Not so Great Expectations and the Proverbial Straw

“Muslims need to develop a sense of humor and an appreciation of satire. . .”

So the now famous Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was reported to have told a New York audience at the end of September.

No, actually Mr. Westergaard is wrong. One only uses the locution “X needs to develop Y” when X has the capacity to develop Y. But in fact, Muslims will never develop a sense of humor and an appreciation of satire—at least not in numbers sufficient for our #1 priority: our security. Nor will they ever develop—at least not in numbers sufficient for our #1 priority—all the other traits of a free and rational mind and heart.

In fact, then: Members of the Anti-Islam Movement need to stop saying “Muslims need to do this, that, and the other thing”. We have to give up our not so Great Expectations, our Great Brown Hope that somehow, some way, Muslims will help us solve the nightmare their Islam Redivivus is increasingly causing the world.

That is to say: We have to graduate from the position of expecting Muslims to change in numbers sufficient to make a difference so that they will become the relatively harmonious co-existent partners on Earth with the West that most other polities and peoples are, such as (with a few kinks and rough spots to work out) Russia, Eastern Europe, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, non-Muslim Africa (perhaps excluding the violently anti-white racist South Africa), Central and South America (excluding two or three countries infected by the pathology of Marxism), and so forth. Muslims will never change. Muslims will never become harmonious with the rest of Mankind—at least not in numbers sufficient for our #1 priority: our security.

This locution of expectation from Muslims used by Mr. Westergaard, incidentally, reveals one of the crucial reasons why certain members of the Anti-Islam Movement really aren’t anti-Islam: they hold out hope that somehow, some way, some day, we and Islam will be able to get along—if by “Islam” is meant (counterfactually) some fantasy Islam that has been viably reformed, or some collective of a sufficiently large majority of Muslims whose inveterate fanaticism has become somehow dissolved by the seductions of modern Western secularism. When a Jamie Glazov or a David Horowitz or a Daniel Pipes, for example, expresses this hope either implicitly or explicitly, one is not all that surprised, for they are bleeding hearts at heart, and they nurture this ludicrous and preposterous hope as a way to appease their psychological unease at finding themselves unavoidably against a massive sociopolitical movement composed mostly of non-white peoples; for, otherwise, however, their intellectual and ethical conscience does not permit them to submerge quite all the way down into that refuge of scoundrels below the deep end of the asymptotic pool in the shark-infested waters of PC MC merging into the deeper murk of Leftism. When, however, a Robert Spencer insists he is not anti-Islam nor anti-Muslim, it arouses bafflement at the apparent paradox of an analyst who with one hand spends years amounting a mountain of evidence that damns Islam and that damns all Muslims who support Islam (and how many Muslims don’t support Islam. . .?), while with the other hand or other side of his mouth claims not to be anti-Islam nor anti-Muslim. One reasonably suspects that Mr. Westergaard lies somewhere between these two poles, and probably more toward the Glazovian end. From an interview with Spiegel Online, Westergaard shows his Glazovian colors, in statements such as:

It was a cartoon aiming at fanatic Islamist terrorists -- a small part of Islam. The cartoon must not be used against Muslim society as a whole. That was not my intention.

And:

Wilders has a [sic] overly generalized perception of Muslims as potential terrorists. But it's not like that at all -- I know a lot of Muslims living here in Denmark who accept democracy completely and who live their religion as a very private matter. I hope that all Muslims will adapt to secular society.

(Thanks to a reader, “Anonymous”, for the tip.)

Pace these various asymptotic representatives of the Anti-Islam Movement who are curiously not all that anti-, we rather must avow our antipathy and follow its logical consequences based upon the mountain of damning evidence that has engendered it in the first place: We must evolve to a position of eternal segregation.

We must do this because:

a) Muslims themselves virulently and violently erect an eternal barrier between themselves and all Others (though their conceptual barrier moves them not to an isolationism but rather to a supremacist expansionism);

and

b) as a central part of their belief in, and project of, separation of Mankind into Believer and Unbeliever, with the latter to be subjugated under the dominant yoke of the former, Muslims will forever foment too much destabilizing and dangerous fitna and fasad in the world.

And that eternal segregation must be reflected concretely in terms of geography—a line in the sand, so to speak, drawn around the Dar-al-Islam, a new Iron Curtain: an Iron Veil. This actual spatial boundary (roughly comprising the traditional swath of land from Indonesia to Morocco) must of course be militarily enforced. And, of course, concomitantly with the creation of this spatial boundary: all Muslims outside of that perimeter must be deported from the Free World and sent into that heretofore voluntary Gulag of a Hell on Earth, that “House of Islam” that will house their chosen way to live out their wretchedly fanatical existence where they can abuse each other to their heart’s content, cut off from, and thus inoculating, the rest of Mankind so that we can get on with our own imperfect lives without having to worry about unpredictably exploding, shooting, flying, and beheading Muslims, and without having to put up with all the other outrageous crap they have been shoving in our faces, or at our civilizational periphery in savage razzias whensoever they had not the power to penetrate its tegument, for 1400 years. Life’s hard enough without having to put up with Muslims.

That old desert adage comes to mind: the straw that broke the camel’s back. We have enough problems in our societies without having to shoulder this additional, intolerable burden of a people who are stark raving maniacs and fanatically follow a blueprint of hostile supremacist expansionism based on ludicrously insane beliefs and an obsessive-compulsive disorder that pursues a warped version of justice.

Enough’s enough. No, Mr. Westergaard, Muslims don’t “need” to do anything—except get the hell out.

Our incompetent analysts: Vahid Brown

The analysts over at Jihadica seem to represent types of analysts who have at least one foot in serious participation in intelligence strategy.

Today’s example is Vahid Brown (what a name!), a “guest blogger” at Jihadica touted there as:

. . . a linguist and historian with deep knowledge of the history of al-Qaida and the jihadi movement. He is the author of Cracks in the Foundation and the co-author of several well-known CTC reports.

More significantly, they note that Vahid Brown works for the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point. He is, in effect, one among probably thousands of “experts” on Islamic terrorism used by Western governments (in this case, the U.S. military), and whose “expertise” is consulted by mainstream media, as exampled by this National Public Radio interview with him on the subject of his main specialty—the fissions and fractures among the various Islamic terrorist groups. That specialty, in fact, was given major treatment by Vahid Brown in his long and detailed pdf essay mentioned above, Cracks in the Foundation (subtitled “Leadership Schisms in Al-Qa’ida 1989-2006”), an essay published by CTC in 2007.

In the foreword to that essay, written by the director of the Combating Terrorism Center, LTC Joseph H. Felter, Ph.D., it is safe to assume that we see the overarching rationale in the minds of the U.S. military for Vahid Brown’s study:

. . . al-Qa’ida’s real strength has never been as a guerrilla fighting force; rather its
strength comes from its ability to transform the local concerns of Islamist activists into
what this report describes as “a unifying vision of apocalyptic inter-civilizational
conflict”. Because these capabilities and their proponents are still in place, al-Qa`ida
continues to achieve success. Effective counterterrorism must better address these capabilities. . . Eroding al-Qa’ida’s brand appeal—reducing its share of the ideological marketplace —will require innovative and multilateral approaches with the US hand rarely seen or suspected.

Thus, eroding al-Qaeda’s “brand appeal” among ordinary Muslims—deemed of course to be simultaneously harmless good people and yet easily “radicalized” due to reasons ultimately stemming from our Western ineptness, arrogance and/or neo-colonial evil—is the #1 goal in fighting this no longer so-called “war on terrorism”.

In this context, Vahid Brown’s overall thesis in this monograph assumes this goal and reinforces it—and offers hope for the strategy it reflects: the thesis being that the overall cohesiveness of al Qaeda and related jihadist groups is “cracked” and thus fraught with internal dissension. The U.S. military can thus feel encouraged by their resident expert, a Muslim himself—or, rather, a Bahai—apparently fluent in many of the relevant languages of the region, including Arabic. And the U.S. military, based on their expert’s knowledge, will proceed to pursue ways to exploit those “cracks” in the cohesiveness of the enemy.

The only problem with this thesis is that it is based massively on a broad presumption that there is no larger ideological matrix that inspires, motivates and guides these various sub-groups who fight amongst each other. Without an awareness of that larger ideological matrix, the fractious complexity of the various jihadist groups—including dissensions within al Qaeda itself—invites other causal explanations, usually leading back to the “meddling” of the West (particularly America) in the Muslim world, for which the cure involves “winning hearts and minds” and lavishing money on their inveterately corrupt governments—along with, of course, continued killing of the innumerable suicide bombers that keep pullulating out of the same milieu whose hearts and minds we are “winning”. Vahid Brown’s pet project of documenting and analyzing the internal dissension of Muslim terrorist groups tends to reinforce the myth that Islam is not in fact cohesive, that Islam in fact is not the overarching inspiration for all of them. In fact, what the PC MC lens of analysts like Vahid Brown occludes is that it is precisely the fanaticism that grows and bubbles out of Islam itself—and has for 1,400 years—that explains the many “cracks” among the various jihadist groups. This is so because the fanaticism of Islam is so extreme it engenders a murderous obsession with “purity”—the “purity” of being a “true Muslim” against all the “false Muslims” who are thereby “traitors”.

But one would never get even a glimmer of this deeper explanation from reading Vahid Brown, for he seems intent on focusing on the superficial complexity that is another way of telegraphing the Islam-apologetic defense that Islam is “not monolithic”—at least, that is, not monolithically dangerous to us. Analysts like Vahid Brown and the millions of other Westerners more or less PC MC-addled indulge in a contradiction that is either quite clever, or merely incoherent (or sometimes both): Islam is “not monolithic” when we might be criticizing or condemning it; but all along Islam is in fact monolithic when we want to praise it, or at least view it as harmlessly benign.

I.e.: Islam is not monolithic when you want to say anything bad about it; but when you want to say something good about Islam, then it’s monolithic as the day is long.

Another aspect of this analyst Vahid Brown is interesting, after one looks into him: Basically, it seems that he is a votary of Bahai, and before his current career (or moonlighting job) as a military analyst of the wondrously variegated tapestry of Islamic jihadism, he was deeply involved in studying the esoteric field of various aspects of Bahai and Islamic mysticism. The reader can glean the general penumbra of his interests in the following titles of papers he was churning out:

Andalusi Mysticism: A Recontextualization

A Counter-History of Islam: Ibn 'Arabi within the Spiritual Topography of Henry Corbin [Henry Corbin being a theologian and scholar of comparative mysticism]

Alchemy in the Baha'i writings: An Introduction

The Beginning that Hath no Beginning: Baha'i Cosmogony

Muhammad b. Masarra al-Jabali and his Place in Medieval Islamicate Intellectual History: Towards a Reappraisal [one suspects this has nothing to do with military jihad—and one’s suspicion is confirmed by reading the explanatory subject header: “Medieval Andalusia; theurgy; letter magic; Pseudo-Empedocles”; as well as the discipline for which it was written: “Religious Studies”.]

Textual Resurrection: Book, Imam and Cosmos in the Qur'an Commentaries of the Bab [“the Bab” being one of the founders of Bahai]

The Quaternities of the Writings of the Bab: A Study in Babi-Baha'i Symbolism

Cosmos and Chaos: Myth, Creation and the Baha'i Administrative Order

(And on this list-serve community where Vahid Brown is, or was, participating, one gets a good sense of his interests—all decidedly to do with various minutiae concerning the general constellation of Islamic mysticism, particularly Bahai.)

These all sound like fascinating essays, but what do they have to do with the field of modern Islamic terrorism—the field of which Vahid Brown is supposed to be an expert analyst? One wonders how Vahid Brown feels, having gone from one pursuit where he was spending all his intellectual time plumbing the arcane symbolisms of medieval and early modern Islamic-related mysticism, to his present career track, working for the U.S. military in studying the dizzyingly complex taxonomy of various grotesquely ghoulish and murderous Muslim terrorist groups in various parts of the world. Why is he doing this? Why did he leave his apparently truer interest in recondite mystical theology, and opt to spend so much time studying all these horrible Muslim misunderstanders of the great Religion of Peace? One conjectures, with the strange hybrid of a name he sports, that Vahid Brown is an “Honorary Brown”—a white convert to Oriental wisdom generally speaking, an intellectual expatriate as it were, to the Patria of Islam in the seemingly more palatably gentle and mystical-poetic Bahai faith (approximately the same pathos that moves white Westerners to gravitate to Sufism). Such types are usually dubious and tend to ensure one will find scholarship of myopic merit when it comes to the critical issue of recognizing the pathology of Islam itself.

And why did the U.S. military hire him for this work for which he is obviously only tangentially qualified at best? Hiring someone like Vahid Brown to be an analyst of Islamic terrorist networks would be like hiring a scholar of Thomas Aquinas or Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to help analyze 21st-century Christian evangelical militant white power groups. Apparently, they hired him because he’s not anti-Islam (for that is the official stance of the U.S. military and has been so under Bush as well as under Obama) while at the same time he is well-versed in many of the key languages and dialects of the central Asian hot spots involved—not to mention of the lingua franca of Arabic used by Internet jihadists. Not only is he not anti-Islam, but he has developed an overarching analysis that reinforces the PC MC paradigm about the problem of Islamic terrorism—whose crucial pillar is that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, and thus all the energy and time of analysis is spent on the hyper-complexity that ensues from that fundamental denial of the Camel in the Room.

Further Reading:

Jihadica: pullulating mosquitoes, the swamp, the camel, and no cigar

Questions about the “Iron Veil”

A reader posed questions about my proposed strategy for the West of an Iron Veil. Below are the questions and my answers. The reader should first read the linked article above.

One question I have about your proposal would be about how one would legally determine who is a Muslim.

It’s not a legal determination: It would be a forensic determination. And that would involve normal investigative procedures, including background checks, records, surveillance, interrogations, etc.

What about those who pretend to be non-Muslims? How would we contain the risk of prosecuting and deporting authentic non-Muslims on the basis of allegations they are secretly Muslims? . . . Presumably some non-Muslims would mistakenly be convicted of being Muslims and would be deported.

Any large complex enterprise such as this one unavoidably involves, unfortunately, collateral damage.

Would jury trials decide whether a particular defendant who claims he is not a Muslim is in fact a Muslim to be deported?

No, as this would be a forensic process whose primary responsibility is to ensure our safety, not a legal process whose primary responsibility is to ensure the rights of those who are threatening our safety.

Would we have problems distinguishing between someone who agrees with some tenets of the Qur'an, and someone who is a Muslim?

That distinction is meaningless for the pragmatic purposes of our primary responsibility, our safety, for a variety of reasons (which, incidentally, were linked in my Iron Veil essay), including the problem of taqiyya, that form a complex bundle.

Would people be compelled, by the threat of deportation, to publicly affirm their profound disagreement with Islam, even if they know nothing about it? Would some sort of McCarthyism become a problem? How would we avoid a policing of thoughts for anything "Islamic" as defined by the government? How, without risk of creating our own totalitarianism, would we have a government definition of "Muslim," and deportation as a punishment for being a Muslim? Would we ban the Qur'an?

If the West gets around to the intelligent position of implementing Iron Veil, it will also necessarily have concluded that Islam constitutes lethal sedition. Anyone supporting Islam, thus, would be logically seen as a threat to society. For Muslims who support Islam, I advocate deportation and global quarantine; for non-Muslims who support Islam, I advocate indefinite internment—perhaps with an added policy of release of those who recant, with their continued surveillance after their release. I don’t think I would advocate a kind of Inquisition to ferret out non-Muslims who support Islam; it would just be a matter of apprehending and incarcerating those who reveal themselves to be such. If, however, there begin to crop up problems of violent attacks perpetrated by Islam-supporting non-Muslims, we could always ratchet up our measures of ensuring our safety.

Maybe one could find some legally clear and simple way to deal with these questions. Perhaps laws that accept at face value claims to be a non-Muslim, and only prosecute someone who publicly affirms he is Muslim, or tells others he is secretly a Muslim, or goes to an underground mosque regularly and participates in Islamic worship there. But mere ownership or study of the Qur'an would not be grounds for prosecution. . . [emphasis added by me]

It depends on why the person owns a Koran and why he is studying it. That would be part of the forensic investigative process, including seizure of records and computers and other kinds of surveillance and interrogation.

. . . and anyone who claims he is not a Muslim could not be prosecuted for being one, unless a high bar of evidence standards could be met to prove that he is secretly an adherent of the Qur'an and Muhammad in a traditional sense.

This statement reflects a poor apprehension of the unique nature of the danger of Islam, as I linked above under “variety of reasons”.

And what about any splinter Islamic sects that might arise and publicly disavow any union of religion and state, and clearly reject sharia law? Would they be in danger of deporation, too?

If this question refers to such splinter sects arising after total deportation has occurred, the members of such sects would be treated as Muslims who managed to slip through the cracks of the rounding up & deportation process, and would be summarily rounded up and deported. Their claims of being some kind of moderate flavor of Islam would be ignored.

What about Muslims who claim to reject Islam and want to leave the quarantine area—would we be able to take them in as refugees?

One thing at a time. The enterprise will be sufficiently vast, complex and filled with potential problems, and the ensuing project of quarantine sufficiently complex and difficult to maintain indefinitely, that we ought not burden ourselves with sentimentally helping alleged apostates who want to leave the quarantine, since (among other problems) the possibility they could be double agents would be a factor. Perhaps after a decade or so of quarantine, when things have settled down and some degree of stability of the overall strategy has been achieved, we could begin to think about helping such refugees.

A flabbergasting asseveration by Lawrence Auster

About Obama’s election victory, Auster wrote:

“Yes he got a pass on various issues because of his race. But that is not the key thing. He won the nomination and won the presidency because HE WON VOTES. He wasn’t even played up that much before Iowa. Hillary was overwhelmingly the favorite, and Obama was considered to have little or no chance. He became the favorite as a result of his big upset victory in the Iowa caucuses, not because some bureaucratic entity gave him higher grades because he’s black. To apply an AA [Affirmative Action] analysis to a popularly elected politician is just mistaken.”

From one of the most energetic and astute analysts of the problem of the race issue, this asseveration flabbergasts in its naively simple-minded summation.

Auster simplistically rejects the proposition that Obama won “because of his race” by contrasting it with the stupefyingly circular assertion that he won “because he won votes” (and adds extra weight to this blunt circularity by putting its punchline in all caps). In fact, Obama won those votes because of reverse racism, plain and simple. The vast majority of whites who voted for Obama—and had they not done so he would not have won—were doing so because they were righting the wrong of which they have been ashamed for decades: the wrong, of course, of “racist” America, which must be purged not only of its shameful legacy in the past, but of the eternally perduring crypto-racism that continues to undermine any progress America might superficially show into the ongoing present. The election of Obama was one major way for all these millions of whites to assuage their eternal shame and guilt—albeit, being eternal, even having championed the first black American President will not actually absolve them of their inner torment. For, after all, it is of the evil nature of whites to be essentially, ontologically racist. One would have thought Auster would know this. In fact, one knows that Auster knows this—and thus his asseveration flabbergasts. Auster knows that nothing will serve to cure this eternal shame and guilt in the minds of these millions of white Americans deformed by PC MC (what Auster with less precision terms “liberalism”), short of the soteriological self-sacrifice of self-extinction. And yet, somehow Auster can’t connect two logically proximate dots to see that along the road to that salvation, these millions of whites will do their utmost to right the wrong of their white culture and their white nature: And helping Obama win was one crucial and happy day in that never-ending eschatological project of cultural self-extinction.

Obama’s charisma and perceived political talents were just icing-on-the-cake justifications for that main irrational rationale—rather slender straws desperately grasped at, in fact, as to many analysts, those justifications were rather decidedly precarious, given the thin ground of his political experience and substance, not to mention his dangerously radical Leftist associations and expressions over the years. Indeed, the darker, uglier side of radical Leftism in Obama’s personal, social and political past and present should have been massively contra-indicative for a nomination, not to mention an election victory. The very fact that this darker, uglier side was ignored by those millions of white Americans reveals that the factors of Obama’s charisma and political talent were obviously not primary in motivating them in their irrational fervor and support for him.

But in his ass-backward asseveration, Auster turns this assessment—which flows logically from everything else Auster has written on the problem of race—on its head.

For more on this, see my previous essay, Why Obama won: nine reasons, where I argue that, among the many factors involved, the number one reason why he won the election was white guilt over racism.

Closing the barn door—not after the horse has got out, but after the wolf has got in.

Recently, I published here an unstinting encomium of Diana West. Well, nobody’s perfect.

A flaw I noticed recently occurred within the context of her formulation of what our war is really about—and it is a well-articulated formulation:

It is not, as our presidents vaguely invoke, a war against "terrorism," "radicalism" or "extremism"; and it is not, as the current hearts-and-minds-obsessed Afghanistan commander calls it, "a struggle to gain the support of the (Afghan) people." It is something more specific than presidents describe, and it is something larger than the outlines of Iraq or Afghanistan. The war that has fallen to our generation is to halt the spread of Islamic law (Sharia) in the West, whether driven by the explosive belts of violent jihad, the morality-laundering of petro-dollars or decisive demographic shifts.

However, when she gets around to articulating what concrete measures this war properly understood entails, she veers over into incoherent Austerism:

Halting the spread of Islamic law in the democratic West requires halting Islamic immigration. . .

That’s all fine and dandy, but that’s only half the problem. She makes no mention of what to do about the millions of Muslims already within our borders. And, as I have argued before with reference to Lawrence Auster’s similar scheme, the problem of the numbers of Muslims within the West is only going to increase as the years go by, through a combination of continued immigration and high birth rates (as well as, perhaps only marginally, increased conversions to Islam within the West). It is eminently reasonable to suppose that neither Diana West’s proposal nor Auster’s similar proposal is going to be implemented for years—if not decades—from now.

That means that while the West is dilly-dallying and ignoring Diana West and Auster, we will grow so many more Muslims within our borders, the problem of Islam will have become (if it is not already so now, for that matter) relocated to a domestic Western problem. At that point, several years (if not a few decades) down the road, to “halt Islamic immigration”—as Diana West and Lawrence Auster sternly intone as though that were a tough no-nonsense measure—would be like closing the barn door: not after the horse has got out, but after the wolf has already got in.

Further Reading:

An Iron Veil

Auster’s Insufficiency and Incoherence

A million Americans say taxes are more important than Islam

This picture speaks a million words. And those million words can be boiled down to 8:

Americans care about their pocketbooks, not about Islam.

As the Daily Mail put it:

“As many as one million people flooded into Washington for a massive rally organised by conservatives claiming that President Obama is driving America towards socialism.”

Why haven’t we seen a comparable rally against Islam? The logical answer to that disheartening question is that the Anti-Islam Movement remains marginal—so marginal it cannot, or will not, muster any kind of a march on Washington, even eight years after 9/11, let alone the Million Man March that should be expected of it. Indeed, a recent Pew poll found that “The percentage of Americans who believe Islam encourages violence has declined in recent years. . .”

Meanwhile, American Muslims are planning a Washington “prayer rally” of their own for September 25, at which tens of thousands are expected to attend.

Jihadica: pullulating mosquitoes, the swamp, the camel, and no cigar.

Jihadica is an amazing website. Its contributors, from what I can gather, seem to be remarkably intelligent and learned analysts who can read (and understand) one or more of various relevant languages in the sphere of terrorism analysis—including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and probably several others.

They probably also work for various think tanks and/or government agencies, and Jihadica represents a kind of moonlighting venue for their work, as well as perhaps a useful storehouse for the fruits of their labors possibly even pragmatically related to their “day jobs”.

And yet, for all their amazing work, one gets a sense, after spending some time reading through some of their archives, of something rather odd, and monumentally misplaced about their whole enterprise. I would plot their analytical position at approximately somewhere in the low to middle asymptotic range: i.e., they continue to guide their analyses by the overarching axiom that Islam is not the problem, and that most Muslims are good (or at least harmless and therefore “jihadistically” insignificant) people.

However, because they have their “extremism detector” set on high and are apparently willing to notice a massive and globally widespread array of data indicating such “extremism”, they themselves put a paradoxical strain on their guiding axiom. I mean, one can detect, gather, sift through and analyze only so much data, over the years amounting to veritable mountains spread out all over the world in a bewildering variety of venues from caves to deserts to villages to cosmopolitan cities far and wide, from the exotic Orient right into our own backyard—before a reasonable man would pause, take a breath, and ask himself whether his guiding paradigm which he continues to maintain isn’t beginning to look a little ridiculous. The tensional juxtaposition of Jihadica’s guiding axiom with the sheer quantity and quality of data increasingly conflicting with that axiom leads its theoreticians to resemble madly industrious taxonomists trying to catalogue and organize an explosion of data dizzyingly complex and exponential in its mutations, pullulations, variety, causes, effects and dispersal. A considerable relief of their exhausting industry could be gained by simply rejecting their guiding axiom. Their taxonomy acquires the burden of a great deal of needless protean complexity by their implicit insistence that Islam itself is not the problem, and that the problem is really “extremist perversions” of Islam reflecting implausibly explicable and seemingly randomly generated epidemics of “radicalization” of otherwise ordinary—and therefore of course heretofore harmless—Muslims.

The analysts at Jihadica resemble dizzyingly scrupulous beekeepers, or madly versatile mosquito-swatters engaged in the quixotic project of forever trying to triangulate, ferret out, and swat the myriad permutations of “jihadists” that keep pullulating out of the swamp of the Umma—and yet somehow, strangely, never seeming to account for that swamp. In fact, they seem to continue to proceed about their analytical business as though there were no swamp at all, as though all these multifarious “jihadists” just pop out of nowhere. Or perhaps they implicitly accept the PC MC etiology: that the “jihadists” pullulate out of the larger societies of Muslims through the magical process of “radicalization” which, of course, is a reaction to all the bad things the West has done to Muslims over the years, decades, even centuries back to the Crusades, perhaps, and continuing right up to the present day with all our “meddling” in their lands.

At any rate, I recommend to my readers that they take a look at the Jihadica website and nose around a little there. A curious experience, at once sobering and comical, will begin to affect any reasonable reader who takes the time to comb through a little of their archives: They will notice that the analysts there are doing complex yoga, pirouettes and dance-steps all calculated in complex ways to avoid the obvious conclusion that the “Jihadism” they are studying is normative, baseline, grassroots and mainstream among Muslims. The overarching question that seems to guide the efforts of the Jihadica analysts is:

Why is a certain number of Muslims in various places all over the world turning to jihadism?

The proper question that should be guiding them, however, is this:

Given that Islam is centrally and directly an inspiration for the globally dangerous mission of Jihadism, why do most Muslims seem to be relatively harmless?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Appropriately, it should reflect the guiding principle that Muslims are guilty until proven innocent and, closely related to this, that there exists a wide variety of ways for ordinary Muslims of every walk of life to advance Jihad, reflecting a wide spectrum from more or less passive enablement on the low end, to active participation on the high end, and many shades in between of collusion. As long as one assumes axiomatically, as do apparently the Jihadica analysts, that Islam and Muslims per se have little or nothing to do with the problem they catalogue as “Jihadism”, then a great deal of activity that serves to help the “Jihadists” will escape their radar.

The question guiding the Jihadica analysts, however, does not seem to be rhetorical, and that’s one problem with it: they are sincerely concerned with trying to figure out an answer to their question, all the while studiously avoiding the camel in the room: Islam. They have thus developed a complex taxonomy of Isms (Islamism, Jihadism, extremism, Salafism, Deobandism, Sahwism, Qutbism, etc.), supplemented by an impressive sub-taxonomy of the multitudes of various terrorist groups and associations—but to what end? It all seems calculated to try to fend off the inevitable etiology: Islam. Their about page articulates the target of their analyses: “militant, transnational Sunni Islamism, commonly known as Jihadism”. Notice their pithy definition includes two Isms—extra buffer to make sure that the “Sunni” and the dreaded combination of the letters I-s-l-a-m within their definition does not lead the reader to think to blame Islam itself. The definition is a textbook example of the phenomenon of asymptotic analysis, which essentially means: “Getting closer and closer, but still no cigar.” Sometimes the asymptotic analyst seems to care about the cigar—as seems to be the case with Hugh Fitzgerald—and sometimes they don’t, and even seem to be positively suppressing any tendencies in their analysis that might move them toward the cigar—as seems to be the case with the Jihadica analysts.

The sheer quantity of data they keep uncovering, the vast global diaspora it reflects, the wide range of types of Muslims involved from cave-dwellers & goatherders to businessmen, politicians, clerics, doctors, engineers, teachers and students, men, women and children—all have a cumulatively comical effect on the effort these Jihadica analysts maintain to keep avoiding that camel in the room, and to keep pretending not to notice the swamp they are floundering in all the while madly and industriously cataloguing all the myriad mosquitoes appearing out of the blue all around the world.

As long as the Jihadica analysts, through their project, effectively hinder any analyses of that camel and that swamp, in turn serving to hinder policies that might be directed to doing something about that camel and that swamp—because the swamp, being Islam itself and the mainstream community of Muslims around the world, cannot possibly be connected to the Jihadists who are endangering us, you see—their otherwise impressive work tends to have a counter-productive effect on our overarching priority of steering the West back to its former rationality so it can recognize the proper nature and dimensions of this inveterate enemy.

Conclusion:

The Jihadica analysts seem to be experts at detecting the Jihadist mosquitoes that keep popping up, which I suppose is better than ignoring them altogether. I do not doubt that on one level this sort of taxonomy is helpful in our fight against Muslim terrorists. But as long as Western intelligence is, at best, only swatting at the mosquitoes while more or less willfully ignoring the swamp whence those mosquitoes pullulate, the Jihadists have only to worry about dodging our swatters and our sprays of insecticide—and have only to worry about trying to stay out of view of intelligence analysts who try to detect them. As long, however, as the West continues to follow its paradigm—whether PC MC or only superficially better the asymptotic model of the Jihadica analysts—the Jihadists need not worry about the West actually getting wise to the real source of their nourishment, breeding, inspiration, recruitment and tactical support: Islam and Muslim communities around the world.

Another asymptotic cacophemism to add to the “-ist” list

As I noted over two years ago here in an essay The Camel in the Room: Prefixes, Suffixes, Qualifers and Euphemisms, the West has developed a variety of ways through terminology to avoid “the camel in the room”—Islam—when talking about the problem Islam is causing: Wahhabist, Salafist, Islamist, extremist, and so on.

I’m afraid we have to add to that list the pet term of Robert Spencer himself: Jihadist. Spencer has written numerous times that what concerns him is not Muslims per se, but only Jihadists. And he is on record as writing that Islam per se is not the problem, but rather “elements of Islam”. Thus, in its Spencerian context, the cacophemistic term Jihadist is solidly asymptotic, even if, paradoxically, among many of his followers the term tends to be used metonymically for Muslim, and even though, ironically, the ever-burgeoning mountain—or rather volcano—of data amassed by Spencer himself over the years, documenting the dangerous evil of Islam, massively indicates otherwise.

I recently pointed out the problem of the term in a comments field of a Jihad Watch article which Spencer had characteristically editorialized with this remark:

. . . what have “the muslim people” ever done to me? Why, nothing. It's what the jihadists among “the muslim people” are doing to others that I am concerned about.

Hugh Fitzgerald tried to defend the term’s supposedly synecdochal function—basically through a theory by which innumerable Muslims in general (all Muslims? the vast majority of Muslims? most Muslims? a slim majority of Muslims? a large minority of Muslims? Hugh, of course, leaves these questions unassuaged) are subsumed under the rubric of Jihadist insofar as those innumerable Muslims can be said to “further”, as he puts it, “the Jihad or struggle to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.”

In my counter-argument to this, I noted:

All Muslims who are not actively opposing the supremacist expansionism of Islam (= “the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam”) would fit Hugh’s definition. And how many Muslims does that leave—who are actively opposing the supremacist expansionism of Islam? I’d say zero, as far as we can tell for the pragmatic purposes of our #1 priority: our safety. For this reason, as well as for the other reason to which Hugh alludes—viz., the vulnerability of the term Jihadist to be exploited by those who seek to marginalize the problem of Islam in order to exempt Islam from scrutiny let alone the condemnation it deserves, a vulnerability Hugh glosses over rather too hastily—the term Muslim (or perhaps better yet, Mohammedan) is to be preferred to Jihadist.

Conclusion:

To which I would add, by way of conclusion, that insofar as we, in terms of the War of Ideas sphere of the Anti-Islam Movement, endeavor to avoid the powerful trend still prevailing throughout the West—namely, the trend that, through the use of various descriptive terms, tends to avoid “the camel in the room” and thus whitewashes Islam and exculpates the vast majority of Muslims—we must counter that powerful trend with our own rhetoric (rhetoric in the classical sense, meaning language in the service of sociopolitical persuasion): And with regard to the problem of Islam and the problem of the Muslims who by their very existence as well as through their passive enablement and active engagement continue to advance Islam and its inherent expansionist supremacism, the term that focuses on the heart of that problem, and the term that embraces the widest possible population of its supporters, are the more pertinent terms.

It should be up to Muslims and their Western apologists to prove to us that these terms—namely, Islam and Muslims—are inappropriate. It should not be our job to use terms that implicitly tend to presume that proof as already a given, and thus to hand to them, on a silver platter, ways for them to continue to exploit their propaganda.

Self-Defense and its Modern Limits

On the supposed pacifism of the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect often touted as an example of how Islam can be peaceful, the founder of that sect (Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad) wrote about the question of whether or not to resist the British Empire in India with violent jihad:

“. . . the conditions laid down for jihad are not to be met with at the present time and in this country; so it is illegal for the Muslims to fight for religion and to kill anyone who rejects the Sacred Law, for God has made clear the illegality of jihad when there is peace and security.”

The problem, of course, is immediately apparent: The apparent moderation espoused there all hinges on the relative and subjective perception of what constitutes “peace and security” and what constitutes a breach of that “peace and security” sufficient to warrant violent resistance. Thus we see that the Ahmadiyya provide the classic loophole by which to allow offensive violent jihad in the back door that we have seen from other Muslims of various flavors from the mainstream to the fringe, under the guise of “Defense against Unjust Aggressors”—where all the terms, “defense”, “unjust” and “aggressors” as well as the oft-cited “oppression”—are as slippery as snakes in a basket and in the Islamic lexicon do not mean the same things which we in the West understand by those terms.

A Muslim writer quoting Ahmad on her website, The True Spirit of Jihad, one Sarah Ahmad, then notes casually and perhaps with unintentional aptness:

Note the words, at the present time and in this country; this clearly shows that jihad may be legal in another country in which exist the necessary conditions laid down in the Quran, or even here when the conditions have changed.

The modern world, under the aegis of the West, has developed a concept of “self-defense”, whereby no religion is permitted to defend itself using physical violence, just as no groups within society are permitted to defend themselves, in the sense of building fortresses and stockpiling weapons and planning for proactive violence in the supposed eventuality that they may be attacked by perceived enemies. Nor are groups permitted to violently defend themselves when they perceive themselves to be unjustly oppressed by some other group. These matters, under the modern Western model, are to be adjudicated by the appropriate law enforcement authorities, not by various groups with grudges and perceived victimization by perceived enemies.

Some may cite as an exception to this model the militia organizations in each state in the U.S.A., which may hold regular exercises where they practice riflery in a rather quaintly antiquated sense, but the American government would never countenance those organizations to hold training exercises with major artillery and explosives, and certainly would monitor and severely restrict them if they were found out to be disseminating literature about perceived enemies who need to be fought, using language that renders the proactive nature of that defense ambiguous at best.

Even individual citizens under Western laws have certain limitations on their self-defense—since virtually all self-defense, of individuals and of groups within society, is conceived in the modern West to be properly in the hands of the police, intelligence agencies, and the state military. This modern principle becomes even stronger the broader is the “threat” perceived by any given group, and thus the broader their potential self-defense response might be. I.e., if we are talking about one man and his defense of his person, his family, his house—there is more latitude given. But when we start talking about a group—religious or otherwise—that feels the need to stockpile weapons and train for violence—if that group begins to embark upon a path of “self-defense” that involves violence against others, virtually in all cases of the modern West, this is simply not permitted. Why? Because in the modern world, the police and the military are there precisely to defend groups as well as individuals, and if a group feels they are threatened, then the state intervenes to protect them. That is the modern system. It may not be perfect and it may have some important flaws, but it’s better than having a “Wild West” situation where various groups, tribes, associations, sects, cults, etc. go around committing violence—each one feeling subjectively and passionately that they are only “defending” themselves.

Thus, it is intolerable for the modern world that there exists a major international religion out there which has a formal doctrine of violent “self-defense”, as though they constitute a State apart from any given nation they reside in—indeed a special trans-national Super-Nation with laws higher than the laws of any given nation, and with their own international Police and Army higher than those of any other nation. This Islamic idea is intolerable and as we see from history and from the news today, is causing enormous disorder and danger around the world. It is true that in the last couple of centuries, this Islamic idea has been extensively curtailed by Western Colonialism, and then by the legacy of Western Colonialism in the last half century, both in the pressure which the West exerts upon the Muslim world to abide by human rights (not nearly enough pressure, but that is another story), and in the propping up, reflecting various degrees of influence and circumstance, of tin-pot Muslim dictators who more or less feel their hold on power is more important than the revival of Islam, and who therefore collude more or less with Western powers (particularly America) in suppressing as much as they can the natural mainstream grassroots groundswell of Islamic zealotry amongst their people. This hasn’t prevented some of those dictators here and there from trying to play both sides at once, as we have seen in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Pakistan for example. Nevertheless, for a brief window of time in the 20th century, it did serve to mitigate to a great extent—at least temporarily—the perennial Jihad of Muslims which fuses Offensive and Defensive War just as indissolubly as Islam itself fuses Religion and State.

The concatenation of events after 9/11 has served to reboot—to borrow a term from Obama—the revival throughout the Muslim world of the original goal of Islam, by which the defense of Islam is predicated upon the “offense” of the mere existence anywhere in the world of Unbelievers who flourish and have any power at all—not to mention power vastly superior to Muslims. To this revived paradigm, dormant only a relatively brief time in modern history, the model of the modern West regarding self-defense is to be followed by Muslims only as long as they perceive themselves as weak, in order to fool Infidels, while the long-term goal is to discard it—and other Western laws—as soon as Muslims gain sufficient strength. Of course, the main threat here is not that Muslims will actually realize their goal of gaining sufficient strength to conquer the West, but rather the violence they will wreak merely in the pursuit of that goal. I.e., Muslims over the next 50 to 100 years could be unsuccessful in their goal of world conquest, and yet, merely in trying to succeed, could still manage to mass-murder untold numbers of people in various places throughout West, cause untold panic and confusion (not to mention billions spent by us in security and defense), and do untold damage to our infrastructure.

The Ahmadiyya group quoted at the beginning of my essay seems to countenance the mainstream Islamic idea of a militant posture, under the guise of “self-defense” against “unjust oppression”. Because of that, their protestations to be more “peaceful” and “moderate” not only are not persuasive, but are positively harmful, because they tend to promote the false notion of a viably peaceful Islam and thus contribute to the disinformation that lulls Western Infidels with a false sense of intelligence about Islam, and a false sense of hope in its reformability. This mechanism is replicated and amplified by innumerable other types of Muslims deemed by the PC MC West to be peaceful and tolerant, with all caution about Muslims relegated and delimited to a tiny minority of extremists.

Furthermore, any data that can be adduced to show that militancy is a widespread idea in Islamic societies, and not as insignificant as the PC MC insists, is re-contextualized by the PC MC (and by their partners, the Muslim apologists) in terms of a vaguely romantic quasi-Che-Guevaresque image of guerilla “freedom fighters” fighting against “oppression” not signficantly different from our own Minutemen of our own American Revolution against oppression—with an attractive added spice that these Muslim Minutemen of our time are perceived to be “ethnic”, and therefore to be “respected” lest we be “bigoted” if not “racist” by showing any signs of criticism against their ways.

This Western model continues to predispose the West to continue to allow more and more millions of Muslims to infiltrate deep within the fabric of their societies, among which will be innumerable numbers of them all too ready—and all the more enabled—to plot horrific attacks against us in the coming decades: all in the name, of course, of the “defense of Islam”.

Further Reading:

Muslims must give up the right of religious “defense”

Muslims: Poster Children of Third World Peoples

Who speaks for us in the Anti-Islam Movement?

The question has many complications: it does not stem from a monolithic situation either existing or desired, nor does it demand a monolithic solution.

Thus, it is reasonable to accept a loose principle whereby we agree that, for example, Robert Spencer, because of his credentials and his intelligence about Islam, speaks for us in the Anti-Islam Movement with regard to many statements he has made concerning the subject of issues under the broad umbrella of the Problem of Islam.

The caveat, surely, to this loose principle would be to avoid a universal rule whereby it becomes incumbent upon us in the Anti-Islam Movement to accept everything Spencer pronounces upon that subject. That is to say, while we agree to the loose principle, we also reserve the right to dispute this, that or the other thing Spencer might pronounce upon concerning that subject. Surely that cannot be deemed unreasonable—and yet, there seem to be supporters of Spencer who would deem it so. And even what we dispute may not reflect utter rejection—it might partake of any one of many shades of degree ranging from strong disagreement to suggestions for modification without necessarily rejecting the totality of whatever pronouncement is in question. (This being another nuance all too often incomprehensible to certain Spencer supporters in their rather obtuse devotion to him.)

An immediate corollary problem appears at this juncture: Who is this “we” that is receiving Spencer’s pronouncements, and then deciding whether or not to agree with any one of them, or deciding at least to agree in part, but not in whole? The “we” ideally would embrace all people in the growing Anti-Islam Movement. What is this Movement? As yet, it seems to have no visible official contours or structure. In fact it seems to be a rather ragged collection of diverse, and largely anonymous people apparently spread out in a diaspora around the West, if not around the world both in the Blogosphere and out in the “real world”, with most of its central communications located in the former. Its numbers, however, remain a mystery.

This generates another wrinkle of complexity. For, how do we define who is within that Movement, and who isn’t, or who shouldn’t be, in it? (We’ll leave that question for now.)

And yet another wrinkle: How are such decisions—of whether, and to what degree, to agree with those who more or less speak for us by pronouncing upon this, that or the other issue involving the Problem of Islam—to be adjudicated? Does there currently exist any process at all for such adjudication? The answer to the latter question, of course, seems to be: No, not yet. At least no process with any semblance of effective organization and representation.

At any rate, given the amorphous nature of these very pragmatic questions in the context of the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement, we have today exhibit A:

In a recent introduction to a Jihad Watch article, Robert Spencer wrote to his readers (emphasis added in bold):

It is not "hate" to report accurately on how Islamic jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence against non-Muslims. Nor is it "anti-Muslim" to do so. . . . Just for the record, the "feud" [between Charles Johnson and Spencer, et al.] did not break out over "whether or not the anti-Muslims should join forces with European neo-fascists." It broke out over a couple of weblinks. No one was or is saying that anti-jihadists (which is not the same thing as "anti-Muslims") should join forces with European neo-fascists.

Let us extract the givens that Spencer is dispensing to his readers, which I have bolded for emphasis, and formulate their meaning discursively for unambiguous clarity:

1. It is not “anti-Muslim” to condemn Islamic jihadists.

2. Muslims are not the same thing as jihadists.

The obvious, though implicit, third dictum that flows logically from these two:

3. We should not condemn Muslims unless they are jihadists.

Aside from the problematic aspects to these statements which most, if not all, of “us” in the Anti-Islam Movement could readily discern, there is the parallel problem, concerning our titular question: Does Spencer in this instance speak for us when he presumes to pronounce upon these things as though they are undisputed verities?

Spencer supporters who disagree with points 1-2-3 (and I suspect that would embrace most of his supporters) can respond in various ways: They can just ignore those points and pretend like Spencer never said them. Or they can register disagreement, but conclude that it’s no biggie. Or they can more forcefully, but with all due respect, stand firm and make it publically known that they disagree with these points and that in fact the principle involved here is a “biggie”. Such disagreement, in my view, should be expressed publically, it should not be suppressed and swept under the rug in the name of “not rocking the boat”. Indeed, there should develop a mechanism within the Anti-Islam Movement for such disagreements to be expressed publically, and beyond that, to be discussed and debated. Should the Anti-Movement ever evolve from its present condition of amorphous disorganization into an actual organization, it may well be that its support of certain policies will hinge on whether, or not, those points express the official platform of the Movement. And it may well be that through the Movement’s own internal adjudication procedures, hopefully reflecting democratic principles, it will have been decided that Spencer’s position on this is correct, or at least should be deemed correct for the purposes of the Movement’s support of certain more general policies. This may be regrettable for those of us who strenuously disagree with those points, but short of seceding and forming a breakaway second Movement, there would be little we could do, other than continue to try to change the Movement’s position from within, for the future.

Lest we be accused of unfairly picking on Spencer in any way, we can adduce any number of fine positions he has presented, such as this articulation from another recent Jihad Watch article that shows his capacity for excellent formulations:

. . . virtually everyone . . . in Washington on both sides of the aisle, assumes that the jihadists are merely reacting to actions by the United States. The possibility that they may hate us for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with what we have done or can do doesn't seem to enter anyone's mind. Yet it is precisely that possibility that is suggested again and again by a close examination of the belief system of the jihadists themselves. They believe that they are commanded to fight against us because we are Infidels. If we are arrogant or inconsistent in living up to our own values, that makes for good grievance propaganda fodder, but it is not the root cause of the conflict itself.

It would be hard to imagine anyone within the perimeter of the Anti-Islam Movement who would take issue with Spencer on that (though there seem to remain quite a few who do not recognize the implicit and not entirely unproblematic dissonance between this articulation and the previous three points discussed above).

At any rate, this has been a rather brief meditation on some of the complexities involved with the titular question of this essay, using one real and concrete example.

Mohammlet’s Soliloquy

To behead, or not to behead—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous Infidels
Or to take arms against a sea of Christians
And by opposing end them. To die, to explode—
No more—and by an explosion to say we end
The humiliation, and the thousand impure shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a Shahada
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to explode—
To explode—perchance to Paradise: ay, there’s no rub,
For in that love of death what Paradise may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Cannot give us pause. There’s disrespect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Fitna,
Th’Occupier’s wrong, the proud Jew’s contumely
The pangs of despised honor, Sharia’s delay,
The insolence of Saudis, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a full rucksack? Who would Infidels bear,
To stand in line before an X-rayed flight,
But that the joy of virgins after death,
The undiscovered Caliphate, from whose bourn
No martyr returns, inflames the will,
And makes us insensate of those ills we have
To fly to buildings that we know not of.

(A little riff I did a long time ago in a comment on Jihad Watch under the name “Dr. Pepper”)

One-Upping Lawrence Auster

Auster belittles Frank Gaffney’s all-hat-and-no-cattle approach to Islam:

"Every effort" must be made to ensure that toxic sharia stops leeching into America, every effort--other than moving one's fingers on one's keyboard and typing the words, "Muslim immigration must be stopped." Nope. THAT effort is beyond Mr. Gaffney's power.

I see Auster’s bet and raise him:

"Every effort" must be made to ensure that toxic sharia stops leeching into America, every effort--other than moving one's fingers on one's keyboard and typing the words, "All Muslims must be deported." Nope. THAT effort is beyond Mr. Auster's power.

Weak Timber

Four months ago, in April of this year, I published three essays here on the problem in the Blogosphere of adequately referencing sources to ensure veracity.

The example I used is a report written by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams about their meeting with a Muslim ambassador in London to discuss the problem of Muslim ships engaging in piracy against American and European ships. The Blogospheric problem that I noticed involved variants on the wording of what is supposed to be a primary source document. I also noticed repetitions of one variant or another among bloggers—indicating an “echo chamber” effect in the Blogosphere, by which a quote found in one blog is simply repeated in another blog, and this continues like a chain reaction among many bloggers, while the concern for veracity gets lost, or never was there to begin with.

In the meantime, I have posted a comment or two on Jihad Watch noting this problem, including this one eleven weeks ago, linking to my main article here.

Then today I note on Jihad Watch that one of the main staffpersons there, Marisol, cites in an article that very same money quote of Jefferson, and uses a secondary (if not possibly tertiary) source (Christopher Hitchens, from an essay he published in the online magazine Slate) which unsurprisingly perpetuates a variant of the original, with incorrect wording:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered 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 Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

The secondary source upon whom Marisol relies, Hitchens, provided no reference citation at all for his quote. It is reasonable to assume that Hitchens himself got it from a secondary source, whether online or from a book, as Robert Spencer did in his own citation of an incorrect variant on page 89 of his book, Stealth Jihad, citing the secondary source American Sphinx, a book by Joseph J. Ellis.

The correct wording, which I saw with my own eyes after my own two hands turned the pages to the correct place on pages 357-9 in volume 9 of the Julian P. Boyd edition of the Jefferson papers (see the third link at the bottom of this essay for more details) , reads:

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.

The variances are readily apparent. (Note: I also included the paragraph before the main quote, to show the context for the “it” being mentioned by Jefferson, which in the Marisol/Hitchens version is indicated by an interpolated “[the right]” (whose meaning only becomes apparent when reading the Hitchens version).) Although the variances do not terribly affect the substance and import, they do affect the veracity if no one cares to provide the actual citation of the correct version. It is simply unacceptable for a serious sociopolitical movement dependent in great part for its persuasion upon ideas and historiography to be bandying historically important primary source quotes around that have one or more variances.

So, in the comments field of today’s Jihad Watch article, I posted a long comment detailing the problem as concisely as possible, given the complexities involved, and provided links to my more extended analyses of that problem. Shortly thereafter, I posted a follow-up explanatory note.

Some time later, I get my head bitten off by Marisol, who not only shows me no acknowledgement or gratitude for my corrective, but added insult to injury by lashing out in actual hostility:

Hesperado:

You snipe and bend over backwards to find fault, and then wonder why you have so few friends in the blogosphere. In appointing yourself as the guardian of the boundaries of ideological purity, you have made yourself the odd man out. Suppose you had offered the above source in a helpful spirit, rather than one of smug superiority. You know what they say about a drop of honey versus a barrel of vinegar.

Here was my response soon after:

Marisol,

It's just a matter of getting the primary source right. If someone comes along who finds the actual primary source and corrects those who have been using secondary sources most of whom have been perpetuating incorrect variants, what sense does it make to get hostile at the corrector, especially if he has taken time and trouble to determine the actual correct wording?

The reader can judge for himself: read my two posts at Jihad Watch linked above. Then see if Marisol’s characterization of them as “smug superiority” devoid of a “helpful spirit” is fair, or even remotely reasonable. The only spot where I injected a bit of judgemental insinuation was where I indirectly alluded to the repetition of the inaccurate quote by Marisol, along with others including Spencer, Bostom and Raymond Ibrahim as indicative of a problem “of a promiscuous Blogospheric echo-chamber sloppiness with regard to the money quote by Jefferson and a consequent apparent unconcern for nailing down the actual primary source text”.

Had someone written that to me, along with the rest of my comment, I wouldn’t lash back at them and bite their head off. If I disagreed, I would articulate my disagreement with an actual counter-argument. If I could not disagree, but saw the commenter was correct about the substance, but I still didn’t like his manner in presenting that substance, I would express that as well, but I would keep it separate from the matter of the substance. To confuse the two, and then to refuse the constructive criticism because of that confusion, is just unacceptably childish and irrational. Marisol’s response to me, however, seems to imply that more is going on than merely an aversion to my specific “vinegar” in my comment—i.e., a long-standing animosity to me based upon my many criticisms over the years of certain aspects of Spencer’s methodology.

It is no surprise that into the next day, nary a peep from Marisol as to my logical reply to her attack on me (and here, while I have criticized others for misusing the word “attack”, I think it applies ) has appeared. She need not apologize at all, but simply recognize the logic. That the inaccurate Jefferson quote still stands unedited on that Jihad Watch article is testament to the fact that petulant pique seems to be more important to Marisol, and to Jihad Watch, than basic historical accuracy.

And while Marisol has not seen fit to respond to me, she has taken the trouble to take the advice of another commenter, “Cornelius”, who nearly three hours after my reply to her, directed her attention to a previous thread in which he and I had a long exchange of various disagreements:

Marisol,

In case you missed it, I had a prolonged exchange with Hesperado on the very question of his "ideological purity" in the August archive at the end of the thread 'Comments Are Back'. You might find it interesting.

Then the following morning, approximately 12 hours after Cornelius's post to her, Marisol responded:

Cornelius-- very interesting. Thanks.

If my readers will peruse that exchange between Cornelius and me which he recommended for Marisol to read (linked above), and which she found “very interesting”, I would invite them to see whether they agree with me—or if not to provide a counter-argument—that Cornelius was consistently misreading me, supplying inadequate argumentation to my challenges, and veering off into irrelevant emotionality rather than sticking to logic. Somehow, I get the feeling that Marisol came away from her reading of it as stubbornly myopic to those problems as Cornelius proved himself to be.

Conclusion:

Marisol’s reaction is indicative of a larger problem in the Anti-Islam Movement. And that problem is the tendency of certain people to let personal animosities and fear of internal criticism get in the way of availing themselves of constructive criticism to help improve the Anti-Islam Movement. Certainly, not any criticism that comes down the pike—particularly down the pike of the Information Superhighway—will really be constructive and therefore useful. But that determination should not be made on the basis of whether you like the guy giving you the constructive criticism, nor whether you deem him to be an “enemy” due to past wrangles you may have had with him. If that criticism is couched in reasonably mature and intelligent language, then no factors should enter into the determination of its usefulness other than its own merits.

To continue to cultivate this attitude, as Marisol and Spencer (among others, such as Cornelius and Davegreybeard and awake) do, is to continue to build the Anti-Islam Movement on the weak timber of an irrational fear and hostility to internal, constructive criticism.

Further Reading:

Once again, here are my three prior essays on the matter of the Jefferson quote and adequate referencing by the Anti-Islam Movement of primary sources:

Primary Sources 101 and the Blogospheric anti-Islam Movement

Addendum to Primary Sources 101

I Struck Gold! Second Addendum to Primary Sources 101

West and the West

I’ve become a big fan of Diana West’s blog. In her own way, West is helping to defend the West as well as, if not better than, any other blogger.

Her blog may not buzz with the minute-to-minute newsfeed urgency that energizes Jihad Watch; and, providing no comments threads at all, it lacks any of the vibrant sense of community that thrives on Jihad Watch—but it crackles with her wit and scintillates with her incisively, often excruciatingly apt perspicacity about the problem of Islam. Her coverage of the tragicomedy of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has been unparalleled. And her recent essays on the virtual submission of Yale to Islamic sharia through their befuddled, cowardly decision to self-censor all images of Mohammed in their upcoming book on images of Mohammed—have been superb and bristling with nuts and bolts of relevant facts.

If she is asymptotic, I have not yet detected it. So far, I have found nothing in her writings that I object to—and that’s saying a lot, as I tend to have a contrarian streak that borders on OCD, and becomes even more obsessed when dealing with what I consider to be the most pressing issue of the day, Islam.

It’s a shame that Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has, apparently, distanced himself from her (one reason may be, as I speculated in a couple of previous essays, her diametrically different stance on the recent Iranian demonstrations) and has stopped showcasing her fine essays. In the past, he regularly did so, and nearly always embroidered his introductions of her essays with high and unstinting praise. In the last year or so, it’s as if Diana West no longer exists at Jihad Watch (other than the dutiful remnant of a link to her blog on the Jihad Watch blogroll). Other illustrious members of the Anti-Islam (woops! I mean Anti-Jihad) Movement that seem to have gone by the Spencerian wayside without any reason given have been Bruce Bawer (though we can guess why), Andrew Bostom (here one would be headscratchingly hard pressed to figure out why), and Michelle Malkin (again, we hoi ochloi not privy to the aristocratic goings-on of the smoke-filled rooms where decisions are made huddle out of the loop). Meanwhile, Spencer’s latest Blogospheric buddy has been Pam Geller, whom he cannot seem to feature and praise enough. Some of her low-end asymptotic faults I discussed in a recent essay.

In the often bewildering sphere of blogs—where the biggest problem is too many bloggers and too much information—Diana West offers a clear, crystalline needle pointing West.

I urge my readers to savor her writing, and to dip into her archives as well.

IntenseDebacle, the Jihad Watch community in ruins, and the Aristocracy of the Anti-Islam (woops! I mean Anti-Jihad) Movement

[Update: Jihad Watch has restored its old comments system, and things are settling back to its previous normal smoothly running baseline.]

The community dimension of Jihad Watch comments has effectively become crippled. It is now in ruins because of IntenseDebacle.

The real name of that thoroughly destructive, complex piece of crap passing off as a system for interactive comments is “InstantDebate” (or, rather “instantdebate” with fashionably uncapitalized letters).

For over six years now, the Jihad Watch comments community has functioned as a way for people all over the world who are concerned about the problem of Islam to be able to get together in one place to vent their frustration at the PC MC West; to share information and ideas; to rally each other with inspiration; to communicate important concrete events, such as upcoming rallies or opportunities to contact their political representatives; and last but not least, to present to innumerable new visitors to Jihad Watch the spectacle of mostly mature and intelligent—and often informative—feedback from the regular commenters.

Robert Spencer some time back (a few months ago, I believe) completely changed the commenting format for Jihad Watch, bringing in the new “intensedebate” system. He did so completely unilaterally, without soliciting any input from his minions of staunch defenders, supporters and purchasers of his books. All along there have been bugs with this new comments system. At first, one could pretty much ignore the bugs, as they were minor, and they seemed to be fixed fairly quickly by invisible hands. However, in the past month the bugs have multiplied and become more serious, to the point now where they are almost intolerable—no, not “almost”: they have finally crossed the line and become intolerable.

Example: Today, I saw yet another interesting article on Jihad Watch, about Tariq Ramadan, the extremist wolf in moderate sheep’s clothing. I decided I wanted to contribute to the discussion that must surely be underway. Though the article at that point was at the very top of today’s list, I knew from experience reading comments at Jihad Watch for over four years that it would likely have at least 10 or 15 comments by now; and anyway, more comments and more readers were sure to come as the minutes turned into hours. Knowing the problems with InstantDebacle, however, I prepared myself to see what I had already been seeing in the last week or so—a comments field with about 200 comments, most of them strangely transported there from comments fields many weeks ago, completely irrelevant comments having to do with old stories on Jihad Watch.

So I clicked on “comments” in order to access the comments field, and what did I find? This time over 700 comments—for an article barely an hour old at that point. And of course, the bulk of those comments had nothing to do with Tariq Ramadan, but had been strangely transported from other threads. The already nearly intolerable problem had effectively morphed into monstrously intolerable proportions. [UPDATE: Yesterday, a few of the most recent threads had reached over 970 comments—and this morning, August 14, I see that a few have pushed 2,036!]

And this is only one aspect of the problem. Another crucial aspect that affects the community dimension at Jihad Watch comments is the fact that a commenter who has left a comment can rarely find his comment again to see the responses of other commenters. That was one of the major beauties of Jihad Watch comments—the smaller discussions that would sprout up, inspired by some angle on the article in question. And often, even if these sub-discussions were “off-topic”, they invariably were interesting and informative, and furthermore conduced to the sense of community among those concerned about the problem of Islam.

This is all now in ruins at Jihad Watch. It is no longer merely impaired. It is a heap of complex bells-&-whistles in smoking ruins.

In a recent essay here about three days ago, I asked: What can Spencer & Staff do about this?

And I answered: The very least they could do is post a formal article at Jihad Watch explaining what they know of the situation and what they are doing to try to ameliorate it.

Well, two days ago, August 11, Spencer finally took time out of his busy schedule to tell us that he is aware of the InstantDebacle problem and that he is going to change the comments system “soon”. This belated notice came to us after a good month of inreasingly escalating problems with InstantDebate. Perhaps Spencer doesn’t appreciate the nature of Jihad Watch comments—how it functions as a thriving community of people concerned about the problem of Islam; how furthermore this community helps to make this site Jihad Watch a dynamic interactive site and not merely a boring newsfeed; and finally how this community helps his book sales.

I also wrote in that essay three days ago: If then they (Spencer & Co.) are feeling particularly respectful of their devoted community, they might even dare to go further and actually post an article at Jihad Watch that solicits from that community its thoughts on the new “intensedebate” system and ideas for improvement. Fat chance for that. Jihad Watch isn’t a democracy! It’s an aristocracy, and Spencer does not seem to care to sully his hands with an actual partnership with the hoi ochloi who comprise his loyal, devoted, expanding community.

As for InstantDebacle: Take a look at the photos of the team that comprises the staff at instantdebate, on their “about us” page. They look like the usual ambitious 20-something Bohemian techno geeks (with a slightly older Penn Fraser Jillette look-alike, Jon Fox, at the helm) who have idealistically tried to corner a market in the online services industry, perhaps hoping someday to approximate the megabucks of the Google guys.

Well, they are never going to make it if they can’t work out the grotesque bugs which afflict their product—bugs which have effectively destroyed the comments system at Jihad Watch.

As I wrote in a comment today at Jihad Watch:

Spencer should treat this as an emergency, stop everything else, suspend Jihad Watch immediately while he switches over to a new system—NOW.

To which I added:

All in favor, say “aye”.

While the sense of community in most ways thrives amongst Jihad Watchers, I suspect they will mostly ignore my plea. It seems, for the most part, their sense of democratic empowerment in the context of the Jihad Watch community remains impoverished—for a number of reasons, among which are the fact that Spencer over the years has done nothing to encourage it and in fact has done much to discourage it; and the fact that most Jihad Watchers seem themselves to encourage a kind of anti-democratic idol worship of Spencer. I thus suspect that they will not bother to say “aye” in sufficient numbers, but will simply suffer this major problem like sheep. I am of course not in any way calling for some kind of coup—only for more representation and respect accorded to us by Spencer. And for this to happen, the Jihad Watch community will have to respectfully ask for it, in sufficient numbers. While we owe Spencer a lot for his continuing valiant efforts in the pedagogy of the West with regard to the problem of Islam, he also owes us for our support over the years. The least he could do is show his appreciation in concrete and substantial ways, by deputizing us.

All in favor, say “aye”.

Let's do a little imaginative concretizing

Robert Spencer in an article on Jihad Watch today suggest that we “... call upon Muslims in the U.S. to repudiate and teach against Islam’s traditional apostasy law, or face stiff penalties up to and including deportation...”

Let’s do a little imaginative concretizing: How exactly would this work? Let’s say by the time the U.S. is even ready to begin implementing Spencer’s advice here, some 25 years from now, there will be at least 5 million Muslim in the U.S. Is the U.S. going to call upon all 5 million to “repudiate and teach against” the death penalty for apostasy?

If so, let’s take the “repudiation” part first: how would that be implemented? Would we require all 5 million to report to some government office in their region to sign a form that stipulates such a repudiation? Or perhaps they could just repudiate on-line, at repudiate-ridda-hadd/depofjustice.gov ? The bureaucratic red-tape nightmare is easy to imagine, involving also the problem of enforcement—what do we do when Muslims do not report to the office in time or do not register online in time, etc.

This is not to mention the flimsiness of verification and trust that would afflict the whole enterprise: would the fact that Muslims simply sign a form mean that we can trust them? This of course applies to any and all stipulations we would require of them—not merely repudiation on the apostasy issue, but also the jihad issue, the loyalty issue to non-Islamic governments, etc.

If, however, we would not require all 5 million to formally register their repudiation, which Muslims would we choose to represent them? Only their clerics? Their clerics and their “community leaders”? This would be more bureaucratically manageable of course than requiring all 5 million, but it would be afflicted with an even worse verification/trust problem—for not only can we not reasonable trust any given Muslim cleric who simply rubber-stamps his repudiation, we would in that circumstance not even have any repudiation from the Muslim masses at all. The same verification/trust problem pertains to Spencer’s second part of his suggestion—the “teach against” part. Just because some imams happen to “teach against” the death penalty for apostasy, this doesn’t mean they really believe it. And, of course, this would require pervasive monitoring of mosques and other Islamic centers, to make sure they are following this rule.

This brings us to another problem involved here: Such a comprehensive policy would formalize a mass posture and display of hostility and distrust against our own Muslim population: and again, by the time our society (thoroughly deformed by PC MC as it currently is) has become ready to even begin to implement such procedures (let alone even contemplate them), our Muslim population will have increased greatly, likely by two million or more. Such a policy would officially bring out into the open an antagonism between our society and millions of Muslims within our borders. And we all know how mass Muslim populations behave when they feel antagonism against them—hell, too many of them act up treasonously even when they are mollycoddled, as they are now throughout the West.

Now, I admit, there might be an up side to this problem—i.e., it would be like bringing a boil on your skin to a state of inflammation the better to lance it and cure it—i.e. if I must spell it out, if it would trigger mass anti-social and criminal behaviors of Muslims; and then our government could then take the next logical step and crack down on them and deport them etc. Nevertheless, I still maintain that instead of steering our society toward this kind of reconfiguration that would bring in its train all these headaches and potentials for insurrections and military crackdowns by our National Guard, etc., we should instead work to steer our society toward the much better, more efficient, more logical, and ultimately more humane measure: D.A.M.N.—Deport All Muslims Now. For us to continue to agitate for piece-meal measures (whether Spencer’s rather mild approach or Lawrence Auster’s seemingly bolder but ultimately no less incoherent and insufficient approach) is to tend to have the effect of actually counter-productively working against the process of sociopolitical reconfiguration toward the more logical approach of D.A.M.N.

It's time to deputize the JW ComCom

What is the JW ComCom?

The Comments Community at Jihad Watch.

What do I mean by “deputize”?

As I wrote in an essay two years ago on my now retired blog Jihad Watch Watch:

“...the owners of JW... have to expand their minds, think outside the box, and stop thinking of their reader populations as merely inert (albeit often effervescent) appendages that simply hang on, adding a little color and spice to their sites: they have to start thinking of their reader populations as partners of their sites, and as actual, concretely contributing, associates of their mission.”

How would the owners do that?

In various ways. There is no need for JW—at least not yet—to create an official organization (whether strictly non-profit or integrating wages for contributing work).

What there is a need for at the Jihad Watch ComCom is two things:

1) more respect shown for the innumerable individuals who have been helping to make Jihad Watch a vibrant, thriving, intelligent community of commentators

and

2) more ways to utilize the talents of those innumerable individuals, not only to improve Jihad Watch, but also to expand its mission in line with the larger goal of moving from a still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement to a more concerted and organized trans-national effort.

Point #1 can be shown in numerous different ways. All these ways would reflect the fact that Robert Spencer and his staff no longer keep the ComCom at arm’s length as though they were lepers with a constant potential to connect JW with “racism” or “fascism” or “genocidal statements”—while at the same time at odd moments condescending from on high to hobnob with that same dubious population in chummy responses to comments here and there.

One concrete way for Spencer & Staff to show this kind of respect has surfaced in the last few weeks at Jihad Watch, increasing exponentially it seems with each new day: Spencer some time back (a few months ago, I believe) completely changed the commenting format for Jihad Watch, bringing in a new system called “intensedebate”. He did so completely unilaterally, without soliciting any input from his minions of staunch defenders, supporters and purchasers of his books. All along there have been bugs with this new comments system. At first, one could pretty much ignore the bugs, as they were minor, and they seemed to be fixed fairly quickly by invisible hands. However, in the past three weeks the bugs have multipled and become more serious, to the point now where they are almost intolerable. Their effect has been to jeopardize the smoothly efficient medium that has for years facilitated the thriving and intellectually (and sometimes actually politically) productive community of people who gather at Jihad Watch concerned about the problem of Islam.

What can Spencer & Staff do about this? The very least they could do is post a formal article at Jihad Watch explaining what they know of the situation and what they are doing to try to ameliorate it. If then they are feeling particularly respectful of their devoted community, they might even dare to go further and actually post an article at Jihad Watch that solicits from that community its thoughts on the new system and ideas for improvement.

Which brings us to Point #2.

Ways to utilize the talents of that devoted community:

a) either hire, or solicit volunteers, to help moderate the comments as well as to do other stuff around the office, like even look for new news articles and analysis pieces to publish on the site, proofreading and crosschecking facts, etc., thus giving the main staff more time to do some of the other ideas below

b) solicit ideas from that community for improving Jihad Watch—perhaps once every six months or so

c) ideas, like, for example: facilitate the debates & discussions that often flare up in the comments field when Islam apologists (either Muslims or PC MCs) participate with their specious but often torturously complex propaganda—this can be done, for example, by setting up visually parallel comments fields attached to the main ones into which the debates & discussions are deposited, not only so they can be followed more visibly, but also to spark wider participation

d) Spencer, Fitzgerald and Marisol (currently the only JW Staff operating, apparently, since Raymond Ibrahim departed) could grant us the illuminating and respectful favor of submitting themselves to interviews conducted by one or more commenters. The interviews could vary in style—some could be friendly, some could be (gasp!) more challenging, and even (horrors!) critical. Wouldn’t that be fun? I think so. And informative. And maybe even helpful to the overall Jihad Watch mission, both in self-promotion terms, and in terms of its sociopolitical project.

e) Spencer & Hugh could hold periodic “town meetings” with the JW ComCom, during which discussions about the ongoing direction of the still-inchoate Anti-Islam Movement, as well as about various sub-topics in the analysis of the problem of Islam, could be aired and fielded.

f) And so on.

Conclusion:

Three intangible yet beneficial effects would flow from Jihad Watch engaging its devoted readership more substantively:

1) It would help move the still-inchoate Anti-Islam Movement from its current state of being an unofficially hierarchical aristocracy where all important decisions, directions and activities are performed from on high by a small number of unaccountable elites, to a more democratic process.

2) It would help give the innumerable, and growing, population of concerned individuals in the still-inchoate Anti-Islam Movement more of a sense of actually contributing something meaningful and substantial to this most urgent problem, and in doing so, would help to improve the still-inchoate Anti-Islam Movement.

3) Finally, it would embody a necessary step in the larger process of evolving the Anti-Islam Movement from the inchoate and disorganized state it is in currently, to a more organized and effective sociopolitical project.

Further Reading:

Jihad Watch and Little Green Footballs need to evolve into a New Society (when reading this, ignore all the stuff about LGF—since, at the time, that blog hadn’t yet transmogrified into the grotesquely bloated enemy of the still-inchoate Anti-Islam Movement it has become)

Insufficient Gratitude Watch

More Ideas for Jihad Watch

Spencer and his Readers: Ideas for Improving Jihad Watch

Update on Spencer and his Readers

The Anti-Islam Movement: Prospectus for Improvement

Leadership in the Anti-Islam Movement: Addendum 2 to the Prospectus

I guess the house isn’t on fire yet.

Yesterday, Robert Spencer posted an article with this arresting title:

Demographic time bomb: millions of Muslim immigrants will change Europe beyond recognition, and almost no policymakers are talking about it

And here was Spencer’s editorial remark:

“And those who are talking about it are smeared and vilified as racists and bigots. When a nuclear-powered Islamic Republic of France threatens the U.S., however, some Americans may come to regret the ease with which they swallowed and even propagated defamation and lies about anti-jihad European politicians such as Geert Wilders.”

Now here is what Spencer has had to say about nine months ago in a Jihad Watch comments field about another valiant political party in Europe, Vlaams Belang (VB), fighting against jihad in Europe:

I should also add, by way of summation, that I am not going to endorse the VB either, whatever I find out about them and whatever they do or don’t do. I am not going to endorse the VB any more than I would endorse the Republican Party, or Democratic Party, or any other party. I am not interested in endorsing parties, I am interested in resisting Islamic supremacism.

Well, Mr. Spencer, one good way to resist Islamic supremacism is to endorse VB. And one doesn’t have to “endorse” it in the sophistical way you are implying, by becoming a card-carrying member of it and volunteering at the campaign office on Saturdays. One endorses VB by standing up and supporting them in their valiant fight against jihad; something, apparently, which Spencer cannot bear to do, out of fear of being called a “racist” or a “fascist” perhaps.

At any rate, Spencer already indicated in that same comments thread that he knows how to differentiate between the red herring of “endorsing” a “political party” and simply supporting Vlaams Belang for their valiant efforts to fight jihad in Europe—when a commenter “UsorThem” asked him point-blank:

It would be nice to see a reasoned debate about whether VB merits our support and should be avoided. Where's the beef?

And Spencer replied:

I answered your question here [then provided a link to another previous comment]. My answer was this: “I am still looking into the matter, and find it appalling to be demonized and vilified by Charles for this.” There are some things I want to find out on my own. I’m not going to apologize for wanting to do this, or snap to anyone’s ideological lockstep in the meantime.

Well, it’s nine months later. Has enough time gone by for Spencer to “look into the matter”? To date, I have seen nary a peep on him regarding this most urgent matter. What I did see, yesterday, was an urgent article about the Islamicization of Europe and Spencer’s editorial remark about the possibility of Muslims in the not-too-distant future gaining sufficient control of, say, France, with its nuclear capabilities. Rightfully, Spencer adduced the vilification of Geert Wilders by the mainstream as one unconscionable display of wrong priorities in this most urgent situation in which our house, the “House of War” (the Dar-al-Harb, as Islam sees all lands that have not yet succumbed to Islamic domination) finds itself. Now what about Vlaams Belang?

I guess for Spencer the house isn’t quite on fire yet. When will it be? And when he and others like him finally deem it to be on fire, will it be too late?

Additional reading:

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

The psychology of Henry Louis Gates

This is a speculative psychological probe of the now infamous infantile tantrum of Prof. Gates.

Aside from the obvious facts that he had, apparently, just returned from the airport from a trip to China (hence, likely a long time of plane travel plus connecting flights), and then upon arriving at his home found that he could not get in the front door because, apparently, he had lost or misplaced his house key, and so had to enlist the help of his taxi driver from the airport to jimmy open his own door—aside from these facts that would predispose most people to becoming more stressed than they might have been already, we must adduce other, deeper psychological triggers for his extraordinary outburst that day.

Prof. Gates has spent his whole academic career of several decades helping to construct a working mythology of black accomplishments in literature, the arts and philosophy that depends upon a demythologization of the ostensible superiority of white Western (pre-eminently American) accomplishments in these same areas. A major part of this project of mythologization interlocked with demythologization—basically a mythomachy, an opposition of one myth with another myth deemed, of course, to be truer—involves a complex revisionism both of history and of culture. This revisionism is calculated to explain away the ostensible inferiority of black culture, and simultaneously to locate the causes of that ostensible inferiority both in white oppression of blacks, and in a mendacious cover-up by whites of black accomplishments—i.e., a false history, or a mythology in the pejorative sense.

Gates is thus a propagandist, not a real scholar. His own sense of cultural inferiority amid a superior white culture causes him pain—a pain of course exacerbated by the subculture of racialist resentment fomented by blacks and white Leftists: and to assuage that pain, he embarks upon a project of revising reality and thus of eliminating the source of that pain.

The decades go by, from the late 60s during his undergraduate years at Yale into the early 70s, to the late 70s during his graduate work at Clare College at the University of Cambridge, in Massachusetts, and during those two decades, enormous progress is made in civil rights in America. But progress to a mind like that of Gates—like most Leftists—only exacerbates his impatience with a reality that does not reflect the utopianism it demands. The imperfect progress of America, in fact, actually stimulates anti-American hatred, and the Leftist obsessively concentrates all his energy and attention morbidly on the glass half empty, threatened by the glass half full of the reality of the superiority of America, because it threatens the Second Reality of his utopian entelechy. Civil rights progress in America in such a mind is remythologized into a framework that interprets it as the fitful, merciful largesse of the Southern white plantation owner who might be kind to his slaves, but who defends the overarching institution of slavery and consequent denigration of blacks as less than human—who, in fact, actually requires the institution of slavery in order to lend the appropriate context for his kindness and favors to blacks. Civil rights progress is thus in this grotesque caricature to be critiqued, deconstructed and rejected as not radical enough.

One never quite gets from such deconstructionists and demythologizers as Gates, however, precisely what it is they want from whites: what can whites do that will finally satisfy him, that will finally assuage that gnawing pain that irks his soul so much? He would have no answer, other than to violently overturn the order of reality and force black superiority upon white society, by hook or by crook. Nothing less than a military coup d'état à la révolution du Toussaint L'Ouverture, it seems, would suffice. (And we all know how well that revolution has worked in South Africa, where horrific racist violence against whites has become the norm, and where life for blacks has become a typical African hell.) Meanwhile, his project of revisionist historiography and anthropology within the Second Reality of his academic ivory tower—facilitated by numerous awards, chairs, grants and various demonstrations of respect and appreciation by the white colleagues and institutions that surround him (perhaps most, or all, of them merely the “Smiling Faces” of hypocritical whites who are really racists under their friendly masks)—helps at least to some extent to mollify his gnawing existential pain. But while mollifying it, it also keeps its flame alive. The decades go by and his career continues to ascend, despite the ongoing racism of white America: the 80s, during which he joins the faculty at Cornell as well as Duke; then the 90s when he becomes part of the prestigious cream of the cream, at Harvard—as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Nevertheless, semi-consciously, he remains constantly aware that his Second Reality is not Primary Reality, and full satisfaction will never come until the latter is replaced with the former, somehow. This desideratum helps to inspire him to keep on keepin’ on, as the decades go by.

When a person who is afflicted by an obsession with utopian perfectionism remains deeply conflicted by a desire whose full satisfaction is continually frustrated by circumstances, often that person experiences a paradoxical sensation the more that the desire seems to approach the satisfaction for which he has been longing: rather than relax and rejoice as he sees more and more signs of his desire on the road to bringing satisfaction, he becomes more and more frustrated and angry. Perhaps this is not a complex psychological phenomenon: it may merely be a case of the infantile personality who demands total results now, and thus becomes more infantile, impatient and angry when only partial results are forthcoming. It is the “all or nothing” mentality: giving such a person partial satisfaction often turns out to be worse than giving them nothing at all. This dynamic can sometimes produce an intolerable pressure in the psyche when the partial results are so massive, they are tantamount to fulfilling the dream of the desire. Such a situation arouses a terrible conflict in the soul: it is so close, and yet it is still the same old shit of partial results because it has not gone all the way to perfection. The nearness to perfection can, in fact, function like a demonic temptation to the one who lusts after perfection, attempting to seduce him to relax and stop aiming for the utopia at the Mountaintop. Such, one reasonably conjectures, has been the state of Gates’s mind ever since America finally elected its first black President.

So here we have Gates in the summer of 2009: Blacks have come so far—the former police commissioner of Cambridge, a black; the current mayor of Cambridge, a black lesbian; the current governor of the state of Massachusetts, a black; and now the President of the United States, for the first time, a black. This sets up in the mind of Gates not relief that finally—Hallelujah!—our day as a black people has come! No, it sets up, rather, an intolerable pressure in his heart and mind, that even with a black President, the same old racist shit keeps happening. Reality remains untransfigured. At least, the same old shit keeps happening in his imagination. And if ostensibly it is not actually happening, it must really be happening beneath the surface appearances: if a white cop comes to my home to investigate a possible burglary—a few months after my home was indeed burglarized before—and shows no ostensible signs of actual racism I can point to, well, he must be racist nonetheless. The mere fact that he is investigating the home of a black man—a black scholar to boot—is proof that he must be racist. The experience of a racist white cop targeting a black scholar and treating him like a nigger becomes unbearable precisely because now we have a black President of the United States of America. The pain in the heart of Henry Louis Gates became intolerable when, on that pleasant summer afternoon on a leafy street in Cambridge on July 16, 2009, that racist white cop confronted him. This can’t be happening—not in Obamerica! The pain hit deep in the pit of his soul as he realized white America was still getting away with oppressing blacks, after all these years, all these decades. Even after Obama, nothing had really changed. The pain became an agony of seething pressure on his brain. He had no choice but to explode in rage at reality still untransfigured.

Auster's Insufficiency and Incoherence 2

1. Auster recognizes that “making Muslims leave” the West is the best way to manage the problem of Islam.

2. However, Auster refuses to take this to the logical conclusion:

a. We must make all Muslims leave the West.

b. We must expel them forcibly.

The logical conclusion 2.a. derives from the fact that there is no reliable way for us to tell the difference between dangerous Muslims and harmless Muslims, and this logical conclusion acquires compelling force from the unique and complex nature of the problem of Islam.

The logical conclusion 2.b derives also from the nature of the problem of Islam, particularly its enculturation of militant supremacist expansionism combined with its enculturation of hostile deceit in service of that militant supremacist expansionism.

3. Instead of 2.a., Auster would only try to make the dangerous Muslims leave—as if he has some magical key that can determine which Muslims are dangerous, and which Muslims are harmless. He specifically told me in an email that he is uncomfortable with my “totalistic” approach that would simply have for its goal the expulsion of all Muslims. So Auster crows about being the toughest anti-Islam analyst on the block with his “subversive but logically inevitable thought”; but then when the rubber meets the road, he shrinks back from articulating the no nonsense of what needs to be done.

Instead of 2.b., Auster would use a graduated combined approach of carrot-and-stick, whereby some Muslims are bribed with money to leave; other Muslims are forcibly expelled; and furthermore additional Muslims would over time find the West more and more inhospitable to their culture (through the West increasingly developing legislation and/or enforcing existing legislation that cramps the style of Muslims) and would for that reason simply desire to leave.

The problem with this graduated approach is two-fold:

a. It does not account for the unique nature of the problem of Muslims.

b. Even if it could be argued to work around the unique limitations and challenges presented by 3.a. (which is dubious at best), given the mainstream dominance of PC MC throughout the West, it will not be implemented by the West until it is too late—i.e., after at least another 20 to 25 years if not much longer, by which time millions more Muslims will be within the West, making such a needlessly complex approach nearly unmanageable, as well as more dangerous, since these actions by the West will further “radicalize” their Muslim populations, which will have increased dramatically by then, engendering a potentially deadly tinderbox situation, if not actual eruptions into widespread riots and more attacks on us in various ways. This in turn would force the West to inflict upon Muslims various forms of physical coercion, and the potential for civil conflicts within the West, between Muslims and non-Muslim forces, would only increase. The potential for horrific, bloody and messy complications to the original, graduated, solution would likely unfold.

Better for us to adopt a single-minded goal, of expelling all Muslims, and work toward that goal without distracting ourselves with needlessly complicated and ultimately incoherent “graduated” strategies. We will never be able to begin to realize the process of working toward that goal, if even people within the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement inhibit themselves from facing the logical conclusion of the problem of Islam.

4. Furthermore, Auster adds insult to injury by accusing others of not having developed a clear and concerted and more no-nonsense plan of action to deal with the problem of Islam, when he himself has developed a plan that is flawed and stops short of doing what needs to be done, in great part because of his absurd (and ultimately reckless) concern for the “dignity and essence” of Muslims.

Again, I have analyzed this in more detail in my previous essay, An Iron Veil, as well as in the transcripts of this comments field in which I respond to various apologists for Auster.

Leftists are not Relativists

Among anti-Leftists, there seems to persist a stubborn belief that Leftists are relativists.

For example, to pick one example out of thousands that presuppose this view, there is this dashed-off editorial remark by Lawrence Auster in his otherwise fine presentation of the problem of non-white savagery (against whites) in the Caribbean:

Why, even when a murder or assault has been an act of wanton cruelty for the sake of cruelty, having no bearing on any rational objective, as is the case with the recent machete attacks in Tobago, do police nevertheless act as though figuring out the motive of the killers is the most important element in the investigation? Answer: the police are liberals who deny the existence of evil.

Actually, Leftists (a term I prefer to Auster’s “liberals”) do not deny the existence of evil, generally speaking: they only deny that it exists among Leftists and non-white non-Westerners. When it comes to white non-Leftist Westerners, however, Leftists believe rather fervently in the existence of evil. Leftists are absolutists, not relativists. Or, to be precise, Leftists are selective relativists who carve out spheres in which they are absolutists—namely, the spheres of anti-Western Leftism and non-Western cultures (as long as those non-Western cultures have healthy doses of anti-Western values, such as Islam). In these spheres, Leftists believe in a system of absolute goods and morals, all conducive to their vision of how to organize society according to an (ultimately incoherent) utopianism.

This notion that Leftists are merely relativists is a simplistic insult used to denigrate them, but ultimately fails due to its lack of a sophisticated appreciation for the complexity of the problem, thus obfuscating the ersatz-religion nature of the Leftist enterprise and its immanentization of the eschaton. The problem, and the issue, is not one of Absolutism vs. Relativism, but rather of a struggle between two competing Absolutisms, where the healthier one abides by the tension of existence, while the more pathological one stubbornly resists that tension in favor of gnostic and utopian urges.

Perpendicular Pooping

When Muslims go to the bathroom to do #2, they are not permitted to face Mecca—nor are they permitted to face away from Mecca. They must poop perpendicularly with relation to the quibla (i.e., the direction of Mecca).

From a hadith in the collection of Bukhari, the most authoritative collection of hadiths in Islam:

The Prophet said, “While defecating, neither face nor turn your back to the Qibla but face either east or west.” Abu Aiyub added: “When we arrived in Sham we came across some lavatories facing the Qibla; therefore we turned ourselves while using them and asked for Allah's forgiveness.” (Volume 1, Book 8, Number 388)

Conclusion:

This rule about defecation is only one of literally thousands of similarly barmy rules which Muslims must follow simply because they believe that Mohammed told them to, and this is because they believe he was the unique and final messenger from God, and the most perfect human in all history, and an excellent model to emulate. All his sayings of Do’s and Don’t’s are preserved in the hadiths and comprise the heart of the Sunna, which over 85% of Muslims worldwide follow. (The other approximately 15% of Muslims, Shia Muslims, follow some of the Sunna, but also have their own set of deranged rules they follow.)

The obsessively meticulous fanaticism and cultish insanity reflected by rules like this, followed slavishly and zealously by hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, is directly related to the reason why Muslims want to attack us in order to subjugate us, and to kill as many of us who resist their domination as they can.

Auster’s Insufficiency and Incoherence

On his blog today, Lawrence Auster once again criticizes Robert Spencer for both his incoherence and his insufficiency, and also quotes at length from another blogger (Kidist Paulos Asrat) who ably does the same thing.

Of course, those who know me and my previous blog Jihad Watch Watch, know that I too have expended much time and energy critiquing Spencer for these faults in dozens of detailed analyses.

However, while Auster is correct about Spencer, Auster himself is insufficient and incoherent on this very same issue, though largely in ways subtly distinct from those of Spencer.

For example, Auster writes:

While he may mention immigration restrictions and other anti-Islamization policies from time to time, he has no serious interest in advancing practical measures to stop and roll back the Islamic tide in the West.

In a couple of previous essays, I have analyzed how Auster’s proposals also suffer from insufficiency and incoherence:

An Iron Veil

The Explanatory Vacuum: Spencer and Auster

And in the following couple of essays, I analyzed his personality flaw that in some respects tends to have serious effects on his ability to conduct ongoing discussions about the problem of Islam without those discussions veering off into meta-tangents where his preoccupation with people “attacking” and trying to “destroy” him take precedence over the main topic:

A thick skull and a thin skin

A paradox of ostracism

For stupid, strange and eccentrically cranky reasons, Auster has effectively unilaterally cut off all communication with me, approximately a year ago, thus making it impossible to conduct a discussion with him about any of this, including the substance of the main topic—the urgent problem of Islam and the cogency of our respective proposals for best managing that problem. I will document those reasons in an essay here in the near future.

“Spooks”: Counter-every-kind-of-terrorism-except-Islamic

Spooks, also known as MI-5, is a British TV drama about the intelligence agency MI-5 and its counter-terrorism activities.

So far, I’ve seen the first season, and the first two episodes of season two.

It’s a well-directed, well-written, well-acted drama. However, in terms of the specific issue of how they handle the problem of terrorism from a standpoint of gritty plausibility—after all, the entire show, like other law enforcement dramas, pretends to be grimly realistic about its subject matter—the entire first season was laughable.

That season aired in 2002, which means they must have written it post-911. Every episode is about terrorists—but never a hint of Islamic terrorists. They strain and reach for every possible flavor of terrorist except Muslims. They have Armenian terrorists holding a Turkish embassy hostage (Armenians, mostly Christians, are supposed to be the good guys, remember? The Turks massacred them in a series of pogroms amounting nearly to genocide and have oppressed them ever since through other ongoing abuses). They have an abortion-clinic-bombing terrorist. They have a white racist terrorist. They have Russian terrorists. And, of course, there is always the trusty IRA to try to deflect from the real terrorism threatening the world today.

Then in season 2 (so far), the first episode again involves IRA terrorism and fuses the plot with a Serbian terrorist in possible collusion with the IRA.

Finally, with the second episode we have an actual Muslim terrorist! However, the story line is ruined by the nearly ubiquitous face-saving maneuver: the Muslim terrorists are twisting the doctrines of true Islam, you see! And for the true, peaceful Islam, we have the two characters of a rival imam, as well as a Muslim who volunteers to be a mole to gather evidence on the extremist imam. The dialogue for both these characters contains pointed moments where they sell to the audience the supposed fact that “true Islam” in no way countenances the terrorism of the bad cleric, and that in fact “true Islam” is viscerally opposed to such extremism.

I will continue to watch this series, and will issue a follow-up report on whether the writers of the show have demonstrated any kind of a rational learning curve about Islamic terrorism. As the show spanned from its starting date of 2002 all the way to last year, when it ended, I particularly look forward to seeing whether the traumatic attack of the London bombings of July 7, 2005, will be reflected in a more intelligent approach to dramatizing the world of counter-terrorist intelligence after that point. I won’t be surprised, however, if the show’s writers and producers opt instead for the typical mainstream response throughout the West: namely, the more that Muslims explode, the more, not the less, do Westerners whitewash Islam and try to sweep its ugly dangerous nature under the Oriental rug.

The Hijab: License to Rape

I had a rather late epiphany the other day: The hijab—the various wraps and veils of clothing meant to cover the “walking vagina” (the hawra) in public—was developed as a way to mark out the non-Muslim women for Muslim men to help them identify which women are permissible to rape.

We who have been schooling ourselves in Islamic literacy know that this goes on in a de facto sense in, for example, the banlieues of Paris and other French cities: in those largely Islamic ghetto areas, non-Muslim women, when they go out of the house, have taken to wearing some form of hijab in order to avoid getting gang-raped by Muslim men in the neighborhood.

I had not, however, put two and two together until my recent epiphany. This function of the hijab is not merely an expedient or some accidental by-product: it is its very essence: precisely to mark out that class of women that it is permissible to rape. The women wearing the hijab are “protected” (at least in theory), while the women not wearing it become fair game. The hijab is not merely a way Islam has devised to control the sexual depravity of Muslim men and thus protect Muslim women: it is also, and more importantly, a way to redirect that sexual depravity and satisfy it with a permissible object: the non-Muslim hawra.

The divine permission to rape is enshrined, among other places, in Koran 4:24, where God tells Muslim men which women are forbidden to be fucked and which are permitted to be fucked—and among the latter category are women owned by Muslim men—i.e., taken as slaves in battles against enemies.

One assumes that Islamic law over ensuing time has endowed that category with flexibility such that any non-Muslim women in any circumstance, whether in the Dar-al-Islam or in the Dar-al-Harb, are considered as enemy property rightfully owned by Muslim men, whether or not the men have acquired the maximum power, through jihad conquest, to be able to enslave them proudly and conspicuously.

And now for something slightly different

To my readers now, and any new ones that come along:

I am going to try a change in style here. Up till now, I have been, for the most part, crafting long and meticulously detailed analyses that take me a long time to compose and edit. As a result, my blog has not really been a “blog” in the strict sense (as I pointed out in an old essay, A Quick Memo to my Readers, near the start of my Hesperado career), where the blogger posts shorter thoughts on a daily basis.

I think I’ve pretty much exhausted long detailed topics that require analysis: the West is PC MC and Islam is bad. I’ve looked at this twin problem from pretty much every angle throughout my 264 essays to date.

So from now on, I will post shorter thoughts, at least one per day.

My penchant for the long detailed analyses has inhibited me from posting in the shorter style, because I have trained myself to avoid posting anything that isn’t meticulously attentive to all the complexities of the subject at hand. From now on, I will try to suppress that tendency of mine. This doesn’t mean I may not post a long detailed analysis now and then, at some time in the future; it only means such pieces will be rare, and the shorter ones will become the norm.

“Gatesgate”: A White Rodney King Moment?

Sometimes in history, seemingly small and circumscribed moments turn out, later by hindsight, to have triggered a chain-reaction of events that eventually resulted in a much larger, if not cataclysmic sociopolitical process.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was one such moment in history that at the time, while of course a shocking tragedy, seemed circumscribed. Nobody could have dreamed it would set off a chain-reaction of events leading to World War One.

On a much smaller scale—though still sociopolitically significant and convulsive—was the videotaped arrest of Rodney King in 1991. No one at the time could have dreamed that less than a year later, when the verdict insufficiently punishing key police officers involved in his arrest was publicized, that major race riots would ensue and a new “discussion” of race in America was infused with more urgency.

I could be wrong, but I get a sense that “Gatesgate” may be just such a seemingly small and circumscribed moment that will trigger a chain-reaction of events leading to a much larger sociopolitical convulsion and reconfiguration: the beginning of the process of a sufficiently representative segment of white America in effect saying:

“Ok, enough is enough with this eternal whining about “racism in America”: shut up and enjoy the least racist, most prosperous (even with our current financial crissis) and most just society in the world—and then we'll talk about continuing to improve and “change” America for the better. Capisce?”

Just to pluck a couple of examples out of a purple pimp hat, there were the intolerable incidents of comedian Michael Richards (“Cosmo Kramer” of Seinfeld) and radio pundit Don Imus, whose careers were ruined by tiny slip-ups of public remarks that seemed racist. Even after Richards issued several abjectly grovelling apologies, practically on his hands and knees, it still wasn’t enough. He has been forever relegated to the outer limbo where neo-Nazis, skinheads and the KKK reside. It is preposterous, absurd, and infuriating that America allowed this to happen.

Reading the over 800 comments about “Gatesgate” on the official Boston Globe website certainly indicates (if those commenters are representative, that is) that most Americans are getting fed up.

The best source for information and analysis on the recent melt-down of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates is on Lawrence Auster’s website. The reader can just go there and scroll down to sample the dozen plus articles he has posted, and continues to post every day. The reader can also go directly to this overview which Auster has provided as a collection of the most important links and discussions.

Conclusion:

If this is a white Rodney King moment, will whites rampage in various cities around America in race riots, and then follow that up with 20 years of intolerable demands and expectations, laced with lynchings and other violent crimes against blacks, as a disturbing number of their black fellow citizens have in fact done against whites? No. We don’t roll that way. Too many of us in the past did roll that way. But apparently we are capable of that novel sociopolitical virtue: evolution. All we want is for the pendulum to be moved back toward the center from its ridiculous extreme. How can that process begin? One important way is for the discussion about race to become honest, candid and free, without the ever-present threat of being called a “racist” and having one’s career ruined (or worse) whenever one makes a small mistake in locution that angers the Big Brother guardians of the PC Newspeak.

Irony Deficiency

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch recently posted a series of articles about an invitation he had by the American Library Association (ALA) to be part of a panel about Islam.

The first few articles were about how he might be blacklisted and his invitation rescinded—because, of course, he is an “Islamophobe”.

His last article was about how he in fact was disinvited. Indeed, all the other invited panelists quit in protest, for they could not stand to share the stage with this Islamophobe, Robert Spencer—and apparently the whole show was cancelled.

In that last article, Spencer aptly noted three “ironies” in this whole fiasco. Each of the three ironies is a direct quote from the ALA, expressing a solemn support of free speech and free intellectual inquiry:

“ALA actively advocates in defense of the rights of library users to read, seek information, and speak freely as guaranteed by the First Amendment. A publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of that community. We enjoy this basic right in our democratic society. It is a core value of the library profession.”

“We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.”

“We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.”

The irony involved here, of course, is that they stifled the free speech of Robert Spencer by succumbing to Muslim pressure and allowing the panel on Islam to be disbanded, rather than standing up to defend Spencer’s right to be part of that panel, as he was originally so invited by them—and in doing so, stifled the concrete expression of the principles of intellectual inquiry and dispassionate scholarly integrity they also claim to uphold.

Spencer himself, however, is guilty of an irony too, and he and virtually all of his followers seem utterly blind to it. And that irony is that Spencer forthrightly and clearly asserted (and has asserted many a time in so many words in the past) that Islam at its core is not a violent doctrine that encourages the murder of non-Muslims.

In response to an allegation made by a CAIR representative in a letter to the ALA arguing against Spencer’s invitation to the panel, charging that Spencer says “... that Islam at its core is a violent doctrine that encourages the murder of non-Muslims....”—Spencer responded that:

“No, I have never said that either, and don't believe it.”

The pièce de résistance of the irony here is that even though Spencer strenuously and directly disavowed this accusation, he still got disinvited from the ALA panel!

So if Spencer is maintaining these soft stances on Islam in the interest of wedging himself more deeply into the mainstream so that the anti-Islam (woops, I mean “anti-Jihad”) fight can have more sociopolitical effect, this strategy doesn’t seem to be working all that well. As I have noted many times before, no matter how much Spencer tries to soften his stance against Islam, he still gets vilified as a “hater” and an “Islamophobe”.

In a related follow-up to this article, Spencer published a criticism of him by a Muslim apologist, and answered one of his charges by stating:

I have never stated that “the interpretations of the fanatics…reflect the core values of Islamic faith and tradition...”

What this means is that Spencer thinks that the interpretations of the fanatics do not reflect the core values of Islamic faith and tradition.

Not only is this a preposterous position for Spencer to assert—to anyone who has been reading Spencer in any length and detail over the years—the preposterousness is bizarrely augmented by subsequent paragraphs in the same missive in which he is answering this Muslim apologist. Spencer goes on to challenge his Muslim critic:

Please supply, specifically, rulings by jurists from any of the recognized Sunni or Shi’ite madhahib, declaring that jihad is not to be waged against unbelievers in order to bring them under the authority of Sharia, but rather that non-Muslims and Muslims are to coexist peacefully as equals under the law on an indefinite basis, even when the law of the land is not Sharia. Please show evidence of any orthodox sect or school of jurisprudence that teaches this.

What Spencer is clearly saying here is that in fact the rulings by jurists from all the recognized Sunni and Shi’ite madhahib declare that jihad in fact is to be waged against unbelievers in order to bring them under the authority of Sharia, and that therefore non-Muslims and Muslims are not to coexist peacefully as equals under the law on an indefinite basis anywhere on Earth, and that furthermore no evidence has been found of any orthodox sect or school of jurisprudence that teaches this.

Furthermore, Spencer goes on in the next paragraph to challenge his Muslim critic:

...please explain why the fard kifaya/fard ayn distinction was elaborated in Islamic law, and why the various madhahib elaborated guidelines for offensive jihad — and how you propose to convince them today to discard those guidelines, even were a caliphate to be restored.

What Spencer is clearly saying here is that the various madhahib did in fact elaborate guidelines for offensive jihad.

If this isn’t evidence that the teachings of the fanatics do, in fact, “reflect the core values of Islamic faith and tradition”, I don’t know what is.

What is even more curious is how his followers seem utterly blind to this, and apparently cannot see that their Emperor has, in this respect at least, no clothes.

There is a second irony to this: a reader of Jihad Watch cannot help but notice that all around these articles about ALA—where Spencer asserts that, in effect, “I have never said that Islam at its core is a violent doctrine that encourages the murder of non-Muslims, and don’t believe it”, as well as that, in effect, “the interpretations of the fanatics do not reflect the core values of Islamic faith and tradition”—we encounter such additional articles as:

Somali Muslims behead seven people for being "Christians" and "spies"

Taliban truck bomb kills 12 schoolchildren

France: Muslim ringleader of gang whot tortured and murdered Jew sentenced to life in prison

U.K.: President of Civil Service Islamic Society back on the job after suspension for endorsing the killing of British, U.S. soldiers

5 Baghdad churches bombed in 24 hours

"Gunmen" assassinate Christian leader in Iraq

And that’s just less than one week’s worth of stories about Muslims, representing just the tiny tip resting on top of a mountain of similar stories documented by Jihad Watch over the years.

Now, what was Spencer saying about “I have never said that Islam at its core is a violent doctrine that encourages the murder of non-Muslims, and don't believe it”...?

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, how