By Demosophist

OK, so who didn't fall in love with the Parminder Nagra character in Bend it Like Beckham? (If you didn't you're feakin' gay, man.) She's now a regular on ER, by the way. I know she's precisely the sort of tomboy that used to get my heart thumping when I was a ne'r-do-well kid in HS and College. (I mean, girly girls are "OK," but give me a girl who can kick a football or run a 100 meter dash any time.)

So having become susceptible to English Pakistani culture through such a sympathetic portrayal it's not all that comforting to see cute Jess's extended family as the perpetrators of the recent London bombings. [Note: Jess's family were Sikh rather than Muslim, as a reader embarassingly points out. See updates below for thoughts on how this changes the thesis.] And I imagine it's no easier for my UK brethren, who must have been similarly enthralled. I do not think that Islam is, by definition, a pathological religion. But I think some elements of Islamic culture might be pathological, and there is a "dirtly little secret" that is rarely discussed, except by an old friend of mine on a new blog called Jefferson State. An excerpt that's liable to ellicit a fatwa [with commentary]:

I grew up living among Muslims (or Mohammedans as we called them) in South Africa. Most of them don't take their religion too seriously and are actually fairly secular, materialistic and ambitious. They were known as "black Jews" in South Africa (a back-handed compliment but not an outright insult.)

But the fact is that the religion of Islam stinks. Mohammed was a scheming opportunistic weasel who married a rich old widow to further his ambitions. It is a primitive religion and, unlike Judaism and Christianity, has never had a Reformation. [Here's the key to the pathology, by the way.]

Our bible-thumpers may not be the most enlightened people in the world but so far they have not bombed anyone. It [Islam] is not a religion of kindness, mercy, forgiveness and love. Has everyone forgotten the video footage of Muslims cheering and celebrating in the streets of the mid-east after 9/11?

[It may, in fact, be a "religion of kindness, mercy, and love"... for Muslims, but reformed religions have generally arrived at the conclusion that "human" and "X" (Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, etc) are more or less synonyms, even though that conclusion isn't obviously or undeniably rational. It is a mark of reformation that humans are innately "of the faith" unless diverted by time and circumstance. That's what "reformation" means.]

The Muslims that I grew up with in South Africa live in a multicultural society and have had to adapt. Same goes for most of those whom I have known in the USA. [Jess, in Bend it Like Beckham is obviously assimilated, which is why she's also attractive. She's a-Muslim.]

In the Middle East, however, they live in practically homogenous societies and are arrogant and medieval. Sadly that applies to many in the UK too where they are not really ever accepted as British and live in ghettoes. It seems that, if their religion and culture are never challenged, they can happily go about being reactionary dinosaurs.

[OK, so what's the thesis of Bend It Like Beckham? Is it not the confrontation between western and medieval values, and the fact that the former tends to win out over the latter for the obvious reason that it's better-atuned to human nature? Why would anyone choose Submission, unless they had a rather peculiar and restrictive image of women?]

Last zinger: One of the major causes of dysfunctionality of middle-eastern culture is seldom talked about because it is controversial and distasteful. [Boy, is it ever!] As much as the Muslims hate gays, they have a dirty little secret - many are pederasts.

Richard Burton (no, not Mr. Elizabeth Taylor - I mean the explorer and translator of Thousand and One Nights) called the mid-east and Mediterranean the Sodatic Triangle because of the wide-spread practice of pederasty.

Muslim boys are molested by older males from an early age. Is Islamic culture pathological because of the sexual abuse of its little boys who then grow up to be vicious, sado-masochistic and corrupt?

Bernard Lewis has made the observation that "What Went Wrong" with Islam has its origins in the suppression of women. Anyone who has investigated the culture of the Mafia knows that they place women on an unnatural pedestal, and that this separation of female and male nature feeds the sociopathic aspects of Mafia culture. What is not recognized is that Sicily is but the northern boundary of the "sodatic zone," and that the dysfunction is entrenched to a far greater extent in the Middle East.

Note also that this practice is no more "Islamic" than the dysfunction in Sicilian life is "Christian." It's the result of a cultural evolution that actually transcends religion, and perpetuates precisely because it is never expressed or discussed. The "evil" is the result of or consequence of denial, as much as praxis. It doesn't require pederasty to manifest, but simply the asymmetrical and unnatural regard for women as "special and untouchable" creations. Pederasty is a consequence of such an attitude, but a consequence that, in turn, produces genuinely vicious results. Although Patrick doesn't say as much, it is this that really lies behind the social dysfunction he's talking about. It isn't entirely unlike "prison culture" if you require a modern parallel.

Young Muslim men ought to find women like Jess Bhamra, the heroine of Bend it Like Beckham irresistible, but instead they find such women threatening. This is a tragedy, with consequences that, though unintended, are not inconsequencial. We saw the results in the London transit system over the past week. If mainstream media leaves you with the impression that such a consequence is inexplicable it's because they're not comfortable talking about reality.

Update 1: A reader, Alf, points out in the comments a rather embarassing mistake: Jess's family in Bend It were Sikh, not Muslim. Oops! This is almost inexcusable since the Sikhs and Muslims have been involved in a low-level war for decades in Kashmir. Demonstrates what can happen if you get too enchanted with your own rhetoric, I guess.

But there's some value in noting that the chief difference between the Sikh and Muslim attitude toward women, which are both "traditional," involves the veil. Sikhism hasn't had a huge problem making it into the 20th Century. You can find Kettle Chips in almost any grocery store in the US, which was a product introduced by the Sikh community in Salem, Oregon. My grad school produces several very fine Sikh MBAs with every graduating class. So the issue isn't merely "traditional values," but something more insidious. It involves something so threatening to Islamic culture that exposing it to any degree, as did Theo van Gogh in Submission, is an intolerable trespass.

Update 2: Another reader, Kstumpf, points out that Muslims don't so much place women on a pedestal as relegate them to a dark room where they serve limited purpose. While that's certainly true, the notion of a pedestal isn't simple. The thesis of Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, for instance, was that placing women on a pedestal also demotes them to the periphery of the culture. But "the veil" is an extreme version of that mystique, implying not only that women are different and off limits, but that they're also unclean. (For instance a Muslim man won't sleep in a bed that has been previously occupied by a woman not his wife.) It's a pointedly abusive form of mystique, which was the point of van Gogh's film. And it's little wonder that the attraction to an opposite gender viewed as both mysterious (and therefore intriguing) and also foul, translates into a higher incidence of the rape of little boys. It's not a difficult equation to suss out.

Update 3: Jefferson State has posted the entirety of a 2001 article by Jamie Glazov from Front Page Magazine on "The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror". There's also a related post by Wretchard at The Belmont Club: The Return of the Ripper.

Posted by: Demosophist at 09:54 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 1200 words, total size 9 kb.