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Siegel: There is a moment in typical horror films where the central characters have been pushed to their limit. They then change and fully embrace the willingness to be as ruthless as the threat they face. No more moral high ground; no more futile attempts to ignore or change the threat’s essence. As Lee Harris described in The Suicide of Reason, it is the willingness o r license to be (not necessarily actually being) as ruthless that is critical. It is a mental state that sheds all the prior counter-productive efforts at denial to finally clearly focus on the threat faced. Part of the Inner Jihad is to reach that Turnaround Moment sooner rather than later.

FP: You suggest that “mirroring” should be used as part of our arsenal. Tell us about it.

Siegel: Mirroring is a literal approach to transferring back to the addict responsibility that we have been inappropriately accepting. Critical to the addict/enabler relationship is asymmetry. Like the addict, the enemy uses a less limiting set of rules than we do. The enemy typically initiates aggression while we respond only. Mirroring means that we demonstrate our willingness to act symmetrically, to be governed by the same rules. It is stunning how much is accomplished when one’s attitude simply is clear that he will do what is necessary; often not much else is needed as the addict or enemy realizes the game is fundamentally changed. But other times action is absolutely needed. Demonstrating that we are not afraid to treat the enemy as it treats us carries great meaning. Imagine (international law aside) if Israel announced that from now on it will mirror Hamas such that if civilian populations are targeted by bombs from Gaza, Israel will do the same (it is accused of such anyway). The population might finally rethink and take responsibility for its privilege of voting its leaders. As stated earlier, all behavior is instructive and when we mirror we teach the other the effects of his behavior.

Conversely, some situations demand that we assert asymmetry; those cases where it is necessary to highlight our differences with the enemy. Just this week, an disingenuous report was issued by an NGO drawing an equivalence between Palestinian and Israe li schoolbooks claiming that both sides have their relativistic “ narratives.” Yet, as the Palestinian Media Watch’s website has demonstrated for years, there is nothing in the West anywhere comparable to the hatred spewed daily by the Palestinian Authority, including through its education system. It is interesting to note that while the US State Department initially funded the “study,”- in what appears to be an attempt to sanitize the PA’s record so that the US can continue to fund the PA against the spirit of US law- Hillary Clinton has a difficult time escaping her conclusion as Senator in 2007 that these schoolbooks along with other media “profoundly poison(s) the minds of these children.” It is most important that we do not succumb to this type of use of symmetry that distorts the profound differences between us and the enemy.

Essentially, we are not clear as a nation, participating in a world with international rules, how to bes t fight this enemy. The first act of any rehab is to acknowledge that we do not know how nor are we yet competent to stop our addictions. This is not a book about policy. In fact, the “right” policies are unlikely to emerge until a critical mass has meaningfully dealt with their Control Factors and share a common perspective. We like to look at our history and assume a single perspective throughout but the truth is that we had to learn how to respond to Pearl Harbor, the Nazis, the Cold War etc. The same applies here. Our press promotes “elites” who are tasked with acting as if they possess the “true wisdom” to deal with our threats but the truth is we do not know nor are we equipped to marshal enough of our population to agree just yet. The sooner we learn, however, the less we will suffer. Mirroring has always been a key component of those lessons.

I have been encouraged by some recent acts that have begu n to nip at the asymmetry. For years, the language of “feeling s” had been reserved for our enemy while we were limited to that of “action;” we would do terrible acts that would cause bad feelings in the enemy which would then serve to justify whatever response it made. It had always been a question of the harsh insensitive acts Westerners do against Muslims and the resulting hurt, loss, shame etc. that Muslims experience. The Ground Zero Mosque incident, however, broke new ground because all of a sudden non-Muslims’ feelings became the focus and were cast as resulting from Muslim acts. Another example was seen in how quickly the attempt to blame the Benghazi murders on the video about Mohammad fell apart. Just as large corporations eventually learned to turn away from shakedown attempts from race baiters, we are beginning to learn to demand symmetry through mirroring. A word of caution: When enablers change their behavior and demand symmetrical rules f or the addict, the latter typically initially erupts with great resistance. This is a stage we must be prepared to

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