Typecasting: A Manipulation Tool Used by Orthodox Muslims

In Gavin de Becker's book, The Gift of Fear, he describes several indicators that a predator is trying to gain control of a woman (to rape, rob, or murder her). One of these indicators is "typecasting." Here's how de Becker describes it:

A man labels a woman in some slightly critical way, hoping she'll feel compelled to prove that his opinion is not accurate. "You're probably too snobbish to talk to the likes of me," a man might say, and the woman will cast off the mantle of "snob" by talking to him. A man tells a woman, "You don't look like someone who reads the newspaper," and she sets out to prove that she is intelligent and well-informed. When Kelly (an example de Becker was using) refused her attacker's assistance, he said, "There's such a thing as being too proud, you know," and she resisted the label by accepting his help.

Typecasting always involves a slight insult, and usually one that is easy to refute (in our case, the insults include Islamophobic or racist). But since it is the response itself that the typecaster seeks, the defense is silence, acting as if the words weren't even spoken. If you engage, you can win the point, but you might lose something greater. Not that it matters what some stranger thinks of you anyway, but the typecaster doesn't even believe what he says is true. He just believes that it will work.

The Gift of Fear is an excellent book with many useful insights into our resistance against the manipulative attempt to Islamize our countries.

Read a full list of the manipulation methods from the book: Summary of Survival Signals.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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Islamic Doctrine in Action

As perplexing as it may be to non-Muslims, jihad is a form of worship.

Allah discouraged Muslims from passive expressions of faith. To prove one's faith, Allah demands action. Specifically and most importantly, jihad — fighting in the way of Allah. Fighting to establish the legal domination of Islam. It is Islam's prime directive.

You and I may think it is wrong, but to a Muslim, it is right. It is commanded by Allah. What could be more right than that to someone who believes it?

The world must awaken to the existence of such a creed and stop blinding itself with wishful thinking. This is not going to go away.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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Using Ambiguity to Reduce Ignorance

Have you seen the MEMRI video, posted by Honor Diaries, of a Saudi sheik talking about the virgins of paradise? I posted it on my personal Facebook page with the comment, "Don't you enjoy learning about other cultures?"

I have used ambiguous statements like this before and found them very effective. Some of my friends and family don't quite know how I mean it when I say things like that. Several of my Facebook friends have told me they sometimes can't figure out what side of an issue I'm on. But with people who are very resistant to basic information about Islam, this kind of ambiguity is very effective.

Lots of my Facebook friends watched the video because they were curious. Even my mom watched it. I mix in all kinds of stuff in my Facebook posts. And then I throw something Islam-related in there once in awhile, and even people who might normally avoid looking at that sort of thing read it or watch it because I am not in their face, self-righteously shoving this horrible reality down their throats. They don't see me as an alien, out-of-touch crazy man spouting hate speech.

Several of the people I work with are friends of mine on Facebook, and today at work, I said to one of them, "Did you see that post on my Facebook page today? The sheik talking about paradise?"

"Yeah, I did," he said, shaking his head.

"Crazy, right?" I said this to join him in his world. In the past he's been reluctant to consider the possibility that basic, mainstream Islamic teachings are violent and intolerant. But he has slowly come around to a better understanding of the painful and disturbing facts about Islamic doctrine. Then I said, "I recognized some of what he said from the Koran, but the rest of it must be in the Hadith, which I haven't read." He already knew I've read the Koran. I said this because I wanted to make sure he understood that these were not merely the mad ravings of a sheik, but the tenets of basic Islamic doctrine, faithfully expressed.

Then I said, "It's amazing that this stuff is televised." He nodded. "That was a video by MEMRI," I said. "which stands for 'Middle East Media Research Institute.' That's all they do: They take programs that air on TV in the Muslim world and translate them into English. You see the most amazing stuff on there."

Another guy had walked in on this conversation, and he asked, "Like what other kind of stuff?"

I said, "Like a video I saw today showing a Palestinian cleric giving a Friday 'sermon' while waving a knife around, and telling the listeners in the mosque (and on TV!) how to stab Israelis."

I talk about many things at work, but every once in a while, when a good opportunity presents itself, I try to inject a little solid information about Islam. I want people to understand that there is a well-established written doctrine, and it is aggressive, intolerant, and violent, and when they see Muslims acting this way, they are not seeing insane "extremists," taking Islam's peaceful teachings out of context; they are seeing faithful believers following the true teachings of Islam.

But to get this message across with any degree of success, I have learned from bitter experience that it has to be done with some ingenuity and flexibility. And one of the methods that really helps is to use ambiguity. The question I added to the MEMRI video on my Facebook page is a good example: "Don't you enjoy learning about other cultures?"

That can be taken at least two ways: I might mean it as sarcasm. Or I might mean it sincerely. It is certainly interesting to learn about other cultures.

As we've written before, one good reason (among many) to learn more about Islam — a reason that a multiculturalist would surely subscribe to — is that it is enlightening to learn about other cultures and to avoid being ill-educated, unworldly, or one-sided about your own culture. So my comment especially motivated those kinds of people, and those are the very people who are not being reached with this information, and who are most in need of a new understanding of Islam.

Using ambiguity this way is a no-lose situation. Those who are already acquainted with Islam will not change their minds, and if it makes the rest of them curious enough to watch the video, they will be closer to waking up to the problem of Islam.

In this way, ambiguity can help you get past peoples' defenses.

In the conversation above, after I said I had read some of that stuff in the Koran, I said, "The Koran seemed so blatant in its lavish descriptions of Paradise and its scary descriptions of hell. It was so obviously self-serving, I'm surprised anyone bought it. L. Ron Hubbard had a better shtick!"

Let me explain why I added that last comment. First of all, L. Ron Hubbard is the creator of Scientology, and I have already talked to my workmate several times about Scientology, and he and I are in agreement that Scientology is a religion with dangerous policies and bizarre beliefs. But as we've advocated here many times, you can use Scientology to make it clear that criticizing religions is a perfectly fine thing to do. Whenever you criticize Scientology, you will never get any flak, unless the person you're talking to is a Scientologist. Nobody ever argues with you or tries to defend Scientology. So by adding this comment, I changed the feel of our conversation from an Islam-bashing session to a civilized discussion of the merits of different religious creeds.

Hopefully we're all getting better at having these conversations about Islam. I encourage you to share what works here: Talk About Islam Among Non-Muslims. Let's help each other improve our success rate.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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Improve Your Persuasion Powers By Speaking Their Language

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to pay attention today to the words people use to describe their experience. Find out what "representational system" they use the most. Once you learn how to do this, you can start talking to people in a way that will reach them, because you'll be using the representational system they favor. But for now, your mission is to simply identify the primary representational system of everyone you talk to today.

Now that I've given you the mission, I'm going to explain it. A "representational system" is one of three things: Visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. When you think or remember, you are representing reality in your mind. For example, you can remember what happened yesterday by seeing mental pictures. That would be using your visual representational system. Or you could remember by recalling what someone told you yesterday or the sounds you heard yesterday. That would be using your auditory representational system. Or you could remember how you felt yesterday. That's using your kinesthetic representational system.

This all sounds terribly complicated, but it's not. We have three primary ways to store and recall reality: Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Many of our memories or imaginings include all three representational systems, of course. In other words, you remember what you saw, what you heard, and what you felt.

But all of us tend to "favor" one representational system over the others, in the same way that you are right-handed or left-handed. You tend to use one representational system more than others. You tend to store your most important information in that representational system. You tend to respect and respond to information presented in that representational system more than you would if it was presented using a different representational system.

In other words, if you are a visually-oriented person, and I speak to you using visual terms, what I say will have more impact, will be more persuasive, will be more memorable to you than if I spoke to you using auditory terms.

Speaking in visual terms would be saying things like, "When you read the Quran, you will see things in a whole new light. You'll get the big picture." Speaking in auditory terms would be saying things like, "When you read the Quran, you are hearing the words of Mohammad the way Muslims around the world hear them. It may sound like what I'm saying does not make sense, but once you read the Quran, it will click for you." Speaking in kinesthetic terms would be saying things like, "When you read the Quran you'll grasp the overall negative, hostile feeling of Mohammad and Allah toward non-Muslims." Click here to find more examples of the kinds of words that indicate the three different representational systems.

But before attempting to speak someone's language, you must first know what it is. How can you know? By listening to the way people describe things when they talk. That's your assignment today. And ideally, you would keep it up every day until you can easily know what representational system people favor. Once you can do that, speaking someone's language is easy.

This exercise will increase your observational powers. And it will increase your ability to connect to people and influence them.

You can practice all day long. Anytime you are speaking with someone, pay attention to which words they use. Which sensory system are they talking about?

This is not as hard as you would think. If I told you to determine whether someone was right or left handed, you would be able to tell just by watching, don't you think? If you observed the person's behavior for awhile, you'd easily identify which hand they favor. You may have known the person for awhile and didn't know if they were right or left handed, but once you pay attention, once you're looking for it, you can find out just by paying attention.

You can do the same to discover the representational system they favor. It is only a matter of paying attention.

We need to reach people. We need to help them understand what we understand about the third jihad. We need to get past their barriers to listening. So we need to get really good at gaining rapport with people. One excellent way to improve our rapport and help people to listen to (and respect) what we say is to speak their language — to use the representational system they favor most when we speak.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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When You Meet Resistance

Milton Erickson was an accomplished and well-respected psychiatrist who created innovative therapeutic techniques and was able to cure or significantly help many seriously mentally ill patients whose cases had stumped every other psychiatrist who had tried to help them before Erickson.

I once read something Erickson wrote that struck me as profound and important at the time, but it wasn't until many years later when I began trying to share what I was learning about Islam that what he wrote became personally relevant. He said in psychiatric literature, they talk a lot about "resistant patients." This is a common phenomenon in psychiatry: Patients often put up psychological barriers to change. Frequently, the mental illness causes intense suffering for the patient, yet patients will often resist change. From the point of view of the psychiatric literature, the resistance originates in the patient.

Erickson's point of view was entirely different. And I believe his different point of view led to his many innovations in the field and allowed him to successfully treat patients who were unreachable by other competent psychiatrists:

Erickson considered a resistant patient to be an indication of his own lack of skill. 

In other words, if he was skilled enough at dealing with a particular human psyche, there would be no resistance. If his rapport with the patient was strong enough, there would be no resistance. If he had the right approach, there would be no resistance. And in fact, many times Erickson was able to help "resistant" subjects nobody else could help because he would use their resistance. He would say things like, "I don't want you to change too quickly" and they would resist him by changing immediately.

I often think about this when I run into someone who "just won't listen." My first instinctive response is, "This person is too self-righteous and stubborn to listen." But then I remember Erickson's perspective, and I think maybe I'm just not skilled enough yet. And I wonder, "What might get through to this person?"

We've got a real problem here. If national policies are going to change, a significant percentage of non-Muslims will need to be acquainted with the basic gist of Islamic doctrine. And for this to happen, it is up to us. The media will not do it for us. Politicians won't do it. School teachers aren't going to do it. If it's going to happen, it will be we few who do it — those of us who are now acquainted with Islamic doctrine.

And of course, you've already discovered that a significant proportion of the general population resists learning about Islam. One way to interpret this is, "They are idiots. They won't listen to the facts." Another way to interpret it is, "I must not be skilled enough yet. I wonder what kind of approach might get through to this person? I wonder what new skill I could learn that would make it possible?"

I propose to you that we will accomplish our goal much faster with the second interpretation than we will with the first. And on this topic, speed is important. To see a good example of this approach in action, watch Freedom Writers, get inspired, and then get to work improving your abilities and coming up with new ways to approach the task. And as you discover ways that work, share them with us here: Talk About Islam Among Non-Muslims.

P.S. For efficiency's sake, it is important to focus first on the undecided.

Citizen Warrior is the author of the book, Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam and also writes for Inquiry Into Islam, History is Fascinating, and Foundation for Coexistence. Subscribe to Citizen Warrior updates here. You can send an email to CW here.

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