The Gentlemen’s Agreement for Women, too

Debbie Schlussel’s recent rant on the “Greeniacs”—i.e., those Westerners who preposterously elevate the Iranian People to the status of Western Revolutionaries fighting for Peace, Justice and the American Way—is wonderful and refreshing.

However, there is one little problem: it’s a problem I have noticed with another fine essayist, Diana West, who on her blog has also decried this strange phenomenon of an irrational romanticization of the “Iranian People”.

And that problem is that neither Schlussel nor West have remarked upon the curious, and lamentable fact that two important luminaries from within the Anti-Islam Movement—namely, their colleagues Robert Spencer and Pam Geller—have been among the most flagrant “Greeniacs” around, both of them purveying a preposterous romanticization of this opposition movement in Iran, and both of them virtually ignoring all the evidence of the deeply suspicious nature of the leaders of that opposition movement (including not only Mousavi, but also Ayatollah Montazeri, Maryam Rajavi and Massoud Rajavi of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), and Mohsen Kadivar).

Both Spencer and Geller have also been ignoring Diana West and Debbie Schlussel.

Meanwhile, West and Schlussel, in turn, have been ignoring Spencer and Geller’s Greeniac mania for the Iranian People.

What’s going on here? It looks like the “Gentlemen’s Agreement of Silence” of the Anti-Islam Movement—whereby the unofficial aristocracy of the Movement pretend like there are no significant disagreements among themselves in the interest of protecting their silly anxiety that public differences will somehow weaken the Movement (when actually the strength of any sociopolitical movement is measured in great part by its ability to air differences in a mature and intelligent manner out in the sunshine of public discussion)—is afoot here. I don’t know how else to explain why Schlussel and West—ordinarily the most perspicacious analysts around—seem to have this blind spot for the egregious behavior of Spencer and Geller.

It’s bad enough when the MSM (both Right and Left) indulge in this kind of irrational romanticization of the Iranian People. It’s even worse, one would think, when major luminaries within the Anti-Islam Movement, such as Spencer and Geller, do so. And this problem is then compounded when other noteworthy luminaries within the Anti-Islam Movement—namely, Schlussel and West—ignore it.

Pam Geller: off the deep end

Pam Geller never met a Muslim victim she didn’t want to make into a human rights cause celebre. Over the months, she has wept tears for the Muslim victims of honor killings as though they were her own flesh and blood. On the contrary, we only have the time and energy to mourn and protect our own.

More recently, she has taken up the cause of the Iranian People with a fervor befitting a supporter of the American Revolution.

Then today, I see she praises former President George “Islam is a great religion of peace” Bush.

Interestingly, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has seen fit to utilize her reports and analyses of the Iranian crisis, but has completely ignored the far more perspicacious ones of Diana West. And recently he has exculpated the cries of Allahu akbar among the crowds of those Iranian People on the basis of the supremely and asininely preposterous argument that this cry has its context in the 1979 Revolution!

And both Spencer and Geller have elevated the death of Iranian protestor Neda Soltani to the level of Martyr Who Symbolizes the Freedom and Liberty of the Iranian People. As extra spice, they have recently found out she was a Christian—but they were already endowing her with that hagiographic role when they merely thought she was a tragically young and pretty Westernized Muslim Iranian cut down in her prime while protesting a cruel Muslim regime.

But I, being a mere peon and peasant of the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement (still inchoate in great part because Spencer refuses to be “anti-Islam”), have little to do or say in this matter.

At any rate, for what it’s worth, I would relegate Pam Geller to the Daniel Pipes Hall of Fame—i.e., outside of the proper business of the Anti-Islam Movement. She has crossed the thin blue line and taken the plunge off the asymptotic deck and into the deep blue waters of PC MC. Unforunately for her, no PC MCs will throw her a life-saver for the trouble she has gone to, to wring her hands in humane compassion for so many Muslims around the world.

The Persian Flu

There’s a new virus going around: it’s the Persian flu.

It is not surprising that the politically correct multi-culturalists would be infected. What is remarkable here is how much the virus has spread among the Anti-Islam population. Among the latter, symptoms include: a starry-eyed fever, a morally noble cough, a runny mind dribbling out the nose, and blurry vision due to seeing Iran through green-colored glasses.

Though not as physically debilitating as the Swine flu, nevertheless the Persian flu has the potential to be much more deadly, in the long run, opening up a well of sympathy and hope in its victim for the plight of millions of Muslims and the supposed “freedom and liberty and justice” for which those Muslims are standing and struggling.

Throughout this whole spasm of Iranian dissidence recently, only two analysts seem to have resisted the Persian flu and have kept their eye on the ball: Diana West and Lawrence Auster. Of the two, West is superior, while Auster’s analysis has some important peripheral flaws that tends to affect its substance. Furthermore and more importantly even, they (more especially West) have forcefully and with clarity stood up for the principle that one would think would be a no-brainer to all people who have chosen to be in the Anti-Islam Movement: namely, that a demonstration or a revolution by a mass of Muslims is never a good thing, much less is it a harbinger of the democratization of millions of Muslims—though it can have limited pragmatic geopolitical functions which the West can exploit if it uses its head.

Neither West or Auster has gone quite as far as I have—namely, to base the condemnation on the skepticism itself in terms of a principle of prejudice against Islam and against all Muslims and not sit anxiously by the daily news awaiting each new development with more and more hope that this mass movement of Muslims, finally, of all mass movements throughout history, is the one that shows substantial massive signs of a true development of “freedom and liberty”. Nevertheless, both (and more especially West) have shown sufficiently strong and healthy skepticism to make their positions, practically speaking, tantamount to mine.

It is this virtue—of standing with forceful clarity to explicitly condemn the Iranian demonstrators along with their oppressors (reserving the pragmatic usefulness of the former to our strategic needs, of course)—where Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has failed in his function of providing pedagogy to his readership and to his admirers in the Anti-Islam Movement. A disturbing number of the latter are showing increasing signs and symptoms of the Persian flu. One wonders what they would do if their unofficial leader took a bold stand like Diana West. I think it would have a salutary effect on them, and provide a much needed splash of cold water on their ridiculously idealistic, fevered brows. As it is, Spencer’s tap-dancing diffidence (at which he has proven himself to be a polished expert on other related issues) on this issue only seems to serve to encourage the Jihad Watchers over whom his influence has become tremendous—and usually deservedly so.

And I notice now that it is only getting worse on Jihad Watch. The Persian flu is spreading, and the symptoms are getting more serious. Just recently, Spencer put up an article headed by a video of more jackbooted oppression from the regime against the demonstrators, and Spencer titled it with righteously aggrieved solemnity: The police vs. the people of Iran. This time, there is, unusually, no commentary at all from Spencer. Just that solemn title, and the still photo from the video. Almost like a grave moment of silence.

And the Jihad Watchers in the comments section are really laying it on thick:

“Czechmade” writes (not entirely coherently, but the reader gets the idea):

Once Irans opens we will get billions of stories supporting our claims and flushing the PV MC speeches and our media. There will be an evidence that islam is unable to rule supreme even in its own lands. There are many fronts opening for our benefit. Think purely in strategic ways and study some Iranica to be able to envolve them maximum in things non-islamic. Already at this stage the whole thing is a heavy blow to islam, to the spread of islam in the West and Obamas silly foreign policy.

“Isabella” manages to be even more ludicrously and romantically rapturous:

To all the praying people out there, please, please pray for the Iranian people, that they will have the strength to overcome and prevail against this evil. I believe in them and I believe in us. Don't think we can't do anything; we most certainly can. I remember my mom telling me a story about when the Communists were driving their tanks down the streets of Chile several decades ago, ready to take over the country and crush anyone who resisted and the mothers grabbed their Rosaries and took to the streets, praying loudly. Inexplicably the Communists turned around and left. Inexplicably. Uh-huh. We can do the same. Right now the Iranian people are free. They are telling the Mullahs and the midget loudly and clearly that they don't want to be ruled at gunpoint anymore. They may be getting their heads bashed in and they may be dying but they are living their lives on their own terms. Please, let's help them to be strong by asking God to keep them safe and help them to overthrow the insanity that has kept them down for 30 years now.

“Yankel” writes:

Not sure exactly what I'm seeing, but clearly the bad guys are in black. They have black uniforms, black jackboots, black face masks. They swarm like Nazis on black motorcycles, einsatzgruppen, looking for prey to swoop down on and devour. Weaving in and out of the black motorcyle gangs are the devout Muslims in white shirts brandishing clubs who seem to be moving in concert with them. Puffs of red that could be smoke or blood or both and patches of green for the good guys always moving fast and seemingly on the run. What a sick Orwellian vision. Beyond sick. Morbid.

“Muhammed Bear” writes:

I think the people demonstrating are incredibly brave; having to cope with sniper fire, acid being poured on them and whatever other vile torments that the Mullahs can conceive.

A slightly more sensible comment comes from “the_poetess”—though it is ultimately undermined by her romanticization of the “Persian people”:

...the Persians have resisted for so many years and are still resisting the islamic cancer of cultural annihilation and submission to a lower civilization. The question is, have they become too tied to islam to see that it's the cause of their misery? Do they understand their real enemies are in Qom? That the russians aren't their friends and marxism is not the way out of their suffering? Until they understand these things, the valiant Persians will fight down through history, over and over again, all for naught.

Something is strangely missing from all these romantically Byronesque comments. Can the reader guess? It’s the gigantic elephant—or rather camel—in the room. All these Iranian “people” are Muslims. Suddenly, a mass movement of Muslims has become the object of sympathy and compassion by all these Jihad Watchers who ordinarily demonstrate a healthy (and therefore devastating) degree of skepticism about Islam and Muslims in general. What’s going on here? Why, it’s the Persian flu!

Not only has Spencer failed to step up to the plate here and provide some much needed direction to his Jihad Watchers, he has been curiously silent about the essays Diana West has written about the Iran Crisis. This is curious because in the past, over the span of many years, Spencer has often published articles highlighting a Diana West essay about this, that and the other thing relating to ongoing issues of Islam. And he has always warmly and with high praise introduced her to his readers.

For example, last year about the Sherry Jones novel about Mohammed story, he began his piece introducing West’s article:

Tell-it-like-it-is Diana West puts this story in better context.

Or, when in 2003 he recommended West’s take on the Vatican and Islam, he wrote:

This morning Diana West has a superb column on the Vatican's extraordinary new statement on Islam and dhimmitude...

Or, in his introduction to her article in 2006 on Bush and the war on terror, he wrote:

Here is the continuation of Diana West's superb proposal for recasting the "war on terror." Part I is here. West for President!

Or, in introducing a review by West of Bat Yeor’s Eurabia in 2005, he wrote:

From the superb Diana West in the Washington Times...

Or, in 2004, when he published an article by West on France and the veil, he wrote:

With her usual acuity and perceptiveness, Diana West explains what is really going on in France's ongoing headscarf controversy...

And Googling only yields more and more:

The ever-perceptive Diana West...

The ever-insightful Diana West...

One of the most clear-sighted and brave columnists on the scene today, Diana West...

Diana West has some acute and perceptive insights on Sharia and Iraq...

The inestimable Diana West once again speaks truth to the dhimmis in power.

And so forth.

Her absence in the halls of Jihad Watch during this entire Iran Crisis therefore becomes highly curious. As we noted, Spencer has apparently chosen to take his fastidiously gingerly non-positional position on the question of whether or not the Iranian demonstrators are worth endowing with anything other than the eminently rational distrust that should be accorded any group of Muslims who do anything that seems good. Is he holding back on recommending to his readers “the inestimable” and “superb” and “ever-insightful” Diana West in this case because she, unlike him, is taking a bold stand in condemning the demonstrators, and he doesn’t want that point of view given any air time on his blog? Or have Spencer and West had a falling out that, like most important things that go on with our unofficial and unelected leadership in the Anti-Islam Movement, seems to go on behind the closed doors of its aristocratic Gentlemen’s Club? If it is the latter, it would be most unfortunate for Spencer to translate some personal or moral or and/or ideological discord the two of them may have had into a stance that has the result of depriving his readership of, yes, in this case, the inestimable and superb Diana West.

In one of her articles on the Iran Crisis, she comes down firmly against the pro-Demonstrators in the West, wryly noting:

Ahistorical and illogical things have been been written by many observers of the Iranian election protests who, looking at what the evidence to date suggests is little more than an intra-Islamic power struggle, see a glorious revolution of liberty-loving secularists ready to propel Iran into the heart of the Western world. Maybe it's the blue jeans that confuse them.

She goes on to expose another of the leaders of the Demonstrators, besides the Only One Mentioned, Mousavi—namely, Mohsen Kadivar. And in the process she exposes the ridiculousness of columnist Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal who practically swoons like a teenage girl at Frank Sinatra over Kadivar.

The only fault I would find with West’s essays written to date on this issue is that she locates all blame for this perverse romanticization of the “Iranian people” on the MSM, whereas the Anti-Jihad Blogosphere itself has shown serious signs of the same problem, as I noted above. But in the larger scheme of things, this is a relatively minor flaw in her otherwise superb contributions to the discussion, and thus I would recommend, as Spencer usually does (but in this case has been strangely remiss):

“Read it all...”

In fact, I recommend a thorough reading of all of her essays on her blog about the current Iran crisis.

* * *

Meanwhile, Lawrence Auster has also been good in this regard, though with a couple of flaws. His recent article on his blog on the Iranian exile terrorist group opposed to the current regime, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), is an important addition to this discussion. In addition, his scathing critique of Daniel Pipes for his support of that terrorist group and its leaders, Maryam Rajavi and Massoud Rajavi, is also salutary.

Where Auster missteps involves two tendencies of his that here exert themselves and tend to undercut his value as an analyst and pedagogue in the Anti-Islam Movement:

1) First, as good as his instincts are about Islam, his rather not-up-to-snuff literacy about Islam tends to make him gullible to distracting explanations—as witness his uncritical swallowing, without any skepticism expressed, of a commenter on his blog, one “Ken Hechtman” who makes a string of assertions and rather elaborate inferences without providing a shred of proof: among the most egregious being—

The MEK is a breakaway faction of the old Iranian Communist Party. After the coup of 1953, they figured out Marxism wouldn't sell in Iran without a green coat of paint on it, so they put one on, thin and transparent though it might be. They are no more Muslim than you are. One of the give-aways is how much they hate the Sadrists in Iraq. The Sadrists really are the Marxist-Muslim fusion that the MEK pretends to be.

As a dryly beleaguered William F. Buckley told Phil Donahue after the latter perorated with some elaborate explanation (coincidentally regarding the taking of American hostages by Iranians in 1979) : “It would take a team of philosophers to unscramble that.” Hechtman’s biggest fault here is to assume that any group of zealously political Muslims could ever possibly become so thoroughly un-Islamic that their Islam is just a “green coat of paint” on their real motivations and aspirations. The rest of his assertions are amusingly recherché and, more importantly, unsubstantiated. To call the Sadrists a “Marxist-Muslim fusion”, for example, is preposterous: indeed, the “Marxist” part of their militia group is precisely what is a “coat of paint” (here, a red one) covering their fanatically politico-apocalyptic Islam, and most of the time they don’t even bother to apply new coats when the old one starts showing signs of wearing away. And Hechtman’s implication that the relative Marxism or lack thereof of either the MEK or Sadrists had any relevance to their ongoing mutual animosity is a tendentious attempt to inject Marxism into the facts, when the more reasonable explanation for that animosity was that the MEK wanted to overthrow the post-1979 Iranian regime and allied themselves with Saddam Hussein in order to do so, while the Sadrists had a legacy of being cruelly oppressed by Saddam and as regards the Iranian regime, at worst only had cool relations with them but were not bent on overthrowing them.

2) Secondly, the whole little bundle of factoids wrapped up in that deceptively plausible but unverified intelligence briefing from Ken Hechtman is swallowed uncritically by Auster and given pride of place in his discussion section, and because of Auster’s severe strictures on his discussion section, someone like me, whom Auster has ostracized, can’t penetrate his maximum-security comments section to offer some correctives to Hechtman’s twaddle.

A couple of good articles to start with about these issues would be this one, and this one.

Conclusion:

I close out by reproducing a sublime quote—from a Democratic Congressman of all people, Gary Ackerman of New York City—who when asked just a couple of months after 911 about the MEK and the Iranian regime they oppose, put the whole thing in a perfectly concise nutshell:

“I don't give a shit if they are undemocratic,” he told the Voice. “OK, so the [MEK] is a terrorist organization based in Iraq, which is a terrorist state. They are fighting Iran, which is another terrorist state. I say let's help them fight each other as much as they want. Once they all are destroyed, I can celebrate twice over.”

Ackerman for President!

The Anti-Jihad Softies: 10 Flavors of the Anti-Islam Soft Serve

Introduction:

Over the years as I have been progressing along the asymptotic learning curve, and since the time I broke free of the asymptotic spell about three years ago and attained the epiphany of the holistic analysis of the problem of Islam, I have noticed various flavors of the soft approach to Islam.

Of course, it goes without saying that the mainstream outside of the anti-Islam movement is soft on Islam, and I have written many essays here at length about that. What concerns me here is the soft approach to Islam by people in the anti-Islam movement.

What follows is a list of the many different flavors of that soft approach along with a brief description. After the list, I will briefly analyze the flaws of each one.

The 10 Flavors of the Soft Approach:

1) Islam is not a monolith.

We cannot condemn Islam, we can only condemn parts of Islam. This is because there are ostensibly good and neutral parts of Islam which, it is assumed, we should not condemn. It is also because supposedly there is no coherent unity of Islam there to condemn—at least not a coherent unity by which the good parts or the neutral parts are embraced within the orbit of the bad parts, or by which the bad parts are deemed to be the “true Islam” while the good and neutral parts are deemed to be either peripheral to Islam or positively enabling the bad parts.

2) Condemn the sin, not the sinner.

I.e., I oppose Islam, I do not oppose Muslims.

3) Many if not most Muslims are ignorant of their own Islam.

Most Muslims don’t know Arabic, therefore they don’t know the evil of their religion’s texts, therefore they must be harmlessly unaffected by the evil brainwashing of their own Islam. Also, ordinary Muslims are ipso facto probably less malevolent, because we all know that only “elites” (here, the “clerics”) are malevolent and are able to manipulate otherwise good people into doing bad things.

4) Many if not most Muslims are victims of their own Islam.

The logic here is that if a Muslim suffers because of the cruelty of Islam, he is therefore somehow less culpable, or less brainwashed than his co-religionists who don’t seem to be victims.

5) Muslim women are victims of their own Islam.

Closely related to #4, with the added spice of extra sentimentality about the female gender: for as we all know, women are incapable of being as evil, unjust and dangerous as men. Furthermore, as we all know, if women tend to be more or less passively co-dependent enablers of the evil of Islam, this absolves them and makes them less dangerous than their male co-religionists.

6) The Myth of the Westernized Persian.

Many if not most Iranian Muslims are ready to throw off Islam and embrace Westernization and recover their Zoroastrian Persian pride. Since the Iranian troubles recently, I have seen with increasing dismay how strongly this myth affects so many within the anti-Islam movement.

7) The Myth of Wahhabism.

This takes the form of the tendency to locate most, if not all, the problem of Islam within some supposedly uniquely “extremist” strain of Islam. The term “Salafism” has recently overtaken “Wahhabism” as the fashionable way to denote this analysis of the problem.

8) The viability of the existence of harmless Muslims.

There must exist harmless Muslims out there—many, many of them. Therefore their existence is useful for our self-defense against Islam.

9) The viability of Muslims converting to Christianity.

This hope seems to be mostly prevalent among the Christians of the anti-Islam movement—the idea being, apparently, that enough Muslims will see the light of the Gospel to make a difference to the threat their Islam is causing the world.

10) “We must not become like them”.

The argument here is that we must moderate our ruthlessness while defending ourselves against Muslims because if we behave like them in terms of physical violence while defending ourselves, we will become as bad as they are, and then what morally will we be defending?

Problems with the 10 Flavors:

1) Islam is not a monolith.

This view ignores the systemic nature of Islam as a sociopolitical culture. When considering a sociopolitical culture in its systemic dimension, the seemingly benign or neutral aspects of that culture become irrelevant if that culture contains dangerous evil as part of its core. That is, such aspects are irrelevant to exculpating that culture from its dangerous evil. And in fact, for a dangerously evil culture, the seemingly benign or neutral aspects actually serve to facilitate the dangerous evil, both in terms of supporting it, and in terms of cloaking it under the veil of “respectability”. Nor should we forget the acutely and ironically important function those aspects play precisely in leading otherwise intelligent observers to conclude that there is no systemic cohesiveness!

And not only does it ignore the concept of systemic cohesivenes in general, but also tends to ignore the uniquely powerful systemic cohesiveness of Islam itself in particular, as demonstrated throughout history and in the way it is able to galvanize so many Muslims globally, and in the broad and deep influence of its fanaticism on Muslims of all walks of life, whether ordinary villagers, university students, academics, politicians, tribal sheepherders or seemingly Westernized neighbors next door.

2) Condemn the sin, not the sinner.

This soft angle is so preposterously absurd, it becomes infuriating to have to spend five seconds refuting it. If Islam is evil and dangerous, then the human agents who put Islam into practice are evil and dangerous. There should be no disputing this. The position here is like witnessing a beheading and concluding that only the concept of beheading should be condemned, not the actual person sawing the innocent victim’s head off. It is one of the most senile abdications of ethical responsibility one can imagine—and unfortunately, not uncommon in the anti-Islam movement.

Of course, the major principle behind this soft angle is the Western sanctity of the individual, which has Graeco-Roman roots, then magnificently augmented by our Judaeo-Christian heritage. Its anthropological arc has led logically to the elevation of the individual human being as abstractly inviolate and essentially worthy of absolute dignity and respect—and this abstract quality manifests its meaning only when concretely instantiated: this means, logically, that any given human being concretely encountered, or abstractly considered as potentially concretized, cannot be “dehumanized”.

This is all well and good, but it has a powerful tendency to interfere with pragmatic actions one sometimes needs to take in self-defense. And, of course, its lofty ideal ignores the massive fact that people everywhere, at one time or another, in one way or another, to one degree or another, treat one or more human beings around them in less than human ways as a matter of course, as a matter of necessity, as a matter of culture, as a matter of laws, as a matter of survival. While of course the West has sought to limit these inhibitions to the ideal and to expand the sociopolitical power of the ideal, it is evident to anyone other than Utopianists that “dehumanization” is just as much a part of being human as human dignity. It can be limited, but not eradicated.

To erect this ideal into a principle that would interfere with our safety in the face of a global revival of Islam as we pursue actions of self-defense against Muslims who threaten it, would be tantamount to soft treason. After all, how did the Allies treat all those hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children they incinerated during World War II? As humans, or as tragically necessary enemies to be killed? Where did that principle of hating the sin (of the ideology of the Axis Powers—Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito), but loving the sinner go when we had to fire-bomb all those cities full of innocent people, and then when we had to A-bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If the purveyors of this lofty principle might respond by saying “Of course, we know that sometimes you have to do violent things in self-defense and we are not absolute Pacifists when it comes to Just War”—the questions remain: Just how would they concretize their lofty principle in our current predicament in the face of a global revival of Islam? And just what actions of self-defense would they forbid because of their lofty principle?

3) Many if not most Muslims are ignorant of their own Islam.

This may or may not be true. Unfortunately, we have no adequate way of knowing, with sufficient reliability, how many Muslims really are ignorant of their own Islam such that they are effectively un-Islamic, nor furthermore which Muslims really are ignorant of their own Islam and which are only feigning ignorance. In addition, there is the problem of “sudden jihad syndrome” where Muslims who seem to be going along for years relaxed in their religion and seemingly “less Islamic” one day snap, or go through a period of rediscovering “that old-time religion” and suddenly morph into a dangerous Muslim.

And finally, another problem with this particular bromide is that it assumes that “ignorance of Islam”—by which is apparently meant an ignorance of a detailed knowledge of the Koran and the Sunna—is sufficient to keep the toxins of Islam from infecting the bloodstream and brain of that given “ignorant Muslim”. This assumes that the dangerous toxins of Islam can only be communicated via scholarly knowledge of its texts and jurisprudence. This is a strange and stupid assumption, and is rather significantly vitiated by the spectacles of largely uneducated grassroots Muslims behaving in various fanatical ways over the years, decades, centuries.

4) Many if not most Muslims are victims of their own Islam.

Whether this is true or not, it makes little difference to our primary concern: the safety of our own societies in the face of a global revival of Islam. This particular bromide also seems strangely oblivious to the unremarkable psychological and sociological fact that victims often become enmeshed in co-dependent patterns of enabling their oppressors. As more or less passively co-dependent enablers, then, Muslim “victims” are perpetuating the systemic whole of Islam that is threatening us.

Furthermore, we cannot afford to modify our primary concern in order to develop policy of rescue operations of one sort or another—certainly not in any comprehensive sense, and certainly not by concretizing principles that would soften the rational ruthlessness we need to protect ourselves from innumerable Muslims fanatically hell-bent on mass-murdering as many of us as possible at times and places we cannot predict, using any number of types of WMDs they can get their hands on.

5) Muslim women are victims of their own Islam.

This suffers from the same problems as #4 above. In addition, it presumes a sentimental conception of the female gender as inherently less dangerous. In light of the unique and complex nature of the danger of Islam, this presumption is reckless and could put untold numbers of lives at risk if concretized into policy, or to the degree it affects the attitudes of our society.

6) The Myth of the Westernized Persian.

Persia/Iran has been thoroughly Islamic for over 1300 years, from the time it was first the victim of a major military invasion in the 7th century, to now. Persians were thoroughly Islamic for centuries. Then along comes one enlightened dictator in the first half of the 20th century, the Shah of Iran, who with an iron fist of dictatorship set about to constrain the virus of Islam which infected all his Muslim citizens. His dictatorship was the only brief window of time in all of Persia’s history when it enjoyed even a faint whiff of a modicum of normal sociopolitical health—i.e., a lessening of the grip of Islam on society. And what did Iranians do in response to him? They joyously overthrew him in 1979 and replaced his rule with a grotesquely evil return to the full-blooded Islam they had had before the 20th century.

To think that Iranian Muslims could possibly present a population of humans sufficiently free of the disease of Islam to be of genuine use to us in terms of any authentic alliance, or in terms of any way of solving the problem of Islam, is naive in the extreme, and betrays a common syndrome in the West when analyzing Islam: namely, the syndrome of superimposing a Western model upon Muslim society and psychology. The rule of thumb here should be that Muslim society and psychology is nothing like ours, and that the only light we can shed on it may be gleaned, cautiously, from our knowledge of the pathologies of criminality, cults, fascism and various forms of Satanism. Even all these pathologies, however, do not suffice to convey the unique evil and danger of Islam, and all tendencies to reduce Islam to their level should be avoided. The second rule of thumb should be that where we notice data of apparently neutral or benign aspects of Islam, those should be automatically and prejudicially assumed to be exceptions to the first rule of thumb, and not indicative of anything systemic in Islam that could possibly countervail its essential malignancy.

It is deeply distressing to see so many in the anti-Islam movement succumb to this sentimental romanticization of the Persian (as can be copiously gleaned by reading through various comments fields of various recent articles at Jihad Watch on the Iranian crisis), thus ignoring the Muslim Mountain in the way of that fantastic, abstract, and utterly ahistorical creature.

7) The Myth of Wahhabism.

This myth is particularly galling to see within the anti-Islam movement, for it is part of the bedrock of the PC MC paradigm. It is the conceptual mechanism by which Islam itself is saved, by sacrificing an expendable appendage deemed to be “extremist”—and therefore the problem—an appendage which serves the function of isolating the problem away from Islam, and away from most Muslims.

When even people in the anti-Islam movement who otherwise seem to recognize that Islam itself is the problem let slip various remarks or locutions that show they too are trying to find a way to save a chunk of Islam, one cannot but be impressed by the profound influence of PC MC, its noxious gas reaching even into the anti-Islam movement to numb the brains of many of its members.

The primary motivation for this particular bromide, it seems, is the psychology behind many of the other flavors listed (#2, #3, #4, #5 and #8): the anti-Islamists in question are anxiously concerned about all the Muslim human beings who will get caught in the gears of a totalistic condemnation of Islam, and thus they cannot help, at one time or another, in one manner or another, modifying their otherwise redblooded condemnation of Islam itself.

8) The viability of the existence of harmless Muslims.

This viability is fundamentally vitiated by the culture of deceit in Islam. When this fact is furthermore combined with the unique quality and degree of fanaticism in Islamic culture, and then in addition combined with the fact that innumerable Muslims are fanatically hell-bent on mass-murdering as many of us as possible, and destroying as much of our property as possible, in times and places we cannot often predict, in the interest of furthering their megalomaniacal goal of conquering the world—the viability falls apart. There is no way we can tell, with reliability adequate to our primary concern to protect our societies, the difference between the harmless Muslims and the dangerous ones. Even if we concede that harmless Muslims do exist, by the millions out of the total 1.3 billion Muslims of the world—even then, there is no viability: for viability depends precisely upon our ability to pinpoint who they are with sufficient reliability and trustworthiness. And we can’t. And yet, too many people in the anti-Islam movement persist obtusely in purveying this particular flavor of softness.

9) The viability of Muslims converting to Christianity.

This viability is based on hope, and so far I have not seen numbers sufficient to warrant translating this hope into policy. Furthermore, if this hope serves the purpose of inculcating an attitude among Unbelievers that would soften the rational ruthlessness they need to cultivate in the face of this uniquely deadly and fanatical foe, then it would become a disgrace to all the victims of Islamic murder and mayhem which the West will suffer in the future.

10) “We must not become like them”.

To this facile flavor, all that needs to be done is present the question: Did the actions the Allies tragically had to take to save the world in World War II—incinerating hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children mostly in Germany, Italy and Japan through relentlessly fire-bombing their cities and then atom-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki—did those actions cause the free West to “become like” the Nazis and Fascists? No. In fact, the West continued to become better after that war, as it always had in the past, on its indefinite progression in unfolding the brilliantly beneficent virtues present in its Graeco-Roman roots and Judaeo-Christian heritage.

Similarly, it can be asked, when F.D.R. signed the order to round up and intern Japanese-American citizens and immigrants in camps, did America “become like” the evil Japanese Imperialists? No. In fact, America went on in the post-war years to continue its ethical progression and become better and better, unfolding remarkable progress in civil rights and social mores. (That this progress has been ambiguous and significantly marred by certain defects is beside the point, for all human growth for the better involves both good and bad.)

Conclusion:

There is no good reason I have yet encountered to moderate two starkly effective truths facing the free world in the 21st century in the face of a global revival of Islam enabled and armed with deadly modern technology:

1) Islam itself is the blueprint and inspiration for the “extremism” which threatens us.

2) All Muslims are agents of that “extremism”—whether actively, or passively; whether overtly or covertly.

Unfortunately, too many people in the anti-Islam movement—both among its unofficial leadership and among the rank-and-file—adhere to any number of the flavors listed above, and insofar as they will gain traction and influence over time, their soft serve will serve to soften the cold hard facts of Islam and melt our resolve into the pleasingly sweet mush of ice cream on another hot, clear, oblivious day in early September.

The Four World Wars: An Interesting Dynamic

Introduction:

Let us say there have been four World Wars in the last century. Three of them are history, the fourth is current events—though most of the people on one side (our side) don’t know they’re at war yet.

The interesting dynamic my title refers to is the fact that each World War has demonstrated rather colossally tragic consequences from the failure to learn from their mistakes of the preceding war. And the most important mistake each time has been, in general terms, the stubborn notion (woefully misguided, in retrospect) that the current war will be fought more or less just like the previous war. This applies not only tactically, but also strategically, and beyond that, as we shall see in wars II, III and IV, also ideologically.

World War I

The mistake of the strategists of World War One was to think warfare would proceed as it had more or less proceeded in previous wars of the 19th century. They did not factor in key technological advances, including the machine-gun and railway systems. This mistake caused the war to metastasize into unexpected proportions, and resulted in the carnage of eight and a half million deaths and, of course, considerable dislocations, disease, and injuries.

It furthermore helped to set into motion the discontent among the defeated Germans that would enable Hitler to gain a foothold in his rise to dictatorial power. In addition, the “Great War” wounded the psyche of the West in complex ways, hastening the disease of excessive self-criticism and thus paving the way for the eventual victory of PC MC toward the final decades of the 20th century, a disease that uniquely typifies the modern West, distinguishing it from all other cultures in history.

World War II

The mistake involved with World War Two was again to think that warfare would proceed more or less like the preceding war.

This mistake manifested itself during the years leading up to the actual beginning of hostilities, during which time one side (Hitler’s side) knew it was at war, while the other side (the free West) was stumbling along in denial of the menace Hitler presented and thus kept trying to appease him in the hopes that what appeared to be his bellicosity would be placated.

Closely related to this, the mistake also failed to take into account the ideological component: here, the fact that a megalomaniac leader could inspire enough ideological support among his followers to galvanize them into a mass movement that would threaten their neighbors and then metastasize into a cooperation of other megalomaniacs (Mussolini and Hirohito) that would become a global threat. No other previous war in recent history was primarily powered by fanaticism, and certainly not the preceding World War. One would have to go back to the Napoleonic Wars to find a precedent, and even that war did not go so far as manifest the grotesque propensities of systematically mass-murdering millions of classes of people defined as “subhumans” in the name of their ideology (though it did veer in that direction with the Reign of Terror that was the immediate precursor to Napoleon’s regime).

Exacerbating the ideological mistake of the Allies in their conduct of World War Two, was the failure to account for technological advances in military tactics, thus putting the Germans at the advantage with their new tactic of the Blitzkrieg attack, as well as their initial advantage in superior weaponry in tanks and planes, enabled in great part by the fanatical totalitarian control and galvanization of industry and science in the pursuit of military technology.

World War III

The mistake of World War III—also known as the “Cold War”—was more complex and paradoxical. Unlike the preceding two World Wars, the mistake of World War III did not exert itself at the beginning or in the years before the beginning, but only really after it was over and won. This particular World War was also not so much an actual war as a protracted condition and strategy of preventing an actual war. It was thus an unusually long-lasting “war”—going on for approximately four decades, in fact, from the late 1940s through to the latter half of the 1980s, when the Iron Curtain finally came down and the Soviet Union—the chief antagonist—dissolved as a sociopolitical entity and as a major carrier of the ideology that was threatening the world during that “Cold War”.

Toward the final years of World War III, the paradox became acute—embodied in its two poles:

1) President Reagan and his supporters, whose vision and determination helped to accelerate the dissolution of the Soviet Union and thus of our eventual victory;

2) the forces of a nascently powerful PC MC which during Reagan’s presidency bashed him and his principles in ways that would prefigure the egregious Bushbashing of the later President who would preside over our entry into our current World War, World War IV.

This powerful sociopolitical force, PC MC, that was nascent but continually gathering cachet and clout since the 1960s, became dominant and mainstream by the time Reagan left office. Not only was it dominant and mainstream in America, but also throughout the West, and this rise to mainstream dominance on all levels—institutional and cultural—occurred throughout the West at roughly the same time, with variances here and there. Among other monumental errors, its paradigm enshrined a colossal misapprehension of the Third World War that had been won—a misapprehension both of its nature and of our victory.

The PC MC paradigm basically frames the Cold War according to a revisionist history or mythology: Communism never was that much of a threat, but rather was exaggerated by proto-neo-cons who exploited the fear and paranoia they manufactured to advance their own agenda of globalist greed, crypto-imperialism and increased crypto-dictatorial control over their own populations.

As such, there never really was a war at all, and the prevention of war was, according to this paradigm, more often than not threatened during those years not by the Russians or Chinese, but rather by the proto-neo-con yahoos who bear most (if not all) of the responsibility for endangering the world by maintaining and aggravating an Arms Race in their pursuit of their imaginary war. And in the deeper, darker organs of the PC MC body politic, where the disease of Leftism lurks more purely, there remained throughout those decades many individuals and groups throughout the West who rather continued to sympathize with, if not positively support, the Communists and their ideology. (Incidentally, some of these individuals and groups finally found a President they feel they can, with unequivocal enthusiasm, support—Obama.)

Our victory over Communism according to this paradigm consequently was less of a victory over a dangerous enemy than it was the cynical and mendacious exploitation of a natural sociopolitical dissolution of the U.S.S.R. into Russia. Even though Reagan and the free West won the Cold War ultimately, the forces of PC MC that put up interference over those decades (indeed, beginning before World War II even started, through the irrationally romantic sympathy with Communism among many Western intelligentsia even then and through subsequent decades) were one major reason why the West was not able to stop the carnage wrought by Communist regimes (Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot being the most egregious).

Thus, Reaganism won one war—the Cold War—but lost another war, the War of Ideas. Its winners have been the PC MCs, and their victory has embodied the transition of their paradigm into mainstream dominance throughout the West, on all levels of sociopolitical existence—academic, political, journalistic, and cultural—and including all social classes, from “Elites” on down to normal schmucks, as well as all the various sociological levels between these two polar extremes.

World War IV

This victory for PC MC represents then the colossal mistake of World War III: a grave and ridiculous misapprehension of the enemy and his ideology, Communism, and a morbidly perverse reversion of the enemy through the sickness of excessive self-criticism: the enemy was Us all along, and continues to be, unless we vigilantly watch ourselves, and of course, unless we do everything we can to “change”—and so, thank Allah for Obama who more than any previous leader embodies that “change” the evil West has to perpetually undergo to expiate its sins.

Thus, the lesson from the preceding World War is that we have to ensure that we always remember how irrationally paranoid we were in our Anti-Communism, and how cynically that irrational paranoia was exploited by evil proto-neo-cons among us; and that indeed the ideology of our evil proto-neo-cons among us was, and remains—for those evil neo-cons are still among us (but thank Allah for Obama and his supportive Democratic Congress, who will finally be able to do something about this)—far more evil and dangerous than Communism ever was.

Now comes along a new enemy threatening us, fanatically hostile to our principles and our way of life, and fanatically driven by an expansionist supremacism: Islam. The PC MC paradigm effectively nullifies this threat and nips it in the bud in two ways:

1) by equating “Islamophobia” with the irrational paranoia of Anti-Communism—i.e., those who warn about Islam are simply manufacturing an enemy and exploiting that imagined enemy for various sinister agendas, just as they did during the Cold War years;

and

2) through its primary dogma of Reverse Racism, it effectively protects this enemy and its ideology from all substantive scrutiny and criticism, let alone from the condemnation it deserves.

The dynamic at work linking our current World War IV with the previous World War III is thus made manifest in the two points above, thusly:

1) the trivialization and demonization of Anti-Communism and the erection of this into a template by which to similarly trivialize and demonize current efforts of premonitory analysis with regard to the global revival of a violently supremacist and expansionist Islam;

and

2) the transformation of Muslims into “New Jews”, reflected by the transposition from the real Jews to these “New Jews” of the implicit, yet powerful, mantra of “Never Again” with relation to the historical Holocaust of WWII—effectively rendering all criticism of Muslims—let alone the condemnation they rightfully deserve—as an ominous harbinger of the evil West’s perpetual propensity to go down the “slippery slope” to genocide: according to this mythologization of Muslims, the only way for the West to continue to avert another Holocaust is for the West to protect Muslims—since they are now seen as the only potential victims of another Holocaust. This peculiarly contorted view of Muslims is enormously strengthened by the ostensible racial fact that the vast majority of Muslims have the appearance of being “ethnic” minorities and the ostensible cultural fact that the vast majority of Muslims are non-Western—and thus the defense of Muslims dovetails perfectly with the supereminent dogma of PC MC: Reverse Racism.

Conclusion:

As far as the free West is concerned, World War IV thus proceeds to be conducted in a myopia of semi-consciously willful denial, and the PC MC West expresses this denial by protecting its mortal enemy through ideological mechanisms that reflect precisely the wrong lessons learned from the preceding two World Wars.

And just as each preceding World War contained the dynamic of an error that served to facilitate colossal mayhem and misery that could have been prevented, so too our current war will likely do the same, since one sees no signs of the West correcting its error anytime soon. Indeed, with the Obama Presidency (as well as with the leadership of most of Europe and the UK), we see massive signs of the West only reinforcing and solidifying that error and thus making it that much harder to turn around and deconstruct, short of the tragically powerful incentives that will come from horrific attacks upon us by Muslims using WMDs of various flavors in the coming decades.

Jihad Watch and Jihad Watch Watch: One Year Later

A little over a year ago, on May 22 of 2008, I retired my other blog, Jihad Watch Watch.

That date itself marked a little over a year since the inception of that blog on May 15, 2007. All told, I wrote 136 essays during that year, the vast majority of them devoted to the effort of analytical critiques of various defects in the methodology, rhetoric and analysis of Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald, the two principal writers on Jihad Watch. A summary of these defects plus a list of links to various Jihad Watch Watch essays pertinent to them was adumbrated in this essay, Overview of my critiques of Jihad Watch (written on March 17, 2008).

In the last year since I retired that blog, I may have had occasion once in a blue moon on my main blog here, The Hesperado, to take pot shots at various features of Jihad Watch, but rarely as concerted and detailed as my critiques were when I devoted more time and effort to them. This is not, unfortunately, because Jihad Watch has in the intervening time amended the faults I noticed and analyzed.

Jihad Watch continues to be the best website for exposing and documenting the ever-growing mountain of fanaticism and atrocity that flows out of the Muslim world into our own like lava. Its increasing influence—and the increasing influence of Robert Spencer in terms of his presence in colloquiums, symposiums, and various media interviews—have made it one of the most important, if not the most important, communications center for the still inchoate anti-Islam movement. It is in the spirit of constructive criticism that I write this essay today, the same spirit in which I wrote all those essays at Jihad Watch Watch.

The “Overview” linked above contains a list of problematic characteristics of Jihad Watch. I here boil them down, omitting some while smoothing over some of the overlap, and introducing one or two I had not seen fit to focus on before:

1. Christian humanist agenda

A bias in favor of Christian neo-pacificism and/or Christian humanism in dealing with Islam.

This particular problem, however, remains rather minor on Jihad Watch, and one cannot discern much influence emanating out of Jihad Watch articles and editorial remarks that might serve to sway, or reinforce, this tendency among those in its readership predisposed to it (who seem to be a sizeable minority among the anti-Islam movement at large).

The major exception to this was the recent series on the Coptic priest, Father Zakaria Botros of Egypt, whose life’s work involves two things: exposing the evil and folly of Islam; and proselytizing to Muslims to try to save their souls for Christ. It is when the latter project becomes intertwined with our broader efforts of self-defense against Muslims that problems potentially arise, insofar as the Christian humanism involved would tend to soften the ruthlessness we need to cultivate on a collective scale. I have noticed this same penchant in Ali Sina, though from a secular atheist point of view, and more generally I have noticed this from various Arab Christians and Arab ex-Muslims. And of course Raymond Ibrahim is Egyptian: does he agree with Father Botros in this regard? He certainly never indicated he disagreed when he introduced each of the several parts of the series. It’s almost like it’s in their blood to want to protect Muslims on some level. Many white Christians who are not even corrupted by PC MC tend to think this way too.

But again, Jihad Watch thankfully has not been pushing this line very much, and it remains rather minor there.

2. Misunderstanding stealth jihad

A tendency to ignore the intrinsic and necessary symbiosis between violent jihad and stealth jihad.

This tendency has continued to manifest itself on Jihad Watch this past year. However, this tendency, while more frequent than #1 above and more important, is still relatively a minor occurrence there. (I did notice one good formulation in an editorial remark by Spencer about this, on July 15, 2008, but never before or since that time.)

3. Misunderstanding PC MC

A misapprehension of the nature and dimensions of PC MC, with a consequently simplistic understanding of PC MC.

This remains an important defect at Jihad Watch. As I have argued in dozens of essays here and on Jihad Watch Watch, since PC MC is the single most important and influential reason why the West continues to remain irrationally inept about the problem of Islam, it behooves us to try to understand the nature and dimensions of this phenomenon, the better to work toward changing it in the years, or decades, ahead.

One important feature of PC MC is its premier axiom of Reverse Racism—the single most important and influential reason why the West persists in whitewashing a monstrous and dangerous Islam along with its enablers, Muslims. This feature remains consistently misunderstood—when it is not ignored—at Jihad Watch.

4. Myopia to the Racial Component

Flowing from the last paragraph under #3 concerning Reverse Racism, the Jihad Watch leadership and its readership continue to purvey the “Islam is not a race” mantra which, while of course true on an abstract level, ignores two overwhelming facts that exert considerable force sociopolitically:

a) the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are non-whites and non-Westerners, and this triggers in the PC MC mind the appearance of racism whenever Muslims and their Islam are criticized (let alone condemned);

and

b) the fact that Reverse Racism is the single most important dynamic of the PC MC paradigm, thus explaining the irrational deference to Muslims on the part of PC MCs coupled with their irrational hostility to critics of Muslims.

5. Exaggeration of the Power and Influence of “Elites”

One major result of this misunderstanding of PC MC is the persistent penchant at Jihad Watch to exaggerate the power and influence of “Elites” in the West and consequently to minimize the problem of ordinary people who participate in the general illiteracy of Islam and who enable, both actively and passively, the whitewashing of Islam. This exaggeration of the power and influence of “Elites” in the West depends upon a caricature of evil Macchiavellians pulling the strings; and therefore all too readily invites notions of conspiracy theory of one flavor or another which, in turn, reflects a strangely impoverished appreciation for Western democracy. This major result seems quite popular among the readership at Jihad Watch, and therefore it would be helpful for Spencer & Co. to try to counteract it with a more sophisticated and intelligent awareness of the complexities of PC MC; but, of course, they cannot do this as long as they too are beholden to it.

6. Failure to support our European “fascists”

Spencer’s unfair treatment of certain European individuals and groups deemed to be “fascists” (e.g., Filip Dewinter, Vlaams Belang, and the pro-Cologne group).

The also remains an important defect at Jihad Watch. While the grotesque behavior of Charles Johnson recently provoked Spencer to moderate his non-positional position on Vlaams Belang and pro-Cologne, Spencer did not actually take a clear stand in favor of them (even though most of his friends and colleagues in the anti-jihad movement seem to have no problem doing so), and compounded this by not attending a pro-Cologne event in Europe after he had announced he was contemplating doing so, and then did not give a satisfactory explanation for why he decided at the last minute against doing so. He added insult to injury by failing at that time to propound clear and bold support for them. The people of the pro-Cologne group are risking their lives and their reputations by fighting the spread of Islam in their part of Europe, and they deserve unflinching and bold support, not gingerly tap-dancing around such support, as Spencer continues to do.

7. Lack of interest in organizing

Lack of concern for the development of an anti-Islam movement in terms of organization and transparency reflecting the virtue of democratic health.

I have written about this in terms of a curious “Gentleman’s Agreement” by which influential members who occupy a kind of unofficial role of de facto leadership of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement selectively censure some people (like Lawrence Auster) but not others (like Bruce Bawer, whose fault was far graver than Auster’s) but prefer to adjudicate the issues of appropriate internal criticism and clarification and operation of the parameters of a Manifesto or working ideology of the movement behind closed doors out of the view of the ordinary people of the movement, as though the latter were peasants, while they themselves are a small cadre of aristocrats, deserving the power to determine the scope and direction of the movement without much, if any, input from the ordinary members, and with virtually no transparency. (And when someone adverts to this problem, as I have done, they tend to be met with various irrational responses ranging from paranoia to arrogant derision.)

This lack of interest in organizing the still inchoate anti-Islam movement serves to retard the evolution of this most exigent sociopolitical phenomenon, and thus serves to retard the development of increased efficiency and influence for the movement. Many subsidiary projects of utmost importance remain unaddressed and undone because of this lack of organization—including the production of a definitive anti-Islam Apologetics Booklet.

8. Spencer’s continuing failure to condemn Islam and continued expectation of Muslims to change

Spencer continues to reiterate various forms of expectation from Muslims—expecting them to do what, exactly...? To start behaving in a civilized way after 1400 years of zealously doing otherwise?

And this in turn is connected to Spencer’s belief in the viability of the harmless Muslim. Since, as he agrees, there is no way for us to tell, with sufficient reliability, the difference between the dangerous Muslim and the harmless Muslim, the latter becomes worthless and therefore pragmatically non-existent for our purposes of self-defense. And yet Spencer continues to tap-dance in mid-air from an untenable position of simultaneously acknowledging our quandary of not being able to tell the difference between the dangerous Muslim and the harmless Muslim, while continuing to factor the existence of the latter into our calculations and continuing to voice helpful expectations from them.

A bold condemnation of Islam—despite whatever sugar & honey ingredients it might contain and despite how much “diversity” it manifests—combined with following the logic of our quandary of not being able to tell the difference between the dangerous Muslim and the harmless Muslim—should lead Spencer at the very least to stop formulating ridiculous editorial remarks that, to the degree they are influential, only serve to muddy the waters when we need more clarity.

This is probably the most important defect on the list. Toward the end of my now retired Jihad Watch Watch blog, it occupied most of my time and effort. The last 15 to 20 essays there delve into various features of this problem in meticulous and massive detail. Its latest manifestation on Jihad Watch, only yesterday, is what pushed me over the edge to decide to publish this essay here. I had been unsure whether I wanted to revisit my criticisms of Jihad Watch in this overview at all, but seeing that particular editorial remark by Spencer—only the latest in many over the months—was the sufficient, proverbial straw. The article in question concerns some “moderate Muslims” in the UK who recently took their more “extremist” brethren to task for supposedly misinterpreting the just and peaceful nature of Islam.

Spencer’s introductory editorial remark was a succinct masterpiece of incoherent self-contradiction:

This is good to see, and it is the sort of thing we should have been seeing much, much more of all over the Western world if the conventional wisdom about Islamic terrorism being the result of the hijacking of the religion by a Tiny Minority of Extremists™ really were true.

The first two clauses express the reward of the expectation from Muslims to do the right thing: what these “moderate Muslims” in this instance have done is “good to see”. And being “good to see”, it is what “we should have been seeing much, more of”—obviously implying that seeing it would have been “good” for us and our goal of trying to manage the problem of Islam. Thus the expectation that Muslims can do something—indeed, something “good”—to help us solve the problem their Islam is causing us. Of course, Muslims can do nothing to help us, since anything they do, no matter how coated with sugar & honey, is fatally vitiated by the problem of Islamic deception and our inability to tell with sufficient reliability when they are not trying to deceive us. And this isn’t merely an abstract rule to govern our ongoing attitude, or a mere extrapolation from medieval Islamic texts: it is regularly substantiated as part of the mountain of damning evidence about Muslims in the news which Jihad Watch publishes daily—which mountain is, in fact, the raison d’être of Jihad Watch.

Now notice, to get back to Spencer’s formulation, how after the first two clauses, from the point of the pivotal “if” forward, we have Spencer effectively undermining his own first two clauses:

...if the conventional wisdom about Islamic terrorism being the result of the hijacking of the religion by a Tiny Minority of Extremists™ really were true.

This third and final clause by Spencer unequivocably implies that it is not true that Islamic terrorism is the result of the hijacking of Islam by a tiny minority of extremists. If it is not true, then that means that Islamic terrorism is the result of Islam itself. Spencer, however, remains unwilling to condemn Islam itself as dangerously violent. He thus remains committed to an incoherent position that simultaneously damns Islam implicitly, while officially refusing to damn Islam explicitly. The third and final clause by Spencer, then, effectively vitiates his first two clauses that finds this demonstration by these “moderate Muslims” to be a “good” thing—good enough, furthermore, that we should be looking for it from Muslims at large.

This is only one example out of innumerable similar ones I have noticed over the past year, but for the most part have bitten my tongue and refrained from calling attention to them on my blog. For example, another recent article on Jihad Watch contained this editorial remark from Spencer, in which he is making this observation about Muslim groups who condemned the recent terror plot in the Bronx of New York City:

It would be more reassuring if they were unequivocally condemning attempts to impose Sharia, whether by terrorism or other means, onto non-Muslim countries, and declaring that they believed in living with non-believers as equals in a secular society on an indefinite basis.

Obviously, if one thinks it would be “more reassuring” if Muslims refined the sweet nothings of their taqiyya to say what we want to hear, one is lending credibility to such taqiyya. If Spencer were called on this, he would undoubtedly try to talk his way out of the corner he has painted himself into. The only logical position for us Infidels is that there is nothing Muslims can say that will ever “reassure” us—much less be “more reassuring”.

And just today, Spencer editorialized, with reference to an impending book to be published about the oppression of women in Islam and a feared backlash of “outrage” by Muslims over the book:

And the response Muslim women deserve is not outrage at the book, but reform...

Muslim women deserve reform!? Aside from the glaring problem that this little slip of Spencer’s implies a belief in the viability of Islamic “reform”, there is another closely related and no less unacceptable problem with his editorial remark: As far as we Infidels are concerned, the only rational view of Muslim women is that they are our implacably fanatical enemy, even if the fanaticism of many of them is only in the mode of passively co-dependent enabling of the dangerous disease of Islam. As for that indeterminable number of Muslim women who might be genuinely harmless victims, unfortunately, the same iron rule applies to them as applies to all Muslims: we cannot tell with sufficient reliability the difference. It appears that Spencer still doesn’t get the logical conclusion of this rule, even though otherwise, in that special mid-air place where he tap-dances like Fred Astaire, he agrees with it.

Conclusion:

I continue to respect Jihad Watch enormously as the single best expositor of the Mountain of Dangerous Shit™ being produced daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and throughout the centuries by Muslims all over the world.

I continue to fault Jihad Watch, however, for failing to extrapolate certain important logical conclusions from this Mountain of Dangerous Shit™.

Islamic “culture”

There are two senses in which “culture” is defined: culture as the generalized, more or less coherent sociological habits and values of a people; and culture as the higher artistic and intellectual pursuits of a small subset of any given people.

Often these two are interrelated, and the influence of the latter may be reflected in the popularity of some “high culture” work of art or poetry or literature in the realm of the former.

This seems to be more or less the view of a certain scholar of Islamic history in India concerning one particular “best-seller” of Moghul India in the 16th century (if not also in its ensuing two centuries) when Islam ruled the Subcontinent. The article by this scholar is a brief book review, and so I don’t know what larger sociological assumptions she is making by calling a 14th-century book of poetry, then revived in the 16th century, a “best-seller” nor what evidence she has for making them. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to trust the judgment of a reputable scholar in this regard, insofar as such a scholar wouldn’t be tossing off such a term lightly.

The scholar is Joanna Lehman who, from a cursory sampling of her academic production, appears to be an unremarkably solid scholar in the field of south Asian culture with apparently an emphasis on Islam in India, and had furthermore collaborated with her husband, Fritz Lehmann, another scholar of the same subject (before his death in 1994).

Prof. Lehmann’s book review concerns a certain “Persian intellectual” of the 14th century named Nakshabi who, she writes, “emigrated to India to escape the Mongol holocaust” (one assumes this refers to non-Muslim Mongols fighting against Muslims).

Nakshabi’s best-known work was based on a Sanskrit legend called the “Shukasaptati” (Seventy Tales of a Parrot) as well as drawing on a panoply of other Hindu and Muslim literature such as the Panchatantra, the Sindhbad-nama, and the Kalila wa Dimna. Nakshabi used an extant Persian translation of the Shukasaptati, the Jawahir al-Asmar of ‘Imad bin Muhammad, “which,” Prof. Lehmann tells us, “he improved by putting into a more elegant style and adding Persian verse, including some qit’a (four-line stanzas) of his own, and quotations from the Quran.”

Prof. Lehmann continues:

Nakshabi’s work enjoyed a great revival of interest during the Mughal period. The emperor Akbar ordered Abu’l Fazl to make an abridgement of it, and another was produced by Muhammad Qadiri.

Now here is the seemingly banal but highly significant observation made by Prof. Lehmann about this popular piece of Islamic literature:

It is interesting to note that while the frame story is taken over intact from the Sanskrit original, the ending and the tone are changed. The young and beautiful wife of a traveling merchant is tempted to take a lover during her husband’s absence, but is distracted by the marvelous stories told by his talking parrot. In the Shukasaptati, the returning husband forgives his wife. In this work, although the parrot boasts to the husband, “I have saved your honey from the molestations of flies,” the husband beheads his wife and becomes a religious recluse—an ending foreshadowed in several of the stories.

Conclusion:

I.e., in the original Hindu version of this popular epic poetry, the theme is one of the husband forgiving his wife even though he suspects that she, in his absence, might have been flirting with another man or even had an affair. In the popular Islamic version, we find a darker more grotesque turn of moral that becomes thematic, where the husband upon his return does not forgive his wife but beheads her—even though the parrot who has been watching her reports to him that she did not succumb to the temptation—and he subsequently becomes even more devoutly Islamic than he was before.

Thus we have a glimpse into the humanity of Hindu culture, and by stark contrast the inhumanity of Islamic culture. This also undermines the typical tendency of the Islam apologist (whether Muslim or PC MC) to exculpate such barbarity on the basis that “well, everybody was that way back in those times”—for here we have the same Hindu literature reflecting a far more humane moral contrasted with the Muslim version of that literature twisted with a grotesque moral, and the Hindu literature is even older than the Muslim version, and centuries older than the Muslim version in its popular revival!

Note:

The citation for the Lehmann review article is:

“The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Tuti-nama: Tales of a Parrot, by Ziya’U’D-Din Nakshabi.” In: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Feb., 1980), pp. 384-385.

Further Reading:

On more of a modern pop culture angle to Islam, see my recently polished up essay from almost three years ago:

Aladdin, Disney, Malaysia, and Islam

Excellently crappy television: Oz, The Unit, and 24

Introduction:

The excellence here refers to the production, direction, writing and acting of these three shows. They are not all exactly equal in excellence, of course. In my estimation, The Unit is the best of these three, though I also enjoy the other two.

All three are also immensely popular and therefore influential in our pop culture, though again, they may be stratified: 24 is easily the most popular, followed by Oz, and lastly by The Unit. The crappiness of them all refers to the way they handle the issue of Muslims, and/or the way they handle the issue of terrorism while ignoring the Camel in the Room. They are of course not alone in this regard among television shows (let alone among movies and broader than that, throughout Western pop culture in general, not to mention the sociopolitical culture of the West on all levels).

24

24 put itself on the map as a blockbuster juggernaut of a show when in its earlier seasons it dealt more directly and more thoroughly than any other TV show before (or since) with Islamic terrorism. It then revisited that in its sixth season. I won’t recount here the many twists and turns of the long arc of plot that lasted many seasons (a discussion of it may be read on a previous essay I wrote here.) Today, I want to briefly describe how in the latest season the interconnected episodes integrate Islam, but more pertinently avoid Islam, in their plot which, as usual, involves a massive and complex plan by some nefarious organization to mass-murder Americans using WMDs.

In this latest season, this time with a female President of the United States at the helm instead of a black President, there unfolds a dastardly plot to mass-murder Americans. The first few episodes lead the viewer to believe that a renegade black African guerilla leader is behind this plot. His motivation for the most part seems to be that America has been supporting with money and arms the government of the African nation he wants to take over as dictator. Of course, none of the black Africans are Muslims, reflecting the common myopia Westerners have about the massively destabilizing and deleterious role that Muslims—both black African themselves as well as Arab—have played throughout Africa not only in our time but for centuries going back to at least the 8th century. But starting the show off with a bang with black African terrorists gives the show the deceptive appearance of being boldly politically incorrect.

As the plot unfolds further in subsequent episodes, it becomes clear that these black African rogue terrorists, while depicted as evil themselves (e.g., willing to use a chemical WMD against their own people as an experiment to fine-tune its effectiveness), were really just pawns of a shadowy cabal comprised totally of evil white businessmen and politicians, headed by Jonas Hodges, a character played by actor Jon Voight. Hodges is depicted as a patriotic American who has created an organization of well-trained mercenaries to help the U.S. military around the world, with the motive to protect American interests. His motive for mass-murdering fellow Americans in terrorist attacks that will be mistakenly attributed to non-Americans (such as the black African rebel leader) becomes clear: he has a neo-con view of the American government being too liberal and weak in the face of growing terrorist dangers, and so he wants to provoke that liberal government and its intelligentsia into becoming more militarily hawk-like through the horror of several actual massive attacks on American citizens. This motive of his not only has the amorphous expectation that the liberal government will become tougher, but the more concrete expectation that once they do get tougher, they will be more eager and willing to avail themselves of his help and the use of his organization of mercenaries, which he wants the government to integrate into its policy-making procedures (as is revealed in one tête-à-tête he has with the “Madame President” where, after his complicity has become known, he tries to extort her with the implicit threat of the WMD attacks).

Thus, what is being telegraphed here by the writers of 24 is that the danger of powerful white neo-cons like Jonas Hodges who would deploy a terrorist attack against America—themselves motivated by a fear of terrorism against America (read between the lines, Islamic terrorism)—is a more exigent possibility and threat than Islamic terrorism. After Jack Bauer successfully foils the plot by Jonas Hodges and his organization to deploy the chemical WND in numerous American cities and Hodges is placed in custody, it becomes revealed that Hodges himself was just one cog in a larger, deeper, even more shadowy cabal of evil businessmen (and women) and politicians—all white, of course, and all non-Muslims.

Where I stopped watching, a couple of weeks ago, because I simply could not stand it any longer, involved a further preposterous turning of the PC MC screw in the plot: this more sinister cabal somehow was able to salvage enough of the chemical WMD that Jack Bauer thought he had neutralized to threaten more terrorist attacks. This time, they were going to set up an elaborate ruse and use a Muslim-American as a pawn: they kidnap some unwitting, harmless Muslim-American and force him to play along by threatening to kill one or more relatives of his. The actor playing the Muslim-American and the director pluck at every heartstring of the bleeding heart PC MC to communicate the awful spectacle of abusing such a harmless, decent young man and exploiting our general bigoted Islamophobia in order to readily blame Muslims for an imminent horrific attack on Americans.

The message being telegraphed here is that shadowy white neo-con cabals can use Muslims—and have already been so using them? wink-wink—as terrorist pawns and dupes to make the general public think mistakenly that the terrorism is Islamic, when it is really the devilish work of ultra-patriotic white neo-cons.

When the reasonable viewer turns off the TV and sits back to think about it and let it settle in, it dawns on him that this is an astoundingly, outrageously treasonous premise, considering our actual context in the real world where we are increasingly in peril from a global revival of supremacist expansionist fanatically anti-liberal Islam. It is no less astounding and outrageous than previous seasons, where it was revealed that the President of the U.S.A. himself—of course, the white guy who became President after the impeccably virtuous black President had been assassinated—was part of the cabal using Muslim pawns and dupes to attack Americans and which included the assassination of the previous black President! Were Abraham Lincoln alive today, he might well shut down 24 and even have its producers and writers arrested.

Oz

I didn’t even give Oz the chance I gave 24. I stopped watching it midway in the first season, after it became clear that their whitewash of Muslims was not going to be leavened with even a drop of common sense or elementary knowledge of the facts. Oz comports itself as a tough, gritty, brutally honest dramatic depiction of prison life in a maximum-security prison, salted and peppered with grimly sarcastic black humor.

As part of this brutally honest portrayal, they dip their toes into the waters of political incorrectness by showing black prisoners behaving routinely in thuggish and violent ways—both in prison and in flashbacks to the violence they committed that got them sent away in the first place. When it comes to the black Muslim prisoners, however, the show consistently depicts them as model prisoners, behaving in mature and calm manner when they are not exercising their right to spread out their prayer rugs and prostrate to Allah. Concerning this latter behavior, the only prisoners who show mocking disgust at this display of Islamic religiousity are those white prisoners who belong to the clique of racist white Aryans.

While there is a confrontation early on between one leader of the non-Muslim blacks and the leader of the Muslim blacks, the show does not depict the non-Muslim blacks, nor any other prisoners, expressing anything more than a kind of baffled yet resigned diffidence with regard to the Muslims—and indeed, more often than not there is a kind of implicit if grudging admiration for their apparent “discipline”. Furthermore, the aforementioned confontation between the non-Muslim blacks and the Muslim blacks concerned the former’s anger at the latter’s attempts to dissuade other prisoners (including blacks) from taking and trafficking in drugs. The simple yet massive fact that al Qaeda and the Taliban account for a major part of the worldwide heroin and opium market and in fact explicitly use the drug trade to further their Islamic jihad shoots this preposterous notion out of the water.

Certainly, there has been PR propaganda in the general media about the Nation of Islam sect (which is considered heresy by mainstream Muslims whom al Qaeda and the Taliban represent) being fastidiously abstemious about drugs, but the Muslims in Oz are not explicitly designated as Nation of Islam and no mention is made of Nation of Islam on the show. From their behaviors and language they appear to be simply American blacks who have latched on to Sunni Islam. With regard to both Sunni Islam and the heretical offshoot Nation of Islam, their apparent puritanism about things like alcohol, tobacco and drugs as well as for example fornication and homosexuality (not to mention cultivating violence, radicalization and extremism) turns out to be regularly flouted in the breech through a complex culture of schizophrenic loopholes derived from the simultaneously and schizophrenically puritanical-yet-depraved Mohammed whose 1,001 sayings constitute the Sunna.

If this were all that Oz does with its Muslim characters, it wouldn’t be so bad. They go further and depict the revered leader of the black Muslim prisoners as a noble, virtuous, Ghandi-esque figure who may burn with indignation at the “injustice” of the system that is “oppressing” his “brothers“ but never in terms of physical violence. Indeed, the show depicts him regularly counseling others against violence and toward “peace” and even has him physically intervening once or twice to prevent violence. He is so widely regarded as a man of peace, in fact, that the prison warden and other officials ask him privately to help them manage an escalating problem of a cycle of revenge violence going on in the prison, and he grudgingly acquiesces in their deeply polite and respectful request. At least from the episodes I saw, the black Muslim and his followers are depicted as the only prisoners who seem well-behaved and civilized.

What took the cake for me, after all this nauseatingly preposterous propaganda in the guise of art, was a scene where the black Muslim leader vehemently stays the homophobic ire of an influential black gangster who has shown interest in possibly joining Islam. The non-Muslim black has a blood brother who is gay, and one thing leading to another, he comes to a point in his homophobic anger where he wants to kill his own brother—and then the black Muslim Wise Man takes a hold of his arm and in vividly strenuous language tells him that this is not the right way, that he must be patient and loving with his brother and slowly show him the error of his ways. The spectacle of seeing a Muslim counsel a non-Muslim against homophobia and toward a more “patient” and peaceful resolution of the problem—when we know that Mohammed himself according to a canonical Hadith explicitly advises Muslims to kill homosexuals who commit homosexual sex—was just too much cognitive dissonance for me to tolerate. I had to stop watching it then and there.

The Unit

The Unit is about a tight-knit unit of highly-trained secret ops soldiers who go on secret missions to clean up various messes, taking them all over the world. In this latest season, there has been a plot thread running through most of the shows involving a shadowy organization that is trying to plot horrific attacks on Americans.

In one of the shows, this nefarious organization already tested a chemical WMD on a small American community, killing many people in the process. Subsequent episodes reveal that they are dangerously close to acquiring a suitcase nuke and plan on detonating it in Washington, D.C. And what kinds of people comprise this deadly terrorist cell? Muslims? Of course not! All of them are Anglo-Saxon whites, and some of them are part of a wing of Aryan-type white power racists. The terrorists also have help from a network of rogue Russians—leading the show during one or two episodes to the preposterously anachronistic spectacle of perilous cloak-and-dagger against Russians as though we were back to the Cold War days. I think once in passing I detected a fleeting mention or two of some operative who had a Muslim name—probably just thrown in there for spice, certainly depicted as pawns in the larger terrorist game (as in 24), and only serving to highlight the non-Muslim character and complexion of the real terrorist threat.

The main message being conveyed here with this plot thread is that the real danger of deadly, horrific terrorism to America is likely to come from some cabal of evil whites and/or white power racists, not from Muslims.

During the long arc of this plot thread spanning many episodes, there were a couple of episodes that branched off into temporary stories having nothing directly to with that thread: two of them back to back involved a female soldier who gets kidnapped by Muslims in Iraq and transported to Syria—the daughter of the sergeant in charge of the unit (played by the same actor, incidentally, who played the black President on 24) who, when he learns of this, goes on a lone mission under the radar to save her. As these episodes unfold, there are pointed scenes evidently calculated to offset any incipient Islamophobia that might arise due to the mere nature of depicting American soldiers fighting and shooting at Muslims.

One such scene involved an area of Iraq where “militants” were shooting at members of the unit who were trying to salvage one specific person for their mission. As the shooting went on, one Iraqi Muslim comes out of his dwelling and is caught in the crossfire. He is only trying to protect his wife and kids inside. One of the unit members gets to him and protects him, and the Muslim is oh so grateful. The message being telegraphed here is that the “extremists” are making life so terribly hard for ordinary decent Muslims. Another such scene showed the unit sergeant taking a mosque in Syria hostage in order to force them to tell him where political prisoners and kidnap victims are normally sequestered in Damascus. When he gets the information he needs, he takes one of the hostages, a Muslim cleric, with him to ensure that he can complete his mission to infiltrate the mental hospital where prisoners are kept—and it is explicitly mentioned, tortured—so he can rescue his daughter. At one point, when he no longer needs the cleric, he lets the cleric go and even hands him his rifle. The cleric looks at the sergeant and says, “You trust me...?” The sergeant responds, brimming with PC self-righteousness: “You are a man of God: I know you won’t harm me.”

Conclusion:

Popular TV shows like these (and the majority of TV dramas show, in one way or another, a similar bias) do not merely reflect the attitudes of “elites”—the producers, directors, writers and actors involved. For one thing, people who work in all those various functions on television cannot be lumped together as “elites”, but many of them occupy various gradations between the two stratified polar opposites which are too glibly contrasted as “elites” and “ordinary people”.

In addition, in free democracies operating under the free market system of capitalism, such multi-million-dollar enterprises as these shows which depend upon marketing and advertisement do not operate on the basis of pushing ideas onto the public that they think the public won’t accept: their bottom line is monetary profit, and if they thought this PC MC crap went against the general mainstream grain of the public, they wouldn’t produce it—and certainly wouldn’t produce it on such a massive scale. Thus, it is only logical to assume that the majority of the public out there is at the very least comfortable with this PC MC crap depicting Muslims.

Excellently produced, written, directed, and acted crap. But crap nonetheless.

More on the Gentlemen’s Agreement and my responses to Auster’s response to my post

In an article on his blog, Auster writes:

Note: My quoting of Hesperado in this entry should not be taken as an expression of approval of him, or as acceptance of his past inappropriate behavior and attacks on me, some of which are referenced and discussed here.

Auster is misusing the word “attack” (I’ve noticed Robert Spencer also misuse it many times in roughly the same way). Or, it can be said, if he is only using it in the one way which a dictionary defines it—the one way of many which, for example, The American Heritage Dictionary provides: to criticize strongly—he is over-reacting; for no reasonable person would withhold “approval” or “acceptance” of someone if all they did was to “strongly criticize” them. Thus, it’s safe to say that Auster is conflating “strongly criticize” with the other meanings provided by the dictionary, such as “to criticize... hostilely” or in its form as substantive, a “hostile comment” or an “assault”.

The evidence he provides for my purported “attack” is a link to a series of articles. I challenge any reader to find any “hostility” or “assaults” there. No reasonable reader would find them there.

A couple of the articles on that Google list simply represent the present one under consideration, so they can be dismissed. Others on that list are laughably insubstantial, such as this one, while this one simply reproduces Auster’s unremarkably approving citation of one of my articles. Articles such as this one only note Auster's highly tendentious subjective interpretation of my supposed attacks on him, referring to the second article on the list which seems to be the only one approaching substance. This one is an article whose allegations by him about me accusing him of being a “gnostic” (and other allegations, like his insinuation that I must not be an opponent of the Left based on an apparently breezily inaccurate reading of one of my essays) I already refuted at length and which in my estimation he ultimately failed to respond to adequately (see the full transcript here). Yes, my wondering about Auster’s view of true conservatism having some consanguinity with gnosticism could be said to be a “strong criticism”—but not a “hostile criticism” or an “assault” on him (much less “a dishonest, sneakily meanspirited, and contorted attack” on him)—at least not by a reasonable person. It is ironic that in this present article of his, Auster after getting done strongly criticizing Spencer (and others who seem to be collluding in the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” which was the subject of my article which Auster is analyzing), hastens to add:

“Let me add that I write the above not in a spirit of attacking anyone, but in a spirit of trying to understand.”

I guess Auster can strongly criticize people but not be “attacking” them, but when other people do it to him, they automatically get accused of “attacking” him. Had I written of Auster’s “truly odd and inexplicable behavior with regard to” whatever he might have said or done—as he does with regard to Spencer but not, he assures us, as an “attack”—, Auster likely would have had the reflex spasm of accusing me of “attacking” him.

Bottom line: The word “attack” is a red alarm bell, a loaded weapon in rhetoric, and should be used sparingly and with accurate precision, not glibly tossed around everytime someone proffers a strong yet maturely worded criticism of one’s analyses.

Spencer also has this penchant to misuse words and indulge in hyperbole and to call any and all criticism that crosses an invisible (and hypersensitively defined) line of unacceptability as an “attack” when arguing with someone: no wonder Spencer and Auster had such a monstrous falling out, with each side escalating in accusing the other of exaggerated abuses. The Spencer-Auster fallout was not like the recent Spencer-Johnson fallout, where one of the persons involved (Johnson) is a demonstrably grotesque lunatic. Rather, the Spencer-Auster fallout seems to have involved two otherwise sincere, intelligent mature individuals who nevertheless have a difficult time moderating their language—and also a difficult time accurately reading their opponent—such that it escalates into emotional and rhetorically complex tangles until it becomes a showdown from which only one can win. With Johnson, the escalation had to do with substance—i.e., the substance of his grotesquely wrong position. With Auster and Spencer, I think most of the problem was the irrelevant sparks and fire tangential to, but overpowering, the light of the actual debate they were ostensibly having.

At any rate, to continue quoting from the present article by Auster:

Also, the fact that he compliments me in the article [i.e., my article which Auster is writing about] and even presents me in part as his standard bearer means nothing to me and is not the reason I quote him.

Again, Auster is misusing a word—here, the term “standard bearer”, which The American Heritage Dictionary defines as an outstanding leader or representative. I defy any reader of elementary intelligence and comprehension to read my article and come away with the impression that I consider Auster an ouststanding leader or representative—not even “in part”. I note in my article that “[t]he only person who has put forth a clear public notice of this Bawer problem and has offered an analysis of it has been Lawrence Auster on his blog...” Then a little later I write that “Auster’s analysis is good within the confines of his delimitation of it...” (and I even add a parenthetical qualification of this). Finally, I discuss the situation of Auster having become a kind of persona non grata in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement, and argue that this has been apparently unfair, particularly as contrasted with the non-existence of any criticism of Bawer who did something far worse (namely, agree with Charles Johnson about “fascism”). Nowhere in this is any sense that I consider Auster my “standard bearer”. Auster seems to have a penchant for hyperbole, vividly exaggerating now one way, now the opposite way.

Hesperado says that I have been the only person to write about Bawer's article (which I did), but since I am persona non grata in the "official" anti-jihad movement (by which Hesperado means basically Robert Spencer and his circle, leaving out other anti-jihadists who do not regard me as persona non grata)...

Auster puts “official” in quotes, but my word was precisely the opposite: unofficial. And the full quote of what I said underscores this:

“As Auster, however, has become a kind of persona non grata among the informal and unofficial elite leadership of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement...”

I’m sure there are other anti-jihadists who do not regard Auster as persona non grata: but do they occupy that role of informal and unofficial elite leadership? At any rate, these are not scientific terms, mainly for the reason that the phenomenon they describe is itself inchoate. If Auster enjoys any substantively cordial intercourse with any significant anti-jihadists who could be said by any stretch of the definition to occupy a role in the inchoate pantheon of an “informal and unofficial leadership”, then Auster would likely already be privy to the mystery surrounding Bawer’s immunity from censure or even normal critique. Since he is as baffled as I am, one can assume his anti-jihadist friends are not part of the “inner circle”, however inchoate and informal and unofficial that “inner circle” might be.

This incidentally cuts to a crucial aspect of the problem of this Gentlemen’s Agreement: its inchoateness—its very lack of form and transparency—seems to be part of its unilateral arrogation by a loose (though mutually loyal) affiliation of individuals: i.e., this loose affiliation has decided to make procedural decisions—on policy matters both internal and external—on behalf of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement, without any process of developing a discussion about it and then a consensus except, apparently, as transacted in private emails amongst themselves. Nor have they shown any signs of being interested in phasing the movement into a more transparent and democratic—and therefore ultimately a healthier and more effective organization. Over six months ago, I published an essay that laid out the problem and possible solutions to this—The Anti-Islam Movement: Prospectus for Improvement. (Subsequently, I amplified it in two more essays.) What have I heard since then about this? Crickets chirping and a whistling wind moving tumbleweeds along the empty streets of the Blogosphere.

Continuing with Auster’s article:

Hesperado throughout misspells Diana West's name as Diane; I have corrected the spelling...

I had noticed I misspelled it a few days after I had posted it, and had already corrected all instances of it several days ago, before Auster published his article.

The above aside, Auster adds a nicely juicy example of the odd pretzelly contortions characteristic of the Gentleman’s Agreement about which I wrote:

...for example, how Spencer remained friendly with Johnson even as Johnson was attacking Spencer's friends Diana West and Andrew Bostom as fascist sympathizers and attaccking his contributor Fjordman as a racist, and how Spencer was never criticized for this; and many equally odd and inappropriate happenings. Yet, as Hesperado points out, when I made criticisms of Spencer that were vastly less serious and damaging than Johnson's attacks on West, Bostom, and Fjordman, I was treated as a threat to the movement, Fjordman called me "immoral," and Pamela Geller portrayed me as the equivalent of Charles Johnson--I, who had written many articles exposing Johnson's false charges against Filip DeWinter, Paul Belien, and Diana West during the very period when Spencer was maintaining his palship with Johnson and calling him "illustrious."

Quoting me from my article—“Bawer in his little article also maintains a mature and ostensibly intelligent deportment, but the substance of his article is the problem: coming down decidedly in Charles Johnson’s favor”—Auster inserts a bracketed comment:

This misstates things. Bawer didn't simply side with Johnson. His article consisted of his own (albeit wrong-headed and hysterical) cri de coeur against the incipient evil he imagines he sees in the anti-jihad movement.

I could have fleshed out Bawer’s problematic substance, but to me it is eminently adequate to say of someone that they “come down decidedly in Charles Johnson’s favor” to sufficiently damn them, since among other deranged things, Johnson has been issuing regular jeremiads “against the incipient evil he imagines he sees in the anti-jihad movement.” Anyone who at this stage of the game comes down decidedly on Johnson’s side on the “fascist” issue (which is the crux of the “evil” being imagined in Johnson’s paranoia) would be obviously guilty of the same thing.

Auster in his article reproduces my quotation of my brief exchange with Baron Bodissey on this issue, and Auster nicely describes the problem of Bodissey’s response:

...the issue is the substantive behavior which Hesperado wants to know about: why is the movement ignoring Bawer's attack, instead of exposing it, as they ought to be doing? It's a legitimate question, And Bodissey refuses to answer, except to declare loftily that he doesn't write about Bawer because he doesn't write about him. Which is no answer at all. Which is what gets Hesperado riled up.

...Bodissey's lofty response to Hesperado. You'd think that Bodissey actually was a European baron, instead of an American guy writing a blog.

(Lest Auster get the mistaken, exaggerated notion that I am here (and elsewhere in today’s essay where I approvingly note this or that thing he has written) suddenly praising him to the skies as my standard bearer, I now iterate the unremarkable truism that just as one can strongly criticize someone without “attacking” them, one can also note with approval anything they happen to say or do without thus putting them on a pedestal: an elementary corrective to such a binary, if not bipolar, framework.)

Moving on, Auster probes more deeply the psychological mechanics of the Gentlemen’s Agreement:

The main figures in the anti-jihad movement have distinct personal flaws, quirks, and vanities, as all of us do. But these quirks and vanities are exacerbated by what seems to be the "prime directive" that is followed by the main figures of the movement, which is to maintain total, phalanx-like solidarity with each other and never criticize each other's ideas, or each other.

This, however, doesn’t include the two more odd twists of the pretzel: The first is that the prime directive of maintaining at all costs the phalanx-like solidarity was violated by Bawer who in his publication on his blog fundamentally criticized not only his fellow anti-jihadists but his supporters—and did not merely fundamentally criticize them, but did so in the context of agreeing with Charles Johnson who had recently acted with such grotesque egregiousness that the Phalanx broke its own Prime Directive and publically condemned him and expelled him. And yet, the Phalanx has not even published one critical discussion of Bawer, let alone has it condemned him. (This, indeed, is part of the pathology of the Phalanx: it tends to confuse critiques—even maturely and intelligently framed critiques—as “attacks” and tantamount to condemnation anyway, as Auster apparently does as well.) This odd twist of the pretzel with Bawer is only the latest manifestation of a trait that has become typical of the Phalanx, as my previous article and Auster’s response discussed.

The second odd twist is that when Auster or when I have written critiques of Spencer—maturely and intelligently framed, even if perceived to be annoyingly persistent—the Phalanx seemed to have little difficulty in publically condemning us. And yet, Bawer’s single and short publication was more egregious and far worse—by virtue of coming down decidedly in Charles Johnson’s favor against all the valiant anti-jihadists in Europe putting their lives and reputations on the line—than all my one-hundred and thirty-six Jihad Watch Watch articles critiquing Spencer’s methodology combined, and when compared with the critiques Auster wrote. The only logical explanation for this particular twist of the pretzel is that the Phalanx considers Bawer that much more important than me or Auster. This would be logical, but it is not rational. The grotesquely monstrous transmogrification of Charles Johnson makes it eminently irrational to thus continue to favor Bawer.

Conclusion:

Again, as I said in my previous article, I am not calling for the unofficial leadership of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement to issue an Anathema of Bawer: all I am reasonably expecting is a response to Bawer in the form of a mature and intelligent discussion about it, with Bawer himself of course included, out in the air and sunshine of the public arena. This basic human response, in keeping with the noble tradition and culture of Western democracy, is apparently beyond the ability or taste of the self-appointed Aristocracy of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement.

An Iron Veil

I. Introduction:

Seeing the way the problem of Islam is metastasizing, one strategy for the West to take will be a global quarantine of Muslims. This might well be the best way to manage that problem.

Note: When this strategy is described as “the best”, this is not intended to mean that it is conceived to be perfect, without flaws. It is intended only to mean that it is the best we will be able to do, given certain unavoidable—or at least ineradicable—limitations due to the complex nature of the problem. I.e., of all possible ways to respond to the problem of Islam, this strategy may well have the least flaws and may well be the most effective: it will not necessarily be flawless or absolutely effective.

II. Adumbration of the Strategy of Quarantine

Let us adumbrate the strategy to clarify and crystallize what it entails:

1) Perimeters of the Quarantine

The location of this global quarantine would be, for the most part, the already extant Muslim countries, stretching from Indonesia to Morocco. I would favor disallowing the use of certain limitrophe lands—such as the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, and certain regions of Africa to be adjudicated.

2) Deportation of All Muslims

This global quarantine must not only be limited to Muslims already living in Muslim lands, but must also extend to all Muslims living in the West and other non-Western non-Muslim lands. This will necessarily entail expulsion and deportation of Muslims from all the lands into which they have immigrated. Since there is no way to tell with sufficient reliability the difference between harmless Muslims and dangerous Muslims, the only rational conclusion will be to expel all Muslims, including of course those who have become citizens of the countries to which they emgrated, or in which they were born, since there is nothing magical about citizenship that suddenly confers upon its Muslim recipient the transformation into a harmless Muslim.

A crucial corollary fact presents a formidable concrete problem which further argues for total deportation: Given that the entire West is currently PC MC and will most likely remain so for at least a couple of decades if not much longer, and will likely only begin to undergo a reversal of this massive irrationality as a reaction to horrific attacks by Muslims in the future, any proposal of global quarantine of Muslims cannot limit itself merely to halting immigration (supplemented by inherently limp-wristed carrot-&-stick tactics calculated to motivate Muslims to leave voluntarily)—for the obvious reason that by the time the West is ready to seriously discuss a quarantine, the numbers of Muslims within the West, both through continued immigration during those decades as well as unchecked breeding by a culture that believes in pursuing jihad through using their women as baby factories, will have increased so much, it would become silly to quarantine Muslims outside the West when the West will by that time have millions more of the enemy within its borders. Indeed, in that likely situation, to begin to enact a process of quarantine as Auster describes it—studiously avoiding total deportation for fear of violating the “dignity and essence” of Muslims—would most likely inflame the millions and millions of Muslims in the West and “radicalize” untold and unpredictable numbers among them, putting our own people and institutions at grave risk and more likely leading to a chain-reaction of internal violent events that would force the West to violate the “dignity and essence” of Muslims far more ruthlessly than Auster ever dreamed of.

Since we would have to totally deport them anyway, so the argument goes, better to begin the slow stillicide of a more coherent pedagogy now in the direction of that logical and rational conclusion in the hopefully not too distant future, rather than continue to articulate incoherent, half-assed proposals that will only tend to serve to leave us with our pants down around our ankles when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

3) Purpose of the Quarantine

The global quarantine will be similar to the “Iron Curtain” during the Cold War, though it will be its diametrically opposite mirror image: where the Iron Curtain was erected by the dangerous regime itself to keep people from escaping from its totalitarian evil to a free world outside, this Iron Veil will be set up to keep totalitarian people with violently supremacist and expansionist goals from trying to infiltrate into the free world outside of the lands in which those totalitarian people derive their historico-politico-cultural provenance.

Again, the likelihood that among the total population of Muslims there might well be many who are not totalitarian (i.e., who are not following Islam) becomes irrelevant for our purposes of self-defense, since there is no way to tell with sufficient reliability the difference between harmless Muslims and dangerous Muslims, and given the complex nature of the danger, the risks are too high to gamble on simply assuming that certain Muslims must be harmless because of superficial indicators or worse yet, because of the mere absence of any dangerous indicators which our intelligence picks up. The most dangerous terrorist operatives will be the ones who have perfected, or nearly perfected, the skill of seeming harmless and blending into our societies in order to infiltrate deeply so that they can more effectively lay the groundwork for horrific attacks on us. To establish a principle, then, whereby we only target the Muslims who are visibly dangerous would serve to solidify policies that will precisely ignore the most dangerous Muslims.

4) Military Enforcement of the Quarantine

A crucial component of this Iron Veil will be its enforcement. It would be egregiously imprudent for us to assume that Muslims (particularly the more actively dangerous ones) will voluntarily remain within the international perimeters of this Iron Veil. The whole point of the Iron Veil is to quarantine dangerous people who threaten to attack us with the long-term goal of subjugating and/or destroying our societies. Such types of people fanatically inspired by such supremacist and expansionist goals are not going to sit quietly behind the lines of a global quarantine if those lines remain unenforced. A closely related point, to repeat ourselves, is that we cannot tell, with sufficient reliability, the difference between the dangerous Muslims and the putatively harmless Muslims—thus necessitating the broadest brush approach possible: precisely this global quarantine of the Iron Veil.

Enforcement will perforce require the perpetual threat of military attack by the West for any Muslims who try to sneak out of that quarantine. Thus, the Iron Veil will require the great expense of having military presence all around it. Thankfully, in our age of sophisticated technology, a great deal of this can be accomplished via long-range communications as well as long-range missiles and/or air power from widely spaced airbases and/or ships. Nevertheless, there will be some necessity to also integrate a policy of permanent military presence of actual military personnel at various locations along the perimeter, on land and sea.

And, of course, this permanent military presence must be prepared to shoot on sight when any Muslims try to escape—whether on an individual level or more concerted attempts. In this context, we could try to develop a policy that tries to discriminate between Muslims and non-Muslims escaping from Muslim lands—perhaps by taking such fugitives into captivity first, determining whether they are Muslim or not, then allowing them to defect into the West if they are non-Muslim, and sending them back behind the Iron Veil if they are Muslim. Whatever ways we develop to try to finesse the stark ruthlessness behind the overall policy of the quarantine, those ways must not serve to obstruct its primary purpose: to maintain our collective safety.

5) Realistic Ability

Obviously, an important ingredient in the entire strategy is the ability of the West to enact it. Currently, there is no technical or material reason why the West cannot actualize this strategy: while it would of course be enormously difficult, it would not be impossible, and the West has done amazingly difficult things in the past. The only impediment that stands in the way is Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC), which is dominant and mainstream throughout the West. With the massive opposition of PC MC, this strategy cannot even be considered for the possibility of being put on the table for discussion, and even considering it would likely have the effect of ruining careers in the fields of politics, the news media, business, academe, and entertainment.

The goal of those who seek to actualize this strategy then has to be realistic. It must factor in the following:

1) It will likely take several decades before the West is ready to merely discuss this issue rationally.

2) The stage then of discussion does not guarantee implementation. We cannot assume that PC MC is going to disappear magically and suddenly at some point. More likely than not, it is going to phase out gradually, and probably to some degree tumultously. The discussion stage will last more time—years, perhaps another couple of decades, after the decades that preceded the readiness of the West to even enter that stage.

3) This movement of the West away from PC MC in the context of becoming more rational about the problem of Islam will likely not occur, or certainly not occur as quickly as only a few decades, absent the grim event of several horrific attacks upon the West in various places over the span of those decades. In addition, various information about more and more Muslims—particularly Muslims heretofore assumed to be “moderates”—expressing their baseline hatred, intolerance and supremacism, will serve to help hasten that process.

4) Once the West is ready to discuss this strategy in concrete terms, the strategy itself will require an international alliance, not only on board with the general concept, but also ready and willing to enforce the Iron Veil and to allow permanent military bases on their soil and in their waters and to do their part contributing financially to its maintenance.

III. Limitations and/or Incoherence of Lawrence Auster

Lawrence Auster has already proposed a strategy of a global quarantine, while no other analyst of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement seems to have proposed this.

A little less than a year ago, in a comments section of his blog, Auster articulated his position on this, and also answered a couple of questions of mine that further clarified it. While Auster has numerous other articulations, this particular one lays down positions sufficiently crystallized to critique.

With regard to my point II.1, Auster seems to be in sufficiently approximate agreement.

With regard to my point II.3, I think Auster would be in sufficient agreement with the first paragraph, but not with the logical implications of the second paragraph; this will become clearer as my analysis unfolds below.

With regard to my point II.4, Auster has expressed two positions, or inchoate positions, that seem contradictory and incoherent:

First, he acknolwedges the necessity of “military force” to quarantine Muslims. Then, secondly, he makes a statement like the following:

...this containment of the Muslim peoples can be accomplished without violating their dignity and essence as Muslims.

This is a preposterous statement, on two accounts: First, forcing a people to remain quarantined by threat of military force if they disobey is a fundamental violation of their dignity and essence; and secondly, it is in fact a specific violation of the “dignity and essence” of Muslims as they understand it—whose Islam mandates proselytizing expansionism and violent jihad against those who resist that expansionist proselytization. It would be additionally preposterous to impose upon Muslims a foreign understanding of their “dignity and essence” (i.e., our Western understanding) in the context of presuming to respect that “dignity and essence”.

Auster then manages to deepen the preposterousness of his argument thusly:

If we sought literally to suppress and destroy Islam, we could be justly accused of practicing cultural genocide. But if we simply contain the Muslims in their historic lands where they can have no power over us, that would not be harming them, even under the terms of their own religion.

The first sentence goes without saying, and has the effect of obscuring the problem with the second sentence: enforcing Muslims to stay in one region of the world (however large that region might be) is obviously to harm them. Imagine if I told you that you had to remain under house arrest, or had to stay within the confines of your neighborhood, and that if you stepped outside, you would be shot. And then imagine that I had the gall to tell you that I was “not harming” you and that I was respecting your “dignity and essence”! Furthermore, as I already argued, this is precisely to harm Muslims under the terms of their own religion, which mandates expansionist supremacism as its essence. Indeed, they have been whining and moaning about being harmed for years now, under paranoid delusions of being under attack by us, and their whining and moaning only increases the more we bend over backwards to “respect” them (not to mention help them and give them billions of dollars annually).

Aside from all these problems with this particular formulation of Auster’s, then, there is the more pertinent rhetorical question to ask: Who gives a rat’s ass about the “dignity and essence” of Muslims anyway, and what does that have to do with our safety?

Backtracking now to my point II.2, Auster has also been apparently incoherent. Auster responded to my question regarding this in the context of his proposal of what seems to be a tough stance—certainly tougher than many analysts in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement—but which falls short asymptotically:

I don't have a single formula for doing this, but a range of things that could be pursued, but all with one aim in view, which is to eliminate Islam as a force in the West. That does not require the removal of every single Muslim. I oppose the fallacy of totalistic thinking, such as believing that we can literally destroy the whole religion of Islam, or that we can literally make every single Muslim leave the West. We don't need to do those things, and we most likely can't do those things. Thinking that we can, gets us into god-like delusions.

At the time, I responded:

Just because a movement has a stated goal that sounds totalistic, does not mean they have to expect total results. I could have a goal to get rid of "all" mosquitos at my summer cottage, but it would be silly of me to expect that all the mosquitos would be eliminated. The problem with couching the programmatic goal in less than totalistic terms is that it leaves loopholes. If we are not going to deport all Muslims, then which Muslims will be exempted, and why? Better to put on the table from the beginning "all Muslims" and then let the accidental Muslims slip through the cracks, as they undoubtedly will, since any system is imperfect to some degree. I.e., better to make the Muslim remnant accidental, rather than exploitable by policy in one way or another. Finally, totalistic language in this particular context I think is helpful, because all the gradualistic language that refers to the problem of Islam tends to acquire adhesion to the politically correct multi-culturalist paradigm and therefore tends to enable its ongoing hold on our sociopolitical consciousness--whether the person articulating it intends this or not.

To that comment of mine, I would add another important consideration—namely, that gradualistic language, even if it seems to be tougher than all the language we normally see in the mainstream, tends to reinforce the prevailing patterns of PC MC attitude and thought which entails an indefinite distinction between dangerous Muslims and harmless Muslims. Even if the gradualist happens to hold a position tougher than the prevailing PC MC position, if it is based on an acquiescence to that distinction between dangerous Muslims and harmless Muslims, then it is vulnerable to the same devastating critique—namely, that we cannot with sufficient reliability make that distinction for the purposes of our self-defense and, given the complex nature of the danger, this lack of our ability to make that distinction is too high a risk to take.

Auster’s response to my response indicates not that he holds a limited position, but rather an incoherent one:

Quoting me—“If we are not going to deport all Muslims, then which Muslims will be exempted, and why? Better to put on the table from the beginning 'all Muslims' and then let the accidental Muslims slip through the cracks, as they undoubtedly will, since any system is imperfect to some degree”—Auster then wrote this response:

I do not necessarily object to your logic. If you want to argue for the deportation of all Muslims from the U.S. regardless of whether they've shown support for jihad and sharia or not--even naturalized citizens, natural-born citizens, and natural born non-Muslim Americans converted to Islam, you can do that. It could be argued reasonably. I acknowledge the clarity and directness of your idea; it cuts to the heart of the issue and leaves no doubts. But it goes beyond any position I've taken. Going back four years to my FP article http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13532, "How to Defeat Jihad in America," I've advocated removing the citizenship of and deporting even natural born jihad-supporting Muslims, meaning people who by their associations or actions, such as belonging to a jihad-supporting mosque, have shown support for jihad.

There are some closely related problems with this stance Auster takes, which he explicitly differentiates from mine which “goes beyond any position” he has taken:

1) He has not provided a sufficiently reliable way by which we can tell the difference between dangerous Muslims and harmless Muslims among the population of Muslim citizens of the West.

2) Surely Auster does not subscribe to the view that Muslims who happen to hold citizenship in the West and/or who happen to have been born here from first- or second-generation Muslims (or third-, etc.) are magically immune from being problematic vis-a-vis the overall problem of our difficulty in distinguishing harmless Muslims from dangerous Muslims. Thus, the only reason to exempt these Muslims has nothing to do with our problem and the danger of our problem, but only to do with respect for certain interpretations of our own laws and customs.

3) The only way to distinguish harmless Muslims from dangerous Muslims which Auster provides is superficial—if they are “jihad-supporting Muslims”. And how will we discern that a given Muslim is “jihad-supporting”? There are only two ways:

a) by simply noticing visible, external indicators whenever a given Muslim reveals them, through speech, association and action;

b) closely, though not necessarily, related to (a), through various degrees of discriminatory surveillance of Muslims.

The problem with (b) is that the degree of surveillance which will be sufficient for our self-defense needs will be ostensibly so invasive of the rights of the Muslims that it will not be much better than simply deporting them. Or, if we adopt a lower degree of surveillance, on what basis do we dial down the surveillance? On what basis, for example, do we moderate the surveillance such that we do not surveil all Muslim citizens irrespective of whether they show any signs of being dangerous, but we only surveil those who show such visible, external indicators? Adopting this decaffeinated approach brings us back to the problem of (a), whereby the only way we can tell the danger is when we can tell the danger. This obviously is inadequate for a population of indefinite number and indefinite location who are precisely plotting attacks in camouflage. The definition of a sleeper cell is precisely a cell of Muslims that do not show up on our radar. If we thus try to manage the problem of preventing terrorist attacks by only going after those Muslims stupid enough to show visible, external indicators of being dangerous, and by in fact solidifying this approach through various policy structures, we will tend to make ourselves more vulnerable to precisely the most dangerous Muslims of all—those clever enough to blend in below our radar.

4) Furthermore, Auster’s approach has a limitation he may not have realized: by only targeting the visibly “jihad-supporting” citizen Muslims, he will perforce target only a minority, since all indications thus far show only a minority actually supporting military jihad against the West. If Auster meant this in broader terms, by including all Muslims who support jihad at all without specifying what they mean by it, then he would have a slightly larger population to deal with, but arguably still not a majority. His protestation that—“[what] I have suggested over the last four years would reduce the Muslim population to the point that the remainder would be so small and non-devout that it would not pose a problem, without our having to force out literally every Muslim in America, including all naturalized and natural-born citizens”—is an educated guess based on his strategy successfully surmounting the objections I have raised in points #1-4 above, and furthermore point #5 below (the culture of Muslim deception).

In addition, what would Auster do about citizen Muslims who say they support jihad in terms of self-defense of lands that they argue have been attacked or threatened? The vast majority of Muslims who even seem “extremist” at all like to frame their “extremism” this way and in similar terms that can seem to sound reasonable from a Western perspective, but which only the application of our knowledge of the Islamic meaning of terms uniquely unlike Western meanings, coupled with our knowledge of the Muslim culture of deception, would detect as being in fact dangerous to us. There is nothing ostensibly visibly dangerous about such “extremism”, unless we assume axiomatically that any given Muslim who seems reasonable about his Islam and about his jihad and about his sharia because he couches them all in terms that sound reasonable to our Western ears is in fact lying to us. So again: how will we tell the difference?

5) To reiterate: there is the problem of the culture of Muslim deception. Not only does this vitiate Auster’s entire program that is built upon the ability to distinguish harmless Muslims from dangerous Muslims, but also in this specific respect it undermines this distinction between “jihad-supporting” Muslims and non-“jihad-supporting” Muslims. Let us say the West gets around to implementing Auster’s approach. One way to weed out the “jihad-supporting” Muslims will be to ask them in a poll or questionnaire. To presume that any given Muslim who says “I do not support jihad [however that is defined]” is telling the truth is to make a grievously reckless presumption. Otherwise, such a West would be forced to fall back on the external, visible indicators and surveillance to supplement that, discussed above in #3.

6) All the same problems cited in #1-5 also pertain to “sharia-supporting” Muslims.

7) Auster continued in his response:

As for natural born Muslims who have not demonstrated support for jihad and sharia, I would first attempt to get them to leave voluntarily by offering them money to leave and by designating Islam a political ideology not protected by the First Amendment. I would make it clear that Islam is not welcome. My ultimate preference is for my proposed constitutional amendment http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/008745.html that, paraphrasing the Thirteenth Amendment which banned slavery, bans the practice of Islam in the United States, thus making it clear at the highest level of our national life that Islam is incompatible with this country.

Auster is here proposing two actions which would be incoherent if implemented at the same time:

1) Trying to persuade Muslims to leave by giving them money

2) Passing a law “designating Islam a political ideology not protected by the First Amendment”, which he goes on to clarify would ban Islam like the Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery.

He calls this a “mixed set of proposals”—but when a law is passed that bans Islam, then any Muslims who remain are perforce criminals. This would logically have the end result that I proposed, which Auster however previously said “goes beyond any position” he has taken.

Furthermore, as with the global quarantine, Auster seems strangely disconnected from the implications of physical enforcement that all laws require. If a practice is banned by law, then those who continue to practice it, when found out, must be punished by the law. The only way to save this particular “mixed set of proposals” would be to have stages: Stage One, bribe citizen Muslims to leave. Stage Two, if that doesn’t work, make Islam illegal and punish all Muslims who break that law—which obviously means, punish all Muslims for the crime of being Muslim, since being a Muslim necessarily involves practicing Islam. Stage Two, however, suffers from the problem noted above: it results in the same “totalistic” approach that Auster previously said he doesn’t like and which “goes beyond any position” he has taken—whether all the Muslims will be totalistically interned, or deported, it’s still totalistic. Why not simply stand for deporting them from the beginning? It seems that Auster is doing pretty much the same thing that he regularly (and rightly) accuses Spencer of doing: weaving a subtle, complex position that never touches ground where the rubber meets the road.

Auster then wrote:

I think my policy is very radical. But it's not radical enough for some, who literally demand the deportation of every single Muslim. It is possible that at some point Islam may become such a palpable threat to us that deportation of all Muslims will seem the right thing to do. I do not support that at this time.

The problem with Auster’s caution here is a general problem which an individual, a group, or a society faces when they are assessing a systemic danger and their response to it. Reasonable people always desire to deal with such a danger in the least “totalistic” way possible: the least “totalistic” method is usually less costly, is less cumbersome, and by being casuistically attentive to details, it tends to be less immoral, or at least less insensitive to moral concerns.

When a systemic danger has not risen to the threshhold of being a “palpable threat”, however, it does not mean it is categorizable only one way. I.e., we are not simply talking in binary terms here about one of two choices—either a danger known to be a “palpable threat”, or a danger that is known to be not a “palpable threat”. The realm of “not a palpable threat” may be subdivided further, to reflect our ability to discern significant degrees. Some dangers that are “not a palpable threat” can be persuasively argued to require only low levels of casuistic, non-totalistic response. The danger of Islam, however, has a complex set of unique characteristics, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that altogether move the rational person concerned with the safety of his society to move from the relatively restrained level of response to the level of proactive prevention—a proactive prevention that again, given the nature of the unique threat of Islam, cannot stand coherently on anything less than the “totalistic” presumption that no Muslim can be trusted.

8) Finally, Auster cites a factor that purportedly would make his strategy superior to my “totalistic” one:

...I think many people would be turned off by the sheer impossibility of total deportation. They will throw up their hands and give up on doing anything.

Auster here apparently underestimates the high degree of PC MC throughout the West, since one important feature of the PC MC psychology, both reflecting and based upon the mechanisms of its paradigm, is that the slightest whiff of anything “bigoted” or “racist” or “Islamophobic” functions as tantamount to the worst manifestation of it. We have seen time and time again when Spencer, or even worse Daniel Pipes, express a decidedly “gradualistic” critique of Islam—even going out of their way to withhold criticism from Islam itself and going out of their way to profess a belief in the existence of innumerable “moderate” Muslims—are nevertheless vilified and marginalized virtually as though they had been standing on rooftops with bullhorns advocating immediate genocide of all Muslims. It thus does not matter in our PC MC culture if one “gradualizes” a strategy to manage the problem of Islam: Auster’s “graded” approach will be processed in the PC MC mind such that it is tantamount anyway to the “totalistic” approach.

And here the PC MC mind is not being altogether irrational: for they can smell an incoherent rat, if even only semi-consciously. I.e., this reflects the underlying incoherence of all asymptotic analysis that shrinks away from the logical conclusion of the totalistic assessment of the problem of Islam and of all Muslims, and thus flowing inexorably from that, a totalistic way to manage that problem. Thus, when a Spencer or a Pipes meticulously and massively present the mountain of data that indicates—both quantitatively by its sheer extent and qualitatively by numerous distinct factors—that Islam and all Muslims present a uniquely formidable threat to the West, and then when that same Spencer or Pipes hastens to add that he is not condemning Islam or all Muslims, the PC MC person receiving this presentation has good reason to be suspicious. The same goes for Auster’s “graded” approach and his contention that our PC MC culture will more readily swallow it rather than my “totalistic” approach.

Creationism and Evolution Theory: Both are Flawed (Part 1)

Introduction:

The philosopher Eric Voegelin proposed a third way to look at the problem of Creationism vs. Evolution Theory which has become a sociopolitical and philodoxic dilemma over the last century. This third way is necessary because neither of the two paradigms behind the two opposing camps suffice, philosophically.

A discursus is in order before we commence, concerning the differences between science and philosophy. This will be Part One. In Part Two, in a separate essay, we will get into the meat and potatoes of the actual dilemma between Creationism vs. Evolution Theory.

The Nature of Pre-Modern and Modern Science:

Modern science has developed historically in the West as an application of reason upon what the ancient Greeks called ta onta—which may be translated as “things”. Specifically, what “things” are comprises the data of material reality. Modern science evolved as a focus on the What and the How of material data—their nature and their interrelations—where at least initially, during its rise in the High Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, the tendency was not to delve into the Why, the Whence and the Wherefore, since these latter types of questions already had their proper framework in mythology, philosophy and theology. Theology, also comprising philosophy and mythology, was deemed to be the “queen of the sciences”.

The historical development is not so simplistic, though, as to presume that the West for a thousand years kept these two spheres apart neatly—the sphere of the immanent structure on the one hand, and the sphere of the transcendent on the other hand (what problematically was bifurcated into Physics and Metaphysics). The whole point of the Western development of modern science was a protracted, fascinating, fruitful and contentious process whereby the two spheres after being elegantly distinguished initially, then became confused over a long period of time, then had their order inverted such that material/natural science became the “queen”—and then at last, succumbed to the modernist coup de grace: the elimination of the transcendent altogether from the halls of knowledge (except, of course, as a topic of quaintly archaic interest).

This modernist coup d’etat has been, in essence, what Voegelin terms an immanentization of transcendence. In this sense, there is never really an elimination of transcendence, since it won’t go away just because a society decides it wants to eliminate it: it simply becomes suppressed and finds its outlet in other ways.

This modernist process involving the aggrandizement of the scope of natural science—whereby it came to swallow up the existential questions previously the province of Mythology, Philosophy and Theology—was part of the overarching process of the modernization and secularization of the West as a whole: the epochal paradigm shift from a theocratic Christendom to a secular Modernity. This paradigm shift not only affected Philosophy and Science, but also Politics, Laws and Culture.

In the larger context of the nature of modern natural science, the major divisions into Biology, Physics, and Cosmology do not presume those divisions to pertain ultimately to the objective reality being studied and theoretically illuminated. Modern natural science presumes a Whole governed by the same laws throughout. The “life” (Greek bios) that is the fundamental phenomenon behind all the complex variegations studied in Biology must follow the overarching logic of etiology which, in turn, derives its meaning from the immanentization of transcendence: according to this logic, the phenomenon called “life” cannot be an ultimate reality, but must have a source in a phenomenon more fundamental and less sophisticated: thus, animate matter (= “life”) has its source in inanimate matter. And, as inanimate matter, or the matter/energy complex, is presumed to be the sum of all reality, the source of it becomes the source of all reality. The transition from a science of things, to a philosophy or theology or mythology of crypto-transcendence, is thus seamless, and has become the province of that division of modern natural science known as Cosmology. However, under the strict guidelines of this paradigm and of the hyper-secularist culture of modern science, it is not permitted to speak of transcendence as relevant to science. Transcendence remains as a factor and a vector in modern scientific pursuits, but is suppressed through reconfigurations-in-denial.

Thus, modern natural scientists, when they speculate through Cosmology about this ultimate origin of all reality, are in fact doing mythology—what used to be called Cosmogony as well as Theogony—even as they remain in denial about what they are doing. The etiological logic, as it has been pushed back in Cosmology to its aboriginal breaking point, so to speak, in its drive to find something more elemental than matter, reduces to a secular materialist version of the theological Creatio ex nihilo in the Big Bang Theory. In the division of Physics, this same reduction becomes preoccupied in the never-ending search for the true “atom”—the Greek word meaning literally “unable to be divided further”: i.e., the Holy Grail of Physics is the search for the smallest particle that will be the first building block before which there is none other. One cannot help notice that this ultimate particle is never found, and with every latest supposed Ur-particle discovered, there comes along another, even smaller one, in due time, as physicists subdivide matter into infinity trying, in effect (though steadfastly denied, of course), to locate the Creator at the bottom stratum—or, more precisely, as the bottom stratum—of Creation. Thus, here too we see modern natural science pursuing its fascination of the What and the How past the point of reason, until it embarks upon the project of transgressing its limits in order to try to plumb the mystery of the Why and the Whence.

This project of transgression of rational limits finds its analogy again in Biology with DNA research, analogous to the search for the true atom in Particle Physics in its focus on the building blocks of Life, while Evolution Theory would be analogous to the search for the ultimate beginning—except that the analogy fails even internal to the paradigm of natural science since, as we noted above, animate matter is never presumed to be ultimate anyway: Life is not presumed to be eternal, or infinite, and certainly cannot be the source of all other reality. The logic of the immanentization of transcendence leads to the inversion of causation: the simpler more elemental reality must precede the more complex and sophisticated levels of reality; whereas, in pre-modern Mythology, Philosophy and Theology, it was the precise opposite—or at least in some systems it was a paradoxical symbiosis of the two realms, not the ruthless reductionism of modern natural science. Biology, even if it delves into the origin of life itself beyond the scope of the “origin of the species”, still does not concern questions of ultimate origin, for that is the proper province of Particle Physics and Cosmology. Biologists therefore operate within a self-delimited sphere, assuming axiomatically that the life they are studying has its material source, but leaving the nuts and bolts of that etiology to other scientists outside their particular division. For, the biota of Biology are just one type of the ta onta out there within a universe of data where all data are material. Living things are reducible, ultimately, to things in general: and things in general all derive back in time from the nihilum of the Big Bang, or down in space to the irreducible atom.

Thus, an elementary adumbration of the new Cosmogony:

1) A conceptual nihilum gives rise to inanimate matter.

2) Inanimate matter gives rise to animate matter.

3) Animate matter gives rise to human being.

4) Human beings give rise to scientists who reveal and illuminate to the rest of Mankind the preceding Cosmology.

In this cosmogonic scheme, as with what Voegelin termed the “compact consciousness” of pre-monotheistic polytheistic mythology, there is no formal eschatology: there is no ultimate destiny of reality. While the Why and the Whence are included in the preoccupation of modern scientific fascination, the Wherefore seems bracketed out. Or perhaps it could be said that modern science brackets out both the Why and the Wherefore, by precisely integrating the Whence—the question of ultimate origin—and that this Whence, as it acquires the irrational limitations imposed by the modern science paradigm, particularly the inversion adumbrated above, demands the bracketing-out of transcendence at the vector of the Wherefore, and in terms of the question of meaning—the Why—that would endow the entire structure of reality with purpose (even if that purpose remains unknown in mystery). It is easy to see the logic of bracketing out a Wherefore and a Why from a system that axiomatically assumes no guiding intelligence or purpose to the structure of reality. It should be remembered that the Wherefore concerns ultimate destiny, not merely an indefinite extrapolation of cyclic repetitions unto temporal infinity. Modern scientists could have also extended this prohibition to the Whence, as well. What disinclines them to do so is the temptation to pursue the trail of data, and with Cosmology there is a powerfully seductive trail of data seeming to go back into the ultimate origin. In this context, there seems to be, in the psychology of the modern scientist, a semi-conscious resistance to surrendering to a scheme of temporal infinity, to what some Hindus call the beginninglessness and the endlessness of reality. This semi-conscious resistance reflects an internal tension in the mind of the modern scientist:

1) he cannot permit ultimate meaning, which in turn requires a Why, a Whence and a Wherefore;

yet

2) he cannot resist the orectic imperative of his fundamental scientific curiosity, by which the What and the How, progressively illuminated by following the clues of data and applying reason to their complexity, become a field of infinite research extending outward, forward and backward—and thus lead inexorably and naturally to the frontiers of transcendence in the existential questions that point to the ultimate sense that would endow the total collection of data with order, as opposed to chaos.

The sense of order, however, cannot stand without ultimates. It is irrational to artificially delimit the field of the Whole, and then to presume—even if only by implication—any ultimate meaning thereof. It is all well and good if the modern scientist explicitly delimits his research and theorizing only to the order he can detect, and brackets out any probes into questions of meaning beyond that delimitation. The problem comes in where the modern scientist treads past that reasonable boundary, and in the divisions of Cosmology and Physics, the temptation is often too great because the actual reality they are researching seems itself to extend beyond those boundaries and thus to present to the scientific curiosity a trail of clues leading from the sphere of Matter to the sphere of the ultimate origin of Matter. Since the modern scientist axiomatically assumes that there is no transcendence and that all former symbolizations of transcendence were misguided and erroneous misunderstandings of reality, he is then compelled to force this trail of clues that resembles a vector toward transcendence into the paradigm where transcendence and the tension toward transcendence are impossible and unreal. This would be the Cosmological and Physics version of the same tendency, under the configuration of a different discipline, seen in modern Psychology, whereby all the existential experiences, questions and responses one finds in Religion are to be explained, one way or another, by reducing them to neurochemical activities in the brain (with other explanations offered by Sociology and Anthropology concerned less with ultimate origin and more with the phenomenological dimension). As with Biology and the question of the ultimate origin of Life, in Psychology the question of the ultimate origin of the existential data of Religion defers to their colleagues the Physicists and the Cosmologists, since even after Religion is reduced down to neurochemical activities in the brain, there still remains the question of the origin of neurochemicals and the brain, which leads back to the inanimate matter that gave rise to animate matter, and so on.

The problem here, of course, is that while the compact consciousness was workable before the epoch of eschatological differentiation, and while it remains one facet that perdures as one pole of the new paradox that has been differentiated with eschatological revelation, it is not meant to be a state toward which consciousness regresses—and yet, this is what modern scientific cosmogony does, collapsing all eschatology back into the closed system of eternal cycles. This eschatological destiny would be the meaning from above, to so speak, which has been lopped off; just the meaning from below, the ultimate beginning, has been deprived of its transcendent substance, even if its structural function, as ultimate, remains.

The fundamental tension in modern science we mentioned above has aroused elaborate strategies to circumvent its inexorable incoherence—particularly in the idea of “multiple universes” and the crypto-metaphysical “string theory”; both being a chimerically doomed endeavors, for they are just putting off, through obfuscatory complexity, the ultimate questions of Why, Whence and Wherefore.

To be continued in Part Two...

The "Gentlemen's Agreement of Silence" Redux

Beginning a little over eight months ago, I published a series of essays here on a curious phenomenon I began to notice in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement, at least among its aristocratic members who seem to constitute a kind of informal and unofficial elite leadership.

That phenomenon which I noticed involved what I termed a “Gentlemen’s Agreement of Silence”—whereby when the thorny issue reared its ugly head of whether or not certain European anti-jihad movements are, or are not, “fascist” as some people alleged, these elite leaders meet, so to speak, behind closed doors in a smoke-filled room, out of sight of the rest of us peons and peasants, to decide what to do and how to publically respond.

As part of the oddity of this behavior among this elite leadership, their back-room discussions in their smoke-filled room never seem to result in a public expression of what they decided: they remain silent about this important aspect of this thorny issue—the aspect being, a clear and public avowal of where everybody stands with respect to the alleged “fascism” of certain European anti-jihad groups, followed by a frank public continuation of the discussion in public by which disagreements can be clarified, persuasion can be attempted, and differences can become crystallized for all to see. Without the discussion enjoying the open air and sunshine of free debate, the intellectual health and growth of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement will suffer.

Another twist of the oddity of this phenomenon involves the strangely selective stances—or stances by default of not taking a stance—concerning various individuals of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement and the strange contortions these selective stances can take. To take one example of many: Diana West can support Vlaams Belang, Robert Spencer can support Diana West while treating Vlaams Belang like a leper colony, Diana West continues to support Robert Spencer, Charles Johnson vilifies Vlaams Belang, Robert Spencer chooses not to notice and comment on Charles Johnson (this was back over eight months ago, before Charles Johnson forced the issue through his brute behavior), Charles Johnson more or less condemns Diana West, Robert Spencer continues to look the other way; etc.

About all these facets of the phenomenon as it stood eight months ago (and structurally the phenomenon remains as odd today as it was then) I wrote several essays:

One quick splash of Cologne...

What a tangled cobweb we weave: Let the sun shine in

The Gentlemen’s Agreement of Silence

We’re all racists—except when we’re not

I do not intend today to reprise the analyses in those essays.

Today I only note the latest permutation of the oddity of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement of Silence”.

It involves the fact that Bruce Bawer, a respected member over the years of the informal and unofficial elite leadership of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement, published an essay on May 6 on his blog which came down in support of Charles Johnson, which Charles Johnson immediately published on his Little Green Footballs blog.

The context of this support of Charles Johnson by Bawer could not be more vividly trenchant, as it comes so soon on the heels of Charles Johnson’s monstrous rupture with the anti-jihad movement only a few weeks ago that crashed and burned in melodramatically sputtering green flames like a dying Godzilla amid the high-rise edifices and circling planes of that movement. Thus, we are not merely talking about a minor disagreement, and a modestly polite posture of solidarity concerning some tangential and relatively less important point of contention about some subsidiary issue. We are talking about a major player in the movement publically expressing his support of another major player after the latter became grotesquely divisive.

And, beyond the context, we have the substance: the position of Charles Johnson with which Bawer is so recklessly expressing solidarity is the position of a paranoid Orwellian misuse of the term “fascist” by which to smear and vilify valiant members of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement in Europe who are risking their lives and reputations as they fight, virtually alone among their dhimmified fellow Europeans, the growing infiltration of Islam in Europe.

Now, concerning the strangely selective silence of this “Gentlemen’s Agreement”, we have frank and public discussions about Charles Johnson a few weeks ago, when he forced the issue by publishing brutely candid vilifications and smears of “fascist” support of all those who not only clearly support those supposedly “fascist” European groups (particularly Vlaams Belang and pro-Cologne), but also and with equal ferocity those who show the slightest hint of possibly supporting them. Charles Johnson brutely lumped Robert Spencer—who always has tried to remain fastidiously aloof from the fray by affecting a non-positional position with regard to those “fascist” European groups—in with those who more clearly support them, such as Diana West, Gates of Vienna, Fjordman, and Michelle Malkin, among others. Thus, Spencer’s careful and gingerly approach—of irresponsible skepticism and indefinite suspension of the responsibility of taking a stand either for or against those supposedly “fascist” European groups—did him no good in the end: Charles Johnson didn’t care how gingerly Spencer was: in Charles Johnson’s brutely simplistic mind, Spencer was equally guilty of supporting “fascism” as the others are.

All this concerning Charles Johnson was aired publically and frankly and with timely alacrity over the last few weeks, and with lots of discussion and analysis. Often almost immediately after every Charles Johnson missive went out, Spencer would have a response on Jihad Watch. Gates of Vienna also participated in this public discussion, as did Fjordman, Andrew Bostom, Diana West, and others (although Michelle Malkin and Daniel Pipes, for example, seem to have remained curiously aloof).

Now comes along Bruce Bawer, publishing an essay two days ago (May 6) essentially in support of Charles Johnson on this issue, and there is mostly only silence from the elite leadership. Spencer has had nothing about it, yet continues to provide a link on the blogroll on the main page of Jihad Watch to Bawer’s blog. Meanwhile, Gates of Vienna had a brief elliptical mention of Bawer enfolded in a larger seemingly distracting context by Andrew Bostom buried in their “News Feed” feature, reproduced verbatim from Bostom’s own blog.

A Google search of “bruce bawer” specifying the Gates of Vienna URL yields many essays published on Gates of Vienna that use Bawer’s observations and analyses in an approving manner. A small sampling includes essays such as here, here, here (rather apt in the context of my essay today seeing as how it involves Bawer’s support of Geert Wilders), here, here, here (again a piquant context where Fjordman is citing Bawer in terms of a larger discussion of Charles Johnson already back at the time in November of 2007 beginning to smear people such as Paul Belien with insinuations of charges of “fascism”), here (where Bodissey writes of “Hizbullah supporter Andreas Malm write brain-dead articles on the “Rise of Islamophobia” in Europe caused by Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn and Bruce Bawer, among others…”), here (an interview with the Danish historian Lars Hedegaard who puts Bawer in the same company as “Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or, Kurt Westergaard, Daniel Pipes, Roy Brown, Chahdortt Djavann, Shabana Rehman, Samia Labidi, Bruce Bawer, Henryk Broder, and anyone who is in fear for his or her life" and who adds that "Copenhagen gives them a hearty welcome”), and here (where Fjordman in an article praising Lars Hedegaard approvingly quotes at length from Bawer’s meeting with Hedegaard). These only scratch the surface of Gates of Vienna mentions of Bawer, none of which seem to be critical at all, and most of which presume him to be a useful member of the anti-jihad movement.

It is particularly egregiously disingenuous of Baron Bodissey to try, in his curt response to me (see below), to distance himself from Fjordman in the context of trying to convey the impression that Gates of Vienna has been affecting a Spencerianly neutral, if not diffident, posture with regard to Bruce Bawer, as though Fjordman doesn’t speak for Gates of Vienna, when Gates of Vienna has prominently featured many Fjordman essays over the years, and when Baron Bodissey himself wrote in November of 2007:

Fjordman is one of the finest minds of the Counterjihad, and possibly the single best synthesizer of jihad-related information that we have. It has been a great honor to be able to present his writings here, and we will continue to post whatever he sends us.

The only person who has put forth a clear public notice of this Bawer problem and has offered an analysis of it has been Lawrence Auster on his blog, who posted his article about it on May 7, 12:45 p.m. Auster’s analysis is good within the confines of his delimitation of it (though here and there a bit tendentiously veering off onto his not entirely coherent anti-secular bias), but he misses the larger picture of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement of Silence” and its odd contortions. As Auster, however, has become a kind of persona non grata among the informal and unofficial elite leadership of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement, his public mention of this doesn’t really count as evidence that this movement has taken appropriate notice of Bawer.

Ironically, but fitting in with the logical contortions of this problem, that same elite leadership—particularly Robert Spencer—publically ostracized Auster for faults far less serious and far less egregious than what Bawer in one little article has done; and yet they leave Bawer untouched. Auster’s only real crime was to be stubbornly annoying in pressing his differences with Spencer in analytical approach (and, of course, to dare to persistently criticize and differ from the apparently untouchable Spencer in the first place). While Auster may have been annoying at times, he always maintained a mature and intelligent deportment. Bawer in his little article also maintains a mature and ostensibly intelligent deportment, but the substance of his article is the problem: coming down decidedly in Charles Johnson’s favor. I am not necessarily calling on the elite leadership of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement to summarily declare Bawer anathema. All I am calling on them to do is move the problem out of their smoke-filled back rooms where peons and peasants of the movement are not permitted access, and bring it out into the sunshine of frank discussion.

When yesterday I posted a comment at the Gates of Vienna blog (picking an article there on the pro-Cologne movement as an appropriately on-topic location for this issue), I received a typically snooty and rude response from Baron Bodissey, who seems incapable of maintaining an objectively neutral comportment when responding to questions and/or comments—even questions and comments such as mine that were worded maturely and intelligently.

I reproduce my comment and his response here, as it helps to flesh out some of the points involved:

My comment (posted May 8, 2009, at 5:42 PM):

I wonder why Gates of Vienna and Robert Spencer have been silent about the recent stand of Bruce Bawer in line with Charles Johnson and against fellow anti-Jihadists, with specific regard to European “fascism”.

Lawrence Auster seems to be the only one who noticed this and who applies appropriate analysis to it.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/013150.html

Auster's analysis, however, misses some of the further perverse wrinkles to this phenomenon reflected by, among other things, the above-mentioned curious silence, as well as by Spencer's and GOV's continued support—at least tacitly—of Bawer: Spencer retains Bawer's blog link on the blog roll of the main page of Jihad Watch; and a cursory Googling of Gates of Vienna articles about, or referencing Bruce Bawer shows no substantive cricitism of him. The only mention of Bawer's recent statement I could find on GOV was buried in a little article by Andrew Bostom as part of the regular “News Feed” feature (this one for the date of 5/7/09) in which, after one scrolls down past other unrelated articles, one finds Bostom mentioning Bawer's “recent apoplectic posting (www.brucebawer.com/ Thursday, May 6, 2009, 9:28 P.M) ostensibly referring to the same subject matter...” The reader would have had trouble seeing that this little article was in fact about Bawer, as nothing in the title or the vast majority of the text indicated so.

If Bruce Bawer were as insignificant a blogger as I am, I could understand this silence; but he's not, so I can't.

Baron Bodissey’s response (on May 8, 2009, at 9:36 PM):

Erich, as I have repeatedly mentioned in the past: you are not privy to all the private correspondence that passes back and forth between the owners of this blog and other parties. My advice to you is, once again, not to bruise yourself jumping to conclusions.

You'll notice that I have never written about Bruce Bawer in the past. I haven't found his writings to be helpful to me, although Fjordman has used them—all the previous mentions of Bawer on this blog (except in the news feed) have been by Fjordman. If Fjordman has anything new to say on Bawer, I'm sure he will eventually do so.

The fact that I posted excerpts from Andy's piece in the news feed shows that I am well aware of what Bawer wrote, because I at least skim every item that appears in the news feed.

Beyond that you would be well-advised to draw no conclusions. I haven't mentioned the issue because it is not important enough, nor germane to any of the things I have been posting about.

My time these days is very limited, so I have to confine myself to significant topics.

If you find Bawer's piece compelling, then take heart! That is why God gave you your own blog.

I then posted a comment later, about two hours before I am typing this:

Baron,

What conclusion did I jump to?

And if you “well advise” me not to draw any conclusions, does that mean there is no conclusion to be drawn?

And why is the still inchoate anti-Islam movement being conducted like a smoke-filled gentlemen's club from whose secret behind-the-scenes discussions among its aristocratic membership the rest of the people are excluded and those among them who, like me, have the temerity to probe with reasonable questions framed maturely and intelligently are given the bum's rush?

Conclusion:

There are two problematic things about the still inchoate anti-Islam movement that come into relief from this latest episode:

1) It is being run informally and unofficially like a loose dictatorship, where a council of elite leaders of indeterminate number decides important matters behind closed doors.

The ostensible fact that the vast majority of ordinary members don’t seem to care about this state of affairs does not excuse it nor make it any more healthy as a way to run the business of the movement than it is.

Because, however, the movement is still inchoate, it suffers from a high degree of a lack of organization. This may partially explain why there are these back-room meetings deciding certain important issues: they may reflect as much an expedient, given the lack of any organizational apparatus by which to adjudicate problems, as they reflect opportunities to exploit by certain individuals out of personal ego, or simply irresponsible disregard for the opinions of their followers.

This deficiency of organization, however, is not a matter of an unavoidable natural formation: it is the result of conscious inaction for which persons are responsible, and thus the result of carelessness by all members of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement. And, because the unofficial and informal elite leadership has more influence and resources, they should bear more of the responsibility for their apparent lack of concern about organizing the movement. (Seeing how they have been comporting themselves, however, with their smoke-filled back-room decision-making, I’m not so sure they would be a reliable nucleus around which to begin to crystallize the movement into the structures of an organization—at least not until they come clean and demonstrate their willingness to operate democratically rather than dictatorially.)

2) Secondly, and closely related to the first problem, the still inchoate movement continues to pursue procedural behaviors that are unhealthy for a sociopolitical movement—particularly the tendency to suppress important issues and have them decided in smoke-filled back rooms by a small elite who are not accountable, rather than bringing these important issues out into the air and sunshine of public debate. This tendency may give the temporary illusion of proferring more control, and therefore strength, to those few elites who are privileged to exert that control; but in the end, as with all dictatorships, what seems to be strength is really an Achilles heel that (pardon the mix of metaphors) sooner or later will come home to roost.

Factoids in the Blogospheric Echo Chamber

It seems that more than half the time when I try to track down evidence for a claim I see on the Internet relating to the problem of Islam, I run into dead ends—or rather, into cul-de-sacs—where no source can be found to verify the claim.

When this happens with regard to particularly juicy claims that help to damn Islam, it becomes highly frustrating. While I often find plenty of sites that repeat the claim, I find none that actually provide a credible source for verifying that claim.

For example, while Googling for something unrelated, I stumbled across this claim by a Dhimmi Watch reader back in November of 2006:

On March 8 1989, while speaking in London's Regents Park Mosque, when asked by a Christian Science Monitor reporter how he would "cope with the idea of killing a writer for writing a book" he is reported to have replied:

In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed into immorality and irresponsibility and I think as far as this writer is concerned, unfortunately, he has been irresponsible with his freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again...

The Dhimmi Watch commenter who posted this did not indicate the quote he was posting with quote marks or italicization: the reader assumes that the text set off as the second paragraph is the quote, since the wording indicates so.

This is a nice, plump, juicy quote allegedly reported by an eminently reputable source (the Christian Science Monitor), and if nailed down with adequate verification, this could help to considerably buttress our claims in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement pertaining to the problem of extremism disturbingly present too often among mainstream Muslims (in this case, in the mouth of an otherwise pleasant and famous pop singer who converted to Islam over two decades ago, Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam). While other directly related damning evidence about Cat Stevens exists that is verifiable (registration which is easy and free is required for this New York Times article), it is always nice to have more evidence on hand.

Now, the first problem with this claim presented by this Dhimmi Watch commenter is that no link is provided. At least, however, the commenter provided a date and venue—March 8 1989 in the Christian Science Monitor.

Reasonably assuming that this commenter provided a verbatim quote, I first copied the first line—In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed—and pasted it into the Google search bar with quote marks at either end.

To my now weary lack of surprise, this yielded not one result based in the Christian Science Monitor. What it did yield was 302 results from various websites and blogs, all apparently parroting someone else in the Blogospheric Echo Chamber, but no one of them actually grounding the Cat Stevens quote in an actual credible source—even if from another reputable newspaper, other than Christian Science Monitor, I would have been happy.

At the head of the list, we see the likely culprit, that secondary source of ungrounded claims throughout the Blogosphere—indeed, throughout the Internet—Pseudopedia, aka, Wikipedia: initially, some of the other sites and blogs that have repeated this quote probably got it from Wikipedia, and the rest of them just regurgitated the first few who had uncritically cited that Recyclopedia.

Checking out the Wikipedia entry for this, the citation of sources for verification provided there is laughable where it is not abysmal: No footnote is provided for the quote, and in the introductory paragraph, there are highlighted link-words, but they do not lead the reader to any relevant verification: For example, the date March 8, 1989 is highlighted as two separate links (the month and day being one, the year being another), but when the reader clicks on them, they only lead to Wikipedia articles about those dates in general having nothing to do with the Cat Stevens quote supposed to be on that date! The same goes for the other highlighted link-words there, “Regents [sic] Park” and “Christian Science Monitor”.

The second result on the first Google page is another Wikipedia entry, from an apparently subsidiary site called “Wikiquote”. There as well, one finds no linked citation to a source. In fact, it only notes the year (1989) along with “Christian Science Monitor”, but no month or day. If that isn’t bad enough, when referencing the Christian Science Monitor, it refers to the title of the article and puts it in quote marks as “Yussuf Islam, Formerly Cat Stevens, Expresses Support For Rushdie Death Sentence”. However, when one searches the archives at the Christian Science Monitor for “Yussuf Islam” (as opposed to its correct spelling, “Yusuf”—cf. above), one gets zero results.

Okay, back to the Google results:

The third result takes us to a website that seems to be a mindlessly naive celebration of the musical talents of Cat Stevens, where in the comments section, a person with good intentions simply regurgitated the quote, probably taken from Wikipedia, but of course, provided no source.

The fourth result is the above-mentioned commenter from Dhimmi Watch.

The remainder of the Google results on the first page have the same problem: no actual credible source for verification of the quote.

While the first page indicated that there were 302 results, when I tried to click on successive pages 2, 3, 4, etc., they all lead me to a second page with only two results on it, indicating an end to the results—after only 10 results on the first page and then two on the next page.

In addition, there was, of course, no link among them directly to the official Christian Science Monitor site.

Conclusion:

Today’s example is only one of many I have noticed over the past year since I began to become aware of this problem. This unfortunately reflects a sorry state of basic evidentiary quality to the communications activity of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement in the Blogosphere. And, since the Blogosphere continues to be the main venue for this most crucial aspect of that movement—if only because the world of mainstream media (including the news, arts & entertainment, the art world, and pop culture) remains so inhospitable to anything vaguely critical of Islam—this augurs ill for the success of the movement, or at least for its timely success. Again, this is not rocket science: most of these claims and quotes can be nailed down, if they exist. All it takes is a bit of meticulous labor.

The fact that nobody in the movement seems to care about this, and that even among the more effective luminaries of the movement (Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Pam Geller, Andrew Bostom, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, etc.) there is no sign of any concern about this, reflects poorly on its state of organization—or more accuately, its lack thereof. If the movement were better organized, matters like this would be noticed when individuals like me brought them to the attention of the movement (for, there would be a system whereby important matters could be raised and actions to take adjudicated), and then certain people would be delegated to do something about it: like physically walking to a library, sitting down in front of a microfiche machine with a spool of the relevant archives of the alleged Christian Science Monitor source, finding it (if it exists), transcribing on a piece of paper its contents as well as the precise and complete referencing information (including the precise page number as well as the number of the tape spool and company that produces the microfiche archives), then writing it up on a blog for all to have as a reference for any future occasion where the quote becomes useful. Ideally, such researchers would be paid for their efforts, as the movement acquires increasing organization, which would include funding for its ongoing project.

As it is now, however, the movement remains “still inchoate”—which means it mostly lopes along in sloppy fashion with little coherence in ideology and not much coordination of practical matters ranging from marshalling public rallies (like a Million Man March on Washington, for example) to providing basic services in its communications activity, as discussed in my essay here today.

Further Reading:

The Anti-Islam Movement: Prospectus for Improvement

Primary Sources 101 and Pseudopedia revisited

Nearly a year ago, I wrote an essay here on the unreliability of Wikipedia as a source for information, given its generally poor grounding in primary sources.

Today, a reader referred me to the Wikipedia entry on the increasingly famous—Blogospherically, that is—Barbary Pirates quote. Once again, Wikipedia disappoints.

To recap the overarching issue here: There are two facets to the problem of primary sources:

1) the reliability of a verbatim quote of the original source being used;

and

2) an adequately thorough reference to that original source.

On both accounts, in terms of this Barbary Pirates quote, Wikipedia fails. I have already exhaustively analyzed the proper nature of primary sources and their referencing in this specific context in three separate essays—here, here and here.

Today, I just want to present the inadequacies of the Wikipedia entry on the Barbary Pirates quote. With regard to #1 above, we see that the Wikipedia entry varies from the actual quote which I finally found and provided (see the third linked essay above for full details).

1.

Wikipedia: “concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury”

Actual quote: “concerning the Grounds of their pretentions to make war upon Nations who had done them no Injury”.

In this phrase alone, we see four variances—three in terms of incorrect capitalization or non-capitalization of words, and one in terms of actual wording (“the pretensions” for “their pretensions”).

A tangential fault in this particular locus of the Wikipedia presentation is in the grammatical syntax of the introductory phrasing:

Upon inquiring "concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury", the ambassador replied...

The grammatical syntax of the phrasing demands the interpretation that it was the ambassador who was doing the inquiring which is then quoted. This is flatly incorrect: it was Jefferson and Adams who did the inquiring of the ambassador. A second grammatical/syntactical flaw here involves the clear, but incoherent, implication by the Wikipedia author as he segues into the quote that it is the ambassador actually speaking, whereas it is clear from the primary source in the Boyd edition that Jefferson and Adams were paraphrasing him. The Wikipedia implication is incoherent because as the reader goes on to read the quote, he can plainly see that it is making third-person references (e.g., “in their Koran”; and more vividly a little later on, “He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel...”: a person speaking is not going to say about himself, “He said...”!). Thus, when the Wikipedia introduces this quote with—“...the ambassador replied:”—it strongly implies that what follows will be an actual quote, not just a paraphrase.

2.

Wikipedia:

[... the ambassador replied:] It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every muslim who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.

Actual quote:

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Variances:

a) the first “it” is capitalized, thus ignoring the fact that what the ambassador replied does not start the sentence as it is presented in the primary source, but begins after “The Ambassador answered us that...”

b) the phrase “founded on the Laws of their Prophet” is absent—this is of some significance, seeing as most Westerners today are still ignorant of the fact that the vast majority of Muslims do not merely follow the Koran, but also the Sunna, which is precisely the “Laws of their Prophet” (i.e., the Hadiths and Fiqh)

c) Wikipedia has “...all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners...”, while the actual quote is “...that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners...” (right here we can count three variances)

d) Wikipedia has “...whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave...”, while the actual quote is “...that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners...” (here the variances are so great and convolved, mere attempts at enumerating them is pointless).

As I stressed in my previous essays on primary sources, a primary source is a quote, and a quote must be both verbatim and singular: one cannot have multiple renderings of a quote floating around—at least not if one wants to provide verifiable proof of a claim being made.

The Wikipedia quote goes on to mention the further spicy detail about how Muslim pirates actually go about their business of seizing ships and boarding them. I regret to say that I cannot remember clearly whether that additional detail was in the source I found when I was at the library and had the book in hand. If it was, I must have decided against including it. I would have made that decision based on my estimation that the main quote was more than adequate to convey the astounding fact of a respectable professional Muslim—i.e., an official diplomat—in 1786 matter-of-factly justifying piracy on the grounds of the Koran and the Sunna; and that thus the extra spice about pirates boarding ships would only distract from this “money quote”. In addition, my focus on that “money quote” without the added spicy detail concerns the fact that the quote that has been bandied about on the Blogosphere, in my experience, has never included that added spicy detail.

To be tentatively fair to Wikipedia at this point, it could well be that there exist—in the primary sources themselves—at least two versions of this account. We cannot accord Wikipedia this benefit of the doubt, however—not only because of the variances we broke down above, but also in terms of the second facet I listed above: to wit, an adequately thorough reference to that original source.

I.e., if Wikipedia had provided a complete reference to their quote, then one could more easily locate that reference, adjudge that it is indeed a credible primary source, and then conclude that there must be, originally, two versions—i.e., that Jefferson and/or Adams had paraphrased their encounter with the ambassador on some occasion other than the one which I located as reproduced on pages 357-9 in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (34 volumes on the shelf), Julian P. Boyd, Editor, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1954. And if such a second original version exists, it would be nice if someone would actually acknowledge their existence as such, analyze their discrepancy, and then reference both adequately. Even nicer would be the location somewhere, perhaps in a study by a credible historian, of an explanation for why Jefferson and/or Adams produced a second version. Of course, apparently we cannot rely on Wikipedia to do any of this. They must have more important things to do.

Let us examine the Wikipedia references: the quote in question is provided two footnotes (2 and 3).

The first footnote (2) takes us to this citation: "American Peace Commissioners to John Jay," March 28, 1786, "Thomas Jefferson Papers," Series 1. General Correspondence. 1651-1827, Library of Congress.

The first problem is with the title. According to the Boyd edition I cited, it is titled “American Commissioners to John Jay”. There is no word “Peace” in it. The second problem with the Wikipedia citation is the lack of the elementary nuts and bolts of any proper citation: a date of publication, notation of the editor or editors for this “General Correspondence”, and pagination. In a word, this citation is pathetic; something we might expect from a college sophomore whose brain is full of pop culture and hormones but little else, but not from a supposedly credible encyclopedia with pretensions to being a major source of historical knowledge.

In addition to this egregiously inadequate citation, that same footnote provides a link to a photograph of a page written in 18th-century longhand. Presumably, this is the page referred to in the citation. However, it is comically unreadable. The ordinary reader of Wikipedia is not an expert in arcane cursive handwriting from centuries past, and does not have the resources to consult one in order to make this photocopy readable.

The second footnote provided (footnote 3) leads the reader to a citation of—The Atlantic Monthly (Volume 30, Issue 180, October 1872). "Jefferson, American Minister in France"—a source that cannot be retrieved unless one has an academic code that gains one access to college library materials. I had accessed and used this source for one of my prior essays on this topic (one of the three essays I linked above).

Aside from the relatively minor discrepancy that, in the immediate secondary source, Cornell University Library’s “Making of America” series that provides journals from historical archives, the “monthly” is not capitalized, we see immediately that this must have been the source which the Wikipedia author used for his quote, as the two are identical. I already analyzed the problem of the Atlantic monthly quote in the above linked essay. While the 19th-century writer who provided it, James Parton, seems to have been a credible historian otherwise, his handling of this quote is rather sloppy—perhaps because of the venue in which he was writing. And, of course, the main problem with it is the presentation of multiple variances contrasting with the actual primary source from the Boyd edition.

The reader of Wikipedia has no way of knowing whether the inadequate citation to the primary source (footnote 2) comports with the Atlantic monthly quote; nor does the Wikipedia author seem to care, if he was ever aware of this problem in the first place.

Conclusion:

Once again, we consult Wikipedia and find it wanting at the precise and crucial point where it all matters most: the primary source that would verify a given claim, and the proper reference citation to that primary source. Thus Pseudopedia remains the better name for that rather bloated, vulgar and, unfortunately, promiscuously utilized enterprise which bills itself as a “multilingual, Web-based, free-content encyclopedia project”.

Islam and the Psychology of Satan: The Tragicomedy of Hell on Earth

Introduction:

Today’s essay veers off on a meditation in uncharted territory—at least uncharted here. This meditation on Islam as Satanic will, more than most of my other essays here, indulge in speculation rather far removed from the security of data that would endow it with an ostensible connection to verifiability. The concern even for plausible indications, then, let alone conclusive proofs, will be held in abeyance as I explore in this meditation some implications of a hypothesis.

That hypothesis is, simply put, that Islam is not only “Satanic” in a loosely poetic or rhetorical sense—an adjective likely to be interpreted even among many in the still inchoate anti-Islamic movement as hyperbolic—and not only even a Satanist cult (albeit the largest, longest-lasting and most successful such cult in history), but positively and directly a creation of Satan himself.

And not only that: today’s essay will explore this rather egregious premise by presuming to palpate the mind of Satan himself.

A caveat to the reader: I embark upon this meditation from the perspective of an imaginative agnostic, not as a follower of Christianity or any other religion. My years of having informally studied the history of Western religions and Judaeo-Christian theology—along with the symbology of mythopoetics of the philosophers Eric Voegelin, Simone Pétrement and Paul Ricoeur, as well as the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell and the anthropologists Mircea Eliade, Henri Frankfort and Thorkild Jacobsen—will have doubtlessly helped me here and informed this little exercise in many ways, some obvious, some subtle. Furthermore, I refract my meditation through a Christian lens, so to speak, for the cogent reason that Islam’s theology is really an anti-theology based on repudiating Judaeo-Christian theology and supposedly correcting it.

I employ the word meditation in an old-fashioned, pre-New-Agey sense, as denoting (according to the 1923 Webster’s dictionary) “a discourse treating of a subject meditatively” where it involves “close or continued thought; turning or revolving of a subject in the mind”.

Why do this meditation? The answer is that it is a noetic exercise prompted by something that has occurred to me about Islam for quite a while now. As I put it in a recent article here:

I am at a loss to explain the genesis of Islam—and its ongoing historical career of grotesquely ghoulish behaviors from the beginning in the 7th century A.D. right up to our present—without it. It seems to make the most sense, for all other explanations seem to beggar the phenomenon—the full, malevolent, horrific dimensions of it—which they are trying to explain.

Meditation:

What can we say about Satan?

First, he is flexible and open to try new tactics: he is a “multi-tasker”. He does not rigidly adhere to one method of trying to subvert God’s Creation. He will try anything that might work toward this twisted end.

Thus, we do not rule out that Satan has “fingers in many pies”—i.e., he has many different human historical contexts in which he can try to work his mischief. So when we say—as is the showpiece of this essay—that Islam is Satan’s masterpiece, we are not thereby saying that he does not also “diversify” his business ventures in other venues. Of course he does. There is plenty of evil in the world that is non-Islamic. However, that said, that should not detract from giving him his due for this particularly spectacular work of art he has managed to create.

Secondly, he is psychotic and pneumopathological, and his psychosis and pneumopathology reflect a center that is an incoherent vortex centripetally unified only by hatred, not by reason. Though there may be logic to this hatred, there is no reason to the logic. This is true of any psychosis and pneumopathology—and all the more so when it comes to the supremely eminent source of all psychosis and pneumopathology, and the massive contradiction of his project to fight and defeat God.

It may well be that defeating God is not Satan’s ultimate aim, because he knows he cannot defeat God, so he sets his sights one step lower—merely to try to destroy as much of Creation as possible, out of the motive, again, of sheer hatred. Knowing he is ultimately (i.e., eschatologically) doomed, he nevertheless desires to bring down as much of Creation with him as possible before that time. This would be a rather tangential point that does not detract from our overall diagnosis of Satan’s psyche and its effects.

According to the New Testament, when God became Man in Jesus Christ, this was a moment in history that particularly wounded Satan. Things had been going swimmingly for him up until then. The Ecumene was devolving into a bewildering confusion of religions, sects, philosophies, mystery cults and so forth. On top of this, collisions of Empires—first the Macedonian vs. the Persian, then the Roman vs. the Persian and others—were causing enormous dislocations, materially and existentially. People were losing hope, or were flailing about sampling from the cafeteria of meanings of life in a desperate attempt at trying to recapture the former stability of belief offered by the previous pagan mythologies. The birth, life and mission of Jesus Christ, Son of God, ruined all this.

One of the first things Satan did, then, was to try to seduce Jesus to betray God—an irrational tactic, seeing as Jesus was part of the Godhead. In the account of the Gospel of Luke (4:1-13), this attempted temptation of Jesus follows immediately from his baptism by John in the previous chapter and the spectacle of God’s voice announcing from Heaven His blessing on Jesus and proclaiming his divine mission (3:22). Furthermore, the context of this baptism is the eschatological salvation and its imminence which John is preaching and baptizing to help usher in. So, in Luke’s account, directly after he has been defined as the culmination of God’s soteriological plan for the world, Jesus feels compelled by the “spirit” to go into the “wilderness”—likely to concentrate through prayer and meditation in solitude and austerity, as he was wont to do rather many times during his life. This time was particularly intense and severe, lasting 40 days—and it was also momentously significant, for it was the inauguration of his eschatological mission to save the world. Thus, Satan, like a bird of prey or a desert jackal, seizes upon him—not to attack him physically, but to beset him on a spiritual level, to lure him away from his divinity.

That Satan would wait until Jesus was out in the desert wilderness may be explained simply by the fact that he wanted to tempt Jesus in a secluded locale, out of the way of witnesses. Or, perhaps this indicates that Satan tends to dwell, naturally, in deserts—such as this desert near Jerusalem, as well as the more notorious deserts of Arabia.

In Luke 4:3, seeing that Jesus is starving of hunger after a long self-imposed fast, Satan contemptuously asks Jesus the same rhetorical question, in essence, which Muslims often ask those defending orthodox Christology: “If you are of God, command this stone to turn into bread.” I.e., the Muslims ask, if Jesus really is God, why did he suffer in various ways like a human? (This challenge occurs again just a few verses later, in Luke 4:9-11, where Satan lifts Jesus up onto a high pinnacle and dares him to leap down and let angels of God save him, to prove he really is “of God”.)

Re-entering the psychology of Satan, we can speculate that Satan either already knows the answer to this rhetorical challenge—but is cleverly trying to undermine the Incarnation by trying to demonstrate its supposed incoherence—or it could be that he himself cannot comprehend its significance, and so he tends obtusely and belligerently to deny it, based on the crude expectation that God must only and always exert Himself in obvious power—for He is Omnipotent, isn’t He?—never in paradoxical and mysterious condescension and self-abasement.

This obtusely limited comprehension of divine power is reflected in the other temptations Satan attempts against Jesus—and is, on a broader scale, reflected also in Muslim psychology by which the power of conquest, along with the power of Strong Men who rule those areas which Muslims have usurped, justifies itself by its obvious and visible material gains. The common leitmotif of Islamic zeal—to wit, “We love death more than you love life”—seems on the surface to vitiate this lust for power and material gains, apparently echoing the contemptus mundi eschato-psychology of Christian piety. However, one look at the Islamic goal and reward for this contempt for this life—viz., Islamic Paradise—would put that comparison to rest. Islamic Paradise as it is envisioned in various writings of the Sunna (and suggested here and there in the Koran) is a massively crass testament to the lust for material pleasure and power. Thus, Islam inculcates a stubborn incomprehension of, and indeed hostility to, Christian virtues such as humility, meekness, self-abasing charity to others, strength in weakness, wisdom through suffering, and the sublimation of the appetite for power and material pleasure even in the context of the ultimate eschatological rewards. (It is of interest to note that Hitler also expressed bitter contempt for these Christian virtues—and at least once in a context of expressing admiration for Islam!)

This Satanic—and Islamic—penchant for expressing right through might, and in turn, might through material displays of what power can deliver, is found then in Satan’s enticement to Jesus in Luke 4:5-7 and what he will gain by rejecting his divine suffering:

And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

In the aforementioned short article I wrote on this blog, I called attention to an interestingly disquieting similarity between this enticement of Satan—more specifically, the synoptic version of it in Matthew 4:8-9 which does not differ in substance from Luke’s account—and the following passage from the Koran offering to its slavish followers an enticement in the ultimate satisfaction of their material appetites which they shall receive as the reward for their fanatical submission:

And when you behold Paradise, you will see all around you delights and a vast kingdom.
(Koran 76:20)

And how did Jesus respond to this enticement?

And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. (4:8)

As I concluded in that aforementioned article (to paraphase):

Perhaps what happened is that Satan, licking his wounds from his abysmal failure to seduce Jesus—not only as manifested at that pivotal moment in the history of Creation, but also in subsequent centuries as Christianity slowly but surely waxed in influence throughout the Ecumene, within 300 years converting the Roman Emperor himself and only growing more and more influential in the centuries after that—recoiled back into his natural habitat, some cave or hole in the desert, there to lurk, hunker down, and stew in his malignant juices plotting some way to get back at God.

Somehow, some way—perhaps it was his diabolical genius, which should not be underestimated, deformed as it is—he at last devised a way: to create a vast following, a vast army, of slaves to worship him against God. But this vast army should not be blatantly Satanic, no: that would be too easily exposed and vilified by most of Mankind. This new counter-religion should not be a mere Satanic cult, which will always command only a marginal following, or some confused Gnostic cult that, however nicely its creed mangles the truth, nevertheless seems only to succeed in attracting a few eccentric souls here and there. No: the new world religion to counter God’s religion has to masquerade as God’s True Religion, over and above all other attempts at worshipping God. And furthermore, it has to denounce all other religious attempts—especially Judaeo-Christianity—as twisted corruptions of the One True Religion of which only it is the True Vehicle. And the new True Religion of God should not merely stop at denunciations of other religions: it must actively fight them until there is no religion other than it—for, after all, the Ultimate Absolute Truth and its survival against hostile enemies surrounding it on all sides is that important, isn’t it?

And that’s not all. Satan benefits not merely from successfully starting up his own religious software and operating system to compete with God’s Word, and drawing millions of subscribers and submitters for centuries. While of course he enjoys the sheer pleasure of having millions of followers, Satan needs more. The hearts and minds of these millions of followers must be degraded, corrupted and possessed into zealously pursuing a twisted mirror-image of righteousness that in reality is evil. This will be the actualization of the counter-religion they follow: Just as this new counter-religion is the diabolically diametrical opposite of God’s religion but has the infinite gall—and wicked genius—to arrogate to itself the title of the One True Religion, so too its daily practice must entail a similarly twisted reversion of ethics, whereby its followers engage in demonic pursuits while fanatically believing they are pursuing a Godly piety.

Thus, their perennial religiousity in its slavish pursuit of submission to their darker source not only leads them eventually to his eternal abode—a mirage of paradisaic gardens camouflaging infernal damnation—; but also manages to wreak the havoc, mayhem and misery of a Hell on Earth in the long and winding meantime of history and the news between the beginning and the end.

Conclusion:

When Muslims become belligerently indignant at the charge that Islam is Satanic, the Devil in them has warped their minds in a deliciously perverse way: for, instead of proudly owning their Satanism, their indignation stems from their inculcation in the lie that they are actually anti-Satanic. What more delightfully twisted way for Satan to disport himself, than to create minions of followers who pursue the delusion that they are against him and for God, when in fact, they are his slaves, and against God!

A note on the artwork:

The first is an illustration by the British poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827) titled “Lucifer”, his rendering of Canto XXXIV in Dante’s Inferno (the first book in his trilogy, the Divina Commedia)—specifically, one surmises, from verses 34-36:

S’el fu sì bel com’elli è ora brutto, e contra ’l suo fattore alzò le ciglia, ben dee da lui proceder ogne lutto.

My loose translation:

If Lucifer was once as beautiful as he is now ugly, and seeing how he gave the finger to God, no wonder that all mayhem and misery has its source in him!

The second, appropriately, is William Blake’s rendering of Dante’s placement of Mohammed in Hell, titled “Sowers of Discord”, from verses 22-36 in the Inferno. In Dante’s story, Virgil has been leading Dante on a tour through Hell, and they are now in one of the worst levels down there, the Ninth Circle of Hell, where Virgil shows Dante the spectacle of the damnation of both Mohammed and Ali (the latter the founder of Shia Islam).

This time, I will use Mandelbaum’s translation (with a couple of minor adjustments):

No barrel, even though it’s lost a hoop or end-piece, ever gapes as the one whom I saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart:

His bowels hung between his legs, one saw his vitals and the miserable sack that makes of what we swallow excrement.

While I was fixated on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his split chest open and said:

“See how I rend myself open: See now how maimed Mohammed is! And he who walks and weeps before me is Ali, whose face is opened wide from chin to forelock. And all the others here whom you can see were, when alive, the sowers of dissension and scandal, and for this they now are split.”

And speaking of Sowers of Discord and Scandal:

A Muslim group in Italy in June of 2001 apparently demanded the removal or destruction of a medieval fresco from in a chapel in Bologna, Italy. It seems they were “offended” by that fresco depicting Mohammed in Hell, its artist, 15th-century Giovanni da Modena, inspired by Dante’s Inferno. (Unfortunately, I have not been able to pin down the actual source of this news story, from either the Corriere della Sera, Milan edition, or from The Times of London, whence it was supposed to have originated; the story having been simply bandied about from one blog to another in the Blogosphere, echo-chamber-wise.)

In 2002, it was revealed that an Islamic terror cell with a network of members in Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain had plotted to blow up this same chapel in Bologna because of its blasphemous fresco.

Then in 2006, it was revealed that another Islamic terror cell had planned to blow up the same chapel in Bologna, along with the subway system in Milan.

To see the fresco in question, click here.

The Five Pillars and the Fifth Column—and the Monolith they support

In an essay on Jihad Watch today, Hugh Fitzgerald writes:

When Muslim apologists and propagandists insist that “Islam is not a monolith,” what they are really attempting to do is to make sure that Infidels do not discuss "Islam" in the sense of an ideology that consists of immutable texts, and tenets, and attitudes and atmospherics that emerge within societies suffused with Islam.

About this business of a “monolithic” Islam and the propagandistic use of its ostensible denial, some points are in order:

1) “Muslim apologists”, of course, includes thousands of non-Muslim Westerners who engage actively in whitewashing, “respecting” and even protecting Islam-and-Muslims (not counting the probable millions who more or less passively do their part in this regard). One important part of this endeavor involves the perpetuation of the myth of an un-“monolithic Islam”. A better term, then, would be “Islam apologists”, since this propagandistic army includes thousands of non-Muslim Westerners actively enabling the Muslim apologists, along with millions of non-Muslim Westerners more or less passively enabling them. Essentially what we have here is millions of non-Muslim Westerners who function in various ways—mostly as unwitting dupes whose politically correct sensitivity and multi-culturalist sincerity is being exploited—to support the Camp of Islam with respect to the War of Ideas arena of the larger War between Islam and the West. This war, of course, remains unilaterally waged for now: it is Muslims vs. the West, but not the West vs. Muslims. And even the ones waging it continue to do so mostly in the deceptive camouflage of an insistence of peaceful co-existence based on “respect” (which, on closer examination, invariably means a one-way deference by the West toward Islam without any expectation of reciprocation by Muslims). The War between Islam and the West, thus, continues to be a Stealth War—involving a symbiosis of violent attacks and the pretense of detachment from complicity with those violent attacks.

Enabling this Stealth War, again, are millions of Westerners: Without this massive and widespread Fifth Column, the Five Pillars of Islam wouldn’t stand a chance.

2) Secondly, the term “monolithic” is purposefully extreme and so, in setting it up to knock it down, it functions in the propagandistic rhetoric of these apologists essentially as a “straw man” logical fallacy (or a “straw Muslim” fallacy). Of course, it goes without saying that no complex sociological system—whether it be a culture, a religion, or a civilization—is “monolithic”. The questions which this term is obfuscating, then, are these:

a) Is Islam sufficiently unified so that we can speak of one “Islam” and not multiple “Islams”?

b) If the answer to (a) is “Yes”, then how, and to what extent, are the problems and pathologies we see in the nebula of Islam—in its texts and in the behaviors and expressions of Muslims in history and in the news—attributable to this one Islam? Or, conversely, on what bases will this attribution both in nature and extent be denied—i.e., on what bases will it be cogently argued that most of the problems and pathologies we see in the nebula of Islam have nothing to do with Islam and are attributable to non-Islamic factors?

3) Now we can get to the rhetorical paradox of this myth of an un-“monolithic” Islam. The paradox turns out to be a superficial optical illusion or mirage: when one digs deeper under the obfuscating sand, one sees what is going on here, reflecting the apparent paradox of the “cultural relativism” of PC MC by which—

a) All cultures are equal

but

b) The West is the worst culture in history.

The apparent relativism of (a) masks a perversely self-denigrating absolutism underneath, whereby out of a pathologically excessive deference, admiration and “respect” for “the Other”, non-white and/or non-Western cultures are elevated above white and/or Western civilization. Meanwhile, on the flip side of this twin axiom, the white West is—out of a pathologically excessive cultivation of self-criticism—abased below all other cultures.

When applied to Islam, and specifically in terms of this “monolithic” business, this paradox becomes:

a) Islam is not “monolithic” if you want to criticize or condemn anything Islamic;

but

b) Islam in fact is unified if you want to praise, admire and “respect” Islam.

(By carefully moving the obfuscatory sand out of the way to excavate and reveal the monolith beneath, the above analysis renders explicit the implicit deployment by Islam apologists of the cleverly exploited ambiguity between the straw man monolithic and its effective synonym unified.)

The same paradox applies, of course, to the wonderfully diverse multi-cultural rainbow of Muslims around the world. If you want to criticize or condemn Muslims, then they are too “diverse” to pin down qua Muslims. If, however, you want to praise, admire and “respect” Muslims qua Muslims suddenly they become a unified datum—to represent concretely the merit and accuracy of the praise, admiration, and “respect” in question.

I’m not sure what species of a logical fallacy this apparent paradox represents. Perhaps “logical fallacy” is too generous a term for what is going on here: this is simply irrational incoherence, at best, or a rather crass attempt at chicanery, at worst.

Either way, millions of Westerners—both “Elites” and ordinary people as well as various flavors of hybrid in the sociological spectrum between these two poles—continue to think this way: By enabling Muslim apologists, they continue to help prop up the holographic monolith of the Good Islam while at the same time they continue to help conceal the real monolith of the Evil Islam. Once the West pulls down its Fifth Column, the Five Pillars will buckle and crumble, for they cannot by themselves support the real monolith of Islam once that monolith becomes visible from behind the Fifth Column that currently continues to obscure it, and by doing so, continues to protect it from the rational wrath of the West.

Further Reading:

The Other Islam—a Holographic Reduplication

The Anti-Western Westerner

The Muslim: The New Black and the New Jew

Muslims have become the most privileged of all non-white minority groups.

This result granted to them by the white West has occurred, perversely but not illogically, post-911 and post-all the other outrageously hostile behaviors and words of Muslims throughout the world.

The reasons why this has occurred include the following:

1) The mainstream dominance of PC MC, which tends to privilege non-whites and/or non-Westerners over white Westerners. Of course, this doesn’t explain why Muslims should have become privileged over other non-white and/or non-Western minorities; but it is a necessary precondition.

2) Muslims are more aggressive and hostile:

a) Out of all other non-white and/or non-Western minorities, Muslims do more concerted violence and more seemingly random violence, as well as more stealth violence—i.e., more or less veiled threats that depend upon the actual violence successfully deployed or terrifyingly plotted but foiled;

b) Muslims throw more temper tantrums in the form of victimization complaints, mass demonstrations, and riots;

and

c) Muslims have the biggest and broadest gang in the global village: Muslims represent a trans-nationally cohesive body with a unifying ideology and identity—and therefore a more effective way of making good on threats of violence in various parts of the world.

Of all non-white and/or non-Western minorities anywhere in the world, the one that comes closest to offering even a distant resemblance to this problem are blacks: but what blacks lack is precisely what explains the Muslim rise to dominance in the Minority-Grievance-Demand-and-Get-Respect Food Chain: blacks have no cohesive unifying ideology of militant supremacism. For a brief period of approximately a couple of decades in the USA, blacks attempted to create a unifying ideology of militant supremacism, either fashioning an idiosyncratic and heterodox splinter off of Islam through the Nation of Islam, or concocting a political gangster-guerilla movement in the Black Panthers. These, however, were cobbled-together new inventions with no historical and cultural roots and they never succeeded in mobilizing and unifying blacks—whereas Islam has a strong and rich tradition of successful miltant supremacism going back centuries and an ideology far more effective at unifying and networking around the world.

3) The perversely paradoxical logic of PC MC: The more that Muslims attack and threaten to attack and the more they otherwise behave outrageously, the more the West bends over backwards to placate and protect them. In addition to its perversely instinctive tendency in general to be excessively deferential and “respectful” of non-white ethnic minorities, this irrationally spasmodic reaction of the PC MC West is due in great part to two overriding fears:

a) a semi-conscious fear of Muslim violence which is known deep down to be more effectively deployed than the threats of any other group;

and

b) a more conscious fear of themselves succumbing to their own evil white inclinations to go down the slippery slope toward committing terrible collective sins against a non-white ethnic people, ranging on a spectrum from bigotry and racism on the low end (already mortal sins in the PC MC mind whether substantiated or not), to abuses of various human rights against those minorities, to shudderingly horrible measures such as—gasp!—mass deportation or—horrors!—mass internment (remember the “Shameful Chapter” of our history and what we did to those preciously brittle and frail Japanese-Americans!), on up to that ever-present propensity we evil white Westerners always have up our sleeves with regard to the non-whites among us: Genocide.

With regard to that last and most evil propensity of the white West, Muslims are more and more successfully expropriating from Jews the “Never Again” mantra which the latter earned through the Holocaust—the former doing so not on the basis of anything the white West has done to Muslims, but merely on the entirely hypothetical basis of what might happen if the evil white Western propensity toward bigotry and racism and “Islamophobia” is not powerfully checked.

Conclusion:

Thus, what is really guiding and motivating the PC MC West to elevate the Muslim as the Most Privileged & Protected Ethnic Minority of the World is a package of twin phobias: Islamophobia and Autophobia.

The former, among PC MCs, is of course suppressed from their consciousness, for they must be in denial of the fact that they fear Muslims, just as the politically correct lily-white suburbanite when he is walking to his parked car late at night on a dubious street and sees five or six black youths approaching feels fear, and feels more fear than if it were five or six white youths—yet at the same time is unable to process this fear rationally so that it becomes consciously accepted as a valid emotion based on logic. The fear is thus repressed and this triggers a concomitant emotion in the politically correct white suburbanite: guilt at his own “racism” lurking deep within himself—which then triggers a psychological mechanism in his mind to redouble and reinforce his politically correct process of self-brainwashing to the effect that blacks can never do anything systemically wrong and if they seem to do so, it must somehow be the fault of the white society “oppressing” them in one way or another.

And this is where Autophobia—the fear of oneself having the constant potential to do very bad things against non-whites—comes in. With regard to the issue of black sociopathy, this has tended to cause only domestic and relatively minor problems, compared with the problem of maintaining a perversely willful blindness in the face of a global revival of Islamic militant supremacism. In the context of this problem of Islam, however, Autophobia on the part of the PC MC West motivates a massive attitude of bending over backwards to placate and to protect Muslims, even as they continue to attack and threaten us. But from whom, or from what, are we protecting Muslims? Why, of course, the West must protect Muslims from the West! In the perverse psycho-logic of the PC MC mind, the more that the Islamophobia is generated in us by Muslims attacking us and threatening us, the more we redouble our Autophobia to make sure we do not succumb to our own supposed evil propensity to mistreat Muslims.

As for the Jew: Jews over the past decade or so—and only increasing post-911—have become “Honorary White Westerners” both because of American support for them and because of the myth of the Oppressed Palestinians and the concomitant insinuations that Israel is a vaguely Nazi-like Apartheid state horribly mistreating a Brown Ethnic Third World People—and the Most Privileged of them all, to boot: Muslims. Thus, by the perversely incoherent logic of PC MC, which the cleverer Muslims of course assiduously exploit, Jews are increasingly denied their deference due them by what they earned in their horrific suffering of the Holocaust—while simultaneously this deference is transferred onto Muslims who not only never earned it because they have never suffered under the white West, but who have themselves outrageously committed one atrocity after another over the centuries right up to the present, against non-Westerners and Westerners alike.

Thus, the Old Black has to take a seat behind the Muslim on the Ethnic Bus.

And meanwhile, the Old Jew is thrown under the bus, while the New Jew, the Muslim, is given the driver’s seat to tell us all where to go.

I Struck Gold! Second Addendum to Primary Sources 101

As I expected in my last article, Addendum to Primary Sources 101, I received notice by email that the college library near me indeed has the edition of Thomas Jefferson writings footnoted by Melvin E. Lee, whom Raymond Ibrahim cited in his own Jihad Watch article about the current rash of Somalian piracy within a broader history of Islamic piracy, including the Barbary piracy in which the newly created United States of America was embroiled.

So today I went to the library as I promised, and looked up the reference footnoted by Melvin E. Lee:

Thomas Jefferson, “‘The American Commissioners’ Report to John Jay,” in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9 (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904-5), p. 358.

(More precisely, Lee footnotes a Frank Lambert book, The Barbary Wars, in which the Paul L. Ford edition is supposed to be cited, which Lee also provided—but not without problems, as we shall see.)

I went to the spot on the shelves where this multi-volume edition was supposed to be. And lo and behold, there it was. It was twelve volumes total. I checked the first volume, just to make sure the publication information was the same as that noted by Lee. It was.

At this point, I thought I was nearing the final pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What could go wrong now? I took volume 9 in hand and went off to find a study carrell to sit in, so I could get to the actual meaty, juicy quote in question and copy it down on a piece of paper.

I should have known: when I flipped through to page 358, there was nothing resembling “The American Commissioners’ Report to John Jay” as Raymond Ibrahim and Melvin E. Lee, had assured me. Instead, what I found on that page was “To the Secretary of the Treasury (Albert Gallatin.)” I read through it, just to make sure: nothing about the Barbary pirates or about any ambassador from Tripoli. Of course, I looked on adjacent pages before and after, just to make sure it wasn’t off by a page or two. Nothing.

Now what? I spent a good 20 minutes scouring through the general index supplied in the last volume, volume 12, looking up any reference that might lead me to the right place—“Barbary”, “ambassador”, “Tripoli”, and even tried the Muslim name of the ambassador which has been bandied about the Blogosphere, “Adja”—which I soon learned was misleading, if not inaccurate. Needless to say, the index had no “Adja”.

Frustrated and dispirited, I was about to leave the library, when I noticed another edition of Thomas Jefferson works nearby—this one titled The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, in 34 volumes (and still incomplete); a good three times the size of the Paul L. Ford edition. This edition’s publication information was the following:

Julian P. Boyd, Editor
Princeton, NJ
Princeton University Press, 1954.

Assuming that this edition would have completely different pagination and possibly different organization of headings, etc., I went straight for the index. Unfortunately, it had no general index for all volumes, but divided the indices up into 4-volume pamphlets. I had forgotten in what year the Jefferson report I was looking for had been written, so it took me some time hunting down what to look up in the indices. Also, at the time, I did not know the proper Muslim name for the ambassador, and there was no “Adja”—the name bandied about in the Blogosphere (including formally by Hugh Fitzgerald) in any of the indices. Looking up the entries for “Barbary” proved to be rather frustrating, since they referred the reader to innumerable pages apparently having little to do with my concern.

Finally, on a serendipitous fluke, when I looked up “Tripoli” in one of the indices, it referred the reader to “see Abdrahaman”—which I dutifully did. Finally, I found something that looked like a meeting between Jefferson and Adams and this Abdrahaman character.

Strangely enough, the volume and pagination were exactly the same as that which had been referenced by Melvin E. Lee / Frank Lambert to the wrong multi-volume edition—i.e., to the Paul L. Ford edition, not this one, the Julian P. Boyd edition!

At any rate, I flipped through to page 358 in volume 9 of the Boyd edition, and lo and behold: there it was. I had hit paydirt!

Spanning pages 357-9 in volume 9 of the Boyd edition, the entry was titled:

“American Commissioners to John Jay”
March 28th. 1786

Here then is my transcription of the relevant passage:

We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the Grounds of their pretentions to make war upon Nations who had done them no Injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Some observations are in order here to complete the process of unravelling all the niggling complexities and inaccuracies surrounding the use of this quote in the Blogosphere (and in the “real world” of actual books) by various members of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement:

1. The various wordings.

a) As I recounted in my last essay, there exist at least three versions of this quote, bandied about on the Blogosphere and finding their way into books as well. We can now see that the partial citation of the quote by presented by Ibrahim / Melvin E. Lee / Frank Lambert / Paul L. Ford is incorrect:

“right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”

Where and how the incorrect wording crept in, who knows. One assumes that Paul L. Ford is not to blame, and that therefore the corruption began with Frank Lambert, or with Melvin E. Lee. In the chain of transmission here, Ibrahim is merely copy-pasting a previous error.

b) Somewhat good news: other than the Ibrahim / Melvin E. Lee corruption, the quote most commonly bandied about the Blogosphere is, with the exception of one letter (for some reason, they capitalize the word “Battle”), the same as the quote from the Boyd edition. This is all well and good, but until the actual primary source was located, we had no way of knowing it was accurate, and this in turn cast doubt on whether it was a real quote at all, or what its real wording was.

2. The name of the Muslim ambassador:

Hugh Fitzgerald, for example, writes:

They had a meeting with the representative of Tripolitania (present-day Libya) then in the Great Britain, Sidi Haji Rahmand Adja.

I’m not sure where he gets this name from. At any rate, the name cited in Boyd’s edition of the Thomas Jefferson papers, and the name used by Jefferson and others in there, is “Abdrahaman” or “Abdurrahman”. This name, “Adja”, has been bandied about the Blogosphere, and apparently it has simply been copied from blogger to blogger, without anyone bothering to check on the more accurate name.

3. “Musselman”:

Interestingly enough, the apparent misspelling of “Mussulman” as “Musselman” is in the original written by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Either they did not know how to spell the word, or “Musselman” is indeed a correct variant, though I have been unable to find it in old dictionaries.

Conclusion:

To all those who have seen fit to make use of this quote, without adequately verifiable documentation thereof—such as Hugh Fitzgerald, Raymond Ibrahim, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, Michelle Malkin, Baron Bodissey, Fjordman—I hereby say, with sarcastic tongue in cheek, “you’re welcome”.

Addendum to Primary Sources 101

Introduction:

In today’s Jihad Watch, Raymond Ibrahim has published an essay that contextualizes the Somalian piracy with the American history of the Barbary Pirates.

Of course, I knew without a doubt that Ibrahim would have recourse to that Bogospherically famous quote about the Muslim ambassador’s Islamic justification for piracy related to then ambassador to London Thomas Jefferson in 1789.

I also suspected that, instead of finally alleviating the subtle hornet’s nest of niggling problems that have attended that famous little gem of a quote, Ibrahim’s use of it would only tend to perpetuate it.

And so it seems I was correct.

For background analysis on this, see my previous essay Primary Sources 101 and the Blogospheric anti-Islam Movement.

Discussion:

First, we have the amusing situation of remotion from the primary source by three degrees: Ibrahim cites Melvin E. Lee, Melvin E. Lee cites Frank Lambert, and finally Frank Lambert cites Paul L. Ford.

Despite this ridiculous remotion, we do seem to find in Paul L. Ford finally an ostensibly credible secondary source—to wit, as Melvin E. Lee notes in footnote #11 of his article referenced by Ibrahim:

Thomas Jefferson, “‘The American Commissioners’ Report to John Jay,” in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9 (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904-5), p. 358.

A multi-volume collection of the works—one assumes the complete works—of Thomas Jefferson would proffer for us, at last, the motherlode of primary source material in which one could locate the actual gem of the quote itself. However, in the context of the Communications arena of this most exigent endeavor of the still inchoate anti-Islam movement conducted largely, still, in the Blogosphere, this citation at third or more remotion of an ostensibly trustworthy secondary source is simply unacceptable—particularly when the actual original document in question and its appropriately complete reference are entirely possible to provide in any given online article, including both Ibrahim’s and Melvin E. Lee’s.

Secondly, I have already run into annoyingly niggling little snags in trying to pin down this ostensibly trustworthy secondary source, the multi-volume edition of Jefferson’s works edited by Paul L. Ford. The edition apparently is not available even for a limited preview on Google Books. I then checked the college library of my city, and their citations of this edition contain numerous problems—including the lack of any information about volume numbers and more importantly an ambiguity about whether its library system even has it on its shelves or not—whose resolution via email with staff members of the library I am now awaiting. If it turns out that my nearby college library indeed has the edition—and, of course, specifically has volume 9, the one cited by Melvin E. Lee as containing the specific primary source in question—I will then have to go physically to the library and look up the reference to check it. It is not so much that this presents any privations or imposition on me: an excursion to the college library is often a pleasant way to spend an hour or two. It is the fact that at this late stage of the game, nearing the second decade of the 21st century, the Blogosphere—and particularly that part of it devoted to the still inchoate anti-Islam movement—should not merely be a medium for demagogic rhetoric and rumor-mongering, nor even for the more respectable activity of speculative essays ungrounded in actual references, but should also include appropriately complete references to primary sources that substantiate at least our more important claims.

The problem of this deficiency is acutely augmented by a further flaw in the representation of the quote in question by Ibrahim / Melvin E. Lee / Frank Lambert / Paul L. Ford: its wording varies from other instances of the same quote adduced by various writers in the Blogosphere, as well as in one other instance of it which I have found from a 19th-century secondary source. In my previous essay, I presented both versions to show the discrepancies. Now we have three versions, compounding that original problem. As I argued before, a primary source quote is supposed to be verbatim, and it is supposed to have one form only, not multiple renderings. This is an intolerable situation where three permutations of an original quote are floating around: it undermines the veracity of the quote.

The quote presented by Ibrahim / Melvin E. Lee / Frank Lambert / Paul L. Ford only supplies a partial citation—indeed, not even a full sentence; but even that small amount is sufficient to reveal a divergence in wording:

“right and duty to make war upon them [i.e., “all Christians” as Melvin E. Lee puts it in his own words] wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”

Meanwhile, the quote bandied about the Blogosphere—including by such luminaries as Pipes, Bostom and Spencer—has these words for that same part:

“right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, . . .”

Notice the differences: The former version has “and to enslave as many as they could take” while the latter has “and to make slaves of all they could take”.

In addition, the latter capitalizes “Prisoners” while the former does not (a common orthographical peculiarity of 18th-century writing was the capitalization, seemingly without rhyme or reason, of apparently random words).

Also, the former ends the excerpt on a full stop period (contained within the final quotation mark), whereas the latter ends the excerpt on a comma, with the conclusion to the sentence following.

Finally, the former contains a little problem in the words of Melvin E. Lee—the secondary (or, rather, the quaternary) source: he describes the object of the attack and enslavement by Muslims as “all Christians”. Where is Lee getting this from? From the original wording of the primary source presented by Paul L. Ford? Or from the representation of that wording by Frank Lambert? This is important because it presents a significant divergence from the quote as bandied about the Blogosphere and as reported by my 19th-century secondary source, where the object in both of those versions is “all nations” which have not acknowledged Islam—though here, both of those versions also have variances in wording on describing this:

1) “all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority” (where “their” refers back in the sentence to “the Laws of their Prophet” and “the Koran”)

2) 1) “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet”.

Some may think a further problem I have noticed constitutes excessive quibbling on my part, but when it comes to adequate referencing of sources, a scrupulous attention to detail is de rigueur. In light of this, Melvin E. Lee’s citation in his footnote #11 contains an extra single quotation mark. I here reproduce it again:

Thomas Jefferson, "‘The American Commissioners' Report to John Jay," in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9 (New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904-5), p. 358; quoted in Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 116.

The single quote mark comes just before the third word, “The”, following “Thomas Jefferson”, and just after the opening double quote mark which the reader logically assumes—and can see for himself—is resolved by its closing double quote mark at the end of “John Jay”. To what, then does the opening single quote mark refer? And where is its closing single quote mark to contain what it is referring to? It cannot be the apostrophe at the end of the word “Commissioners” since that is, indeed, an apostrophe denoting the possessive form of the word “Commissioners”, and not a single quote mark. This sort of discrepancy, however minute it may seem to the reader, is important in that it exposes a potential inaccuracy in the citation itself, which poses a problem of accuracy more generally.

Bottom Line:

Today’s article by Raymond Ibrahim only compounds the problem I had noticed and analyzed in my previous essay. Such an exacerbation is to be expected when no one has bothered to pin down the primary source and make it available online. Again, in this case, it would be relatively easy to do so.

When I hear back from my local college library, and I learn that the work in question is at my local college library, I will go there and check it for myself. It is possible that it is not available there, but at some other library further away from me, which will present more inconvenience for me. Others in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement who travel more than I do (such as Robert Spencer who regularly goes to college campuses and could take 30-60 minutes out of his schedule one day to pin down this reference) and/or who have immediate easy access to major library systems (such as Raymond Ibrahim, currently a grad student at a school in the Washington, D.C. area—Catholic University, which surely would have a superb library containing the primary source in question—and who furthermore has worked in the Library of Congress himself and doubtless has access there) have a greater facility and higher responsibility than me to do this basic and important task. Andrew Bostom who has made it his life’s work to collect, edit and present primary sources on the problem of Islam, is another one that could be adduced in this same regard. Many others come to mind as well, such as Daniel Pipes or Hugh Fitzgerald (who often drops hints about his travels and his access to obscure libraries and scholarly bookstores in various parts of the world).

But I suppose it will have to devolve upon me—a relatively obscure nobody in the Blogospheric anti-Islam movement in pursuit of his “hobbyhorse” at which Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald have arrogantly and snidely turned their sneering noses—to finally pinpoint the proper reference to this important little gem of a quote which has become so often used by so many in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement. Will I get a nod of thanks by any of the aforementioned for my trouble? Let us wait and see, though I won’t be holding my breath.

Primary Sources 101 and the Blogospheric anti-Islam Movement

Introduction:

For various reasons, the Blogosphere remains one of the most important (if not the most important) realms where the still inchoate anti-Islam movement continues to crystallize and continues to try to get its message persuasively out to the general Infidel public.

One of those reasons is the mainstream dominance of PC MC throughout the West, which has the effect of marginalizing if not altogether excluding from the public airwaves in all media any substantive criticism and critical examination of the problem of Islam. This situation has pushed those who seek to conduct that criticism into the Blogosphere: one wonders what would have happened post-911 had there been no Internet for members of the still-inchoate and growing anti-Islam movement to utilize.

Another reason, of course, is the nature of the Internet of which its Blogosphere is a major part, allowing for an amazing amount of freedom as well as an amazing and unprecedentedly global reach for the communication of information and the exchange of ideas.

Discussion:

One important part of the activity of the anti-Islam movement in the domain of Communications—i.e., getting the message out about how dangerous Islam is—involves the verifiability of claims we make about Islam and about Muslims. There are many facets to this area, but today I only focus on one: the problem of primary sources.

On the Internet in general, there seems to flourish either a disregard for the importance of primary sources for verification of claims, or an ignorance of what they are. It’s not a complex concept: a primary source is simply the original document that establishes evidence of a particular claim.

Inextricably related to the primary source itself is an adequate reference to it by the person making, or reproducing, the particular claim. That adequate reference must include the original author, the document in which the author wrote his relevant statement, the page number in that document, the date he wrote it, and the place of publication or republication of that document. All of these are necessary for the elementary function of providing enough information to the reader so that he himself may find the document and see for himself that it exists in the same form attested by the person making the claim in question.

Today’s example is a remarkably damning piece of evidence about the sociopolitical culture of Islam and its hostility to the West: it is the statement made by a Muslim ambassador from Tripolitania (now Libya) in 1786 in a meeting in London with Thomas Jefferson (then ambassador to Paris) and John Adams (then ambassador to London). The meeting concerned negotiations on how to minimize the piratical attacks by Muslim ships on Western (and American) ships in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. The main issue on the table was, to put it bluntly, what price was acceptable for the Americans to pay to persuade the Muslims to stop attacking them—i.e., extortion. At that point, America was too weak and economically strained so fresh from its Revolutionary War to try to bargain from a point of strength, much less to make any demands on the Muslims. Nevertheless, Jefferson was already trying to figure out some way for America to free itself from the snare of this unacceptable extortion, and he would spend many years doing so, until finally America around about 1815 found the material strength and the political resolve to punish the Muslims involved with sufficient military attacks (mostly naval bombardments) to cause them to cease their piracy and extortion for good.

Back in time again to that meeting in London in 1786, Jefferson at one point asked a gingerly question of the Muslim ambassador: he asked him why the “Maghreb” nations of North Africa (Algeria, Tripolitania, Tunisia, Morocco) were attacking American ships, kidnapping their crews and stealing their cargos. The Muslim ambassador’s answer to Jefferson is the specific example I use today for this essay on primary sources. For now, I shall paraphrase his answer, since the problem I am examinining today pertains directly to our ability to render an actual exact quote. Reportedly, he said that the reason those Muslim nations were attacking American and European ships was because according to Koran and the Sunna, Muslims have a right to attack and plunder Infidels and furthermore that if any Muslim dies while doing so, he goes to Paradise.

Now, this is a marvelously juicy quote for us in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement to be able to have in our armory. It goes a long way toward helping us establish certain things that go against the prevailing grain of PC MC assumptions about Muslims:

1. First and foremost, that when Muslims attack us, they are not merely rogue Muslims disconnected from a more organized body of Muslims directly motivated by their religion. Of course, this example of the Barbary Pirates does not prove that all attacks by Muslims are that solidly founded in Islam: as I argued in my previous essay The #1 problem: Statistics and Dot-connection, this kind of data is not conclusive proof, but it is a persuasive indication.

2. Closely related to #1, that various violent acts of Muslims that seem random or statistically dissolvable into the generic category of “criminal” behavior are, in the minds of Muslims and in their holy texts, part of their ongoing expansionist and supremacist project of Jihad. Again, the same caveat to #1 applies here as well.

3. That the problem of violent Muslims is not merely a recent phenomenon justified by their grievances against Israel and Bush, but goes back to the late 18th century when Israel did not exist and America had not done anything to Muslims at all.

The importance of these points, and furthermore their particularly poignant context of being centrally involved in the beginnings of America as a nation and its formation of the military institutions of the Navy and the Marines, makes it incumbent upon us in the still-inchoate anti-Islam movement to nail down the primary source of this quote by the Muslim ambassador and have the reference to that primary source readily available in the Blogosphere. That the precise opposite is the case is particularly distressing, at this late stage of the game.

The actual situation with regard to this quote throughout the Blogosphere has the following unfortunate features:

1) The quote and its historical context is repeated at multiple sites and blogs, but never is any reference given as to its primary source.

I have seen it thus repeated like a rumor or an urban myth (i.e., with no primary source reference) by various bloggers some more or less well known, such as Fjordman, Sheikh Yer Mami, Baron Bodissey of Gates of Vienna, Hugh Fitzgerald, Pamel Geller, Michelle Malkin and—moving higher in the hall of famous anti-Islam bloggers, Daniel Pipes and Andrew Bostom.

Often, no reference is given at all for any kind of a source, primary, secondary or tertiary. Somewhat less often, a reference is given that just takes the reader to another blogger in the echo chamber of the Blogosphere who himself offers no source. Occasionally, a reference is given that takes one back to supposedly authoritative founts of the veracity of the quote, such as Andrew Bostom, or more pertinently (yet less often), Johsua London, a historian and author of a recent book about the problem of the Barbary Pirates and its role in early American history. However authoritative these two might be, they remain secondary sources. Certainly the latter of the two is the more persuasive secondary source, whom one would be comfortably confidant had actually checked out the primary source himself. However, the ease with which the primary source could be pinned down, if it exists, and then its reference made generally available for all to use in the Blogosphere, makes the reliance upon a secondary source, no matter how credible, intolerable. We are not talking about some obscure hadith that might only be available in Arabic or in Urdu in some dusty bookseller’s curio shop in some casbah in Fez, Morocco, or in some jasmine-scented alleyway in Karachi, Pakistan. It is particularly aggravating when even Joshua London himself, writing for the online National Review magazine, again adduces the quote with only a shred of a reference to a primary source—to wit, “as they reported to the Continental Congress”—but no trace of a proper reference to the primary source which one would reasonably assume he must have read himself in his scholarly research for his book. And Robert Spencer, in his book Stealth Jihad, uses this same quote and context, but cites as his reference only another secondary source, a book called American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis, on page 89.

2) If #1 isn’t bad enough, I have found that there are at least two permutations of the quote in existence. This is simply impermissible.

While one of the permutations seems to be the only variant, this becomes problematic because it is cited in a reputable source, well outside the Blogosphere—an article titled Jefferson, American Minister in France, by the prolific 19th-century historian and biographer James Parton, published in 1872 in The Atlantic monthly magazine, volume 30, issue 180, pp. 405-424. In Parton’s version, the quote runs like this:

"The ambassador replied: It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise."

From reading Parton’s account, it becomes clear that he is apparently quoting Jefferson as actually having written “The ambassador replied:. . .” etc. The less-than-desirable punctuation here—the lack of quotation marks to demarcate what the ambassador replied—one assumes reflects on Jefferson, not on Parton. [Update, in fact, it reflects poorly on Parton, as my analysis of the actual primary source which I finally located reveals: see link below.] Parton is also remiss in failing to provide a reference to the primary source, making it difficult for the reader to check with the original. In a later essay here, I meticulously analyzed the discrepancies in the Parton version compared with the actual primary source I later discovered in the Boyd edition of The Thomas Jefferson Papers.

Meanwhile, the form of the quote bandied about the Blogosphere (and in Spencer’s book) goes like this:

. . .that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

The differences are sufficiently remarkable to put the reader in doubt as to what the actual original quote was. Furthermore, the Blogospheric version misspells “Mussulman” as “Musselman” (I doubt that the Muslim ambassador was referring to fishermen who gather mussels from shorelines); while, to add more niggling aggravation to our search for authenticity, Parton’s rendering spells it correctly but fails to capitalize it.

A quote has only one form, and that is verbatim. If there exists more than one wording for a quote, this jeopardizes the veracity of all wordings of that quote. The uniformity of the quote bandied about by the various Bloggers, thus, does not so much substantiate the veracity of their version, as it simply reflects the tendency of Bloggers to repeat things they read in the Blogosphere.

It would be apposite at this juncture to note a certain wrinkle to the quote: apparently, even the original quote, which could be definitively ascertained from an actual reading of the primary source (apparently, some document among the archives of the papers of the Continental Congress, which was the institutional body embodying the transition of America from a state of a confederation of Colonies to its form as the United States of America), was not a direct verbatim quote from the lips of the Muslim ambassador, but was a paraphrase of it by Jefferson himself who wrote up his report of the meeting with him. This wrinkle should be of no cause for concern, however, since only a crank would dispute the reportage of Thomas Jefferson himself after that reportage has been verified.

Conclusion:

Today’s specific example could be multiplied to innumerable instances of claims made in the still-inchoate anti-Islam movement concerning Islam and Muslims. Some of those instances are more important due to the nature of the claim, such as today’s example, and some are less important. (An example of the latter is a nice anti-Islamic quote by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, where the problem here is that the reference citation to the primary source, which is at least supplied by some of the Bloggers, varies from citation to citation in terms of titles, page numbers and dates—a distinct problem with the same result of undermining the effectiveness of the quote. However, the opinion of an 18th-century founder of a Christian denomination will hardly carry much weight in today’s climate of cynically sophisticated and residually anti-Christian secularism.)

At any rate, the general disregard and disinterest among members of the still-inchoate anti-Islam movement for the importance of primary sources is lamentable. A damningly juicy quote like the one used in today’s example may enjoy some traction for a while as it skims along on the surface of demagogic rhetoric. However, sooner or later the effectiveness for a quote like that will run up against a brick wall whenever the intended audience of the quote asks for a reference to verify it, and the person employing the quote cannot produce it. This is particularly infuriating knowing that it is entirely feasible to pin that quote down in its primary source form, if it exists. In addition, having the adequate reference to the primary source at one’s fingertips from the beginning adds considerable weight to the force of the quote.

Individuals of the still-inchoate anti-Islam movement have no excuse for this pathetic state of references to primary sources—and the blame and shame most acutely falls on the shoulders of those who have more money, influence and resources to do something about this. The larger situation verges into the problem of a major deficiency in the still-inchoate anti-Islam movement about which I have written many times—namely, the lack of a definitive, simple yet comprehensive Anti-Islam Manual and, furthermore, the lack of any interest in producing one.

Note:

I refer the reader to my response to the comment by “Nobody” in the comments section below. My response further clarifies the importance of the Jefferson quote of the ambassador as a primary source.

Related Reading:

Primary Sources 101 and why Wikipedia should be renamed “Pseudopedia”

We Don’t Need 1,001 “Islam 101”s

The #1 problem: Statistics and Dot-connection.

Since I started this blog in 2006, out of the 239 essays I have written here, at least a hundred of them have attempted to analyze the complex reasons why the West remains in a state of irrational denial about the dangers of a global revival of classical Islam.

With any complex phenomenon, however, it is sometimes possible to identify the most basic or crucial factor that explains that phenomenon. I have come to the conclusion that the single most important axiom in the PC MC paradigm—by which intellectual and emotional resistance to anti-Islamic arguments is codified and solidified—is the axiom that assumes that the vast majority of Muslims are nice, decent, harmless people, and that the bad apples among them are statistically negligible and do not warrant special measures on our part beyond treating them as more or less common criminals in order to protect our societies from them.

This axiom depends upon statistics: and, unfortunately, the statistics about Muslims do not conclusively support those who worry about the dangers of Islam. Statistics about Muslims do arguably indicate a widespread and metastasizing pathology in Islamic culture that nourishes the terrorism and militant supremacism that are endangering us more and more—but these statistics only tend to do so persuasively to a rational person who, by some miracle, has been able to free his mind, more or less, from PC MC; they do not do so conclusively enough to pierce through the mainstream irrationality inculcated by PC MC. Therefore, by their inconclusive nature, statistics about Muslims tend to lean in the direction of favoring the PC MC axiom described above.

In light of this, our #1 problem in this ongoing War of Ideas phase of the yet undeclared War against Islam may be summed up succinctly:

We cannot, with sufficiently conclusive proof, connect the dots that would tie the demonstrable dangers of an ostensibly tiny minority of Muslims to the broader populations of Muslims worldwide.

Significant gaps persist in and among the many dots of data out there about the problem of Muslims. Again, while a rational person would tend to conclude that the connection of those dots is cogent and prudent, more is needed to convince the majority of Westerners whose minds continue to think according to the PC MC paradigm, which irrationally resists such dot-connection. And also again, the actual data of the ostensible harmlessness of the vast majority of Muslims tends to favor this inclination inculcated by the PC MC paradigm.

An analogy: random shootings in an office building

Basically, what is going on here—if I may briefly indulge a failure to resist delving into the complexity of this phenomenon in an essay devoted to its simplex exposition—may be illustrated by an analogy:

Imagine one large office building owned by a business, in a city of dozens of large office buildings owned by different businesses. Each office building is staffed by approximately 1,000 workers in various positions, from admininstrators on down to janitors and everything in between. Each office building represents a kind of microcosm of society, insofar as all its employers and employees work and live together for hours every day and have a system of getting along sociably as well as productively.

Now imagine that among the dozens of office buildings in this hypothetical city, one of the office buildings over a period of time is showing signs of a problem with individual workers now and then suddenly snapping and shooting fellow employees. Obviously, if this happens even once in any office building, it becomes a problem that everybody agrees deserves to be investigated and remedied so that future occurrences do not happen. When it happens more than once, it is also obvious and elementary that the problem becomes magnified and more urgent. Nobody would argue with this.

The problem of the problem, so to speak, comes in during the phase of escalation of shootings when

a) the shootings are sufficiently numerous to indicate the probability that there is something essentially wrong, something diseased, about the culture of that particular office building,

but

b) they are not numerous enough to prove conclusively to the majority of people in the city that, in fact, there is something essentially wrong, something diseased on a systemic level, about the culture of that particular office building.

Such a situation navigates that ambiguous area where an imprecise, relative, subjective and fluctuating threshhold is operative: one person’s “so many shootings are happening we must conclude this is a systemic problem with that office building” is another person’s “well, let’s not get carried away here, there haven’t been enough shootings to warrant expanding this to a systemic problem”.

And when no scientific objective criterion exists for establishing what that threshhold should be, and when no such criterion can be agreed upon generally, then we have the “problem of the problem”.

In addition, this problem of the problem becomes magnified when other factors—ideological, sociological and psychological—come into play and interfere with the normal rational process of trying to determine whether a given problem has risen above the threshhold whereby it becomes a systemic problem. Thus, in the case of the office building analogy, imagine further that for some complex cultural reasons the majority of city-dwellers have a tendency to resist any attempts to persuade them that something is essentially, systemically wrong with that office building’s subculture and so they tend to have an irrationally high threshhold for what number of shootings have to occur before they begin to be willing to even consider the question that there could be some systemic problem going on—even persisting with this resistance after the shootings begin to happen outside the office building and have claimed casualties on the streets and in other buildings.

And imagine that this tendency is based upon an irrational favoritism for the employees of that office building, a favoritism that resists any attempts to manage the problem of escalating shootings that would even hint of anything remotely resembling “collateral damage” whereby apparently innocent office employees are inconvenienced in any way by measures taken to protect lives.

Expanding beyond this analogy to our real situation of the favoritism for Muslims in general that remains dominant and mainstream throughout the West, we see that this same process is operative: the violence and expressions of supremacist intolerance among Muslims are, quantitatively speaking, sufficiently numerous and in addition are, qualitatively speaking, sufficiently singular, to persuade rational people of the cogency of at least considering the question of whether there is something systemically problematic about Islam. However, at the same time, those quantitative and qualitative factors enjoy a limbo state of hovering below an invisible threshhold, and this limbo is massively exploited by PC MC and by Muslim apologists.

Conclusion:

One thing we can learn from all this is that it is important to realize a fundamental distinction going on here: the PC MC people who ostensibly tend to resist noticing the problem of Islam are not resisting noticing the problem per se. What they are resisting is expanding the diagnosis of the problem to the collective dimension of embracing multitudes of Muslims (if not all Muslims) which will include untold numbers of ostensibly innocent Muslims potentially inconvenienced, at best, by our measures to protect ourselves and, at worst, having their human rights abused, or even hurt or killed.

Therefore, our efforts to persuade these PC MC people would be more effectively served by concentrating on ways by which we can suggest the dot-connection linking the Muslim bad apples to the vast majority of apparently harmless Muslims. Currently, it seems that most people in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement (including many of its unofficial “leaders”) proceed by assuming that the dots are already connected in the minds of their audience to begin with, or at the very least, impatiently breezing over the dot-connection problem and getting straight to the “meat” of the problem without sufficient awareness that this “meat” will have little or no traction among their audience unless the dot-connection problem is dealt with thoroughly beforehand.

There seems to be this curious posture one senses about most in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement, a posture based upon the obtusely impatient rationale that, because the dot-connection should be affirmed by any reasonable person, it therefore already is, and so little effort need be expended in establishing it. Then, when their audience doesn’t seem to “get it”, the anti-Islam person tends to indulge in a sloppy conglomeration of berating his audience with insults, categorizing them with inaccurate labels (such as “liberals”, a label which tends to obfuscate the massive fact of the majority of conservatives who also whitewash Islam), and then veering off into the dubious territory of conspiracy theory to explain why his audience resists what he thinks is conclusive proof, but which is, in fact, only persuasive indication.

And as long as the recipient of our exposition of the problem of Islam does not make the dot-connection in their mind, they will be able to assimilate and digest enormous amounts of data that, to us, seem conclusive to connect the dots, but to them only remain below the threshhold and thus forever substantiate treating the problem of Islam as a problem of a tiny minority of bad apples who need to be dealt with more or less as common criminals.

All of this reflects a lot of time and energy that would be better spent concentrating on the problem of dot-connection.

Muslim Profiling Revisited and “Mr. X”—Conclusion

This is a continuation of my previous essay, in which I established some basics about Muslim profiling as a framework for my more direct responses to the latest objections of “Mr. X”.

My articulation in that previous essay was a combination of making explict certain subtle complexities that I had not rendered sufficiently clear heretofore, along with certain elementary logical points that someone of the apparent intelligence of “Mr. X” should already know but for some strange reason stubbornly refuses to factor in. That articulation should provide a general framework for my more specific engagement with the latest objections of “Mr. X”, and should serve to minimize my need to have to encumber my responses with excursions into complexities.

I now proceed with my point-by-point responses to the latest critique by “Mr. X”.

Mr. X writes:

“Both Muslims and non-Muslims come in shades ranging from pale white to pitch black, and they belong to all three of the major races of mankind and every possible mixture thereof.”

This is ostensibly correct, but obfuscates a patently incorrect conclusion. Yes, both groups under consideration, comprised by Muslims and non-Muslims, come in all racial shades. That is the correct part. The incorrect part is the obvious implication Mr. X is making which is his conclusion: that this racial apportionment among the two groups under consideration is equally represented in all respects by both of them. In fact, the vast majority of Muslims are non-white, and the vast majority of white Westerners are non-Muslim. The inequality of comparison on this point is staggering—and so too is the obtuse stubbornness of Mr. X here; all the more so because he seems otherwise intelligent.

Furthermore, there is the cultural inequality: the vast majority of Muslims are non-Western, and the vast majority of Westerners are non-Muslim.

Mr. X goes on:

“That [i.e., Mr. X’s semantically correct but substantively incorrect claim about Muslims and non-Muslims] renders any system of profiling based on color and/or race unreliable at best and totally useless at worst.”

Here, Mr. X is focusing on one factor—

1) the difficulty presented to racial profiling by the existence of multitudes of non-white non-Muslims

—and ignoring or obfuscating a second factor as though its significance is nullified by #1:

2) the facts, again, that the vast majority of Muslims are non-whites, and that the vast majority of Western whites are non-Muslim.

While Mr. X may have an arguable point to discuss about #1 with respect to the multitudes of non-white non-Muslims out there, his avoidance or outright obfuscation of the complication expressed in #2, and furthermore his apparent use of #1 in order to obfuscate #2, is either untenable, incoherent, or cleverly disingenuous.

I.e., the real issue is not whether the racial facts in terms of the two groups in question, Muslims and non-Muslims, are sufficiently variegated as to render any and all attempts at racial discrimination impossible; the issue is that

a) with regard to non-whites, any profiling for terrorism on the basis racial discrimination, presents important difficulties, while

b) profiling for terrorism on the basis of racial discrimination with regard to the white/non-white division presents few important difficulties in terms of the facts we have noted above.

Thus, what could be a reasonable debate about the difficulties of (a) and to what extent it complicates, or even undermines, our pursuit of (b) is pre-emptively rejected by Mr. X by the maneuver of confusing (a) and (b) (and #1 and #2 above) and/or by obfuscating (b) with (a) (and #2 with #1).

Mr. X goes on:

“Dividing the world as you have into Muslim "Browns" and non-Muslim "Whites" (whom you seem to think are best represented by orange-haired outliers like Carrot Top). . .”

Firstly, I already responded to Mr. X long ago that I do not, in fact, think whites are best, let alone exclusively, represented by someone like Carrot Top. And yet he obtusely persists in claiming that I do.

Secondly, as I also already explained to Mr. X long ago, the word “brown” has become in the lexicon of PC MC a symbolism with traction and propaganda effectiveness, even though it may have incoherent ragged edges. Furthermore, it is more and more being adopted by Islam apologists (whether Muslims or non-Muslims) as a collective appellation of Muslims in order to exploit the PC MC axiom of Reverse Racism, by which those who are deemed “white” are handicapped in various ways while those who are deemed “brown” are privileged in various ways—this further complicated by the West/Non-West division of the world by which the PC MC paradigm tends to privilege the latter and handicap the former. In this context, Muslims have become, in the nebula of PC MC which is dominant and mainstream throughout the West, the most privileged non-white and non-Western group in the world.

Mr. X goes on:

“[dividing the world into "Browns" and "Whites"] is simplistic beyond belief and not at all conducive to teaching people how to make "fine distinctions" between different ethnic groups. It’s a child’s way of looking at the world.”

Aside from once again ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are non-white, and aside from ostensibly ignoring or confusing the difference between the biological reality of races with the sociopolitical reality of the way racial symbolisms and constructs are exploited, Mr. X is here also once again ignoring my repeated articulations of “granularization” whereby in fact I have called for fine distinctions to be integrated into any profiling methodology, where feasible. What Mr. X cannot seem to get into his obtuse head is that in the context of profiling for Islamic terrorism, there are any variety of situations where fine-tuning—certainly not to the fastidious degree he demands—is not feasible. As my previous essay argued at length and in detail, profiling is not a simplex monolith, but has many distinct levels of operation (at least when it is done rationally). These distinct levels of operation are not dictated by the racist or stupid whims of the methodologist, but rather by our relative unavoidable ignorance in various different ways —ignorance about the dangerous groups and people from whom we are trying to protect our societies; about the various complex features of the culture and ideology of the enemy; and about the physical location and complexity of venues of potential attacks.

Mr. X goes on:

“You’re also naive in thinking that the only "collateral damage" would be an occasional European mistaken for Middle Eastern.”

I never said that. Nor did I ever say, as Mr. X implies here, that collateral damage would be a minor matter about which we should not worry too much.

In fact, I have noted the possibility, for example, of Italians and/or Hispanics being caught up in the net of profiling, insofar as, and wheresoever that level of racial profiling (see my previous essay toward the end where I distinguish between three levels of profiling and articulate the complexities of their utilization) is deployed. I reiterated in my previous essay that collateral damage with regard to non-white non-Muslims is a significant difficulty. The question is, is it such a big difficulty that it should always rule out racial profiling? How exactly does its difficulty serve to rule out racial profiling? Is the problem for Mr. X an ethical problem, or is it a pragmatic problem? If for Mr. X it necessarily includes the latter, he has failed to articulate exactly how that pragmatic difficulty works to effect the impossibility of effective racial profiling. In fact, in a situation of a large public place where multitudes of people are in flux, and where there is a top-level threat of a terrorist attack which could be anything from a suitcase nuke to a chemical or biological WMD to conventional explosives, and where the security personnel do not have the luxury of time but must urgently save lives without a knowledge of whether the attack might be in 60 seconds or 60 minutes or 6 hours—in such a situation, given the general facts about Islamic terrorism and Muslims that we know, it would be unconscionably reckless for those security personnel not to racially profile and in so doing inconvenience or even harm or possibly kill innumerable non-white non-Muslims—solely for two reasons:

1) because of the higher likelihood that the Muslim perpetrators are going to be non-white;

and

2) the nature of the situation makes it impracticable if not impossible to treat Everybody as collateral damage.

Now, sometimes there will be situations of dire threat where it is possible to treat Everybody as equally suspect. The point is, this is not always the case. Nor will the other extreme always be the case—that we will be able to fine-tune our profiling and thus spare the vast numbers or groupings of people in that situation from the inconvenience or even harm of preventive measures. Indeed, that latter extreme will likely be a rather rare occurrence. And furthermore, there will be situations where the attempt to fine-tune the profiling can actually interfere with and impede the efforts at protecting the public—efforts which perforce require the blunter, cruder levels of racial profiling, or slightly better, Muslim profiling (again, cf. my previous essay, toward the end).

Mr. X goes on:

“No one in your Photo Gallery looks like any kind of European except the actual Europeans from Bosnia (either train that damn eye of yours or poke it out).”

Yeah, go figure. I could supplement that Photo Gallery by a thousand more pictures from the Jihad Watch archives and the archives of other terror watch sites, and still would be hard pressed to render the proportion of “any kind of European” (i.e., white) on a par with that of the brown Muslims—for the simple fact that the vast majority of actively dangerous and/or actively extremist Muslims out there are brown and do not look like Brigitte Bardot or Mr. Bean.

Mr. X goes on:

“The reality is that vaguely "brown" people in the United States are most likely to be Latin American.”

As I have repeatedly argued, profiling methodology should not be monolithically simplex. There will be situations where casuistic modifications will be appropriate—example, places in the Southwest of the USA where a considerable flux of internationals may be less likely to present itself, and thus the vast majority of browns there will be Hispanics and thus, depending on the precise concrete situation of course, the level of racial profiling may be less utilized than the slightly more fine-tuned level of Muslim profiling. Nevertheless, to the extent that more and more cases of brown Muslims sneaking across the southern border from Mexico into the USA occur, this might well tend to moderate such casuistic modifications. At all times, needless to say (and I already argued this in the comments fields of the previous 3-part essay White Muslims: Honorary Browns as well as touched on it in the first part to this present essay), our profiling personnel should be trained to “granularize” their racial profiling such that they become better at being able to distinguish, for example, an Egyptian from a Mexican. This will never be an exact science, and the factor of concrete exigencies must also be noted, whereby it is not always possible to have the luxury of time to spot those differences, but sometimes it might be a matter of seconds. Nevertheless, it is a worthy and useful adjunct to our profiling methodology. Its limited usefulness, however, should not be perverted into a club by which to beat racial profiling out of existence, as Mr. X would have it.

Mr. X goes on:

“. . .what good is a profiling system whose collateral damage far exceeds its positive identifications?”

This rhetorical question begs the question, because it carries the assumptive conclusion that in fact the collateral damage exceeds its positive usefulness sufficiently to nullify any purported usefulness. This conclusion needs to be argued, not simply asserted axiomatically from the start.

Secondly, his conclusion brutely ignores the complexities of different situations of danger which I articulated at length and in detail in the previous essay (and which I touched on above). Bottom line: we must be prepared for certain types of dangerous situation where various features of that situation dictate that we use a broad brush in order to protect the public. Mr. X would want to officially and institutionally interdict pre-emptively our capability to do so.

Mr. X goes on:

“The poor understanding you have of these issues is emblematic of the general ignorance you displayed in our discussion. You proved to [have a] lack knowledge about the science of race and pigmentation. . .”

Mr. X is here referring to our discussion in the comments field to the third part of my 3-part essay, White Muslims: Honorary Browns. Let us see if his accusation holds water.

First of all, in his first comment there, Mr. X made the claim that “your White/Brown racial dichotomy has no taxonomical validity and finds no support in the scientific literature. Europeans, West Asians and North Africans all belong to the same race (Caucasian) regardless of their relative differences in pigmentation, which are more a product of environmental adaptation than divergent biology.”

I responded:

“I may not have made clear in my essay that I am not speaking of "race" primarily in scientific terms qua the object, but rather I am dealing with "race" as a mythological construct, so to speak, that has real effects in the real world to the extent that people more or less believe in them in varying ways. As such, it could be "scientific" in the realms of disciplines such as Sociology and Psychology.”

I.e., I already, long ago, explained to Mr. X that the racial issues I was dealing with in that particular three-part essay necessarily include, if they did not actually focus on, aspects that are less strictly to do with biology/anthropology and more generally to do with how racial issues have acquired various meanings and exploitative uses for sociopolitical purposes, as in effect “mythological constructs”, including most importantly the whole mess of the PC MC paradigm (about which I have written at great length in a number of essays here on this blog). Thus we see that Mr. X persists obtusely in a red herring and/or a straw man in this regard—continuing to milk a position I am supposed to have and/or a deficiency in my position which I already laid to rest in my response to him long ago. Needless to say, Mr. X in the context of that discussion we had never responded to that particular point of my response, other than to take the breezy drive-by pot shot—“it’s a big mistake to feed people’s ignorance about race by treating it as a "mythological construct" and trading in simplistic stereotypes.”—though he never expanded on that and explained sufficiently why it’s a “big mistake”. Meanwhile I, of course, did respond to him again with a patiently and respectfully detailed articulation of my position in light of this, according him the intellectual respect he obtusely persists in failing to accord me.

Let us continue examining other accusations Mr. X makes about me, about how I “proved to have a lack of knowledge” about this, that and the other thing—the next thing being:

“. . . about the histories of Greece and Cyprus, about the ancestry of Cat Stevens. . .”

Here, Mr. X is referring to his correction of my point about Cat Stevens being Greek, when in fact, according to Mr. X, Cat Stevens is of Cypriot extraction. The reader can consult that comments field to see how I “proved to have a lack of knowledge” about this. In fact, what I did “prove” was that, I acknowledged, tentatively (and not without some difficulty disentangling some of his incoherence in this precise regard), even if only for hypothetical purposes (pending verification as well as pending clarification of Mr. X’s incoherence in this precise regard) that okay, Cat Stevens is Cypriot and not Greek; but the salient point is that this is not relevant to the overall logic of my argument in the essay in question to which Mr. X took offense: particularly this part:

“Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam, is himself of Greek extraction, and Greeks tend to occupy a kind of taxonomic limbo between White and Brown, even if that limbo becomes somewhat artificially and officially resolved by deeming them Whites. Put another way, a Carrot Top or a Conan O’Brien or a Brad Pitt would not be able to pull off the physiognomic transformation managed by Cat Stevens, no matter how long and bushy their beard and how correct their kufi.”

One could just as easily substitute “Cypriot” for “Greek” in that excerpt and the logic remains just as cogent.

As an added bonus, I also noticed at that time that Mr. X affects to possess an unusual talent for granularization, claiming to be able to easily tell the difference between a Cypriot and a Greek. I thus pointed out to him that:

“BTW, for a person as aware & knowledgeable of such fine physiognomic differences as those between Cypriots and Greeks, you seem otherwise oddly resistant to incorporating that kind of awareness & knowledge into a profiling methodology. I mean, if you are so good you can spot the difference between a Cypriot and a Greek at an airport, then surely you can tell the difference between, to pluck one example out of a fez, a Jordanian and an Austrian at an airport.”

However, the thrust of most of his objections to my argumentation has been that it is impossible to tell the difference between, for example, a Jordanian and an Austrian at an airport, let alone between an Egyptian and a Mexican, etc.

Or he accepts the viability of granularization, but otherwise emotionally wishes to obfuscate it because he wants to avoid the collateral damage of innumerable non-white non-Muslims who hail from Muslim milieus around the world: we have Filipinos who may be either Muslims or non-Muslims, as well as Indonesians, Thai, Indians, and various black Africans, etc. This is a genuine problem for profiling, but it does not necessarily rise to such formidable dimensions that we should pre-emptively and impulsively reject all racial profiling in any and every context, as Mr. X would demand.

Mr. X goes on to claim about Cat Stevens that “before his "transformation" he [Cat Stevens] could’ve been one of the Beatles”—and provides some links as proof of this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/herefordandworcester/content/images/2007/10/03/cat_stevens_358x450.jpg

http://www.fannins-
collectables.com/images/c_listing/cat_stevens/mathew_and_son/dm435_fc-fs.jpg

http://www.thewaxfactor.com/images/Cat-Stevens-New-Masters---Tes-326072.jpg

The first link takes us to a photograph that suffers for being excessively washed in white tone. By itself, one may grudgingly concede that Cat Stevens at that age, and if his actual appearance was sufficiently like that photo, would have just as hard a time passing for a Muslim as, say, Paul McCartney at roughly the same age. Nevertheless, the discerning eye can detect something “oriental” about his physiognomy even then, some almost indefinable je ne sais quoi “spice” about his eyes, etc. Furthermore, people’s physiognomies change as they grow older; sometimes that change results in certain ethnic aspects of their heritage becoming more pronounced. It is an arguable fact that Cat Stevens now is ostensibly more capable of pulling off a Muslim look with his beard and headgear than he was as that youthful pup in that photo—and more capable, furthermore, than Paul McCartney could now at roughly the same age, or Lennon or Harrison were they alive (let alone innumerable multitudes of other whites we could adduce). (Ringo Starr may be another story, partly to do with his Semitic background.) The second and third photos which Mr. X links show Cat Stevens at a later stage of growth, but still fairly young. The same things could be said as I said above.

Again, Mr. X contradicts himself when he claims I am stupid for not being able to tell the difference between a Cypriot and a Greek and claims he has this remarkable ability, and then turns around and thinks it is stupid and impossible to try to tell the difference between a Cypriot and an Englishman of Irish extraction!

Furthermore, Mr. X’s obtuse use of these links are based on riding crudely roughshod over the important fact that the third part of that 3-part essay dealt largely with the propagandistic ideological aspects of the mythological construct of racialism with regard to Islam, not with concrete profiling methodology per se, which was more touched on in the first two parts, but really more adequately covered in the several other essays linked in that 3-part essay (which was less about profiling methodology per se than about the mythological construct and how it has created the odd concept of the “Honorary Brown”).

At any rate, according to the more specific delimitations of the profiling methodology aspect, the existence of white Muslims continues to present such a tiny proportion of Muslims overall—both in the general pool as well as in the sub-pool of terrorists/extremists—that to treat them as exactly equal in incidence as non-white Muslims would be not only flawed and silly, it would be positively reckless to our safety concerns.

Muslim Profiling Revisited (and my ongoing exchanges with “Mr. X”)

Given the ongoing, if fitful, criticisms by a reader named “Mr. X” of my analysis on profiling in the context of Islamic terrorism, I have decided to devote a post here to my responses, since his criticisms have incidentally provoked from me useful further articulations of my analysis.

His latest criticisms were posted as a comment to a previous entry here: Racial Islamic Profiling: Photo Gallery.

Previously, Mr. X and I engaged in quite a bit of back-and-forth on this same issue (an exchange that he seems obtusely to have learned little from), in the comments field of this older 3-part essay of mine, White Muslims: Honorary Browns. The pertinent comments of Mr. X and my responses appeared mostly in Part 3.

Aside from otherwise simplistically mischaracterizing some of my positions, Mr. X persists in mushing together different spheres of this complex problem when they have distinct features that need to be kept distinct.

For example, in terms of our profiling needs in the context of Islamic terrorism, there is to be considered the general nature and logic of profiling, which has different levels.

The different levels function sort of like successive stages of filtering out and attempts at maximizing focus on the danger while simultaneously weeding out extraneous data that, because it is irrelevant to, or less relevant than, the danger, would encumber our safety needs were we to include it—or at least were we to allow it to divert too much of our attention away from the danger we are trying to focus on.

Needless to say (though it seems there is a need to point out elementary things to Mr. X), the danger that is the central focus of profiling is not immediately apparent, but is ensconced in a matrix of harmless data, and the two are usually confused together: the whole point of profiling is to try our best to disentangle the two in a situation where they present themselves so mixed together, there is often no way to tell which is which, or at best it is exceedingly difficult to do so.

Thus, concomitant with the effort in profiling methodology of teasing apart these two types of data, there is—to the extent that the danger is urgent and the luxury of time is not available to wait for the process of discriminating the two types of data from each other (if indeed it can ever be done)—a distinct, second procedure for unavoidably including what could well be harmless data along with the dangerous data. And whenever including harmless data along with dangerous data is avoidable, it is, needless to say, avoided by rational profilers.

Thus, there are at least these two procedures of profiling. These two Mr. X seems to persist in mushing together and failing to see their important distinctions one from another.

Now, in the latter procedure described above, profilers in their duty of protecting the public do the best they can, and—assuming they are rational and not deformed by PC MC—in doing so factor in any data that is relevant to that duty.

Thus, in the context of Islamic terrorism, we have a global movement whose members we cannot often sufficiently pinpoint in order to weed them out by procedure #1. About these members, we know the physiognomic fact that the vast majority are non-white, and we know the physiognomic-&-cultural fact that the vast majority are non-Western. On this basis alone, it would be imprudent, if not reckless, for our profilers in the discharging of their duty, to ignore these facts whenever their duty happens to involve procedure #2.

Now, there is a formidable complication to procedure #2 in light of these two facts: and that complication is the co-existence of large numbers of non-whites and non-Westerners who are non-Muslims and thus pose no danger in the context of Islamic terrorism.

At this juncture in the analysis, the rational person will not emotionally and impulsively recoil from any attempts to grapple with this and so will not reject without further consideration all discussion of the matter, rather prejudicially declaring that the aforementioned two facts should be eliminated immediately from procedure #2 and that any contemplation of their usefulness is stupid and ethically repugnant.

No, the rational person will proceed thusly through a meditation on questions:

1) given the complication noted above, is there still a way to proceed with procedure #2 by factoring in the two aforementioned facts?

2) related to question #1, do we even have a choice, given our relative ignorance of who the enemy is at any given moment and in the context of our ongoing duty to protect the public, of deciding whether or not to so proceed per question #1?

3) what are the pros and cons of so proceeding per question #1?

4) how, concretely, would we go about doing this?

5) should imperfections inherent to proceeding per question #1--including among other things the “collateral damage” of innocents--prohibit us from even considering the efficacy of the aforementioned two facts?

6) what is the threshhold for imperfections (including “collateral damage” of innocents) beyond which a profiling procedure is no longer workable?

7) does that threshhold apply in this context, per question #1? If so, how? If not, why not?

8) if the answers to #5 and to the first question in #7 are “no”, how can we at least optimally minimize those imperfections without jeopardizing our prime directive of protecting the public?

Etc.

With question #4, for example, there is not the implication (as Mr. X would simplistically and indiscriminately have it) that proceeding per question #1 must be implemented at all levels, all stages, and all venues of our profiling. There is, to the rational person, an awareness of discrimination among these levels, stages, and venues.

For example, in the context of an urgent threat where the threat level is at, or near, the highest level, and in a public situation of masses of people in constant motion within a public place of complexity and variety enabling hiding places, etc.—in this context and situation, it would be prudent to engage in racial profiling. This does not mean that other more refined types of profiling cannot proceed in tandem, to the extent that they are feasible. However, the crux of the point here is that the rational person knows that there are, indeed, contexts and situations where the blunter approach that incurs lots of ‘collateral damage’ is unavoidable and necessary for the public safety. And again, they are unavoidable and necessary insofar as, and wheresoever, our ignorance of all the data compels us to cast the wider, less focused net.

Stepping back to take a somewhat wider view, we can discern successively concentric levels of profiling in the context of Islamic terrorism:

1) At the broadest most indiscriminate level, there is racial profiling, based on the facts that most Muslims are non-white and non-Western, and that most Westerners are white and non-Muslim.

2) Narrowing our focus to the next level, there is Muslim profiling, which attempts, wherever and whenever feasible, to refine level #1 not only by fine-tuning our detection of physiognomic “granularization” (the ability to discern the differences between, for example, a Moroccan and a swarthy Sicilian, or perhaps even more subtly, between a Pakistani and an Indian), but also by supplementing that with a variety of other types of information ranging from observation of clothing, paraphernalia carried by the suspect, cultural behaviors, and more conventional intelligence concerning their backgrounds, activities and associations.

3) Further narrowing of our focus takes us to the third level, at what might be called “terrorist profiling”--or, more scientifically, Jihadist profiling. This is the level at which the profiler wishes to distinguish the harmless Muslim from the dangerous Muslim, where the latter may be involved in a terrorist plot on any one or more of a variety of levels and degrees of involvement, ranging from passive enablement perhaps dependent upon a good deal of their ignorance of their own involvement, all the way to direct active involvement, and all the many shades in a spectrum between these two.

While theoretically it would be wonderful if our profilers could implement and deploy level #3 all the time, or even a majority of the time, and never have to bother with levels #2 or #1, the unfortunate fact is, the kind of information required for enjoying that luxury in an effective manner is simply not available a majority of the time (much less all the time). Indeed, it is arguable that it is never available, but I am here allowing a benefit of the doubt out of rhetorical generosity.

Thus, our profilers much of the time, if not probably most of the time—depending, of course, on the nature of the threat and of the location of the threat—will not be able to deploy level #3 to the exclusion of levels #1 and #2 (and often will not be able to deploy level #3 even in tandem with either of the other two levels because it would unduly interfere with them). Thus, they will be forced to have recourse to level #2, and at times, level #1, often exclusively.

It is also apposite to reiterate that in any given situation of profiling where level #1 is being deployed, circumstances may change quickly to warrant the deployment of the more precise levels of #2 and/or #3. On the other hand, profilers must also be prepared for the probability—at any given time, in any given situation, where one of the levels is judged to be more effective than the other levels—that the introduction of one of those other levels might well interfere with the effectiveness of the level currently in deployment. Thus, there would be contexts where only level #1 must be deployed, and attempts to fine-tune that level with levels #2 and/or #3 would actually serve to decrease the efficiency of the profilers and so potentially endanger more lives. And, of course, the converse is true as well.

According to the rather crudely simplex thought process of a Mr. X, however, all these important subtleties and distinctions should be tossed out the window, and Islamic terrorism should, apparently, be treated by our profilers wholly in the same terms as we treat all other dangerous crimes (or at best no different from the way we treat political criminal organizations that might have international activities, such as the Basque terrorists or the Colombian drug cartels or the “Red” terrorists of the 70s and 80s)—from our overarching theory on down to our concrete methodological particulars in the field, irrespective of the racial physiognomic data we could be using to supplement our profiling and their contexts of radiating complexities which occur in daily real life, one or two of which I have addressed above along with an analytical treatment of general consequences that flow from their consideration.

To be continued...

Andrew Bostom: Asymptotic Analyst?

I had heretofore assumed Bostom was one of the tiny handful of analysts in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement who is holistic, or at the very least, in that razor’s-edge proximity to holistic analysis occupied by, for example, Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch.

In an article on Frontpage.com today, Bostom’s unalloyed and unreserved praise for what he himself interpretetively crystallizes as the Geert Wilders dictum—“Islam is the problem; radical reform is the solution”—, however, reveals how solidly asymptotic he is. After all that Bostom has written about Muslims and Islam (including in the first nine-tenths of this article!), for him to proffer, in the climax of this article, reform as the solution to the problem of Islam is essentially to agree with the Pipes Dream: namely, that we should hope that Muslims will help us to solve the problem which their Islam is causing.

This Pipes Dream is conceptually contiguous with the PC MC paradigm. It is not qualitatively different from PC MC, only quantitatively distinct. Only two significant features distinguish it from the PC MC paradigm:

1) its openness to substantive criticism and, where it is deemed pertinent, condemnation of Islamic doctrine and culture;

and

2) its readiness to expand the “tiny minority of extremists” to a much larger number of Muslims.

Indeed, Bostom himself in this same article begins by citing polls that indicate that a sizeable majority of Muslims in Muslim countries—even relatively “secular” countries like Egypt—desire Sharia law and the revival of the Caliphate. On what basis, then, does Bostom expect us to place our hope in “radical reform” of Islam? Who is going to “radically reform” Islam and by doing so “solve the problem” of Islam, if the majority of Muslims around the world actually desire an unreformed Islam? This expectation of the Pipes Dream is not only unrealistic, not only does it rest on a fantasy belied by the very same facts and learned interpretations which Bostom has spent years marshalling, but it is positively counter-productive to the self-defense needs of the West, for it tends to reinforce the PC MC axiom that Muslims are “moderate” until proven “radical” and closely related to that, the notion that when Muslims proffer “reform” they are to be trusted. Thus, it will tend to help perpetuate policies which continue to permit Muslims to insinuate themselves deeper and deeper into the sociopolitical fabric of our Western societies, and from there innumerable numbers among them (whom we cannot reliably distinguish from the supposedly harmless Muslims among them) to have greater opportunity and advantage to continue to plot horrific attacks upon us in the coming decades and to continue their parallel project of stealth jihad which undermines its host society in ways other than through terrorism, yet symbiotic with terrorism.

The anti-Islam movement should be engaged in the concerted effort of slow pedagogical and rhetorical stillicide in the context of the ongoing War of Ideas which is first and foremost an intellectual civil war of uncompromising persuasion directed at our own fellow citizens. This War of Ideas should certainly not waste its time trying to persuade Muslims to “reform” their Islam. Through this concerted effort, then, of our War of Ideas, which realistically will take many decades to begin to exert its effects, the PC MC paradigm will best be undermined—both by the effects of stillicide over a long time, and by the slow but sure increase in numbers of Westerners fed up with Muslims. The holistic goal that is the rational guiding telos of the anti-Islam movement should not be “reform” of Islam, but rather the mass extrication of Muslims out of the West—not only through prevention of further immigration of new Muslims, but also through the mass deportation of Muslims already in the West. This, however, should not be expected to be a “solution” to the problem of Islam: it should realistically be seen to be the optimal way to manage that problem for the decades, probably centuries ahead. (If by some miracle it did serve to “solve” the problem, then that will be a pleasant surprise for us, but this unlikely miracle should not serve as an expectation that informs our policy behavior.)

Precisely because this holistic telos is such a tall order at present, due to the mainstream dominance of PC MC throughout the West, it behooves us in the anti-Islam movement to push in concerted fashion for this now, and to continue relentlessly pushing for it in our ongoing War of Ideas. This does not mean we have to stand on the rooftops and doomsay like fanatics. We can go about this in a mature and reasoned manner that does not, nevertheless, compromise the principles of holistic analysis nor the urgency of taking action against the problem of Islam. If any one of us in the anti-Islam movement seems incapable of controlling his or her asymptotic impulses, it would be best, in the interest of our overarching agenda, for that person to refrain from analysis altogether. Instead, we have such otherwise eminent luminaries including Bostom, Horowitz, Spencer and Pipes regularly sending mixed signals—by implying, or outright