Absurd, but logical

Robert Spencer calls our attention to the near-universal avoidance of the Camel in the Room, in the form of mainstream media using descriptors of Muslim jihadists that describe anything but the one thing actually motivating them and explaining their dangerous actions: Islam.

"The absurdity of this is obvious," writes Spencer, "but we take it for granted, since it crops up again in every news story from every news agency about every Islamic jihad plot anywhere in the world. It's as if we were trying to fight World War II without ever mentioning Germans or Japanese."

Yes, it is absurd -- but it is also logical.

The logic of PC MC in this regard becomes clear when we detect the one feature of Spencer's analogy where it fails (for at some point all "analogiae claudicant"). And that point is that in WW2 we were fighting individual nation-states: the German Nazis pertained only to Germany, and their two principal allies pertained only to Italy and Japan. While the phenomenon of wartime collaborators (e.g., Vichy France) lends a semblance of a trans-national or international aura to our enemy at that time in history; and though the leadership of the enemy had pretensions toward an international transformation through conquest which they were able to mobilize in alarming ways; and though the leadership were able to muster mass rallies of brainwashed people: still, the principal threat was that of three individual nation-states who had formed an alliance -- not, as with Islam, of an entire People whose provenance forms a global diaspora of over fifty countries with a rich heritage and history going back 1,400 years.

This leads us to the logic of PC MC that forces the PC MC person to back himself into an absurd corner (even if, currently, that corner of the Dar-al-Harb occupies, in an infuriatingly surreal Alice-in-Wonderlandesque, Rene Magrittish sense, the space and furniture of most of our collective house): And that logic is that all substantive and informed critiques of Islam cannot help but lead, by the nature of the beast (pun intended), to the condemnation not only of the unifying and inspirational global culture of 1.3 billion people living all over the world, but also to the condemnation of all those people who continue to support or even merely enable that unifying global culture (and how many Muslims don't continue to support or enable Islam..? and how would we know for sure those we think don't indeed don't?).

Obviously, then, it is understandable why PC MCs recoil at substantive and informed critiques of Islam, and why they continue (at least, that is, when they are not utterly burying their heads in the sand of De Nile) desperately to amputate some appendage off of Islam itself to appease the growing sense that all of Islam and all Muslims are the problem -- "here, take this appendage, 'radical extremist Islamism', will that be enough to assuage your dismay at the global jihad...?"

And it only makes it worse that the followers of Islam are perceived to be an Ethnic People (or a wonderfully diverse rainbow of Ethnic Peoples from around the world) -- for this tends to compound the problem of indicting an entire People with the added (and, in the modern West, mortal) onus of "bigotry" and "racism".