The Suicidal Empathy: How “Islamophobia” Became the Racism That Protects a Religion
By Khaled Salih
Khaled SalihA curious superstition
There is a curious superstition doing the rounds in certain corners of Western academia and policy circles: the belief that if we redefine reality cleverly enough, it will stop being a problem. Terrorism, ideological fanaticism, theocratic politics – all of these can, we are assured, be alchemised into mere “constructions”, to be rearranged with the right vocabulary and enough wounded indignation.
The project I want to describe here is more sinister and more systematic than simple intellectual mental gymnastics. Let me present it as an assembly line – a production chain for manufacturing what is called suicidal empathy by Gad Saad: a moral posture so deranged that it compels liberal societies to dismantle their own defences in the name of compassion.
This assembly line has three main stations and four diagnostic tools. The stations are staffed, the case of Sweden, by:
Mathias Gardell, the architect of the “Islamophobia” concept.
Emin Poljarevic, the fortifier, who dresses that concept in academic armour.
Anna Ardin and Mattias Irving, the foot soldiers, who deploy the construct on the policy battlefield to shut down legitimate security scrutiny.
And the toolkit for examining this contraption comprises:
Thomas Sowell’s conflict of visions (constrained vs unconstrained).
David Deutsch’s hard-to-vary criterion for good explanations.
Iain McGilchrist’s model of left-hemisphere capture.
Gad Saad’s notion of idea pathogens and Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome (OPS).
Put together, they map a coherent pipeline of intellectual sabotage: from idea, to fortress, to political weapon.
