Dr. Phil, the Islamists' answer to Lenin's "useful idiot"

If you want to know why we are losing the struggle with radical Islam you don’t have to go very much further than this little piece of national television fare.

It is a segment from CNN’s Larry King Live Show featuring an interview a few days after the Fort Hood event with Dr.Phil, a woman in the Veteran’s Affairs Administration, and a JAG lawyer.

Philip McGraw gets the head start, which means he gets to frame the discussion that follows. For him, this is a mental/emotional issue, full stop.

You can’t blame him for that, it is his field, it is the prism through which he views the world, and it is the thing he is most comfortable talking about.

I would venture to say he knows diddly-squat about Islam, from at least one comment he made.

Next up are two other split screen guests, Shoshana Johnson, who served in Iraq and was, for a brief period, a POW, and Tom Kenif (not sure of the spelling) a JAG officer and criminal lawyer who also served in Iraq.

Kenif disputes the mental explanation, believing the truth may lie in Islamic extremism. However, both McGraw and Johnson jump down his throat, accusing him of saying dangerous things that are simply untrue and ridiculous. It is also pretty clear from King’s interjections that he finds Kenif’s explanation suspect.

At various times, Dr. Phil says things like, “You can’t make sense out of nonsense” and “Well (mentally healthy) people don’t pick up a gun and kill their friends.”

Unfortunately for Kenif, in the ensuing argument he falls into Dr. Phil’s trap, agreeing that a person who murders people for religious reasons is mentally ill. At that point he loses the argument.

Wrong, Dr. Phil. That is music to the Islamists’ ears.

Go on spouting about mental illness and believing that the military should focus on stress and not religion. This was a one-off, an isolated incident, completely explained away by westernized notions of mental illness. It has nothing to do with Islam. Move along now, nothing to see here.

The Islamic Project will give you a big medal for that one.

There is no reason to think whatsoever that an Islamic radical who kills the perceived enemies of Allah, with the full knowledge that if he dies in that battle he will be guaranteed eternal life in Paradise -- the only guaranteed path in the Koran -- is mentally ill. There is nothing nonsensical about this if the religion makes sense.

The only way that could be true is if you were to say that all people who believe religious doctrine must be mentally ill. No American is going to say that, certainly not Dr. Phil.

You could possibly refine that last statement and say that only people who believe the religious dogma of Islam are mentally ill because of the violence it spawns. Again, no American in the mainstream media and establishment is going to say that.

If Major Hasan was acting out of purely religious motivation then the soldiers he killed or tried to kill were not his friends, Dr. Phil. They were his enemies. There is nothing irrational about that. Soldiers are supposed to kill their enemies.

And if you knew anything at all about Islam, Mr. McGraw, you would know that Muslims are not permitted to make friends with non-believers.

Mr. Kenif had the right idea even if he couldn’t follow it up properly on the King show.

The safest way to proceed after Fort Hood is to assume an Islamic influence and act accordingly, and revise your judgment only if subsequent evidence emerges that mental factors unrelated to religion are prevalent. This would be called an application of the precautionary principle, or, as we used to say, doing something simply out of an abundance of caution.

Unfortunately, the Dr. Phils in America control the high ground and more Fort Hood disasters can be expected in the future.

On a related note, here is a Washington Post story of the first post-Fort Hood interview with Hasan’s jihadist mentor.

What did we learn?

I saw something the other day that highlighted a coincidence. The Dow Jones stood at exactly the same level on September 11, 2009 as it did on that day in 2001.

Oddly enough, I also was in the same place. I had been camping in Killarney Provincial Park in Northern Ontario and was driving home when I switched on the car radio to be startled by the live broadcasts from New York and Washington. Fortunately, this time my drive home from Killarney was uneventful.

That caused me to consider the events of that infamous day and what has transpired since.

It was said that it was a day that will change the world.

At a personal level, it caused me to get off my ass and to get concerned about religion generally and Islam in particular.

I had been a comfortable, complacent atheist for decades and paid little heed to religious issues or controversies. Raised as a Protestant and church-attending until the age of 13, I knew my Bible as well as anybody who wasn’t obsessed with it, and did not bother to keep a copy of it. Indeed, there was not one book in my reasonably extensive personal library dealing with any matter concerning religion or non-religion.

Eight years on, I have a good thirty works on the subject and have both a Bible and a Koran. I regularly scan websites devoted to these issues, as well as reading or watching anything that crops up in the mainstream media.

I not only schooled myself in religious issues, I joined and promoted organizations devoted to spreading science, reason and secularism as a counter to religious deference that seems to permeate our North American societies. As well, I started this blog partly to convey my thoughts on these matters. So, I am not just a passive reader and TV sponge.

If you had asked me on September 10, 2001 to tell you what I know about Islam, I probably could have come up with about 6 things of the most general nature. Now I feel I have a very good handle on that pernicious creed.

At a country level, I think not much has changed in Canada. I correspond regularly with several Canadians and I get the impression they think radical Islam is all somebody else’s problem.

They are not concerned that home grown terrorists are being convicted in their own backyards, that the recently convicted plotters in the U.K. were planning on blowing up Canadian airplanes, or that imams are permitted to spread hatred in the mosques of Canada while critics of Islam are subject to prosecution by government agencies, or that there are signs of apparent honour killings of females.

If you raise the danger inherent in Islam, you are met with a torrent of statements of moral relativism about “state terrorism” on our side. We are the problem, not the religion, according to these folks. If only we behaved in some non-aggressive fashion, Neville Chamberlain-style, we would be left alone by the Islamists.



Mainstream journalists regularly employ the term “Islamophobia” as if it were a real mental/emotional condition and not a propaganda ploy which they have uncritically swallowed.

Left-leaning bloggers decry the raw deal Muslims get in this country from the authorities, naming less than 10 Muslims, out of 800,000 Muslim citizens, who have been subject to scrutiny in one fashion or another by the security apparatus of this country. One wonders whether the “at risk” Muslims of Darfur, Somalia or Iran would prefer Canada to their countries despite this leftist-manufactured “hostile” climate of persecution. Jews still maintain the top billing as the victims of most of the hate crimes.

At the international level, what baffles me is the inability of western officialdom to define exactly what they are dealing with. They spend their time being apologists for this “great” religion of Islam, assuring everybody that the problem is not the religion of peace; President Obama being just the latest politico to join in this parade.

During the 45 years of the Cold War I don’t recall the same reluctance to name communism as the evil doctrine which must be defeated and to which all our efforts were devoted.

There were apologists for the practitioners of communism, like Fidel Castro, of course, but nobody except fringe players ran around defending communism as a preferred political/economic model.

Now the reverse is true, almost nobody wants to say a bad thing about the ideology of Islam, but only bad things about some of its practitioners, like Osama bin Laden.

On balance, I guess the world has changed, but not for the better, I suspect.

LOOK A BLUE CAR!

I have been around long enough to have lived through the deaths of a number of world famous people: King George VI, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Martin Luther King, Jr., Sir Winston Churchill, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Princess Diana, to name a few over the decades.

The latest is now Michael Jackson.

Three of these bore the title King: George, Elvis and Jackson. One of them was a King: Martin Luther.

Some died of natural causes: George, Churchill, and possibly Jackson (apparent heart failure).

Four of them were murdered by assassins: the two Kennedy’s, King, and Lennon.

Monroe and Presley overdosed on drugs.

Diana was killed in a traffic accident.

Those who died too young: George, the Kennedy’s, King, Presley, Lennon, Diana, and now Jackson.

In each of these cases, people like me who did not personally know any of them is somehow expected to feel something, if one takes the outpouring of sentiment one sees in the media as a guide to life.

The only one on my list that truly gave me a sinking feeling was JFK. I was 17 when he was shot. I had lived through the Cuban missile crisis that he had stick-handled adeptly and it seemed to me at the time that the world had just become a more dangerous place without him in it. There was a spillover effect when his brother and King were also murdered, but it was as a tail to JFK’s head.

Time and historical revelation have revealed that he was a more flawed individual than a teenage lad knew. Although, nothing about his shortcomings takes away his two triumphs: the Russian showdown and the space program.

I didn’t feel very much about George and Churchill. They were for my parents to ponder. For me, they were just historical figures.

The others who died by bullets or drugs had little impact on me, except there is always a bit of twinge one gets that life is fleeting when their young age is factored into the equation.

Jackson is the only one in the group who had a rise and fall just before his death. He had it all and it was blown away by some bad judgments on his part. It is always sad to see a person fall in this fashion, but the decline has been some time in the making and is not news.

We are being exhorted by the commentators in the media to forget the freak show that became Jackson’s life in the last 15 years. We should remember his contributions to music and the entertainment industry.

I listen to music radio, particularly stations that play hits from the past. Mercifully, very seldom is Michael Jackson played on air. My own selection of Jackson’s output is limited to Billie Jean. The rest I could cheerfully discard. His voice was crap. There is nothing attractive about a grown male sounding like a 13 year-old girl.

If you want to listen to a cringe-producing song, play that duet he did with Paul McCartney, The Girl Is Mine. Michael Jackson is the one on the right in the picture below.

“I told you Paul, I am a lover not a fighter”, says Jackson, sounding exactly like a eunuch.

His main claim to fame came from his stage performances and music videos which were very dependant on his excellent dancing routines for impact.

Although I can get past the incessant face surgery and the pigmentation issues, the image of him dangling his infant child off a hotel balcony with a towel covering its face is hard to erase.

That is why I thought irreverent comedienne Sarah Silverman’s twitter comment best reflected my feelings:

Did you hear Michael Jackson's kids are free? That's not nice. I'm sorry. Ugh, I feel bad for saying that. LOOK A BLUE CAR!

Phelps phlap -- the consequences of being born in the U.S.A.

You have to feel a bit sorry for Michael Phelps because he is an American olympic champion. He was outed for smoking a bong at a party and now there is an enormous morality play going on in the U.S. that has seen him suspended from competition and losing millions in corporate sponorships.

If he had been Canadian this would barely have rated a ripple.

Witness Ross Rebagliati, Canada's gold medal snowboarding winner in the 1998 winter olympics in Nagano, Japan. After taking the gold, olympic lab tests revealed that Ross had traces of marijuana in his blood. Since nobody could make an argument that marijuana is a "performance enhancing" drug, he kept his medal.


At home, Canadians did a collective shoulder shrug and chuckled. The media consensus was that there was something called a "snowboarding culture" amongst young people and smoking dope was part of it.