Saturday, May 08, 2010

Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences

Nicolai Sennels (May 2010)

Introduction by Nancy Kobrin, author of The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing[1]

When I first read about Nicolai Sennels’ work concerning therapy, which he had conducted with criminal Muslims in Denmark, I knew that it would be groundbreaking. I hope that you the reader will listen closely to what he has to say. I also had the opportunity to conduct prison interviews of Muslim detainees, which were not interrogations. Minneapolis has the largest diaspora of Somali Muslims outside of Mogadishu, and there was an overload in the county jail. I was trying to decide if I wanted to draw up a research project. Pressured for time and with too many other responsibilities plus receiving a death threat during one of the interviews, I decided against it.

Like Sennels, I came away with a similar sense that Western law enforcement and the general public did not understand why there was so much crime in the Muslim population. And why there has been this problem of jail house converts to Islam who then become radicalized through contact with other criminal Muslims during incarceration.

Islam is the perfect religion to give justification for those who feel under attack and to maintain the eternal “victim" fantasy. Islam is also “higher” than Christianity because it comes last in co-opting the revelations of Sinai and the New Testament. What a perfect receptacle for projecting hatred. Islam incites, encourages and permits hatred of the Jew and Jihad. It’s perfect for a fragile personality that has the need to hate and the need to have an enemy. There are billions of people out there who share those sentiments and that profile. As an underdog religion, Islam provides great mass appeal, which even Eric Hoffer, the author of the True Believer, noted in 1951. It should come as no surprise that its numbers are growing. If one has a grievance, Islam will take care of it.

Sennels adeptly outlines the key problems of why Muslims are not able to integrate into Western culture. What he doesn’t say, I shall name. We are dealing with nothing more than paranoia. Sennels stresses that the West must set boundaries because otherwise they will kill you. This kind of rage is malignant borderline behavior as in serial killing. We must come to understand such politically incorrect observations as Sennels does in order to connect the dots concerning criminal Muslims even though it is brutal.

Happy well-adjusted children do not become suicide bombers nor do they become criminals. Let us choose to know what we are dealing with rather than bury our heads in sand out of terror. Let us meet the challenge straight on as Sennels has. If the Swedes had intellectual fortitude, Nicolai Sennels, the Dane, should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for standing up and proclaiming that the “Emperor Has No Clothes.” But then again, that is a Danish tale and the Swedes are left with Ingmar Bergman’s drama. Need I say more?

[1]Dr. Nancy Kobrin is a psychoanalyst with a clinical specialty in trauma. Her Ph.D. is in romance and semitic languages, specializing in Aljamía, Old Spanish in Arabic script. She did a two volume dissertation on Ahadith Musa. She began to study the perpetrators of terrorist attacks in the early 80s as the truck bombs went off in Lebanon. Residing in Minnesota for many years she was asked to teach Radical Islam to the Sheriff's Deputies of Hennepin County. She is an expert on the Minnesota Somali diaspora and a graduate of the Human Terrain System program at Leavenworth Kansas and was slated to go into Helmand Province. Her new book is The Banality of Suicide Terrorism: The Naked Truth About the Psychology of Islamic Suicide Bombing.

This is extremely long article, I have placed the actual piece in another post-doc

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