Bloodiest Ramadan in Recent History: So Why Are People Violent?

At the end of Ramadan on Saturday, the total number of casualties across the world for the entire holy month had reached 3,451 (1,627 murders and 1,824 injuries), more than tripling the 1,150 (421 deaths and 729 injuries) that took place in 2016, considered the deadliest holy month in recent memory.

The 1,627 fatalities this year nearly quadrupled the estimated 421 deaths last year. There were an estimated 160 terror incidents in nearly thirty predominantly Muslim countries during Ramadan 2017.

Wow. Pretty shocking figures for a religion of peace.

We’re admonished and lectured not to talk about these facts. But facts override admonishment and lectures, just the same.

Instead of talking about these facts, we’re told to “discover the origins of violence, and figure out why these people feel the need to attack”. The unchallenged premise of this p.c. garbage is that anyone who’d do these attacks would only do them in self-defense. Self-defense against what? Why, against white, male, “imperialist capitalism”, that’s what. The progressive people compelling us to stop talking about Islamic violence assume that Muslims hate the same things that these progressives hate, even though many of these progressives — being gay, lesbian, or women who don’t cover their faces, and the like — would be first on the hit list of these religious fundamentalists.

In order to truly understand violence, you first have to distinguish between violence done as an initiation for its own sake as opposed to violence done in self-defense. Violence against the Japanese and the Nazis in World War II was pure self-defense against obviously aggressor nations. Violence done by Muslims against anyone who disagrees is, like the violence of Nazis and Japanese in World War II, a total initiation of violence, having nothing to do with self-defense and everything to do with domination and control.

The reason people initiate violence — whether in the name of Islam or for any other reason — has to do with almost unimaginably faulty thinking. The faulty thinking of an aggressor includes the false viewpoint that “I can force and intimidate other people into agreeing with me”. Of course, nothing could be further from the rational, objective truth. If militant Muslims got their way and managed to destroy all of Western civilization, there would be nothing left but a pile of despair, death, ruin and ashes. It would look like many of their home countries in the Third World, only worse, because there would be no Western civilization to constantly improve and benefit — excuse me — to “rape” the planet of its intrinsic beauty and goodness.

The same faulty thinking, without all the accompanying evil and destruction, happens with people in daily life. “I’d like to shake some sense into him.” Or, “Shake some sense into her.” As a therapist, I get told that all the time, because people with the same faulty thinking as these terrorists believe, even if only a little, that you can force or intimidate people into doing what you believe they should do and thinking what you believe they should think. It can’t be done.

The only thing that force and violence can do? Stop people from doing what you think they should do — generally by enslaving or killing them. Go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Read about the Nazi concentration camps. It’s a particularly ugly example of how it is possible to destroy millions because they don’t think, act or look the way people in power believed they should have thought, acted or looked.

People think because they’re educated, enlightened, and particularly if they’re left-wing, that they’re immune to such tyranny. Only right-wingers could devise concentration camps, right? But left-wingers, under Stalin in Soviet Russia, for example, killed even more millions than the Nazis did. And they did so for the same fundamental, underlying reasons: Because he and his fellow Communists believed that people can and should be forced to do what they otherwise would not have done of their own free will. Stalin killed millions because he thought it was for people’s own economic good, while Hitler killed millions because he believed it was for the good of the nation and race. But the underlying error in each case was the same. It’s not always as spectacular as it was with Stalin and Hitler, but analyze the faulty thinking of any dictator and you’ll come back to this same faulty premise, again and again and again.

Muslim terrorists act not in the name of economics or race, but in the name of religion. Either you agree with their religion, or they will destroy you. They believe that by threatening this, they will get what they want. But they won’t get anything out of it, because no matter what evil people do, they can never capture and enslave the hearts and minds of people. The worst way to go about peddling your case for anything is to force it, rather than reason it. It’s a short-cut that’s doomed to failure. As much destruction as Nazism and Communism created, their goals were never actualized. Nor will the goals of Islam. Islam is doomed to lose the war for people’s hearts and minds, no matter how many battles we keep letting them win.