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 nearly 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.
The other window in time in Persia's history when it had a chance to throw off Islam came as an opportunity in the 13th-14th centuries A.D., in the form of a non-Muslim conqueror. As reader "Infidel Pride" helpfully noted in the comments thread below, I requote his words (with one slight modification):
When Persia was conquered by the non-Muslim Mongols and the center of
the Ilkhanate empire of Hulegu Khan, the local Infidels -- Zoroastrians
and Christians -- had full religious freedom that they didn't have under
the intial Arab rule or subsequent Safavid rule. The Persians -- who
were by then overwhelmingly Islamized -- did not apostasize out of Islam, even though they
had no Islamically driven incentives not to. For the first 8
generations of the Ilkhanate, Persia was a non-Islamic state, but the
people remained Muslims. It was only after the 9th Ilkhanate ruler
married a Muslimah princess and embraced Islam that the Ilkhanate too
Islamized, destroying that opportunity.
To think thus that Iranian Muslims -- thoroughly Islamized for over 1300 years -- 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. And it's particularly disturbing to find this starry-eyed idealism so prevalent in the Counter-Jihad movement.
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 (and we helped to make our own enemy, the Japanese, better in the post-War years). 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 movementboth 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, every time that anniversary rolls around and we are reminded—yet again—that our society remains unconscionably myopic to the deadly fanaticism that inspired its atrocity.
Given that infuriating, insulting, aggrieving, wearying truth we brave, we few, we proud of the Counter-Jihad have to endure day in and day out, why on Earth are so many of us countenancing, if not reinforcing, the very same axioms and shibboleths that continue to blind us to the dangers of Islam?
8 comments:
#1) Islam is not a monolith.
Ironically, when it comes to claiming the achievements of a few, such as inventing Algebra, the same people don't shy away from claiming this for 'Islam', despite the fact that there were only a handful of Muslims who did that (and even if one ignored the fact that they were transporting that knowledge from India/China to Europe), and certainly not random Muslims all over from Morocco to Brunei.
#2) Condemn the sin, not the sinner.
Unfortunately, this seems to have its roots in the biblical edict to 'love thy enemy'. Even w/o Islam, it's an assinine proposition, and something pro-Life activists do in trying to prevent pro-life assassins from acting logically. After all, if abortion is murder and a sin, how does one then rationalize not being violent against abortion docs, aside from following the law?(Note that I myself am largely pro-choice, but there is this inconsistency in the stance of the pro-Life movement.)
#3) Many if not most Muslims are ignorant of their own Islam.
What this assumes is that the moment random Muslims become aware of what Islam says, they'll automatically jettison Islam. While this has been true about Ali Sina, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, et al, it's preposterous to assume that even most Muslims will react that way. A lot of them could well be pretty proud that Islam has an empire as vast as Christianity, and when they learn what it took to create it, they could well decide (as many actually have over the centuries) to dedicate their lives to Jihad.
#4&5) Many if not most Muslims are victims of their own Islam.
One thing about victims - particularly those who never get a closure route - is that when they attain power, they start mis-using it in the same way that it was mis-used against them. For instance, a wife who has been persecuted by her in-laws, particularly her mother-in-law, would not automatically be inclined to be gentle w/ her own daughter-in-law whenever her son marries - she would pretty often assume that it's her turn.
Similarly, Muslim women may be at the short end of the stick, but when they know that they are superior to Infidels and in an Islamic state have the power to ill-treat them, ill-treat them they will.
Also, even gay victims, or other Leftist victims of Islam would die for the enablers of Jihad, if not for Jihad itself, as evidenced in the cited article.
(continued, since Blogger has now started capping us @ 4096 characters (including spaces)
#6) The Myth of the Westernized Persian
The Pahlavis weren't the only 'non-Islamic' regime that Iran ever had. There is a historical precedent for this not happening. When Persia was conquered by the non-Muslim Mongols and the center of the Ilkhanate empire of Hulegu Khan, the local Infidels - Zoroastrians and Christians - had full religious freedom that they didn't have under the intial Arab rule or subsequent Safavid rule. The Persians - who were by then overwhelmingly Islamized - did not revert, even though they had no Islamically driven incentives not to. For the first 8 generations of the Ilkhanate, Persia was a non-Islamic state, but the people remained Muslims. It was only after the 9th Ilkhanate ruler married a Muslimah princess and embraced Islam that the Ilkhanate too Islamized, destroying that opportunity. Luckily, that desease did not spread as far as Mongolia.
Getting back to the current events in Iran, what dismays me is the enthusiasm that tooo many otherwise intelligent people have for the Iranians in the street, as though it's equivalent to the Russians who stood down the attempted coup against Yeltsin, or the Orange revolution in Ukraine. This thing in Iran, as the linked article above shows, is anything but, and there are enough Iranians in this who may be anti-Ahmadinejad, but are otherwise anti-Semitic as well as supporters of Hizbullah and the nuclear project. How the heck does the fact that many of them are 'Persian Nationalists' exculpate any of that? All that Persian nationalism seems to suggest is that they are hostile to Arabs (including their own in the South-West Iran), and maybe even Azeris, Kurds and Balochi minorities in Iran, who make up the other 50%. Since when did Persian nationalism be equivalent to a Zoroastrian revival?
In fact, in JW, they had an article 'Both sides in Iran claim to represent Islam'. Yet, 3 stories later, JW has this in the editorial part of their article:
Still, the situation in Iran may be moving beyond Mousavi to larger change. The Islamic Republic may not fall, but it could conceivably become more secularized and less vicious. Things are spiraling out of control, and it is not at all certain that the mullahs will be able to clamp down entirely at this point. Certainly the bulk of the opposition to them appears to be just as Islamic and Sharia-oriented as they are, but there are signs -- women ripping off their chadors, etc. -- that there are other ferments as well. It may be that all the demonstrators want is some relaxation of Sharia enforcement inside the country. But that in itself could open the door to other changes.
Muslim demonstrators say one thing, and JW reads something totally different. Unbelievable!
And the comments lauding the protestors and calling for embassies to open up their gates - and that too from supposedly anti-Islamic commentators - even worse!
Nobody,
Thanks for your comprehensive response.
On the "Islam is not a monolith", you wrote:
"Ironically, when it comes to claiming the achievements of a few, such as inventing Algebra, the same people don't shy away from claiming this for 'Islam'..."
Actually, I'd say this applies to the Islam Apologists and most of the PC MC, but as bad as the Soft Anti-Islamists are, they don't descend to this speciousness.
"#2) Condemn the sin, not the sinner.
Unfortunately, this seems to have its roots in the biblical edict to 'love thy enemy'."
Yeah, I forgot to advert to the Judaeo-Christian (really just Christian) underpinnings of this as one major influence.
"#3) Many if not most Muslims are ignorant of their own Islam.
What this assumes is that the moment random Muslims become aware of what Islam says, they'll automatically jettison Islam."
That too. Even if they never do, the baseline assumption is that they are unwitting dupes who are just "moms and pops" like the rest of us, going about their peaceful lives, caught up in the machinery of Islam -- therefore... we should not mistreat them in any way in the interest of our self-defense?
"A lot of them could well be pretty proud that Islam has an empire as vast as Christianity, and when they learn what it took to create it, they could well decide (as many actually have over the centuries) to dedicate their lives to Jihad."
In fact, we have seen far more signs of this response than the response that leads to jettisonning Islam.
"#4&5) Many if not most Muslims are victims of their own Islam.
One thing about victims - particularly those who never get a closure route - is that when they attain power, they start mis-using it in the same way that it was mis-used against them."
Yes, in this instance, the Softies are suddenly ignoring the gigantic sociopsychological phenomenon of co-dependent enabling and Stockholm Syndrome.
"For instance, a wife who has been persecuted by her in-laws..."
Or a woman who was genitally mutilated herself becomes one of the women who perform the operation on the next batch of little girls, or help the female "surgeon" by holding down the protesting arms and legs of the victim.
On the Persians, thanks again for the historical exception of the Ilkhanate empire. I will incorporate that in a brief formulation. One question: are you implying that those Mongol rulers were less iron-fisted than the Shah? That seems incredible, given the reputation of the Mongols, and given the fact that it was in the early Middle Ages when nobody was democratic at all.
"Luckily, that desease did not spread as far as Mongolia."
If it had, there might have been a chance for Muslims to expand the other way and then to invade, and possibly conquer, China.
"what dismays me is the enthusiasm that tooo many otherwise intelligent people have for the Iranians in the street"
Me too. It's perfectly understandable from a PC MC POV (though a little ironic when many of them heretofore were tending to whitewash the Iranian regime), but to see it among Anti-Jihad people is distressing. What galls me is that we already know that anywhere you look in the world -- other than the extreme hot spots of Afghanistan, Somalia or the Sudan -- one sees obvious variety among Muslims, and the standard PC MC line has been that this variety shows that there really exists various forms of "moderate" Islam -- we all know the Myth of Moderate Malaysia, the Myth of Moderate Indonesia, the Myth of Moderate Bosnia, etc. The Anti-Jihadists heretofore have shown a healthy, thoroughly cynical skepticism about these Myths. And now suddenly, all these Anti-Jihadists are going to throw that skepticism out the window and their hearts leap with sentimental support at the spectacle of those poor Iranian Muslims getting suppressed at demonstrations, and at the first sign that some Iranian women are flinging off their chadors.
"All that Persian nationalism seems to suggest is that they are hostile to Arabs (including their own in the South-West Iran), and maybe even Azeris, Kurds and Balochi minorities in Iran, who make up the other 50%. Since when did Persian nationalism be equivalent to a Zoroastrian revival?"
I've also noticed Hugh Fitzgerald indulging in versions of this, with his tendency to place too much hope in the ability of the Kurds and Berbers moderating their Islam, or maybe jettisonning it altogether, just because they hate Arabs. Suddenly he forgets that Muslims have been bickering, fighting and killing each other for 1,001 reasons of inter-tribalism for centuries? Islam is an organism which in its very essence routinely violates its own parts internally: internecine strife is the very essence of Islam.
Your quote of Spencer's commentary on Iran:
"it could conceivably become more secularized and less vicious."
This formulation could have been saved had he modified it thusly:
"it could develop into a regime that seems to be more secularized and less vicious and which may be slightly more amenable to apparent compromises -- though as we know from even our "staunch allies" like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, such apparent signs of relative moderateness in conduct and diplomacy mean little when the base is Islamic."
"#8) The viability of the existence of harmless Muslims
Aside from what you pointed out, the harmless Muslims in question would actually have to be actively opposed to Jihad, Shariah and an agressive spread of Islam, not merely passively uninterested"
Yes, but the Anti-Jihad Softies are working with what is massively the reality out there -- and they are psychologically motivated to find a way to avoid the logical conclusion that a comprehensive distrust of all Muslims would lead them. They know that all these minions of Muslims are not actively showing signs of opposing the bad aspects of Islam, but they don't want to condemn them, for they fear what we would do to all these Muslims if we translate that condemnation into policy. So instead they try to squirm out of this by endowing mere passivity with an exemption from our self-defensive wrath.
"#9) The viability of Muslims converting to Christianity
"Those who want Muslims to Christianize en masse should root for a war w/ the Muslim empire ASAP, so that such a threat can be made in the first place."
Well, they probably know semi-consciously that this would entail lots of bloodshed and the killing of lots of Muslims and, being the Softies they are, they recoil from this. They'd rather have their fantasy of being able to evangelize and have the status quo continue. (One psychological factor among some Christians -- not all -- is that they are positively attracted to persecution situations like moths to a flame, and so the very experience and context of a hostile Muslim region as a place to go to missionize rather invigorates them because it makes their faith feel tested and alive. One prominent Christian observer of the long-standing persecution of Christians in Communist Russia remarked that ironically, but logically, Russian Christians who had to go underground and struggle for their faith amid persecution had a stronger Christianity than the soft, flabby Christians who had complete freedom in the West. Thus, this psychological tendency, to the extent it is influential, can actually desire an ongoing situation of Muslim hostility, in energizing tension with the constant prospect of new Muslim converts to the Gospel. (This would be also reflected in the psychological use some Christians have in seeing Islam and the Muslims as the apocalyptic Anti-Christ finally ushering in the Last Days.)
"#10) “We must not become like them”
Only problem - result of such an obdurate stance is that 'they' will win, and when they win, all that will remain in the world will be their type, regardless of whether we become 'like them' or 'them'. "
This stark logic you present is often easily obscured by any number of complicated arguments against ruthless measures such as internment, deportation etc., where the Softy thinks that we can still fight Islam in more "ethical" ways, but please, we must not go down that "slippery slope"!
Thanks Nobody, very interesting stuff.
This is a great summary. The realist view of the semi sometimes no not really can't bear to say the truth etc. group that are the counter-jihadi blog movement. Most of them are also unable to be unambiguously for the survival of the white race.
That seems to be the real core dividing line.
Those for our survival have no trouble seeing what Islam is. Those who favor 3rd world immigration, etc. are the ones who can't bear to come out and say what Islam is.
Old Atlantic Lighthouse,
Yes, I suspect much of the anti-jihad softies' resistance to taking the logic to its reasonable conclusion is their fear of going down that "slippery slope" against a Brown People. In this, they share the same emotion as the Leftists and the PC MCs.
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