The problem of Islamic terrorism still has a racial component.

In an editorial remark to an article on Jihad Watch today, Robert Spencer makes a leap from the reported fact that a certain group of Al Qaeda operatives in an area in Pakistan are purportedly training “white” mujahideen, to the conclusion that, concerning the global menace of jihad terrorism, “despite the dominant understanding of this issue, it is not a racial issue at all.” [emphasis in the original]

I could not beg to differ more emphatically.

First, all we know is that certain Al Qaeda operatives are trying to recruit white mujahideen for terrorist operations. This is not evidence of a sufficiently numerous, successful recruitment.

Secondly, the evidence for actual white mujahideen, who have been apprehended or who are wanted, is still minuscule, compared with the non-whites who have been captured, and who are wanted.

Thirdly, the vast majority of Muslims are non-white and non-Western.

This revolves around an elementary, rational point of degree: all indications suggest that the majority of future attacks will be planned and implemented by non-white Muslims. Thus, it is only logical for our intelligence profiling to devote a majority of time and resources to intercepting and apprehending non-white Muslims. The ratio of time and resources should not be devoted to whites and non-whites on a 50/50 basis, because all indications continue to suggest that the racial ratio distribution among terrorists, of whites compared with non-whites, is more along the lines of one out of a hundred, at best.

Thus, a headline such as the one on the Telegraph.co.uk website linked at Jihad Watch—

Next US terror attack “could be white Americans or Europeans”

—is not only melodramatically misleading, it is counter-productive, for it will tend to further reinforce the PC MC Western tendency to avoid racial profiling. And this in turn is bound to have concrete consequences that will hinder the measures we need to take to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks.

The problem of Islamic terrorism is not entirely racial, but it has a racial component—both in terms of recruitment and in terms of propaganda—for the obvious reasons that I must repeat for the umpteenth time:

1) The vast majority of Muslims are non-white and non-Western;

a) the vast majority of Muslim terrorists and their Muslim enablers have been non-white and non-Western.

2) The vast majority of white Westerners are non-Muslims.

3) The West is currently infected with a dogma of Reverse Racism, which stems directly from the politically correct multi-culturalism that is dominant and mainstream throughout the West, and has been so for about 50 years. According to this dogma of Reverse Racism, the mere appearance of being racist is enough to damn you—and, because of the facts of #1 and #2, any substantive criticism of Islam, and of Muslims, becomes tainted with the charge of racism and is thus effectively suppressed in the public square, if not positively vilified and even sometimes legally punished.

Conclusion:

It is understandable that Robert Spencer and Jihad Watchers (and Little Green Footballers) want to avoid the label of “racist”, and in the mantra “Islam is not a race”—a perfectly accurate mantra in its limited context—they think they have found the ultimately indisputable rebuttal to the common charge of “racism” wielded by Islam apologists. But this mantra is transparently disingenuous, when virtually every time one looks at a group of Muslims anywhere—whether at a mosque, at a protest rally, at a courtroom proceeding, on the street, on FBI Most Wanted posters, on news clips from around the world or even in Michigan or St. Paul or the Swift meat plant in Colorado—they are 99% non-white.

Thus, even though it is a perfectly accurate characterization of Islam that it is an ideology that embraces all races and has some whites as members—nevertheless, the vast majority are non-whites, and the vast majority of terrorists have been, unsurprisingly, non-whites. So anytime substantive criticism is levelled against Islam, and against Muslims, it takes on the unavoidable appearance of a racial criticism. And in politics, as in life, appearances matter—even when you think they shouldn’t.