Lindsay Lohan in 2010 DUI mugshot (left) and in Turkey, October 2016 (right).
Lindsay Lohan has made many bad decisions in her life, but her apparent conversion to Islam may be her worst ever, Robert Spencer explains:
Lindsay Lohan has sparked widespread speculation that she has converted to Islam by deleting everything on her Instagram account except for the Arabic greeting “Alaikum salam” . . . .
Lohan has fueled this kind of speculation in the past, saying in 2015: “My very close friends, who have been there for me a lot, in London are Saudi and they gave me the Qur’an and I brought it to New York because I was learning. It opened doors for me to experience spiritually, to find another true meaning. This is who I am.”
She didn’t say what “true meaning” she found in Qur’anic injunctions sanctioning wife-beating (Qur’an 4:34), devaluing of women’s testimony (Qur’an 2:282) and inheritance rights (Qur’an 4:11), allowance for polygamy (Qur’an 4:3), or mandate of warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers (Qur’an 9:29), but that’s just the beginning of the absurdity.
Is Lindsay Lohan prepared to venture out in public with everything covered except her face and hands, as per Muhammad’s injunction (Abu Dawud 4092)? Is she willing not to go out at all unless accompanied by a male guardian, as per Islamic law? Is she happy with being judged deficient in intelligence and religious commitment, as Muhammad said of women (Bukhari 304)?
Lindsay Lohan likely doesn’t know that any of this is in Islamic teaching. She probably knows about Islam only the things she has been told by her friends in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, who are no doubt anxious to add her to the list of celebrity converts to Islam.
Lindsay Lohan is a drug-addled celebrity dimwit from a broken home who was pushed into show business as a child. Like so many other former child stars produced by the Disney movie/cable-TV fame factory — including Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus — Lohan’s young adulthood seemed to be a constant trainwreck of public shame, played out in tabloid headlines.
Lots of teenagers who aren’t rich, famous and beautiful struggle with similar problems — drugs, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, mental illness — but we never read headlines about those troubled youth unless and until they commit some horrible crime. Ordinary adolescent trauma cases don’t fascinate us the way the Troubled Starlet does, because the celebrity trainwreck is so ostentatiously blessed with everything our popular culture values — youth, wealth, beauty and fame.
Here was Lindsay Lohan, who had captured America’s hearts as a wholesome freckle-faced girl in Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap and who, at age 18, became one of the most promising young actresses in Hollywood when she starred in the hit comedy Mean Girls. She had everything in the world going for her, it seemed, but by the time she was 21, her career and personal life were in disarray. She broke up with her boyfriend, That ’70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama, her movies flopped, and her substance-abuse problems escalated to the point that directors were no longer willing to work with her. Eventually, as it became obvious that she would probably never work again as an actress, the tabloids lost interest in Lindsay Lohan, and her brief stint in a “reality TV” show on Oprah’s network fizzled out in 2014, inspiring me to comment:
It’s wrong to say that Lindsay Lohan ever had a drug and alcohol problem. No, Lindsay Lohan had a Lindsay Lohan problem.
And so, in 2015, somebody gave her a Koran and she moved to Dubai and now, evidently, Lindsay Lohan is an adherent of Islam. Why? That is to say, why Islam, and not some other belief system? Why didn’t Lindsay Lohan move to Lynchburg, Va., and become a Southern Baptist? Or why didn’t she move to Dublin and return to her Irish-Catholic roots?
Oikophobia — a term that Roger Scruton has popularized to describe “the repudiation of inheritance and home”:
He argued that it is “a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes,” but that it is a feature of some, typically leftist, political impulses and ideologies which espouse xenophilia, i.e. preference for alien cultures.
Scruton uses the term as the antithesis of xenophobia. . . . Mark Dooley describes oikophobia as centered within the Western academic establishment on “both the common culture of the West, and the old educational curriculum that sought to transmit its humane values.” This disposition has grown out of, for example, the writings of Jacques Derrida and of Michel Foucault’s “assault on ‘bourgeois’ society result[ing] in an ‘anti-culture’ that took direct aim at holy and sacred things, condemning and repudiating them as oppressive and power-ridden.”
This rejection of our own cultural inheritance has become widespread among the decadent elite in Western societies, where affluence fosters an alienation from the simple values of ordinary people. Oikophobia expresses itself in an attitude which, for example, considers the vile traitor Bradley “Chelsea” Manning deserving of presidential favor, but which disparages the loyal soldier who courageously does his duty.
The same liberal media that celebrates the cowardly traitor Manning, despises the genuine war hero Chris Kyle. Liberals hate real heroes because liberals hate America — this is oikophobia.
Likewise, after Lindsay Lohan destroyed her own show-business career, we could not expect that she would seek recovery by returning to any form of Christianity, especially not the traditional Catholicism of her Irish-American ancestors. Why not? Because to do so would be for Lindsay to admit that she was the source of her own problems.
Oikophobia is highly correlated to what Christopher Lasch called The Culture of Narcissism, a phenomenon I discussed in 2014:
What the narcissistic personality lacks more than anything else is an objectivity about the relationship between the Self and others. The narcissist is unrealistic about himself because he cannot step outside himself and view his own flaws and failures as they actually are. The gap between who he thinks he is and who he really is, and perhaps more importantly, the gap between how others see him and how he sees himself, creates an existential crisis which he attempts to evade through various rationalizations and psychological defense mechanisms. . . .
The narcissist’s devotion to self-image — what he thinks of himself, and what he wishes others to think of him — blinds him to his own faults and errors, so that he must always find scapegoats to blame for his failures. . . .
Feelings of entitlement and unrealistic expectations based on an inflated sense of superiority — this is classic narcissism. And when narcissists fail, their reaction is always predictably to engage in evasive blame-shifting and scapegoating.
The celebrity like Lindsay Lohan who wrecks her career through substance abuse has failed not only by the standards of show business, but she has also failed in terms of basic moral values. To return to Catholicism would require Lindsay Lohan to admit that she is the problem — “Mea culpa” — and because the narcissist is psychologically incapable of such an admission, instead she must turn to another belief system. Under the influence of oikophobia, the belief system she chooses must be exotic and foreign. Madonna turned to the Kabbalah, and some people turn to Buddhism, but Lindsay Lohan (who never seems to do anything in a moderate way) turns to Islam. If she continues down this path according to her usual immoderate habits, we may expect Lindsay Lohan to become a Islamic extremist. Comparing her to Bradley “Chelsea” Manning may be apt in another sense, i.e., the destruction of one’s own identity.
Because they are obsessed with their own self-image, narcissists tend to react badly when their self-image — their sense of identity — becomes associated in their own minds with failure. The narcissist’s typical grandiosity, a belief that he is an extraordinary personality, leads to cognitive dissonance when the negative feedback from reality does not match the narcissist’s overblown self-image of superiority. Transgenderism can be seen as the ultimate attempt to resolve this cognitive dissonance by destroying one’s own original identity. For example, after a rich white boy named John Walker Flynt drops out of college and squanders a small fortune in a failed business venture, he decides to destroy his identity and become “Brianna Wu.” (With typical narcissistic hubris, John/“Brianna” is now running for Congress.)
John Walker Flynt as a failed male (left) and after becoming ‘Brianna Wu’ (right).
One reason people like John Flynt/“Brianna Wu” become so enraged when their original identity is referenced is because they do not want anyone to discover any of the wrongdoing or failures of their past. By declaring themselves to be a new person of the opposite sex, transgender people claim that the person they once were never really existed. “Brianna Wu” claims to be an entirely different person, who cannot be held responsible for anything done by John Walker Flynt.
Not coincidentally, Westerners who convert to Islam also usually change their names: “Esteban Santiago, who opened fire in the baggage claim area of the Fort Lauderdale Airport on January 6, murdering five people, was a convert to Islam who took the name Aashiq Hammad.”
Narcissism, oikophobia, self-destruction, transgenderism — all of these are symptomatic of pervasive decadence in 21st-century America.
