Iran's Leaders Are Cuckoo

In case you missed it, Ahmadinejad expressed his warm fuzzies for Israel again:

Speaking of which: always one with the quick quip, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “labeled the Zionist regime as a ‘stinking corpse’ and said those who think they can revive the corpse of this fabricated and usurper regime are in mistaken."

If you think he was taken out of context, well, that’s from the Iranian news agency. It’s enough just to point out the quote and let it sit there and stink. File that one away with the others. The future should never come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.

It is easy to get inured to insanity in this post-modern age. Surely, a civilized looking human cannot have genocidal desires. As Dr. Sanity says, though, psychopathology is woven in and through Islamic society:

Then, don't forget all the other superpsychos whose megalomaniacal blood lust and chilling disregard for their fellow human beings are unparalleled in modern history. Names like Osama Bin Laden, Aymen Al-Zawahiri, Moqtada Al-Sadr...the list goes on and on and on, encompassing a great many of the Imams and "holy" leaders. Never have so many wanted to kill so much because it is so essential to their identity.

Then there is this guy, who seems a bit unclear on the concept of "antisocial".

So, why is this sort of hate and viciousness celebrated in the Islamic world? I note in a series on the psychopathology of terrorism that along with the parenting issues, cultural factors play an extremely strong role in personality formation and can under certain circumstances "stack the cards" against normal develoment even if all other factors are benign (which they aren't, actually, but read the entire two-part article if you are interested).

Several key factors that contribute to the development of psychopathy include:

Genetics

Constitution/temperment

Parenting

Culture

Children who happen to be born into authoritarian or tyrannical regimes are frequently systematically indoctrinated and programmed (by teachers or political authorities) to develop habits of thought and behavior at variance with healthy parenting and inconsistent with normal human values. Such programming can easily deform personility development in a variety of ways--none of them very healthy or humane. It is easy in such tyrannical regimes to become rigid; or mindlessly obedient; or cruel; or rebellious, bitter etc.

We shouldn't be surprised when a professed lover of killing actually kills. It's what he's been programmed to do. He'll do it eventually.