A new article by Robert Spencer at FrontPage contains a real insight into the paranoid mentality that we have documented extensively here at LGF: The Conspiratorial Mind of the Arab World.

A fundamental element of Islamic culture is an implacable belief in its own superiority. This idea is rooted in the Qur’an and Islam: the revelation to Muhammad, according to orthodox Muslim belief, is the final and perfect revelation from the one true God. It corrects and abrogates all previous revelations, including the Torah and Gospel that form the foundation of the culture of the non-Muslim West. The Jews and Christians who remain in the world after the time of Muhammad are renegades who have rejected this final revelation out of corruption and malice. At certain points in the Middle Ages, this Muslim self-understanding meshed quite well with the realities of the world: a unified Muslim empire encroached inexorably upon a Christendom riven by squabbles and overmatched in both military might and technology.

But when all that began to change, and when the squabbling mini-states of Western Europe began to chip away at the former domains of the Mehmet the Conqueror and Suleiman the Magnificent, the Muslim world found that it had no framework to deal with defeat. The superiority of the House of Islam was a given. How then did it lie defeated, divided, colonized? Well, it must not have been a fair fight. The Muslims must have fallen victim to shabby, shadowy trickery — to a conspiracy.