Richard L Cravatts, PhD, is the author of 'Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad
In their third and final
presidential debate in Boca Raton, Florida, on October 22 – this one
focused on foreign affairs — neither President Obama nor Governor
Romney, somewhat inexplicably, addressed a still-nagging question on the
minds of many, both Republican and Democrat: Why, for some two weeks
after the lethal attack on the US consulate in Libya, did the Obama
administration continue to explain the attacks as a random madness of
Muslim protesters incited by an innocuous video clip on YouTube, rather
than a pre-planned, deliberate attack by well-armed terrorists
commemorating 9-11 with spilt American blood?
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quick to point out that the
anti-Islam video “Innocence of Muslims” was “inflammatory, despicable
material posted on the Internet,” and “an awful Internet video that we
had nothing to do with,” trying to distance both the administration and
the US government as a whole from the film.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney similarly insisted that the
protests and deadly attacks in Benghazi were not “directed at the United
States,” but could be traced directly to the video.
“This is a fairly volatile situation, and it is in response not to
United States policy, obviously not to the administration, not to the
American people,” he told the press, “but it is in response to video
that is offensive to Muslims.”
Appearing on no less than five Sunday news programs on September
16, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice repeated the by-then widely
promoted theory that “the best information and the best assessment we
have today is that in fact this was not a pre-planned, premeditated
attack…. that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired
in Cairo as a consequence of the video.”
However, a story released just last week revealed that a flurry of
emails, sent nearly in real-time, as the consulate attack was underway,
contained information that Ansar al-Sharia, a group identified by the
State Department as being an Al Qaeda-affiliate, initially claimed
responsibly for the attack that from the outset clearly was an act of
terrorism, and not, as the Obama administration continued to contend and
position the event, a random reaction to perceived insults of Islam.
The problem with all of the explanations emanating from the Obama
White House was, of course, that they were intentionally misleading or
certainly misguided, a situation that was immediately apparent to many
observers outside of the White House’s inner circle who saw the assault
on the Libyan consulate exactly for what it was: a carefully executed
terrorist attack on a day with specific symbolic import, and not a
spontaneous outpouring of anger from indignant and aggrieved Muslim
mobs.
A Libyan man investigates
the inside of the US Consulate, after an attack that killed four
Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, on the night of Tuesday,
Sept. 11, 2012, in Benghazi, Libya (photo credit: AP/Mohammad Hannon)
The question is, why did the Obama administration reflexively, and
obsessively, cling to the view that an obnoxious video inflamed Muslim
passions, and not a long-apparent ideology of jihad against the West in
general and America specifically? Why were the president’s spokespeople
so adamant in deflecting the obvious explanation that the Libyan events
were very clearly acts of terrorism, and that they signaled, quite
obviously, on the anniversary of 9/11, that the lethal reach of radical
Islam had not been curtailed with the killing of bin-Laden?
The answer to those questions may not come from strategists in the
State Department, or even from the White House spin doctors, but may
have an explanation from psychotherapy, and particularly in a theory
developed by Dr. Kenneth Levin who, in his book “The Oslo Syndrome:
Delusions of a People Under Siege,” he examined Israel’s responses to
terror as it tried to hammer out peace with its Palestinian foes.
Levin, a historian and psychiatrist, postulated that Israelis,
faced with persistent hostility and existential attack from an
implacable foe with whom they were forced to negotiate for peace, had
the characteristics “of at least some members of besieged or abused
groups to embrace the indictments and calumnies of their abusers… the
psychoanalytic concept of ‘identification with the aggressor.’” In the
case of Israel, Levin saw the repetitive inclination of many Israelis on
the left to negotiate for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian
leadership — and to make continued one-sided concessions and
accommodations in that effort — at a time when Yasser Arafat was
conspicuously derailing authentic peace negotiations and actually
continuing his efforts to extirpate the Jewish state through terror,
incitement, and ideological attack.
But all the while, the failure to achieve peace after the Oslo
Agreements was assigned to Israel; not to its abusive and disingenuous
“peace” partner, a classic symptom of the Oslo Syndrome, which Dr. Levin
describes as “a defense mechanism in which the individual blunts the
pain of negative interactions with others, such as criticism or
rejection, by embracing the indictment, making it one’s own criticism.”
Embracing the indictment and making it one’s own criticism, of
course, has been a salient and oft-noted characteristic of this
administration, starting with what Governor Romney referred to as the
president’s “apology tour” and his 2009 Cairo speech, where Obama
contended that the “great tension between the United States and Muslims
around the world” was the result, not of an expanding Islamism and
impulses of jihad, but “tension [that] has been fed by colonialism that
denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.”
So, in Obama’s view, it was the behavior and actions of the US and
the West that had inspired jihad, and our own progress and freedoms were
at fault, that “the sweeping change brought by modernity and
globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the
traditions of Islam.” Similarly, in an Al Arabiya interview in
which he announced his intention to reset the diplomatic vagaries
introduced by George Bush, the president suggested that the US must
“start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by
dictating — in the past on some of these issues — and we don’t always
know all the factors that are involved.”
There is also the prevalent strain in the multiculturalist,
victim-focused, group-identity ideology of the left on campuses and in
the current administration, who have been willfully blind to the
realities of terrorism, and have either obscured its existence when it
was seemingly self-evident; as in the Ft. Hood mass murder by Maj. Nidal
Hasan, defined by the administration as an incidence of “workplace
violence”, or as in the Benghazi incident, when the US Embassy in Cairo,
during the height of the attacks, quickly issued a statement
condemning, not the slaughter of Americans by jihadist madmen, but “the
continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious
feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all
religions.”
The reality is that members of this administration, because of
their delusions about their own healing abilities and their
misinterpretation of and apologetics for the lethal nature of radical
Islam, have continually sidestepped the issue of terrorism, falling for
the psychological trap, as Levin describes it, of thinking they can
remain in control by ignoring manifestations of radical Islam over which
they actually have no control; instead blaming terroristic events on causes over which they presumably can
exercise control, such as workplace conditions, aggressive US foreign
policy, and YouTube videos. In this psychological juggling, Levin
observed, “the individual [or nation, a collective individual] at least
attains a sense of being in control of the indictment rather than simply
feeling the passive victim of assault by others, and he or she attains
also a sense of shared comprehension and rapport with the attacking
other rather than feeling simply the targeted outsider.”
This explains why many on the left, including those in academia,
have regularly glossed over terroristic behavior on the part of
Islamists — Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Al Aqsa Brigades, or others —
and not only refused to call this terrorism, but romanticized the
violence as justifiable “resistance.” In Obama’s idealized,
post-colonial, multicultural world of progressive thought, the
assumption is that political actors behave in rational ways; something
that is clearly absent in conflicts in which theology, apocalyptic views
of the world, a longing for martyrdom, contempt for the infidel, or
genocidal ethnic hatred underlie geopolitical struggles. The
administration’s professed belief that through sheer good will and
mutual understanding the forces of radical Islam could be moderated has
shown itself to be delusional, similar to Levin’s point about what
Israel attempted to achieve by making itself, on its own, responsible
for making peace even when confronted with an implacable, even hostile,
opponent.
‘In Obama’s idealized,
post-colonial, multicultural world of progressive thought, the
assumption is that political actors behave in rational ways.’
(illustration: Arie Katz/The Times of Israel)
This “pain of abuse and the fantasies of relief,” Levin said —
“however divorced from realistic expectations those fantasies may be” —
results in two behaviors. One is “self-denigration,” as Obama has
expressed in Cairo and elsewhere and was certainly underlying the
sentiment of the diplomatically worded communiqué that announced that
“the Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing
efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of
Muslims.” The second behavior, Levin noted, is “grandiosity, the
inclination to believe that they have the power by their own actions, by
their self-reform, to alter the behavior of their abusers.”
That grandiosity was fully on display in Cairo in 2009, where
Obama, announcing himself as the new, freshly multicultural,
compassionate face of American diplomacy, deluded himself that making
apologies for America’s perceived diplomatic excesses under Bush,
excusing its failure to appreciate the subtleties of Islam and to
accommodate its beliefs, and ending the US’s own feeling of
exceptionalism in dealing with the world, would, as measures of
self-reform, work to moderate radicalism and suppress terrorism. The
problem with that thinking, of course, just as it was a lethal problem
for Israel, is that jihadist foes see those reforms not as acts of
kindness and understanding, but as weakness. The Islamists who murdered
Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans may have actually been
insulted by the silly YouTube video, just as many Muslims were outraged
by the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, but these offenses were simply
pretexts for the ensuing violence, not its root cause.
Radical Islam is at war with the US and the West, and with Israel,
because our way of life, rights of expressions, standards of law, and
civil and human rights, conflict with the rigidity of radical Islam and
its inability, in its fundamental form and practice, to coexist. That
reality contradicts the administration’s apparent belief that Islamic
truculence and aggression are merely understandable and natural
responses to the vagaries of America policy and culture, and that if we
simply behave appropriately, terrorism will disappear. That is why, too,
this administration is so wary of even using the word “terrorism,” or
identifying terroristic acts as being just that when they do occur.
It may give psychological comfort to the Obama administration to
think they have the power and ability to moderate the behavior of
jihadist foes by reforming US behavior, but in spending two weeks
arguing about the merits of an offensive film, tracking down its
producer, and blaming the victims of terror instead of the perpetrators,
the Obama administration simply demonstrated to our lethal foes the
phenomenon James Burnham described in the “suicide of the West“
when he spoke of those who threaten themselves from within because they
“hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows
struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough
to pull it down.”
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