sick sad world

or, "those who rewrite history are doomed to repeat it":

Despite this centuries-long, consistent expression of jiahdist doctrine, many in the West continue to dismiss it as an aberration or a deformation of Islam, and to look for other economic or political causes. Just as Sovietophiles during the Cold War dismissed Soviet expansionism as an understandable response to Western aggression or a traditional Russian anxiety over its long western border, so too today jihadist aggression is waved away as a natural reaction to neo-colonialist sins or autocrats at home or lack of economic development or even sexual frustration — indeed, anything and everything except what the jihadists plainly tell us is motivating them, and what millions of Muslims around the world who support the jihadists clearly understand to be the spiritual imperatives for jihadist violence.

Conquest shrewdly links to Freudianism this strange Western habit of thinking that people are incapable of knowing their own minds and saying what they mean. Like Marxism, this materialist explanation for behavior dismissed conscious motives as so much camouflage or rationalizations for deeper, unconscious causes. “And both doctrines provided,” Conquest writes, “separately or together, that built-in proof that disagreement was due to prejudices predictably embedded in the opponent’s mind by forces understood by the elect.” Likewise with many of today’s commentators who ignore conscious motives: these “elect” know that such spiritual beliefs are mere illusions masking some deeper psychic dysfunction or compensating for some environmental cause. And they display the same elitist disdain for those who prefer to take seriously what the jihadists tell us, scorning them instead as intellectually unsophisticated or in thrall to various neuroses such as bigotry.

Other parallels between Cold War Sovietophiles and today’s rationalizers for jihad present themselves. The academic establishment for most of the Cold War was predisposed to leftist ideology, and so seemed “notably prejudiced against realities and persuaded by smoke and mirrors,” as Conquest puts it. A wave of revisionism in the eighties attempted to explain away the horrors of Soviet communism, a change noted with approval in Moscow. As late as 1990, at the Soviet Union’s last hour, a Soviet professor could write in Pravda, “Anti-Sovietism has begun to disappear from the works of contemporary Sovietologists.”

So too today, when some of the most blatant apologizers for jihad are found among the academic ranks of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. Their perspective can be gleaned from the titles of the talks at their upcoming annual conference: "Anxious for Armageddon: Christian Zionism and U.S. Policy in the Middle East"; "Bad Fences for Bad Neighbors: The Divisive Process of the Israel-Palestine Border"; "A Tale of Two Walled Cities: Jerusalem and Johannesburg." You get the picture: terrorism is all about Western sins, particularly those of Israel, and has nothing to do with spiritual motives — unless those are the neurotic ravings of "Christian" fundamentalists.

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