THE PSYCHOSIS OF THE MEDIA: A WOMAN IS BEHEADED BY A MUSLIM ON AMERICAN SOIL AND THE MEDIA IS MOSTLY SILENT
By Brenda West
In the psychoanalytic world, there are levels of psychological defense mechanisms. Some of them are psychotic, which means they are not in touch with reality. While some denial of mildly unpleasant things is not pathological, in fact, it might even be conducive to happy living, there are levels of denial considered pathological.
To deny a serious threat to life and limb, and to deny it repeatedly, would be considered definitely pathological. Denial of a persistent threat to life and limb can even be seen as psychotic. Let’s take the case of a woman living with a man who repeatedly beats her up and swears he will kill her, based on his commitment to a theological code. Yet this woman stays with him and continues to profess her love, respect and tolerance for his way of communicating with her. She denies his values, his hostile actions, and her gut feeling that she will be killed by him.
Newspaper readers cluck their tongues and feel sorry for her, but wonder if she wasn’t a bit nuts to put up with him. Mental health professionals trot out various names to describe this sort of behavior, such as self-defeating personality, major depression, PTSD, and psychotic thought disorder involving delusional thinking.
So what are we to make of a nation that collectively ignores threats to its life and limb based on an alien theological code. I am NOT directing my remarks to that unfortunate woman in Buffalo, NY who was beheaded by husband. However, I am jolted by the horror of what happened to her to think about what is going on in our nation as a whole.
We are literally living with – under the same roof of a nation – another culture that acts as a savage “husband” that has sworn to exploit, subjugate, humiliate and murder ……not some hapless lass down the street, but US. We folks, the ones who have lived in the U.S. in relative peace and quiet.
And what do we do about it? We turn away. We don’t look. Our main stream media don’t report it and we castigate the brave few who do leak the news as oddballs, or worse. For all intents and purposes, this never happened – this Muslim wife living in America whose head was severed by her Muslim husband. We turn our collective head away from it, even ignoring the awful irony that the husband’s mission in life was to convince us that Islam is a peaceful religion.
Why? Are we so depressed as a nation that we refuse to think ahead? Where is this “marriage” or co-habitation going? Will we survive? What kind of a world will our descendents live in?
It could be one ruled by these words from the Koran, “Non-Muslims must convert to Islam or they will be killed” (chapter 48: verse 16).
Unless we take action to remove this real and present danger, this is what is coming our way.