“Like Us”—A Note on a Persistent Blind Spot at Jihad Watch

Of the people who post at Jihad Watch—from my long experience of reading most of the posts there on a nearly daily basis (skimming through some, skipping past others, reading carefully a good many others) going back over two years now—, approximately 95% are supportive, and a good 90% seem quite up to snuff on the learning curve of the problem of Islam, with only relatively minor disagreements now and again about peripheral issues.

Now, all those 95% represent how many people? It seems reasonable to me that, factoring in the possibility of duplications due to nickname changes over time (and given the fact that I have seen the same names post repeatedly, either spanning the entire 2 plus years I have been reading there, or for large blocks of time within that), and even including the last say 3 years, the total would be somewhere around two to three hundred, give or take a couple dozen. This is of course not factoring in the evident multitudes of visitors who go there but never post (the site has been lately showing how many visitors it has had: for example, as of today, according to the Site Meter web counter, December 28, 2006, it has had well over six million visits since May 30 of 2006—that’s a period of seven months; though it is unclear to me whether, or to what extent, the Site Meter service discriminates among repeat visits by the same person and repeat visits by the same person using different nicknames) . One has no way of knowing where these multitudes stand, though it's safe to say that a large chunk of them come here precisely out of a sympathy that may likely blossom into a supportive intelligence, if it hasn’t already.

I notice that most of those two to three hundred seem to exhibit a tendency that is all too human: to think that most everybody—except some nefarious minority in which one can conveniently locate most blame—thinks like they do. Now, in this observation, my phrases “most everybody” and “nefarious minority” are not at all referring to Muslims or Islam: I am talking about the vast populations of non-Muslims out there, particularly in the West. I think this tendency to think that most everybody thinks like us—except some nefarious minority in which one can conveniently locate most blame—leads the majority of posters here to think that the aggravating myopia that rules the day out there concerning the problem of Islam is due either to banal peccadillos (it would have to be just plain stupidity or laziness or oafish sentimentality or, as two recent Jihad Watch posters put it, of our being “too good”—for, how could people “like us” not otherwise agree with us and see what we can so plainly see?), or to the dastardly shenanigans of a nefarious cabal of “elites”, or some combination of the two factors.

This tendency is also, of course, facilitated by the common temptation to find easier fixes for a vexing problem. But this tendency ignores a subtler, more complex, and ultimately far more difficult to solve explanation that would be more sociological or sociocultural than psychological & logical, requiring more than simply the superimposition of a crude template of the three Esdrujula Elves upon the baffling problem of why the West is committing suicide (I refer here to a handy trope employed now and then by the remarkably erudite Vice-President and frequent essayist at Jihad Watch, Hugh Fitzgerald: the “Esdrujula Explanation” of Cupidity, Stupidity and Timidity—an explanation a tad too handy and facile, in my estimation, functioning sort of like the crude Modalist analogies certain theologians would superimpose upon the Trinity by which to finesse its scandalous paradox)—as though the entire stupendously sprawling problem of the Western inability to diagnose the problem of Islam were reducible to mere character flaws. With astonishingly uncharacteristic simple-mindedness, thus, Mr. Fitzgerald writes:

“The three words that compose the Esdrujula Explanation -- timidity, stupidity, cupidity -- explain the folly. When it comes to the widespread inability to grasp the the promptings, the instruments, the full menace of Jihad -- those three words usually do.”

It may well be, ultimately, that the “folly” is rooted in such mundane character flaws; but between the mess of history and the ground of the personality of actors lies the rich and complicating pageant of society. This deserves a more suitable explanation, attentive to the sociopolitico-cultural complexities that paradoxically transcend, envelop and impinge upon individual morals, even as they ultimately arise from them.

That more suitable explanation, I think, must account for the mainstream dominance of PC Multiculturalism, a dominance by which millions of ordinary Westerners are sincerely convinced of its truth, not merely lazy and stupid, nor merely sheepishly hoodwinked by some sinister cabal of “elites”.