Not everybody, Bob...

In a magnum opus on classical Anti-Judaism and Jew-hatred throughout the career of Islam published on Dhimmi Watch today, Andrew Bostom mentions a multitude of interesting grotesqueries about Muslims and their sick culture of hatred.

Today, I only wish to put the spotlight on one little detail that is so buried amid the wealth of information Bostom provides, many readers could have easily missed it.

Before I present that detail, it would be instructive to sketch in why this detail is interesting.

One of the hundreds of reflexive responses triggered like an elbow spasm on the part of Islam Apologists whenever they encounter a critic of Islam involves one of the many that fall under the rubric of the Tu Quoque Argument—a logical fallacy that, in a nutshell, is when a person attempts to refute a criticism not by denying the criticism or offering a counter-argument that would show the criticism to be flawed, but rather by turning the criticism around and accusing the critic of having the same faults. The crucial problem with this fallacy should be immediately apparent: Accusing your critic of having the same fault does not absolve you of also having that fault—indeed, such an accusation involves a tacit admission of guilt!

The prevalence of the Tu Quoque Argument among Islam Apologists is perversely compounded by a grotesque variant: for, the Latin words tu quoque literally mean “you too” (as in “you too have the fault you are accusing me of ”). And the grotesque variant we see time and time again in discussions about the Problem of Islam is what I have called the Ego Quoque Argument—for, too many of the Islam Apologists who indulge this fallacy are not Muslims, but belong to the West at which they are, in their Tu Quoque Arguments, pointing an accusatory finger! In their PC MC perversion of the virtue of self-criticism debased to self-hatred, then, the argument becomes one of essentially: “Don’t accuse the Muslims of those faults, for we too have those faults!”

Never mind that most of the time, the argument is essentially flawed: We the West in fact do not have the same faults as the Muslims, neither quantitatively nor qualitatively. And even if we had some of the same faults to a lesser degree in our distant past, that still does not address the exigent problem and threat which the thriving existence of those problems among Muslims today poses to us.

At any rate, one such example of that fallacious argument occurs when the Islam Apologist—in attempting to fend off our screamingly appropriate revulsion and condemnation of the continuation of the practice of lapidation (the punishment of stoning) as well as its rhetorical defense among too many Muslims today—says: “Well, the Old Testament has stoning too!”

Most Anti-Islamic Infidels are able to counter this fallacy with the fact that while stoning is prescribed in the Old Testament, the practice was abandoned by Jews long ago and was never adopted by Christians—and in fact, the only reference to stoning in the New Testament refers to Jesus actually stopping a public stoning! And meanwhile, stoning continues to be rhetorically defended and even practiced by too many Muslims today, on the basis of classical religious texts of Islam.

I now present the interesting nugget I found in Bostom’s lengthy treatise on Jew-hatred in Islamic history. It is a quote from an eminent Muslim exegete from the 14th century A.D., Baydawi. In his exegesis of the Koran, Baydawi amplifies 3:112, the verse in which is found this condemnation of the Jews: “ . . . because they [the Jews] disbelieved [in the truth of Islam] and killed the prophets unjustly. . .”

Baydawi’s amplification:

. . .by reason of their disbelief in miracles, e.g. the splitting of the sea, the clouds giving shade, and the sending of the manna and quails. . . disbelief in the revealed books, e.g. the Gospel, Qur’an, the verse of stoning, and the Torah verse in which Muhammad is depicted. . .

Here we have an eminent Muslim writer of tafsir, still respected today by Muslim scholars, effectively saying that one of the many inexcusably blasphemous faults of the Jews was that they had stopped believing in stoning!

To the reckless politically correct idiots who purvey the Ego Quoque Argument in order to protect their precious Muslim friends, we can say: Put that in your pipe and smoke it!