Dhimmi Derangement Syndrome: Why Tony Blair Is Nuts

Yesterday Tony Blair had an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs in which he praised Islam and the Koran. His comments were patently ridiculous and transparently false. If you missed it at Little Green Footballs or elsewhere, Blair said:

To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is.
I write with great humility as a member of another faith. As an outsider, the
Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity
to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church
centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and
abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes
toward marriage, women, and governance.

Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over
previously Christian or pagan lands were breathtaking. Over centuries, Islam
founded an empire and led the world in discovery, art, and culture. The
standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to
be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.

Here is a short rebuttal by someone (me) who is well-read on the Koran and the history, beliefs and practices of Islam:

The Koran is filled with ignorance and superstition. It expresses the beliefs that a big chariot moves the moon around in the sky and that the sun sets into a muddy pond at night. Shooting stars are arrows fired by the hosts of Heaven at demons attempting to spy on them. A child resembles the parent who had his or her orgasm first during the copulation that produced him. At no place in the Koran is science and knowledge extolled. Blair's comments are idiotic and ludicrous.

The Koran is far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women and governance? What a load of happy horseshit. Before Islam women in Arabia were far more equal to men than after. Mohammed's first wife was a successful and well-off merchant. She hired Mohammed and was his boss! She married him later - after she proposed to him! She was Mohammed's only wife until she died - he took no other wives beside her - he didn't dare!

After Islam was established, women's status fell precipitously. Women were valued at one-half that of men, in inheritance rights, in testimony before a court. As for marriage, under Islam a woman has little or no rights. Her husband can divorce her at will but she does not have the same right. A man can have four wives and any number of concubines, including those captured in war.

And governance? Do as Islam says or be beheaded. I fail to see how this is an improvement over what went before Islam. As for Islam's "tolerance," it never existed. Islam's intolerance was the fuel that propelled its conquests of much of the civilized world and its subsequent execution of millions of "infidels," its looting, savagery and enslavement.

The truth is that Tony Blair is of that liberal persuasion where reality can be molded like wet clay to anything you like. Wishful thinking, urban myths, wild-eyed Pollyanna optimism take the place of actual historical facts.

However, it seems that Blair style dementia is not uncommon with regard to Islam and Mohammed. Last week I saw a PBS television documentary on how Islam influenced Christian reformation and lent spiritual color and inspiration to the Christian faith. The documentary also claimed that Islam and Judaism are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable. I turned off the TV set in disgust. Who writes such garbage and why?

A few weeks ago I was reading the book "Why I Am Not a Muslim" by Ibn Warraq. Warraq described one university textbook on Islam that claimed Mohammed was such a fervent practitioner of non-violence that his attitudes closely resembled those of Gandhi. Once again, the exact opposite is true - Mohammed was a very violent man, ordering critics assassinated, beheading 800 captured Jews, launching attacks on caravans and ordering the killing of any Jew that his followers encountered. These facts are documented in Muslim writings (the Haddiths), as opposed to the cotton-candy dreams of demented liberals.

Indeed, Mohammed was probably even more sadistic and cruel than the surviving Haddiths and Surahs tell us. Centuries ago a Muslim historian destroyed documents of Mohammed's life that he considered too controversial.

I suspect that non-Muslim apologists for the Koran and Mohammed suffer from a variation of Stockholm Syndrome. Stockholm Syndrome is the name given to the phenomenon of hostages who come to identify with their terrorist-captors. This identification is some sort of coping mechanism. Hostages adopt this attitude hoping to win favor with their captors and so be spared. Hostages apparently wish to tell the terrorists, "Don't kill me, I'm on your side." A possible example of this is heiress Patty Hearst, who was kidnapped in the 1970's by the radical Symbonese Liberation Army, and who later helped them rob a bank.

Muslim-apologists probably don't see it that way. They think that "if you give someone a good reputation, they will do their best to live up to it." That slogan may work in western societies, but it is absurdly simplistic as a way to deal with the problem of centuries-old Islamic violence and malevolence.

Tony Blair should grow up and try living in the real world for a change.