Clearly, the problem with Vimothy is that his racism is ontological: Islam, Arabs, Muslims are inherently evil, are crazed sub-humans hell-bent on destroying all of humanity, including themselves, and as such have no right to exist, but must be collectively punished and, where necessary, ultimately exterminated. Consequently, there is no point in attempting to 'argue' with him on humane or moral grounds (ie that not all Arabs and Muslims are crazed fundamentalist terrorists, that the majority are reasonable and moderate people etc), because the very terms of reference, the whole terms of the 'debate' are constitutively racist, so that by being drawn into it one is unwittingly accepting the 'reasonableness' of Vimothy's racist diatribes.
Zizek summarized this dilemma with respect to Nazi anti-Semiticism: "For example, Nazi anti–Semitic violence was false in the same way. This entire large–scale frenetic activity was fundamentally misdirected in a massive passage l’acte betraying the inability [to come to terms with] the real kernel of the trauma, the social antagonism. What I claim is that anti–Semitic violence was not only factually wrong, in the sense that Jews were not really like that, they were not exploiting Germans, or organizing a universal plot against humanity. It wasn’t only morally wrong when judged against some elementary standards of decency. Of course it’s morally wrong but that doesn’t really hit the mark. If you claim it was factually wrong, in the sense that "Jews are not really like that", because the moment you accept the discussion in these terms, you are lost. Let’s say that in the 1930’s you try to answer a Nazi by claiming "Wait a minute, you are exaggerating." If you check it out the truth will of course be somewhere in the middle. Of course there were some Jews who were seducing German girls, why not? Of course there were some Jews whose influence in media was very strong. That’s not the point. We get a cue here from one of my favorite dictums of Lacan. Let’s say that you have a wife who sleeps with other men and you are pathologically jealous. Even if your jealousy is grounded in fact it’s still a pathology. Why? Because, even if what the Nazis claimed about Jews was up to a point true, anti–Semitism was formally wrong, in the same sense that in psychoanalysis a symptomatic action is wrong. It is wrong because it served to replace or repress another true trauma, as something that inherently functions as a displacement, an act of displacement, as something to be interpreted. It’s not enough to say anti–Semitism is factually wrong, it’s morally wrong, the true enigma is ,why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew for their ideology to function? Why is it that if you take away their figure of the Jew their whole edifice disintegrates?"
The question that arises here is why in order for Vimothy to retain his 'balance' does he desperately need to construct such racist fantasies about Arabs, about Muslims, about Islam. The post-9/11 paranoia in the West characteristic of dogmatists like Vimothy is a direct result of the misdirected attempt to reconstitute their imperialist neo-liberal universe so that they can function unfettered once again, with disasterous consequences.
"If you take from the paranoiac his paranoiac symptom, it’s the end of the world for him."
