My "law" is, half facetiously, modeled after the famous "Murphy's Law" -- "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
It could also be modeled, I suppose, after the law of diminishing returns, or the law of thermodynamics; for there is an inexorable, almost mechanical quality to the phenomenon it describes -- namely, the problem of Mohammedan reform.
I say "mechanical" because Islam, and the culture it inculcates, with its obsessive-compulsive monomania imposed from without and dutifully sought from within, resembles more the robotics of a cult or a totalitarian system than it does a relatively free society of human beings out in the air and sunshine of imperfect, messy, real life, with all its headaches and joys -- and, in between, simple pleasures -- where most Earthlings (particularly in the West, for all our repeatedly reminded faults) move and live.
The oft-cited "diversity" of Islam is more a superficial array of spices trying to dress up, distract and make palatable a purulent and toxic corpse of a meal, whose underlying abhorrent taste and poison becomes thus masked for those who have drunk the kool-ade -- whether Muslims themselves or our Western idiots who persist in seeing Islam as benign.
The rudiments of the idea of my "law" have been bouncing around in the back of my head for years, but only recently did I think of it in clearer terms. It was occasioned by a recent tentative exchange I've been having with a self-affected Moderate Muslim: that odd category and strange animal which someone once -- I believe it was some commenter years ago at Jihad Watch (it even could have been me!) -- termed a "Muslim unicorn". That, in fact, is the name of this particular Muslim's blog -- The Muslim Unicorn -- and the sobriquet he goes by. He may have adopted this title and name in the spirit of a tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation, which in turn may or may not reflect a self-awareness of his relative singularity (if, that is, he's being sincere) amid the diseased mass of his new brothers and sisters whose diseased organization he has apparently chosen to join.
Those of us in the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement know this type of Muslim well. The gold standard, so to speak, of this type became famous at least within the confines of the Blogosphere, during a span of some four years (roughly between 2004 and 2008) of lengthy arguments in innumerable Jihad Watch as well as Front Page comments fields. Simply do a Google search (choosing "advanced" and specifying the Jihad Watch or the Front Page site as the domain to be searched) for the name "Tom Haidon". One example (of which there were many) is this lively discussion of Haidon (with Haidon himself in the mix), from January of 2007. Under the moniker "remote control", by the way, the reader will be able to see in that lengthy exchange -- moi.
At any rate, concerning the possibility of Mohammedan reform in any meaningful sense -- i.e., in a sense that would have an adequate effect on sufficiently minimizing the dreadful, disastrous, demonic problems which Muslim are causing all over the world -- here's Hesperado's Law:
The more sincere a given Muslim seems to be in wishing to practice a kinder, gentler Islam, the more marginal -- and thus ineffective and irrelevant -- he becomes.
The self-proclaimed Moderate Muslim can try to argue until he's blue in the face that his wishing upon a star has hope for real results -- but the behavior and attitude of millions of Muslims (as well as the passivity of millions more in their failure to put down the extremists among them), and the texts and tenets officially encoded and cultivated in Islam for centuries and right into the hot present, indicate massively otherwise. It's self-delusional magical thinking at best; taqiyya at worst.
P.S.:
Hesperado's Second Law
Hesperado's Third Law
Hesperado's Fourth Law
15 comments:
I believe the first poster to use the term, "Muslim unicorn" may have been duh_swami or Buraq. It probably predates them, though, as I have only been reading Jihad Watch since about 2005. In any case, the term stuck with me throughout the years.
I disagree with a portion of your law, that portion being that "unicorns" (my words, not yours) are "ineffective and irrelevant". We're extremely threatening to the Islamic establishment because some of us frankly want to drive the religion, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. I consider this approach to be both more dangerous (for us, though I've yet to be threatened... of course, that may change if I reveal more of myself, which I am willing to do)and more realistic in terms of dealing with the problem of Islam.
Many anti-Islam commentators have lost all hope in Islamic reform, feel that Islam is diseased to the core, or even worse, feel that all Muslims are a fifth column. The reality is that the world is "stuck" with Islam for the foreseeable future. We can't all sit around waiting for Islam to make the strides that Christianity or Judaism made centuries ago, so genuine Muslim secularists are necessary.
The problem with Jihad Watch or Gates of Vienna or any of the other major anti-Islam portals is that they preach to the choir. One poster some time ago argued with me on Jihad Watch that I was wasting my time arguing with them, because I should be arguing with Muslims.
He was 100% correct, I *should* be speaking out in criticism of Islam and Muslims. Incidentally, that is why I respect you much more than many of the other anti-Islam bloggers. Most give lip service to desire to cooperation with "unicorns", but actually want nothing of the sort. You have never operated under the pretense of cooperation with Muslims. Your interest is to expose, not to politic.
Muslim Unicorn,
In order for Muslims like you to have effect and be relevant, you need numbers. Then those numbers need to demonstrate activity. I haven't seen any evidence of sufficient numbers or activity yet.
In fact, the trend seems to be toward even more extremism (or, alternatively, transparently duplicitous denial of any problem) in the Muslim world and among Muslims in the West.
My answer to MU, would be as follows,
(and here I copy/paste from my own past comments; at least in that respect I trust I'm not going to be compared with the notorious new Godwin, A.B.B. ;-):
Here we go again..
Speaking zealously about these chimerical "Moderate Muslims", about Islam varying with the interpretation of every other Muslim, and so on and so forth.
I agree wholeheartedly with the view that, for us Westerners, it is only relevant what Islam teaches about so-called "unbelievers". The rest, all of the minor theological/behavioural disputes, is - indeed like the moderate apologist for Islam says - a matter for Muslims to waste their time upon. We should only care about self-defence and thus rid our societies of Islam and Muslims. Plain and simple.
I'd like to confront MU with the following observation:
As it is true - like everyone in the CJ initiative understands, that Islam shows no signs of any moderation, what are we to think then of the relative weight and significance of the highly ephemeral phenomenon of "Moderate Muslims" within an Islamic context?
In all of the decades that we have been witnessing our politicians playing midwife to the forced ascendancy of Islam in the West, I never ever saw an example of "moderate" Muslims fighting in our corner for the sake of freedom and liberty of all, and winning that battle. I think that apologists for (reform) Islam, claiming to be moderate or even ex-Muslims, will have a hard time pointing out any period in recorded history where "Moderate Muslims" stood up, fought for freedom and saved the day. So isn't it true then, that the best one can say about "moderate" Muslims, is what Pat Condell described as their main feature, i.e. that they have been quietist to the point of insignificance?
That's why - in the end - we in the West shouldn't care about nor concern ourselves at all with the actions and motives of moderate followers of Mohammed. The world may be "stuck with Islam", but the West shouldn't be. Past and present mistakes with regard to the ideological presence of Islam in our societies, represented by all practising Muslims (i.e. all who consider themselves followers of Mohammed) should and can be corrected.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sagunto thank you for your reply. As I do not wish to clog Hesperado's blog with my point of view, which may be considered counterproductive or redundant, I'll try to keep this fairly short without too many replies.
"In all of the decades that we have been witnessing our politicians playing midwife to the forced ascendancy of Islam in the West, I never ever saw an example of "moderate" Muslims fighting in our corner for the sake of freedom and liberty of all, and winning that battle. I think that apologists for (reform) Islam, claiming to be moderate or even ex-Muslims, will have a hard time pointing out any period in recorded history where "Moderate Muslims" stood up, fought for freedom and saved the day. So isn't it true then, that the best one can say about "moderate" Muslims, is what Pat Condell described as their main feature, i.e. that they have been quietist to the point of insignificance?"
Sagunto, I do not view myself as being a moderate Muslim. Indeed, I maintain a number of the rigors more closely associated with fundamentalists than I do with say, Irshad Manji. Preferably, and you may find this to be euphemistic, I consider myself to be a Muslim secularist. As such, I see a very clear distinction between my private beliefs and practices and how these relate to the secular sphere of governance.
You say that at no point in history were Muslim reformers fighting in your corner for freedom, I would argue that Kemal Ataturk's reforms for Turkey would be a solid example of such success. Granted, those reforms were not made in the West, but his reforms and secularism were significantly influenced by Western thought and modernity. Today, Turkey is going backwards, it is on a dangerous precipice.
Additionally, Sagunto writes, "The world may be "stuck with Islam", but the West shouldn't be. Past and present mistakes with regard to the ideological presence of Islam in our societies, represented by all practising Muslims (i.e. all who consider themselves followers of Mohammed) should and can be corrected."
How do you propose we correct this? My answer to this would be for Muslims to promote an embrace of secularism in the interest of genuine Muslim reform and an acceptance of Western values. We cannot, however, excise all Muslims from the West.
MU -
Thank you for your honest and kind response. I'm sure Hesperado won't mind your replies and I'm faily sure he wouldn't regard them as "clogging" this blog.
As for your answer about the example of Turkey:
"Granted, those reforms were not made in the West, but his reforms and secularism were significantly influenced by Western thought and modernity. Today, Turkey is going backwards, it is on a dangerous precipice."
That is one way to in fact substantiate my point. Atatürk unsuccesfully tried to "modernize" Turkey, because the Muslim element remained part of the equation. Another way, I might add, to validate my view, is to point out that in order to fight Islam in the public domain, Turkey had to be changed into a veritable police state with today only the army effectively enforcing "secularism". Do you see my point here?
All this time, Islamic "secularism" couldn't somehow prevent the Christian, Greek, and so on, heritage of Turkey, to be progressively erased from the public sphere.
Kemalist forces committed atrocities against the Armenian Christians, with Atatürk presiding over the final eradication of the Amenian Christian population and the expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia, and that's only one indication - besides him bringing about a Turkish police state - that proves him not to be a champion of freedom, at all. While he may have struggled for power with other factions within Islam (what else is new?), he most certainly didn't fight for freedom.
So again, I honestly don't care whatever perspective is used by whatever Muslim. We are not stuck with Islam, only the followers of Mohammed are, and that includes you too. So good luck with your internal struggle, while I maintain that it doesn't concern Westerners.
I present you with my one-sided view, that of freedom for those who can rightfully regard it as their cultural heritage, which means that we in the West must rid ourselves of Islam and all who follow Mohammed.
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sagunto, many thanks for the civil posts and discussion.
Ataturk's reforms aren't popular all around among Turks and certainly not among Armenians. Consider the fate of the Alevi in many cases, and I do certainly accept that Ataturk presided over war crimes following the worst atrocities committed by his predecessors in the Ottoman Empire. His zeal for nationalism though probably had little to do with his religious leanings.
Turkey's constitutional guarantees of the army preserving the secular are a necessity given the attitudes still surrounding Muslims in much of the world. All of this has, however, allowed Turkey to advance significantly away from her Ottoman past.
I would like to ask you again how you would propose to rid the West of Islam? Certainly, I appreciate the concept that the West might be well rid of Muslims as a means to preserve our cultural identity. However, Muslims are already here, and it's extremely difficult if not an intractable problem to excise a population.
My point is that it may not be pragmatic or ethical to attempt such a feat, if that is indeed a suggested method. One could, of course, argue for making Islam illegal, but how would it be enforced?
Monotheism thrives on struggle. Essentially, if there is persecution, real or perceived, monotheists use this as a means to validate their religiously informed world view. "We are the righteous and they are the unbelievers. Obviously they are wicked because they seek to oppress us!" Again, the persecution need not be REAL, it can even be imagined, but it is a powerful motivator for believers.
How then do we practically and ethically respond to fundamentalist monotheists in the West?
Hesperado, your comment "The sheer quantity -- and the grotesque quality -- of the behaviors of Muslims and of the verbal expressions of hatred and intolerance of innumerable numbers among them around the world requires a response, and an attitude, proportionate to its dimensions" is quite profound and correct. Your insight in this is remarkable, and it's quite welcome.
For myself, as a pacifist, I am unable to physically assault Muslims accused of wrong doing. Besides, I'm like five foot six, my fighting pedigree is certainly lacking. I cannot enact vigilante justice. What I can do, is to live my life as a moral person in the culture to which I was brought up, that culture being the West.
Resorting to mob justice in response to fundamentalists and their atrocities is wrong. I'd love to believe that it would spank them, and make them collectively see the light. However, I feel it would validate their world view that they are the righteous and everyone else (including most other Muslims) are filthy unbelievers.
As such, to deal with the ideology we (and by "we" I mean Muslims) have to inculcate genuine reform among Muslims. You may view as this an impossibility or a fool's errand, I disagree.
Also, word to your Judge Judy reference re: piss on our heads/raining.
Hesperado -
At the very least, you have the decency to tell MU what he should be doing. I'm afraid that I honestly am completely indifferent in that respect. Muslims are part of Islam, so I don't care at all what Muslims do or decide among themselves.
MU -
You can do better than to come up with this "mono-theism" diversion. This is about Islam, nothing else. You conceded the point that Atatürk didn't fight for freedom (whether he did that as a "Nationalist" or whatever is beside the point).
To conclude this discussion, I'd like you to internalize the message that there's no "we" on the question what to do about the presence of Islam in Western countries. There's only Westerners who decide about their own fate and future. We will not take the views of Muslims into account, rather you should accommodate to the fact that as long as you're a follower of Mohammed, you are our existential enemy and a problem for Westerners to solve. When you live in the West, where you shouldn't, you are dependent upon our solutions. Your suggestions for Islamic reform only have a place in Muslim societies.
Thank you for the exchange. I think we both know where we stand now.
Sag.
Sagunto, I appreciate you taking the time to reply and produce constructive posts. My only fear is that I ended up hijacking the thread, which is not what I want to see happen here.
I live in the West because I am a Westerner. My ethnicity is thoroughly Western European, my ancestors came to the Americas between 200 and 400 years ago. As a religion, I have adopted Islam. This is, to my mind, no more so foreign a faith than Judaism or Christianity. If I wanted to truly adhere to the faith of my ancestors, I would mimic my father in worshiping the Hellenic pantheon (no, I'm not kidding).
This is my society, to which I am an heir, and I feel more than entitled to be a part of it. My children, who shall be half Acehnese and half Euro-mutt, will share in the same upbringing and traditions that I did. So my place is most assuredly here, and I have no other society to which I owe allegiance or have a cultural connection to.
We are not on opposite sides of the field at the Battle of Tours, and I hope never to be the enemy of my countrymen or aligned peoples.
Hesperado -
If I'm to continue this discussion, it will be with you, unless some other commenter might wish to join in.
In my book, someone adopting Islam is a traitor by choice. But perhaps I'm being too soft and kind-hearted here. Maybe "traitor of humankind" is a more fitting description.
Note how our esteemed neo-Mohammedan secularist, tries to steer away from Islam and frame his replies to confirm the well-known PCMC discourse: "mono-theism", "ethnicity", trying to drag Christianity and Judaism into the picture, we all are depressingly familiar with these tactics.
Nice though, to remind us of the Battle of Tours, which was fought to rid our lands of Muslims. Only a Muslim (self)deceiverr could bend his mind around the contention that we're on the same side in the reprise of this existential battle.
Now, about "Hesperado's Law"..
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag.
Sagunto,
"At the very least, you have the decency to tell MU what he should be doing. I'm afraid that I honestly am completely indifferent in that respect. Muslims are part of Islam, so I don't care at all what Muslims do or decide among themselves."
My prescriptive outburst of rational fury was really more rhetorical than literal; I gave up expecting Muslims to do what I was telling MU. I was more simply expressing what they should do, if MU is correct about any of his central points; not what I realistically expect them to do now or ever. Since they aren't doing these things, MU is (at best) holding on to a hypothetical picture in his mind that is not only irrelevant in relation to the reality of Muslim behavior and Islamic culture -- but is moreover in contradiction to them.
We are thus being asked -- by the "Moderate Muslim" or the "Secularist Muslim" or the "Reformist Muslim" or the "Peaceful Muslim" (etc.) -- to ignore the mountains of horrible things Muslims are saying and doing around the world, and instead bet our lives and the safety of our societies on their ungrounded hypothesis (perhaps bolstered by some kind of "hunch" they have, + the sweetness and kindness of their Indonesian wives and mother-in-laws who cook such nice meals for them and treat them so nicely, you see; etc.).
Sagunto,
"Now, about "Hesperado's Law"..."
The above quote I quoted from you, plus some of your other comments above will be addressed and hopefully clarified by my upcoming "Second Hesperado's Law" (and in a way that second "law" has already been implicit in much of the conversation thus far).
Muslim Unicorn,
"For myself, as a pacifist, I am unable to physically assault Muslims accused of wrong doing."
I wasn't referring to Muslims accused of wrongdoing, but of doing horrible things. If a tiny minority of Muslims are throwing acid in girls' faces, then the majority of Muslims around them should move in and PHYSICALLY STOP THEM RIGHT NOW. There is no excuse justifying inaction in that regard. Failing to move in and physically stopping such acid-throwing Muslims is to AID and ABET the evil.
As for those one hasn't actually seen with one's own eyes, but which are thereby "accused" -- well, how many evil men will get away with that excuse? How many evil Muslims are getting away with that as we speak? How many little boys, little girls, women, and men (Muslims and non-Muslims, mostly the latter) are suffering right now because of Muslims treating them horribly in a ghoulish variety of ways all around the Allahdamned world? Etc.
Again, Sagunto (if you're reading) -- these are rhetorical questions for MU; I'm not literally asking him as a human being, expecting him to answer as a human being. I gave up on that about 5 years ago, when Sister Leonella -- a Catholic nun and nurse who spent 40 years of her 60+ years helping Muslim children in Somalia -- was shot in the back by Muslims inspired by Islam through the medium of a FRIDAY SERMON IN A "MASJID" TO GO OUT AND HUNT DOWN CHRISTIANS (because of a lecture the Pope gave about the Middle Ages in which he "insulted" Mohammed) three days prior.
Anywho, back to you, Muslim Unicorn:
"Besides, I'm like five foot six, my fighting pedigree is certainly lacking. I cannot enact vigilante justice."
I'm not asking you to. There are supposedly over one billion good Muslims, according to you (with only perhaps 20 million "extremists" remaining, at best, who are causing dire problems -0- right?). Surely, one billion can control a measly 20 million. So why aren't they? The reasonable inference to draw here is that those supposedly "good" Muslims aren't so good after all. They are letting a tiny minority among them get away with horrible evils. That's not good. That is bad. And inexcusable. And since it is causing increasing problems in the West as more Muslims immigrate here, we will have to do something about it -- since Muslims don't seem interested or capable of doing anything about it. You'd think, if the vast majority of Muslims are good, they would do something about it by now. But the problem is only getting worse. Obviously, something is wrong with your equation. But you persist in denying this, while talking double-talk that tries to paper over the problem from which your own conception suffers.
[continued next]
[continuation to Muslim Unicorn]
"Resorting to mob justice in response to fundamentalists and their atrocities is wrong."
My call for lynch mobs was not so much a literal advocacy of it as a vivid illustration of the fact that Muslims are doing the precise opposite -- they are amassing in various places around the world (and have been for years, decades, centuries) in order to hyperventilate about "death" and "killing" and/or to perpetrate horrible atrocities against people.
To pluck one example out of thousands one could adduce: consider the journalist Oriana Fallaci who, long before she woke up on 911 to see the full horror of Islam, back in the 1980s, witnessed a stadium full of Muslims in Bangladesh file solemnly down from the bleachers to the center grounds in order to TRAMPLE ON THE BODIES of recently executed Muslims who had "betrayed" Islam. She reported that while chanting "Allahu Akbar" they took their turns trampling those already executed bodies until there was nothing but pulps of blood, flesh and broken bones. This was a crowd of over a thousand Muslims who did this. No other group on the face of the Earth does this kind of Satanic shit.
Nice organization you chose to join there. It would have been far, far better had you joined the KKK -- not because they aren't evil; but because by comparison with Islam, the KKK is the Boy Scouts.
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