May 2, 2013

Biochemical roots of immigrant terrorist anti-Americanism

From the NYT:
Boston Plot Said to Have Focused on July 4 Attack
Surviving Brother Says Suicide Attacks Were Considered 
By ERIC SCHMITT, MARK MAZZETTI, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and SCOTT SHANE 
The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told F.B.I. interrogators that he and his brother considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July as they plotted their deadly assault, according to two law enforcement officials. 

I thought that all immigrants come to America because they love the propositions in the Declaration of Independence?
But the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, told investigators that he and his brother, Tamerlan, 26, who was killed in a shootout with the police, ultimately decided to use pressure-cooker bombs and other homemade explosive devices, the officials said. 
The brothers finished building the bombs in Tamerlan’s apartment in Cambridge, Mass., faster than they had anticipated, and so decided to accelerate their attack to the Boston Marathon on April 15, Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts, from July, according to the account that Dzhokhar provided authorities. They picked the finish line of the marathon after driving around the Boston area looking for alternative sites, according to this account.

If they had been Four Lions-style Pakistanis instead of Chechens, they would have aimed for Patriots Days but not gotten their bombs finished until Independence Day.

There has been endless speculation about what could have motivated these Cambridge lads. Here, for example, is a Slate article discussing what can be learned about the Tsarnaevs from watching Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and other premium cable serials. (Yes, I know that sounds like a parody of the ultimate Slate article, but I'm not making it up.)

In contrast, I would emphasize the effects of testosterone. Young men like to divide themselves up into teams and fight other teams. Hence, they look for reasons to take passionate sides (as spectator sports entrepreneurs long ago noticed). I touched on this in VDARE a decade ago in "Anti-Americanism Spurred by Immigration."
ANTI-AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM #1: the U.S. college experience can set off ugly reactions in foreigners. Perhaps the most disastrous example: the Egyptian fundamentalist ideologue Sayyid Qutb, the "Philosopher of Islamic Terror" who became "the intellectual hero of every one of the groups that eventually went into Al Qaeda," according to Paul Berman. In the New York Times March 23, 2003, Berman writes: 
"[Sayyid Qutb] even traveled to the United States in the late 1940's, enrolled at the Colorado State College of Education and earned a master's degree. In some of the accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear." 
It's hard to predict what will outrage visitors from other cultures. Qutb's conversion from modernizing to jihad is sometimes said to be a reaction to the lasciviousness of a church dance he attended in Greeley, Colorado! 
Perhaps the most detailed account of this alienation process at work in a foreign intellectual is John Updike's 1978 novel The Coup.  Written when Updike was at the height of his powers, it might be his most spectacular (if hyperbolic) effort. The Coup consists of the extraordinarily articulate memoirs of the revolutionary dictator of an impoverished African country. 
Colonel-President Ellellou is a fervent Muslim, Marxist, and black racist. He's perfectly aware that his three faiths are contradictory. But, since they each give him additional reasons to indulge his consuming hatred of America ("that fountainhead of obscenity and glut"), he luxuriates in them all. 
Ellellou traces his obsession with America to the four seemingly-pleasant years he spent at a liberal arts college in small-town Wisconsin in the 1950s, where he made blonde Candace the second of his Prophet-sanctioned four wives. 
How can America's openness backfire so badly? Well, American universities specialize in leftist indoctrination.  Maybe their foreign students, well, study. 
And foreigners living in America are constantly confronted with America's superiority over their homelands. It would be wonderful if every visitor to the U.S. reacted as objectively as Alexis de Tocqueville. But don't count on it. 
For instance, years later Updike's Ellellou is still driven into a rage by the thought of how well stocked a Wisconsin drugstore was compared to the shops at home: 
"Hakim's instinct was to smash, to disarray this multifaceted machine, this drugstore, so unlike the chaste and arcane pharmacies of Caillieville, where the sallow Frenchman in his lime-green smock guarded his goods behind a chest-high counter showing only a few phials of colored water." 
I sympathize. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and went to college in Houston. On any kind of rational scale, the difference between living in suburban California and suburban Texas is minimal. But so what? I was young. I missed my home. The testosterone was flowing. So I just decided I was going to hate Houston. I spent four years, objectively as enjoyable as Ellellou's, searching out reasons to despise Texas. 
If I could succumb to pointless anti-Texanism, how much more understandable is the anti-Americanism of many immigrant students?

25 comments:

David said...

These aren't your grandparents' immigrants.

They want to blow up Ellis Island.

Dahlia said...

I love this article about testosterone, it's been so long it seems fresh.
So, were you content to just hate Texas or did you mess with Texas?

DR said...

In some of the accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear."

No one's full of as much resentment as a guy who's not getting laid living around a bunch of people who are.

Anonymous said...

No one's full of as much resentment as a guy who's not getting laid living around a bunch of people who are.

Were the people attending church socials in 1940s "getting laid" i.e. fornicating extensively? There was dating back then, but it was fairly ritualized courtship by today's standards. You picked up a girl at her parents' house, went to the church dance and for some ice cream, and brought her back home. "Going steady" meant doing something like this on a regular basis, not "hooking up". "Dating" actually meant "dating" back then. It didn't imply fornication.

Anonymous said...

Steve, I'm glad you have watched Four Lions. It was a very funny movie but also exposed the very real side of disaffected Muslims living in Western countries.

fnn said...

There has been endless speculation about what could have motivated these Cambridge lads. Here, for example, is a Slate article discussing what can be learned about the Tsarnaevs from watching Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and other premium cable serials. (Yes, I know that sounds like a parody of the ultimate Slate article, but I'm not making it up.)


There seems to be some real leftist confusion about assimilation-which was supposed to be bad for representing some sort of Western Supremacism and was therefore rendered obsolete by the doctrines of Diversity and Multiculuralism.

countenance said...

Steve, you're spot on in this respect -- It has been reported that the reason Somalians who weren't initially "radical" who were allowed to immigrate to Minneapolis then ran back to Somalia to fight for AQ and Co. got "radicalized" was because American prosperity they saw in contrast to Somalian poverty in which they grew up made them mad.

Of course, they couldn't accept non-diabolical HBD-related explanations for that, and certainly, Official America wouldn't try to instill that explanation in them.

You said in V-Dare in 2003:

ANTI-AMERICAN PYSCHOLOGICAL MECHANISM #2: the option of immigration to the U.S. can turn those who stay home against America. I call it the Big Leaguer Syndrome.

We St. Louisans have a huge hard-on for Chicago, mainly because long ago, Chicago displaced St. Louis as the Biggest League in this general part of the country.

Anonymous said...

I sometime feel white Americans (not really Europeans) have a mad attitude (based on resentment without a particular root) towards the prosperous parts of Asia.

Molner said...

In contrast, I would emphasize the effects of testosterone. Young men like to divide themselves up into teams and fight other teams. Hence, they look for reasons to take passionate sides (as spectator sports entrepreneurs long ago noticed)

This must be why Pat Tillman joined the Army so he travel to the other side of the planet and kill Muslims.

Molner said...

If I could succumb to pointless anti-Texanism, how much more understandable is the anti-Americanism of many immigrant students?

A lot more understandable. Were Texans invading California, bombing your people, and bulldozing the homes of your family and friends?

Anonymous said...

No one's full of as much resentment as a guy who's not getting laid living around a bunch of people who are.

You fail. The Tsarnoff brothers by many accounts were quite successful with the ladies.

Anonymous said...

No one's full of as much resentment as a guy who's not getting laid living around a bunch of people who are.

Do young white people resent young black people?

Anonymous said...

No one's full of as much resentment as a guy who's not getting laid living around a bunch of people who are.

You must be speaking from experience.

Anonymous said...

I sometime feel white Americans (not really Europeans) have a mad attitude (based on resentment without a particular root) towards the prosperous parts of Asia.

What are the prosperous parts of Asia?

Dr Van Nostrand said...


No one's full of as much resentment as a guy who's not getting laid living around a bunch of people who are."

Actually in Lawrence Wrights The Looming Tower, he recounts that Qutb was once propositioned very openly by a comely,tipsy co ed when she knocked on his door. This apparently outraged him even more and he slammed the door on her face.

This is not normal behavior even for an Islamist. Pretty all the Al Qaeda members captured and interoggated revealed some sexual pecadillo or the other

The 9/11 hijackers patronized strip clubs ,are we believe they did so only not to appear Islamist as some analysts claim. "God its a such torture to see naked women but I guess I will do it for jihad"
while Al Awlaqi was arresting for soliciting a prostitute.
Lets not forget the mountains of child porn found on Al Qaeda computers.

Wright interestingly notes that Qutb was a small,bespectacled and odd looking man and could possibly did not know how to respond to an open sexual invitation.

Anonymous said...

Anon 8:06, a quick perusal of the Vegas wedding files from the Fifties shows a tremendous number of youngsters from Cali running across the border to get married. I don't think Elvis was officiating back then, so there must have been another reason.

I always laugh when people believe they were the first generation to engage in teenage fornication!

Paul Mendez said...

"Hakim's instinct was to smash, to disarray this multifaceted machine, this drugstore...

Be honest.

How many reading this haven't had a similar sort of fantasy about smashing up the White House Correspondents Dinner or Davos?

rob said...

Anonymous said...
No one's full of as much resentment as a guy who's not getting laid living around a bunch of people who are.

Do young white people resent young black people?


Amend that to guy who's not getting laid..bunch of people who are getting laid with desirable women.

Most white guys aren't resentful of the average black guy who effs black chicks or porks porkers. They/we certainly are about the very small but visible minority of male blacks who bag pretty white women.

Anonymous said...

In some of the accounts of Qutb's life, this trip to America is pictured as a ghastly trauma, mostly because of America's sexual freedoms, which sent him reeling back to Egypt in a mood of hatred and fear."

No, the sexual insinuations in 1949 northern Colorado church dances were not what blew Qutb's mind (the evidence is he was likely gay anyway).

What shocked him were American death customs: ER personnel making macabre jokes, widows calmly talking with insurance representatives only a day after the funeral, things like that.

Anonymous said...

But I assume you didn't blow up any rodeos? This seems to be the Islamic difference. The world is filled with young men with raging hormones. The world is filled with religious fanatics. The world is filled with people who are far from home and bear irrational grudges toward their place of current residence. But only (or mainly) the Muslim kind blow things up. Why is that?

Anonymous said...

You fail. The Tsarnoff brothers by many accounts were quite successful with the ladies.

I think he was referring to Kutb, not the bros. Joker and Tamerlane were quite the ladies men, which made them unusual terrorists. This is probably why they didn't do suicide bombs (though their lack of a getaway plan was in effect suicidal but in reality can be attributed to their being lazy/stupid/clouded by religious fervor).

Anonymous said...

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm finding the iSteve comments section an oasis of sanity, coming after my visit to the fever swamps of Youtube, where hundreds of people are screaming FAKE bombs FAKE blood FAKE leg amputations... and many of them white American college students.

rob said...

Anonymous said...
I never thought I'd say this, but I'm finding the iSteve comments section an oasis of sanity, coming after my visit to the fever swamps of Youtube, where hundreds of people are screaming FAKE bombs FAKE blood FAKE leg amputations... and many of them white American college students.


It's a terrifying day if I'm the sane one. Just sayin'.

I wouldn't put too much stock in youtube commenters. As some of the recent anonymous commenters here reveal, it is quite easy to fly a false flag. Mohamed Allahtard from Buttfuckistan can readily type 'My name is John Smith, and as a white American...' They sometimes give themselves away by doing things like taking Baghdad-levels of violence as the no-biggie default, without realizing that Americans have (to them) impossibly high standards for life. Many of those American college students are as American as Jokah Tsarnaev and Robel Philipos. Others are troll-Americans and are, well, trolling for reactions.

totally not rob said...

I quite concur with Rob's analysis. What a brilliant man, whose talents are wasted on mere humans!

I would like to add that one dedicated commenter can look like a bunch of people.

yet another person who isn't rob said...

Indeed! The brilliant insights of the above two comments leaves me breathless! I cannot add anything to such perfection! I merely wanted to express my humble agreement.