Genocide, Islam and Weaponized Empathy
As some of my readers know, I am part Armenian by ancestry. It used to be a thing that didn’t enter into my daily thought process, for I am also partially of English descent and am fully American, in culture, language and appearance. Armenians can generally tell that I am of Armenian ancestry, but few others can. But as militant Islam made its presence felt, increasingly in recent years, that identity has resurfaced because of the connection my own family has to the affair.
Then I saw this photo of a drowned Syrian boy:
This photo was intended to provoke a reaction, and it did.
Leftists would have you believe that us on the Right have no empathy. We wish to deny the endless migrations away from crisis areas in the Islamic world and that, they would tell us, is incompatible with human rights, dignity, empathy and so on.
My grandfather told me stories of Armenia (Armenians, then, lived throughout Anatolia), which he remembered only dimly. For he had been only a few years old when my family escaped, just ahead of the genocide in the dying Ottoman Empire. Mostly, he remembered it through the stories told in the Armenian exile community.
Entire villages were erased, all the inhabitants slaughtered, the buildings burnt to the ground, the movable wealth stolen and melted down. Nothing of them remained. In the days before the genocide, two dialects of the Armenian language existed, colloquially referred to as the Western, or Anatolian, dialect and the Eastern dialect. The Western dialect has mostly gone extinct, spoken only by a few elders in the diaspora. My grandfather could speak it, but my mother knew only a few words. Only the Eastern dialect survives. Half of Armenia ceased to exist.
These were hardy Christians who had survived on the edge of the Byzantine and Islamic worlds for centuries. They had fought alongside Greeks and Crusaders. They were among the earliest — perhaps the very first — nations to convert to Christianity. They spoke an ancient language, a variant of the Indo-European language set that appears distantly related to Greek, and unrelated to any other.
Islam nearly erased them.
Now that Christians in the Middle-East are approaching extinction, the new target is the insufficiently Muslim. The Yazidis with their syncretic half-Muslim religion, or the Kurds who elevate their own nationalism over their religion (a rarity in the Muslim world).
I feel for them. I really do. In fact, I cannot tell you how much it pains me to see these things. On my grandfather’s knee, I heard the stories of Armenian survivors. In particular, one woman stands out. She was a child when the Turks came for her family, but she was comely and pretty. Her parents and brothers were killed and she was sold as a slave for a wealthy Turk’s harem. Her story of survival and escape was terrifying to me as a child, and it instilled a sense of resolve where Islam was concerned that has not abated to this day.
Can you imagine this? Seeing your family slaughtered, and only surviving to be used as a sex slave by those who did the deed? Blacks in America lecture me about my White privilege, saying that their ancestors were slaves. Mine were slaves much more recently than theirs. Mine were slaughtered wholesale.
But back to the central point, why, then, if America sheltered my family, must the West turn back the refugees of Syria, of Somalia, of Libya?
Because they bring the source of infection with them. Armenians had managed, through some strength I sometimes find difficult to fully grasp, to hang on to their European culture and Christian religion through millenia of conflict with Islam. They had stubbornly resisted assimilation into Islam and its ideals. These refugees, for all that my heart yearns to give them sanctuary and a place to escape to, nonetheless carry Islam with them.
There are good Muslims in the world, and I want to make this clear. My own family lived only because an Ottoman official warned my great-grandfather that genocide was coming. This man, whose name I cannot remember — something that genuinely pains me, for my grandfather died when I was young and his stories are almost dream-like to me, now — paid for the ticket to America for my family, for English language lessons, and everything else needed to escape before it was too late.
I hope that I will meet this good and righteous man in the life to come. I hope God saw fit to accept him into His kingdom.
But Islam nonetheless is a contagion, even if some maintain a stubborn moral immunity to the infection. Where Islam goes, this violence will follow. You will never save all the little boys, you will never stop the slaughter. All you will do is bring it to your own shores.
And if there is something I know for certain, it is that my ancestors did not escape Islam only to see their descendants fight it again, once more in their own homes.
There were tears in my grandfather’s eyes, at times, as he recounted the things he knew. And I know what his reaction would be to this boy’s death. He would feel empathy and sadness, far more acutely than the moral busybodies of Progressive Leftism. But then he would turn off the TV and tell me the truth: that we could not help them without also dooming ourselves to the same.
So, Leftists, take your Weaponized Empathy elsewhere. We understand that the world is full of terrible things, of children dying, of women enslaved. But we have to find our resolve and protect our own.
For if we do not, it could be my son laying on that distant beach, and that I will not allow.on Weaponized Empathy Weaponized Empathy is a device employed constantly by the Left, because, in the past, it has effectively nuked the Right wing positions on almost everything. Art Sartrus explains in a comment on the previous post:
I only wish more people could see that US leftists use these situations to increase their own power – racism, poverty, environmentalism – they scream so loud about inequality while building giant mansions for themselves.
This is why they constantly bleat out accusations of racism, sexism, etc… because the Left knows that Conservatives, Libertarians and other non-Progressives are generally pretty decent people and don’t want to feel as if they hurting people or doing a moral wrong. In simple terms, they propose to use our better natures against us.
In the recent Planned Parenthood scandal, Rebecca Watson released a video practically pleading her viewers to believe the entire thing was a lie. Take a look at this screencap.
This pose is carefully calculated.
You can see her pleading expression, the raised eyebrows, her almost innocent look, the locket, etc… Everything is designed to make you believe this woman is in earnest, and how could you possibly disagree with her? Why, you must be some kind of monster if you don’t believe her! This is a classic example of Weaponized Empathy. White Knights, eager to defend the downtrodden woman, eat this sort of thing up. Of course, where the empathy was on her side when babies (one still living) were cut up for parts, nobody seems to know.
It is the same for environmentalism. Support our position, or you are evil Earth destroyers. Nobody wants to be seen this way, and so the argument is suitably framed for the Leftists before the debate even starts. Even if they are losing the debate, they can escape by deploying this weapon again. “Oh, you just don’t care about the Earth.”
When I lived in California, ostensibly a longtime Left-leaning state with a healthy environmentalist movement, I noticed more garbage, more litterbugs, more smog, sludge and environmental disasters than any other state in which I have ever lived, including my current “moderate” state of Florida. And it was only getting worse when I left. Rolling blackouts were the norm. You would hear of sewage contamination on the beaches and smog reports, each consistently worse than the last. Leftism wasn’t fixing the problem, indeed, it seemed to be exacerbating it. And now, in the midst of terrible drought, California largely votes against securing its own borders. So a state with a clear population problem won’t even take measures to prevent large migrations of non-citizens into its territory.
But, remember, pointing out the problem is racism, dontcha know.
The Trayvon Martin affair was another great case in point. Media outlets ran story after story, showing pictures of a sweet and innocent little boy, while omitting the facts that he had been involved in Mixed Martial Arts and choosing to ignore more recent photos that were somewhat less innocent. Regardless of where you stand on Zimmerman’s innocence or guilt, this is a clear attempt by the media to deploy Weaponized Empathy in the service of their chosen narrative.
A rather blatant case of Weaponized Empathy.
The good news is that many non-Progressives have started to see through this thin disguise. Gamers in #Gamergate were some of the most non-sexist people you would ever meet. In fact, if you were a female gamer, you were more likely to be worshiped than denigrated by the gaming community. A woman who plays Starcraft? Throngs of gamers would bow to your every whim.
But the media portrayed them as woman haters, wannabe-rapists, pedophiles and the like. The irony being, of course, that a recent anti-Gamergater was outed as a wannabe incestual rapist and pedophile itself. I use “it” because the gender of this person is indeterminate, a common problem for them. No, I’m not going to “learn your pronouns” either. That’s just ridiculous.
The Leftist defense? This:
Outing pedophiles is worse, says Phil Sandifer, than the offense itself.
They are trying to deploy Weaponized Empathy again, but it’s falling on deaf ears. Donald Trump’s famous takedowns of the politically correct, and the massive support this language has engendered from the Right, indicate that we may have at last found a workable defense against Weaponized Empathy: indifference.
When liars and pedophile apologists make a claim to your empathy, the proper response is dismissal. They have already demonstrated that they lack the very morality and empathy they are appealing to. Like the Boy Who Cried Wolf, they’ve spouted “sexism” one too many times, while getting caught supporting such morally reprehensible hashtags as #KillAllMen. They have accused you of racism because you have light skin, itself a form a racism. They accuse you of being morally deficient because you take offense with the cutting up of fetuses and the selling of their parts.
And, as I explained in the previous post, they will claim that you must host hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Muslim refugees and migrants, while not holding the Muslim countries responsible for their own moral deficiencies, for the failure to care for their own people, fellow Muslims, as their own religion commands.
The next time a Progressive attempts to make you feel bad, or appeals to your morality in order to win your support of a Leftist objective, or to silence your criticism of it, consider that they may be using this weapon against you. Hypocrisy is the greatest tell in this regard. Remember that California is a dirty, failing state, that Detroit was destroyed by half a century of Leftist mismanagement, that Islam has made a mess of its own countries and seeks to do the same to yours.
The only moral wrong here would be allowing these things to continue without resistance, just because a Leftist calls you a name or spins a nice propaganda piece, designed to make you feel bad.
Genocide, Islam and Weaponized Empathy
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Originally Posted by BugoutBear
