Fear

[manfred]

The former Chief of the Communist East German secret police, Erich Mielke, once told a clinical psychologist sent to assess his ability to stand trial this rather incredible admission in his prison cell:

There is envy, ambition, loyalty and whatever else, but the one human emotion, the most powerful one by a mile, is fear. If you can control just this much ( showing the top part of his little finger to her) of fear in others, you rule the world. Trust me , kid, I know what I am talking about, I really do."

He used fear most effectively to control a whole nation, and even the rulers of that nation feared him and never dared to cross him. He was in effect the last authority in East Germany, over the ruler Honecker even, on whom he had a secret dossier.

And he spread this fear with rumour... he happily let people believe that every moment of their lives were watched over, when in fact that was a gross exaggeration. However, just by occasional very public measures, such as some dawn raids and arrests, the fear the spread lasted for 40 years.

There are many people like him in history, controlling others by fear.

Perhaps we could spend a while analysing together how one other man, Mohammed, followed the same path to power and control. There are striking similarities, but also differences.

[pr126]

Muslims police themselves, they are judge, jury and executioners to each other.
Islam is a license to kill.
I guess they fear each other more than Allah.

[Fernando]

"islamophobia" is massively to the fore again in the media and I had a look, again, at the origins of this ill-defined overused word. Wikipedia has something I'd not seen before. You can see why those who use it are wary of defining it.

One early use cited as the term's first use is by the painter Alphonse Étienne Dinet and Algerian intellectual Sliman ben Ibrahim in their 1918 biography of Islam's prophet Muhammad.[57][58] Writing in French, they used the term islamophobie. Robin Richardson writes that in the English version of the book the word was not translated as "Islamophobia" but rather as "feelings inimical to Islam". Dahou Ezzerhouni has cited several other uses in French as early as 1910, and from 1912 to 1918.[59] These early uses of the term did not, according to Christopher Allen, have the same meaning as in contemporary usage, as they described a fear of Islam by liberal Muslims and Muslim feminists, rather than a fear or dislike/hatred of Muslims by non-Muslims

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia#History_of_the_term

Islamophobia = Fear of Islam by Muslims

That says it all! No wonder they steer clear of definitions.