Terminal Stupidity — The New Threat To Civilized Humanity

Once upon a time it was enough for stupid people to cut their noses to spite their faces, but its seems that this generation`s crop of idiots have a lemming-like need to go one step further and slit their throats to spite their faces.

Stupid people have always made me feel uneasy and anxious — more so than evil ones. When the Haggadah talks about the Four Sons, the sheh ayno yodayah lishal — the one who doesn`t know to ask — is more worrisome to me than the rasha, the evil son. The rasha may have gone off the derech and rejected his heritage, but there is always the possibility that he will one day come around and do teshuvah. You can reason with him. He has the intelligence to grasp what you are trying to convey to him.

But the one who doesn`t how to ask I find very disconcerting. There is something very disturbing about his being so oblivious to, and unmindful of, the buzz of activity occurring around him. His detachment to the events taking place, his willful denial that there is anything noteworthy going on, is almost pathological in nature. It`s not that he doesn`t know how to ask. He just doesn`t want to.

The simple son at least makes an attempt to understand what is going on by asking for an explanation from the people in the know. But the one who doesn`t bother asking — who figuratively sticks his head in the sand and ignores reality — is dangerously stupid. And stupid, unlike evil, is almost always a chronic state of being.

One individual with terminal stupidity is not a major threat to humanity. But when there are millions the world over with this affliction, when the populations of hundreds of nations — the educated elite among them included — collectively act like a bunch of ostriches, then the situation is truly problematic and downright scary.

Globally, terminal stupidity is manifesting itself in two stages: anti-Jewism and pro-Islamism. Now, hating Jews has been an international pastime for the peoples of this planet since Jacob and his extended family settled in Egypt, and mindless hatred in itself isn`t going to result in an "end of the world as we know it" scenario.

Disliking Jews intensely and restricting their endeavors — i.e., impeding their ability to receive higher education etc., as was the case decades ago in Europe, the United States and Canada — may have delayed the cure for cancer and Alzheimer`s and spinal cord injury and other nasty diseases and illnesses, but it hasn`t really had a horrific impact on the way we live.

The butchering of six million Jews whose never-to-be-born children and grandchildren — more than 60 years later likely to have numbered in the 50 millions — may have significantly slowed down the alleviation of many of the world`s social, economical and medical woes, as evidenced by the tremendous contribution to progress that are the fruits of the labor of the remnant that did survive Hitler.

Again, that decimation did not put the world at peril — it just significantly delayed its betterment. However, embracing the Islamic elements in their midst and condoning their often brutal actions definitely has the potential to undermine civilization as we now enjoy it.

It`s bad enough to hate Jews who have always been assets to the countries in which they`ve resided. But to allow rabid Jew-hatred to impede one`s instincts for self-preservation, to actively protect an element that is out to destroy you and shatter your well-being, is an extreme case of terminal stupidity. It`s like a man who for some inexplicable reason hates his spleen — an organ he can live without but one that is very beneficial to him — and allowing a deadly infection to destroy it. The fact that this insidious infection will eventually attack the rest of his body and kill him does not concern him. It`s beyond stupidity, but when it comes to the Jews, this self-destructive behavior has its precedents in history. Case in point: even though the Germans invaded Poland and enslaved and murdered many Poles, whom they regarded as subhuman, the Poles quite happily betrayed their Jewish neighbors, friends and employees and even those Jews who were actively fighting the German enemy in the Resistance.

Governments are bending over backward to placate the cancer in their midst. Canada was outraged recently over plans by the U.S. to fingerprint and photograph "Canadians" crossing the border who were born and raised in such terrorist breeding grounds as Iraq, Yemen and Pakistan. Incredibly, the Canadiens were indignant that the U.S. would take measures to protect the lives and well-being of its citizens at the expense of "hurting the feelings" of these new citizens .

Never mind that a number of terrorists of Middle Eastern descent had already entered the U.S. from Canada, and American authorities had legitimate concerns that these "Canadian tourists" harbored ulterior motives for entering the country.

American and European university professors ensconced in their ivory towers are demanding that Israel be economically, politically, academically and socially boycotted and that Israeli faculty members be excluded from conferences or booted out altogether. However, radical Islamists are welcome on their campuses to spew their lies and historical distortions to young, impressionable Christian and Jewish students.

Muslim terrorists are butchering Christians, Buddhists and other "infidels" in the Philippines, in India, in Pakistan, in Ethiopia , in East Timor, in the Ivory Coast, and in Egypt, as well as demolishing their religious sites. Yet the Western media — when they even bother to report these incidents at all — mention merely as an afterthought that the perpetrators are Muslims and almost never point out that their hapless victims are deliberately targeted because they are "non-believers."

Not that this should come as a revelation to journalists; after all, if fundamentalist Muslims treat their own mothers, wives, daughters and sisters like chattel, ready to stone, mutilate and imprison them for any imagined slight, why would they have a shred of compassion or respect for "infidels" and anything connected to them?

Too many people — especially the memory-challenged Europeans, whose near-zero population growth is being compensated for by the multi-married Muslim immigrants and their extremely fruitful wives — are so busy condemning "Israeli atrocities" (how dare those Jews defend themselves!), and gleefully jumping on the global Jew-hating bandwagon, that they refuse to acknowledge the insidious cancer that is doggedly invading the world body of nations.

It`s not just about the Jews. It`s about global holy war — Jihad — and world domination and an Islamic lifestyle that would make the "Dark Ages" seem enlightened. It`s about a threat to civilization that makes communism seem as benign as a communal picnic.

It`s also about terminal stupidity — a deliberate denial and "not asking and not wanting to know" that is more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.

Great post. I've always thought that the idea of the "fool" was one of the great contributions of the Jewish Scriptures to moral thought.

In the South, we have appropriated this idea in the category of "ignorance," pronounced "ignernce." The fool, the ignernt individual, is a person who's dumber than anyone has the right to be.

Folly or ignernce has nothing to do with lack of braininess. At the bottom of the fool's folly is not lack of IQ but avoidance of reality. The fool just doesn't want to know. As the great Louis Armstrong said, "There is some folks, if they don't know, you just can't tell 'em." This is a moral flaw found maybe more often in the highly educated than in peodple who have to deal with the hard edges of things to make a living.

As the Bible says, the fool says in his heart, There is no God. To avoid dealing with unpleasant reality, you have to deny or confuse the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, and that already is practical atheism. Of course, there are fools in every religion; the fool denies God in his heart, in his attitude to life, not necessarily with his mouth.

It's really a toss-up, I think, whether more evil is done in the world by really malicious people, or by fools - people who refuse to see what's really going on -- as we say in the South, people who "just don't know how to do." One thing is for sure, the wicked couldn't do without the ignernt - they ride to power pillowed on the smooth soft brains of fools.

The "rights" of illegals are more improtant to our leaders than the rights of native born Americans. I can't figure it out why they are so gutless. The majority of Americans are sick of it, but it continues. Do you have an answer for this or does the article lay it out?

I don't think the "rights" of matter to most of them, both sides of the aisle, any more than the rights of citizens matter. It's the votes they care about.

The illegals seem to have a lot of political clout. Illegal immigration is a big issue on FR, seems to me to be an issue along the border in the Southwest, but IMO that's about it. Even in areas like NY or Chicago, with large illegal (and legal) immigrant populations, there doesn't seem to be much concern about the problem, at least as a campaign issue. Until American's wake up to this issue nationally, not regionally, I'm not sure much progress will be made.

Deporting illegals and enforcing our immigration laws would seem to me to be a pretty easy issue for politicians to get on the right side of, but I don't think the nation's calling for it.

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