctional culture and religion of Islam could be an extremely helpful first step to finding real solutions to your very serious problems. Blaming the Jews is fun and all, but if you want to get serious about those Nobel Prizes, then you need a complete intellectual, moral and spiritual overhaul.

Sadly, Al-Astal represents compelling evidence that it is unlikely any insight will be developed in the present generation of Palestinians; and, since they have taken great pains to make sure that the next generation remains handicapped by the pervasive cultural idiocy, we might as well not expect any at all for some time to come.