Wednesday, July 12, 2006

The Six Stages Of Muslim Response To Terror

So far 183 human beings have been killed and more than 660 wounded in the latest commuter train attacks in Bombay. Now, we don’t know who did it yet. Just because Muslims bombed commuter trains in Madrid and London doesn't mean we should jump to conclusions and blame the current bloodshed on the Muslims, who may be completely innocent. It could be Quakers this time.

Just kidding. It's Muslims. You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. Muslims love blowing infidels into bloody chunks on trains. Planting bombs on trains is the modern equivalent of Mohammed raiding enemy caravans.

We've all seen enough Muslim terror attacks to notice the patterns that emerge in the way these events evolve. I can’t help but notice that there are certain stages in the Muslim response to Islamic terror that recur over the past dozen major attacks. I summarize them here. Let's see how they match the evolution of the Bombay massacre.

Tantor's Six Stages of Muslim Response To Terror Attacks

Stage 1: Denial
The Muslim community makes strident denials that the atrocity of the moment was perpetrated by Muslims: “It is impossible for this attack to have been committed by Muslims because terrorism is against Islam. This is a bigoted and racist slander of Islam by Western Islamophobes.” In the Middle East, the response does not progress past Denial.

Stage 2: Fingering The Muslim Suspects
The police make tentative identifications of the perpetrators, who are all young Muslim men. This prompts howls of outrage from the perpetrators’ community, who counter that they are good, devout Muslims. The perpetrators’ families strongly protest their arrests/identification, demonstrating outside the courtroom in full hijab. Local Muslim clergy claim there is no proof of their guilt.

Stage 3: Damning Evidence
Incontrovertible evidence is publicly presented which leaves no doubt of the guilt of the accused Muslim men. Security camera video of the perpetrators shows them carrying their bombs to their targets. A mountain of evidence is collected from suicide bombers who made no effort to cover their tracks: email, documents, fingerprints, jihad videos, trips to Pakistan, bomb components, receipts.

Family and friends of the perpetrators go into taqqiya mode in public: “We had no idea. They must have been brainwashed by extremists against their will.” Privately, they celebrate the martyrdom of their noble jihad warriors who went to their wedding in paradise and have guaranteed that seventy of their family will follow them. It's a win-win situation from the Muslim perspective.

Stage 4: Backlash
Once guilt is established too firmly to fight it, Muslims switch tactics to warn of a backlash against the “peaceful moderate Muslim community.” The backlash never quite materializes. A hundred dead infidels might prompt a yahoo or two to toss a rock through a mosque window. However, Muslims then harp about living in a climate of fear. Any insult to the Muslim community trumps the previous terror. No matter how many innocent lives are snuffed out for Islam, the Muslims always believe themselves to be the true victims.

Stage 5: Conspiracy Theory
Once the facts fade from the public memory, the conspiracy theorists begin manufacturing an alternate reality which exonerates the Muslim perpetrators and implicates the true villains behind the scenes, usually the CIA and/or Mossad, maybe the Pentagon or Illuminati. Ultimately, George Bush is to blame. The "facts" of the fable do not need to make sense because the kind of people who believe this stuff have the IQ of gravel. All they need is enthusiasm.

Stage 6: Martyr Video
On the anniversary of the attack a year later, one or more martyr videos pops up on the Internet and Al Jazeera in which the dead perpetrators confess from the grave to their role in the martyrdom operation, proclaim its justice, and threaten more. Allah Akbar!