Islam and psychological displacement.

The U.S. is a magnificent country. Yet, the U.S. -- the U.S. as it actually is -- is hated by the American left.

Europe is equally magnificent for having created an extraordinary civilization without which there would have been no United States. Alas, the same enthusiasm for throwing it all overboard is present there too. This quote from Robert Spencer suggests the pathetic reason for Europeans' hatred of Catholicism, Israel, and the U.S.

"Is it possible that feelings that cannot be expressed, towards the belief-system [Islam], and those adherents of that belief-system [deranged pricks], causing such physical, intellectual, and moral disruption, upheaval, and sense of menace within European societies and . . . European peoples, out of fear, are instead being diverted, without recognition of what is happening, toward much easier and more obvious and more conventional targets, the Catholic Church in this case and, wherever possible, the state of Israel and, of course, that whipping-boy with or without the gaucheries of the current President, the government and people of the United States, which more than once has helped to rescue Europe, and may (or may not) do so again.

This may also explain the virulence of PC attacks on people who do have the backbone to sound the warning about Islam. Naked fear. If you pretend the danger doesn't exist or is coming from a safer quarter, voila, no need to fight or sacrifice. The virulence comes from feeling the unwelcome fear that springs up when the truth is told.

By any objective measure, life in any Western country — exclusive of the problems cause by having to deal with putrescent Islam — is unbelievably rich, secure, and healthy.

But the debate is not about this. The merits of European society are irrelevant and ignored. It is not hyperbole to say that it is a tragedy that the competition between the left and everyone else in the Western world can only be understood by delving into abnormal psychology.

Robert Spencer, republished at "The Hate Whose Name We Dare Not Speak." By Hugh Fitzgerald, New English Review, 1/2/08 (emphasis added).

ADDENDUM (1/6/08):

Some have said that Unwillingness To Face Reality And Its Consequences is the most serious mental illness of our time; and that is most certainly true.

If scientists can say that obesity is "socially contagious", consider for a moment how a much more contagious psychological processes like paranoia and projection are. Indeed, this tendency to deny reality is at epidemic levels. In our own country, we must deal with an entire political party and half the nation in the grip of the illness.

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. . . [Paranoia and projection] represent a distortion of reality that occurs in order to meet the inner needs of a crumbling self (or a crumbling ideology, culture, or society) that cannot otherwise be psychologically sustained.

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As long as they [Presbyterians?] maintain those delusions, they do not have to deal with the sad state of their own culture; their own sick religion; or their pathetic ideological inadequacies.

"The Paranoid Delusions of the Left." By Dr. Sanity, 1/5/08 (emphasis added).