Asymptotic Analysis in Action

Robert Spencer is on a tour of college campuses around the U.S. as part of educating students about the dangers, not of Islam per se, but of a truncation off of Islam, termed “Islamo-Fascism”.

He recounts a typical reaction from a typical audience at Penn State university:

[The] aggressive willful ignorance [in the audience] climaxed in the question from a gentleman who insisted that I was saying that all Muslims were terrorists. When I pointed out to him that I had explained just the opposite at some length, he began to excoriate me repeatedly for denying him his freedom of speech after I had spoken about defending free speech (I had explained the attempts by the Organization of the Islamic Conference to destroy this freedom), and finally walked out ostentatiously, to applause from his allies. They did not seem at all impressed by the fact that he was manifestly claiming that I had said something I had not said -- that all Muslims are actively involved in the Islamic supremacist effort.

The fact that Muslims everywhere and always respond more or less in the way the Muslims in this audience responded, rather than with a show of a reasonable and respectful awareness of the problems that worry us non-Muslims about Islam—and have been doing so for as long as we can remember—makes it abundantly clear that there is no point in maintaining the generously asymptotic position Spencer valiantly maintains.

I.e., it’s time for the Anti-Islamic Movement to acknowledge that in fact all Muslims are actively involved in the Islamic supremacist effort, notwithstanding the ostensible fact that many of them seem to be only passively enabling it, and even when—or precisely because—a handful here and there pretend, in transparently disingenuous and loophole-ridden statements, to assure us that they condemn terrorism and the killing of “innocents” because Islam is a “religion of peace”.

And it’s time to acknowledge that this is due to the fact that Islam itself, not some truncation or permutation of it, is the dangerous ideology nourishing, inspiring and motivating Muslims to do what they have been trying to do for 1400 years: conquer the world in preparation for a deranged eschaton.

Once this is acknowledged, we can better spend our time communicating this message—and not some incoherently and misleadingly asymptotic message—to the broader non-Muslim public. In tandem with this, we can also better spend our time in paving the way for the development of appropriate policies our governments can take with respect to the most rational assessment of the problem and danger.