Will Victoria Jo Stinnett ever celebrate a happy birthday? I
very much doubt it. As soon as she is old enough to understand,
she’ll be haunted by the trauma of her birth — ripped from her
dead mother’s womb by alleged killer Lisa Montgomery. Yet monster
though she undoubtedly is, Montgomery is already reaping the
benefits of the insidious root-causes racket.
Root causes are the rationalizations liberals give — usually
after the fact — for their immoral actions or for the immoral
actions of others. The paradox at the heart of the root-causes
fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only
after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds have no need of
mitigating circumstances.
Thus liberals find no need to explain why Bill Gates behaves
benevolently, but somehow, they require a theory to
explain why Montgomery, after a good deal of premeditated scheming,
gained access to the Missouri home of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, strangled
her, sliced open her abdomen, and then made away with her child,
later passing the girl off as her own.
In the months to come, you’ll see the dog-and-pony psychiatric
show and its media claque pose such questions as: “What
drove Lisa Montgomery to mug, murder, and mutilate Bobbie
Jo Stinnett.” That’s because, after people perpetrate evil,
liberals toss free will to the wind. Since Montgomery did a
monstrous thing, liberals attribute her actions to causes.
You see, to perpetrate evil, one must be “mentally ill.” Since Bill
Gates does good things, those of a liberal mindset attribute his
actions to choice. They acknowledge free will and human
agency if — and only if — adaptive actions are involved.
“Progressives” make some exceptions to the rule. Never once did
the punditariat ponder what drove Scott Peterson to murder
his wife and unborn child. Peterson’s sex made it easy for liberals
to accept that he chose to act on his inherent evil
impulses. Liberal misandry guarantees that female offenders are
more likely to benefit from root-causes “reasoning.”
FEMALE OFFENDERS AND JIHADISTS, to be more precise. Western Liberal
“intellectuals,” not Jihadists, are behind the root-causes theory
of terrorism. Ask any Islamic terrorist why he desires to kill
Americans and Israelis, including innocent civilians, and he’ll
reply with candor and conviction. The Islamic criminal, unlike the
common criminal that inhabits Western jails, lacks psychological
savvy, a fact that increases his believability. He hasn’t yet
imbibed the teachings of Western progressive psychotherapists,
eager to help him excavate the “root causes” of his depraved
deeds.
Not given to the-camel-ate-my homework excuses, the Islamist
will disclose that he desires to kill us because he hates us. And
why does he hate us? 1. Because America’s government prefers
democratic Israel to the despotic Palestinian
Authority. And 2. Because America’s military, as he sees it,
meddles in Muslim affairs.
Now, Islamic propagandists assure us that the Muslim disdain for
the “infidel” Jew is a recent phenomenon based entirely on the
continued existence of the tiny “Zionist entity,” i.e., Israel. But
over a cup of thick Arabic coffee, the Islamist will concede that,
while his contempt for the dhimmi, as the Jew was
derogatorily termed, has gathered Nazi detritus along the way, its
origins are purely Islamic. What does this have to do with America?
As our candid Islamist will argue — and most of the “Muslim
Street” will agree — America is a puppet whose strings are pulled
by a Jewish/Israeli cabal.
Liberals, of course, know any man’s mind better than he does
himself. According to their lackluster logic, which has come to
dominate debate, the “Three P’s” — patriarchy, poverty, and
powerlessness — are responsible for terrorism. Never mind that
Osama bin Laden is a millionaire. Or that the September 11 killers
were scions of privilege. Or that Al Qaeda is hardly manned by
illiterate peasants. No matter that from Russia’s Bolsheviks to
South America’s Tupamaros and Montoneros, from Germany’s
Baader-Meinhof Gang to Italy’s Red Brigades — terrorists have
always been middle-class.
The typical terrorist is prosperous and self-righteous, writes
Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “The elite
flocks to Islamist ideology,” seconds Middle East scholar Daniel
Pipes. “Militant Islam is not a response to poverty or
impoverishment but results more from success than from failure. Not
only are Bangladesh and Iraq [before the war] not hotbeds of
militant Islam, but militant Islam has often surged in countries
experiencing rapid economic growth.”
Forget all that. Rather than face facts, liberals opt to libel
the poorest of the poor, and that includes most sub-Saharan
Africans as well as the slum-dwellers of Brazil and India. Last
time I looked, however, these paupers were not mounting a global
terrorist offensive.
Liberals are especially vigorous in applying root-causes
“reasoning” to female suicide bombers. To liberals, Chechen suicide
bomber Zarema Muzhikhoeva is not a criminal who conned herself into
a corner as tight as the corset of explosives she tried to
detonate. Instead, they regard Muzhikhoeva and her Palestinian
cohorts as mere pawns in a patriarchal game.
To discuss these doyennes of death, Scarborough Country
rounded up Dr. Drew Pinsky and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Both told
host Pat Buchanan that while women were capable of violence, they
enjoyed “a natural nobility of character.” Boteach insisted, “To
get women to be that aggressive, they have to be brutalized by men
or their society.”
The Rabbi’s chivalry runs counter to the facts, not least
anthropologist Ilsa Glaser’s research into female aggression in the
Palestinian Authority. Glaser discovered that women’s gossip and
nagging play a crucial role in the instigation of one of the most
wicked of crimes: the “honor killing.” In defaming the targeted
women and goading the men to act, Arab women are the prime movers
behind these murders.
Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud is a typical Palestinian woman, but boy,
does she defy the liberal stereotype of Arab woman as victim of
male hegemony. Qaoud’s daughter Rofayda was raped and impregnated
by her own brothers. When the girl refused to commit suicide, Mommy
Dearest hacked away at her own child’s wrists — ignoring pleas of
“No, mother, no!” — until the poor girl expired. Qaoud’s kinfolk
(and she concurs) see in her not a murderess but rather a woman
driven by devotion to community, family and Allah.
THE SIRENS OF SUICIDE are viewed in much the same light. “She is a
hero. She is a martyr,” brayed the mother of Palestinian suicide
bomber Wafa Idris. These people are proud of the ghastly deeds they
say their faith commands. They demonstrate no consciousness of
guilt nor do they exhibit the urge to adorn their barbarism with a
respectable pedigree. That’s the job of patronizing Western
liberals. “In dealing with crime,” wrote political philosopher
Murray Rothbard, “liberals are concentrating on the wrong root
causes. That is, on ‘poverty’ or ‘child abuse’ instead of a rotten
immoral character.”
Nothing causes ordinary Palestinians to strap on belts
of razor blades and dynamite and then blow up innocent Israelis.
And nothing causes ordinary Israelis to not
respond in kind. These are respective choices. Since so
many Palestinians choose to commit evil, liberals invariably
attribute their actions (after obligatory and perfunctory
denunciations) to Israeli-engendered oppression. Since just about
no Israeli civilians respond in kind, liberals fail to credit their
moral choices. Similarly, Lisa Montgomery has reasons —
not causes — for killing Bobby Jo Stinnett and stealing
her child.
The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist Viktor Frankl
said this of his experience in Auschwitz: “In the camps one lost
everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s
attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own
way.” You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to
Frankl. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that
traumatic toilet training is destiny.
