Life is complex but the way we learn is simple. We spot patterns and use them to predict. Most of the time our minds do this without us being aware of it or even able to correct it. Take a look at the picture below, if you follow with your eye the disappearing pink dots, the background left by the disappearing dot is just grey. If you focus on the cross in the middle, instead of a disappearing pink dot your mind will make you see a green dot going around. This is just how your mind works.
All it needs for you to be manipulated into any belief is misdirecting your focus. If you don’t look directly at the problem, you are at risk of seeing what is not there. This is the basic method of magic tricks – misdirection.
Most problems of understanding the world come from the sheer complexity of what is going on. There are many factors that simultaneously influence events. The main way we can begin to try and work out what is true from what is not is to identify as many of these factors as possible and controlling all others see what varying one factor does to change the outcome. Even then in most situations, we only get a correlation : when A happens, B also happens. We cannot usually be sure which is the cause and which the effect. Often it is circular.
We all know that drug addictions wreck lives right? Wrong, actually what happens is people with messed up lives turn to drugs as a way to escape their situations even if only for a short while. Fix the messed up life issues and the need to escape goes away and with it goes the addiction. In many cases the causes are circular, drug addictions also wreck lives more causing a vicious cycle.
Phobias are irrational right? Wrong, they are your mind trying to deal with trauma. It is the simplest of patterns. If you have never been around snakes and you know snakes can kill you then all snakes are to be feared as if they are deadly. Only later when you have more experience can you know the difference, but sometimes that experience never comes and so the simple binary concept we adopt persists.
Trauma is the basis of brainwashing too. It comes from what was observed with dogs that had been trained to do all kinds of tricks. They got left behind when people evacuated an oncoming flood. When the people returned, the dogs, having survived the flood but deeply traumatised, would not do any of their usual tricks. Someone noted that it was as if their brains had been washed – and the term stuck.
Vaccinations also work on this principle of manipulating people’s immune system to see and recognise a threat. In most if not all vaccinations the virus included is dead and harmless. The body is only tricked into destroying it by adding a poison, euphemistically called an adjuvant (something that gives life). Your body sees the harm done by the poison and blames every new thing it sees at the same time just in case that may also be the cause. For this reason, the body also learns to treat anything else injected with the virus as toxic. The inclusion, for example of tiny amounts of peanut oil as a preservative in vaccines has caused a massive amount of severe – sometimes fatal – peanut allergies. It is likely IMHO that the massive increase of autism is caused by some similar reaction to particular vaccinations.
Our minds and our bodies are regularly manipulated to see such patterns by presenting them with incomplete and misleading information. If we only passively consume information and do not understand how to get and evaluate accurate information, we are at the mercy of those who would bend us to their wills.
Islamophobia is not an accident, it has real causes. They are however very largely due to deliberate agendas of people who benefit from it. These include people who profit from wars and all the debts that they cause. A big part of the ongoing wars ensnaring the Muslim world is the drug trade, in particular the ever increasing bumper heroin crop from Afghanistan. This produces criminal black market profits for dealers each year in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Much of this is recycled to help create the traumatic chaos needed to justify ever more military interventions causing yet more chaos and ensuring lives are messed up more, and so creating demand for the drugs. Drug money has been and continues to be a huge source for unaccountable funds spent on illegal activities done by a changing alliances of intelligence agencies and organised crime. They work to create all kinds of entrapment operations, whether sexual or violent, funding rebellions, satanic child abuse, terrorism and controlling politicians, police and other people of influence though blackmail and bribery.
There are many levels of this manipulation. The whole agenda behind preventing violent extremism is one of the biggest. The media says little about the causes and programmes like Prevent in the UK assume that anyone showing any kind of interest in Islam is a risk. The reality is that the UK and its heirs to their colonial project have sought and continue to seek to have Islam misrepresented by suppressing genuine democratic Islamic mass movements while funding and arming all kinds of extremist insurgents, as has happened in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan etc. Today, they continue to arm and fund groups in Syrian that are officially affiliated to Al-qaeda. It is not new, and this is the real source of violent extremism.
For years the UK government funded Omar Bakri who led the Muhajiroon organisation, members of whom carried out stabbings in London last year. The attack in Manchester was carried out by a Libyan rebel fighter given the green light by the security services for multiple trips to Syria and Libya to fight with UK sponsored terrorists. Who knows why they did their attacks when they did, but I don’t think it is a coincidence that it happened just before a UK election which then focussed much of the government party campaign on attacking the opposition leader as being soft on fighting terrorism.
Extremists are a tool of foreign and domestic policy, they are recruited by the security apparatus and deployed as and when they want them to do what serves an agenda. That agenda is to justify the bloated security budgets that could and should be better spent in many ways. It is essentially a racket.
The truth is what Jeremy Corbyn observed before the last election much to the consternation of that same security apparatus: we need a change policy to one..
” ..that fights rather than fuels terrorism”