The ingredients of the primary reason:
1) Muslims are perceived to be an ethnic people—or more specifically, a collection of ethnic peoples.
2) “ethnic” of course denotes non-white and/or non-Westerner.
3) This perception is eminently, albeit simplistically, common-sensical, seeing that whenever one looks at Muslims, 98% of the time one is looking at someone who looks “ethnic”.
4) There is a worldview that has become dominant and mainstream throughout the West—the PC MC paradigm.
5) According to this PC MC paradigm, only white Westerners are capable of systemic wrongs and even systemic evils: "ethnic" peoples are exempt. Furthermore, according to this paradigm, white Westerners are ever prone toward systemic wrongs, and even systemic evils, against “ethnic” peoples, and one of the slippery slopes that leads white Westerners to slide perilously toward such evils begins with thought and speech—specifically, with bigotry and prejudice. Thus the PC MC paradigm is wired to be forever vigilant against what it perceives to be racism: its main preoccupation—even obsession—is thus Anti-Racism. Tragically, the “racism” it is pledged to combat is too often an irrationally excessive exaggeration, if not a twisted perversion, of real racism—principally because it locates all predispositions toward systemic racism in white Westerners while at the same time it essentially exempts all ethnic peoples from any such predispositions.
6) Muslims post-9/11 have become the most privileged of all perceived ethnic peoples—mainly due to their predisposition toward violence, whether threatened, plotted or successfully carried out, in symbiosis, of course, with our fear of that violence. By a perversely paradoxical dynamic in the PC MC paradigm, an ethnic people becomes more privileged the less they deserve it. (Thus blacks—by virtue of the high degree of crime and general belligerence against whites which they commit—remain at the #2 spot of privilege, just below Muslims.)
This perversely paradoxical dynamic is logical, even if it is grotesquely irrational: When any data threatens to undermine the primary predisposition to accord any ethnic people with extraordinary deference, respect and privilege, that data is suppressed internally by PC MC whites through psychological mechanisms and externally through institutional means. Thus, it is logical that the more force that data exerts, the more the measures of suppression on the part of white PC MCs will kick in—and the most damning force such data can possibly have is when the ethnic people in question themselves exhibit behaviors that reinforce that data. Since Muslims by far exhibit more such damning behaviors than blacks, and furthermore are perceived even through the addled haze of the PC MC brain to be beholden to a blueprint for organized supremacist expansionism unlike blacks whose pathologies continue to seem (except perhaps for a brief period of Black Panthers influence in the 1960s and 70s) disorganized and centrifugal, Muslims have elbowed their way into the #1 spot.
7) Any criticism of Islam, and of Muslims, that goes beyond a very delicate, gingerly minimum, thus, begins to be feared to be slipping into bigotry and prejudice—and from there, we will be slip-sliding down the slippery slope toward rounding up all those “ethnic” peoples, putting them in camps, and inexorably cleansing them, if not trying to exterminate them. So, to prevent another Holocaust—this time against the New Blacks and the New Jews, the new most privileged, most vulnerable and most endangered Ethnic People of all, the Muslims—we must stop ourselves at the beginning of that slippery slope: at how we think, and what we say.
8) The power of PC MC is that it is not so much an external imposition of “correct” thought and "correct" speech, imposed by some cabal of "Elites" upon ordinary yet strangely hapless Western people, as is the case in totalitarian systems: it is voluntary. Millions of Westerners have become internally affected with PC MC and as a consequence impose these inhibitions on their thought and on their speech themselves, voluntarily, willingly, and in one degree or another really feel them to be right (though not at times without some semi-conscious misgivings).
Afterthought:
What remains a head-scratching wonder is why reasonably intelligent (not to mention a few extraordinarily intelligent) people in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement continue to scratch their heads in wonder and ask why, why, why is the West persisting in its irrational stance vis-à-vis Islam. Or worse yet, we see disturbing signs among some, perhaps too many, in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement to proffer all-too-easy conspiracy-theory type answers to fill in the vacuum left by their strange inability to notice the primary reason.
Further Reading:
Color-Blindness
3 comments:
Captainchaos,
You bring up many different points. I will address two of them for now:
Commenting on my claim that "Muslims post-9/11 have become the most privileged of all perceived ethnic peoples..." you wrote:
I would be inclined to give that slot to Jews. Criticize Jews and one is no longer considered a morally normal man but an unperson whom should be cast into the outer darkness...
While this may have been more or less the case in the approximately 30-year period from the end of WW2 to the 1970s, a general growing criticism of Israel -- particularly among the Left -- loosened that up considerably. And since Leftism percolates, to to speak, into the broader sociopolitical bloodstream through its more diluted form of PC MC, it has brought this less inhibited criticism with it. Back in the early 70s, for example, the actress
Vanessa Redgrave was practically blacklisted from work for her support of the Palestinians over the Israelis; in the last decade, such a position would be unremarkable, if not fashionable among Hollywood. (Meanwhile, the Palestinians have gained additional merit by being part of the generally favored Muslims who, being potential victims of "racism", must be protected at all cost.)
...criticize Muslims with sufficient panache and one just might be subsequently employed at AEI.
I took a look at some of the publications at AEI on Middle East issues: all the ones I saw were firmly in the PC MC camp, which means, sure, go ahead and criticize "terrorism", Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Iranian government -- but be careful not to criticize (much less condemn) Islam itself and the Muslims who follow Islam.
Generally speaking, I see far more deference and hypersensitivity with regard to avoiding criticism of Islam and of Muslims since 911. While a person's career can still be ruined by going "too far" with perceived anti-black comments (comedian Richard Kramer, radio commentator Don Imus), nobody even dares to utter a word against Muslims in the public limelight (comedian Jackie Mason is an exception, but he long ago became a persona non grata for his perceived racist remarks about other ethnic groups; and even if he still has a career, I'd say he's the exception that proves the rule).
Also, most Jews, from what I can tell, have succumbed unremarkably to the PC MC paradigm, like most everyone else throughout the West has.
Blacks are certainly on average committ more crimes than Muslims, and are less economically productive. In other words - even with the intermittent relatively high-casualty terror episodes we get from Muslims - Blacks are clearly more of a societal blight. So just how is it, according to your logic, that Muslims occupy the number one spot ahead of Blacks?
Blacks may statistically do more violence, but the violence they do differs from Muslim violence in important ways:
Black violence isn't following a supremacist blueprint that is
a) meticulously organized and directed
b) geared toward imperialistic expansionism
c) richly historic going back some 1400 years
d) capable of unifying millions internationally in various ways toward its ends.
Black violence thus remains at a level of a general criminal sociopathology. It hasn't attained the level of a guerilla insurrection, and that's why I object to Lawrence Auster's use of the phrase "low-level Intifada" to describe black-on-white violence. While there have been attempts by certain blacks to endow their belligerence with more structure and organization (e.g., briefly with the Black Panthers in the late 60s through the 70s), these were largely artificial and cobbled-together attempts, they do not grow organically, as does Muslim violence, from the rich soil of centuries upon centuries of history furthermore augmented by a proud past of having conquered more land than the Roman Empire and Alexander the Great.
I find the argument as to which ethnic group is #2 or #3 most privileged, that is, Muslims or Jews, is a total waste of intellectual energy.
The real issues here relate to the many threats to our society today, whether they are organized or not, and whether they are ethnic in origin or not.
Each threat must be dealt with on its own terms, and if that results in the necessary condemnation of an entire ethnic group, such as either Muslims, Blacks or Eskimos, etc, then so be it. They will be condemned by their words and actions against our society, and thus should be treated according to their just deserts, and PCMC be damned.
Whether they are Number 1 or Number 15 makes little difference, except for ensuring timeliness and effeciency in organizing counteractions.
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