Melanie Phillips, Raw and Uncut

“You couldn’t make it up.”

Coming from an individual who links to a website run by a truly demented anti-Semite that really is rather rich.

‘mostly harmless’
“You couldn’t make it up.”

I’ve just read your blog.
Clearly you can make it up and do!

A fantastic must-watch piece by one of Israel’s most articulate defenders. Mel is completely fearless.

No wonder ‘mostly harmless’ is stamping his dainty feet in frustration. He’s probably over-tired poor little chap.

cityca, as a psychologist I have learned about syncronicity. Life has a habit of presenting us with incidents which seem to be related but which are not.

Since I first saw Melanie’s video I have been sent what I posted above and am in correspondence with a psychotherapist in a European country who was forced to resign his job because he wrote a paper which criticised the tendency of most of his Muslim clients not to accept responsibility for changing their lives or blame for what they did wrong – it was always someone else’s fault, and he located that tendency where he believed it belonged, within Islamic culture. I have read the paper. It is scholarly and measured.

I have little doubt that these are chance, unrelated occurrences, but what if I am wrong? What if they are the beginning of a pattern which will initiate change?

Mitnaged, that’s a great “what if”. It is possible. If Netanyahu spoke up more…

cityca, it’s a hope, only. I can easily identify with your concerns.

I base my thinking on a seminal model of the change process developed by Prochaska and DiClemente in 1982, which says that it happens in stages and by way of an interplay between external stimuli and internal triggers in the person. The stages are

precontemplation (in which the person is passive, may be troubled but not sufficiently informed that the changes need to be made);

contemplation (in which the person may be open to timely messages or advice about the benefits of changing);

determination stage (where the person is on the cusp of changing or moving in that direction and here again correct information can push him/her into taking the actual steps);

and finally the maintenance stage (where the lived experience of the change has become internalised and the change becomes lived experience).

This is an individual model but it can be informative when we examine groups.

There needs to be a massive change in its pluralistic, inclusive mindset for the West to be able to deal with the threats we both describe. It needs to drag itself away from settling for a quiet life and divest itself of all its assumptions that if it accommodates Islamist demands then its people will be left in peace.

In terms of the model above, I believe that the West, where it is at all aware, is poised between precontemplation and contemplation phases as regards the dangers it faces from Islamism. What is woefully lacking is the systematic dissemination of the information that there IS a danger, and the regular, timely messages which will drive home what is going on, and which will, if people like us can put them out there, will eventually push our societies into the determination stage.

The determination stage is, I believe, where our troubles will really begin because Islamism will resist the threat to its supremacy, and much depends upon how we cope with that resistance. It will also take a long time because Western governments have let this ride for so long.

If our society manages to maintain its reasoned, informed attitude to Islamism (by which I mean holding it accountable for everything it does and resisting being bullied into submission by it) our children may be able to hope for free and peaceful lives.

Bear in mind, however, that Islamism will not cave in quietly – it will continue to push the boundaries until it is firmly kept in check.

cityca, my post about the stages of change was necessarily very simplistic – as my colleagues and family know, I could go on and on (and regularly do!).

Many of us are still processing the shock of 7/7, myself among them, because I was very nearly involved in one of the explosions. I was delayed by a phone call at home and by the time I had finished, all the transport networks into and out of London had been shut down. Had I left on time, you might never have heard of me :~)). Later still I worked with the effects on the emergency services and with the bereaved and the survivors and their families.

Perhaps we are at the precontemplation stage of dealing with the Islamist threat: we are aware of the discomfort it causes us and more and more of us are becoming resistant to the “Islam means peace” message. However, in order to make changes, the person needs to have a sense of agency and power. We are equally aware that we have very little, thanks to our respective governments’ apparently incapability to confront this head on and Jewish people’s interests having been sold out by the the likes of the BoD.

Thankfully, Islamists in the UK and elsewhere literally don’t know when to stop taking advantage and they up the ante of entitlement in their uniquely belligerent way. The model change I posited above doesn’t apply to them – it is situated from within the western perspective. Islamists don’t see the need for change anyway, particularly not when they are getting what they want by being thoroughly barbarian. However, they lack the insight to quit while they are ahead, so to speak, or to realise that every Islamist insult and incident of violence, every encroachment or criticism of us which makes the press adds to our awareness that something must be done.

It’ll be a slow process but that will push us into the contemplation stage, and as you know people are already speaking out and naming their discomfort in spite of attempts to silence them by the sort of legislation that Elisabeth Sabbaditsch Wolff and Geert Wilders have fallen foul of.

The role of CiF Watch and other blogs is to make people aware that there is a danger.