Robert Spencer, creator and editor of Jihad Watch -- a kind of daily ticker-tape UPI newswire service which relentlessly reports and republishes an ever-mounting mountain of data of various news stories and analysis from various sources from around the world providing massive documentation of the multifariously grotesque and metastasizing pathology of Islam -- has noted:
... a fact that we have pointed out many, many times at Jihad Watch: there is no reliable way to distinguish jihadists from peaceful Muslims.
And:
... what we have pointed out many times over the years: that there is no reliable way to distinguish between Islamic "extremists" and Islamic "moderates".
If these observations are cogent, and if the dangers they imply should alarm us -- and only someone who has not taken the time and trouble to familiarize himself with the mountain of data about Islam would be reluctant to agree -- then what we are faced with, increasingly, as millions of new Muslims continue to immigrate into the West, and as the West continues, insanely, to support and aid various Islamic regimes around the world, is a situation and dilemma which may be expressed by the following vivid metaphor and analogy:
Imagine you have two guns on the table before you.
You know that one is loaded, and the other is not loaded.
But you don't know which is which.
Even though one gun is clearly labelled "loaded" and the other is clearly labelled "unloaded", you also know that the labels cannot be trusted to be accurate.
Now let us say that in order to get something you need -- food, money, or the safety of a loved one -- you are told you must pick up one of the guns, point it at your own head, and pull the trigger. And you must do this several times.
Or, for our metaphorical analogy to better approximate our actual situation we find ourselves in, in the real world, we may say that there are not merely two guns on the table, but two groups of guns, on two tables before you: on the first table is a single gun, or two or three guns, labelled "Tiny Minority of Loaded Guns". On the other table is a whole pile of guns, about 100 of them, all labelled "The Vast Majority of Unloaded Guns". And you are being asked to pick up every last gun from the latter pile, point it at your head, and pull the trigger, not once, but several times each. And yet still, you remain unsure of the accuracy of those labels, for you cannot trust the judgment of the people who affixed them. Better yet, let us say you are being asked to point the gun at the head of your lover, or your spouse, or your brother, or your sister, or your mother, or your daughter, or son, or granddaughter, or grandson, or best friend...
Finally, let us add this detail: Let us say that, unlike the Christopher Walken character in Deerhunter, you are not being forced at gun-point to play this cruel but deadly game -- that, in fact, you have a third choice: to stand up and refuse to play this game by the arbitrary and reckless rules which Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism, in its mainstream dominance, has been trying to impose.
And you can do this, because the West, as bad as certain sectors of it may have gotten, is not a totalitarian society: it remains the freest, most intelligent and most decent collection of societies in the history of mankind (with, of course, plenty of flaws, since nothing is perfect, yadda-yadda...). The West's current fashion of PC MC may remain quite powerful in its influence; but as a fashion, it can go as quickly as it came. And it will. The only question is not whether -- but only how quickly and reasonably it will do so, avoiding the kinds of catastrophic mistakes the West made the last time it dragged its heels waking up to the danger of an evil expansionist culture, the Nazis and Fascism, when, having acted sooner, it could well have spared the lives of millions, and the horrible dislocations caused by a global war.
And so you stand up from the tables and refuse to make this silly choice, because over time, after learning about Islam and Muslims, you have come to the reasonable conclusion to deem all of the guns on the table equally lethal -- and this insane game, as a consequence, irrationally reckless.
Enough is enough. Surely we can do better than to continue, out of misguided good intentions gone grotesquely mad, to convince ourselves to play this suicidal, unconscionably illiterate and ill-informed game of Muslim Roulette.
Ah, but Robert Spencer manages, in his estimable way, to put a deer in the works:
I guess it's not so dire a dilemma after all, eh Bob...?
12 comments:
Sagunto,
If you're reading this, I'd like to ask a question about the Liege attack.
News reports indicate there were multiple attackers, both throwing grenades and shooting guns (and that thus this "Amrani" fellow was just one of many).
It sounds like a Mumbai-style attack in Belgium, no?
P.S.: I'm trying to communicate with you here since I was unfairly banned from Jihad Watch comments over a year ago -- or I would just have added my question as a comment, like a normal person, to the Jihad Watch article in question.
Sagunto,
With regard to my previous comment, I notice on that JW comments thread, you imply it was only a lone gunman; then later you go so far as to say:
"Earlier reports about 2 more gunmen discredited."
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/12/belgium-grenade-attack-outside-courthouse-linked-to-sentence-in-honor-killing-case.html#comment-841396
Three problems with your statement:
1) You provide no source.
2) You also provide no proof that the reports of more than one attacker were "earlier" reports.
3) None of the earlier reports I have read set a number (whether "2" or any other number) -- they merely reported multiple attackers.
If you could rectify these gaps, I'd appreciate it.
Hi Hesperado -
Let's proceed from the following axiom. I've sifted through the media here in Holland and Belgium. Being a "local" I'm in a somewhat better position than you, to know which media to "trust" (part MSM, so we must keep our caution) relative to others.
Now, concerning the JW thread, there's a few interesting things to say about that one. But let me first say that I will respectfully decline to jump through your hoops (like the Baron once said), for I think we can do better than that, if ever so slightly. I hope to explain in the following why I have chosen to indirectly answer your concerns on my own terms.
Early on in the JW discussion thread below the newsflash, the important issue of "reliability"* emerged and the practical question of whether or not to copy scoops in the MSM that would merit a little more careful consideration. Two initial rumours were involved:
(1) Link to a Belgian honour killing case by the "Karachi Post", mentioned in many MSM media to be later retracted in silence.
(2) Rumours about several gunmen, the number of three most often repeated, originating from a Walloon reporter amidst the initial panic; several grenades thrown, then machine gun fire from a nearby bakery; Perhaps Americans are more easily wrong-footed here, to imagine sort of a malign posse in action, with one man throwing grenades while his buddies shoot up the place from a nearby bakery's rooftop, I don't know. The scene is some kind of viaduct, not a roof, with a bakery and other shops beneath. That's were Amrani threw his grenades and began shooting into the crowd. That's also were he shot himself.
Anyway, one commentator called for some prudence in reporting, and I thought it to be the wise thing to do. Others were quickly flocking to support the rhetorical position that somehow, a call for caution amounted to underhanded criticism of Robert Spencer's good intentions.
(to be continued)
(..)
So I set out to do just that, be cautious in providing the info that was continuously updated here in Holland and Belgium.
What quickly emerged, was that this "Karachi Post" proved to be a lone self-declared "activist," proud of his taking the opportunity to link this terror attack to a Muslim gyno-cide case that played out the other day at the court in Luik.
So, logically, I defused that rumour right away, like dependable sources in Belgium and Holland did, to bring some sense to the JW discussion. Notice how precious few of them picked up on my "Karachi Post" debunking, including you, in your cherry picked assessment of my contribution to the JW thread. Now there's a "gap" in need of explanation. From you, Hesp.
There was no reason to expose the other rumour as a hoax, for the simple reason that it wasn't. With hindsight we can say that it probably was the result of the initial panic, interpreted by a journalist from the Walloon media who found himself at the site.
Then on a hour-by-hour basis, I sought to bring the news as it was presented by the local media (not English or US newspapers/agencies), without any attempt at interpretation by yours truly. I left that to others at greater (overseas) distance.
I thought that in so doing, I was providing some service to all of those who wished to refrain from undue and premature interpretation. Of course some of the MSM stuff I reported, could be interpreted by the Robert Spencer cheerleaders as an implicit attack on what was thought by some to be his rash copying of MSM scoops. Some of the news feed I presented, might be used to depict me as some kind of a "lone wolf-propagating Jihad-denier" by novices who were unaware of my posted views at JW throughout the years. I knew that beforehand but I chose to post the news the way I did, just to also wait and see who would fall for the temptation to denounce me in terms that could be anticipated, whereas I only presented updates as they poured in from, again, relatively reliable sources.
And now this is how you saw fit to reward me? ;)
After all of those spirited exchanges we've had, which I thoroughly enjoyed, shouldn't you know just a little bit better than to come up with such "questions"? So no, there's nothing wrong with my way of reporting and therefore no "gaps" to be rectified at your request. What remains is just some curious amusement on my part that, of all people, it had to be you who'd take the bate I had set out for presumptuous RS aficionados.
Cheers,
Sag
* In the same vein, though much more important imo, I see another tendency that jeopardises JW reliability and independent scholarship, and that is the way some GoP presidential hopefuls are quasi-endorsed while others are fanatically un-endorsed by Robert Spencer. I'm in favour of schooling all candidates, irrespective of the red meat sound bites they throw at the MSM no and then.
Sagunto,
Thanks for your replies.
I think you're over-reacting to my questions. There's nothing in my questions which necessarily demonstrate the ill will you impute to them. I was merely asking for information. I wasn't implying anything further about you.
I noted (to myself) at the time when I saw your JW post about the Karachi Post Twitter, and I had no reason to doubt you. However, as that wasn't the focus of my interest (I wasn't interested in the idea that the attacker's motivation had something to do with the honor killing case in the nearby courtroom -- an idea tangential and distracting, in my opinion, to the more important need to determine whether this was a terror attack and whether it was a Mumbai-style one), I simply didn't remark about it one way or the other.
I was also at the time not interested in that whole issue of whether Spencer was prematurely implying a linkage to jihad or not; so any nuances relating to that angle -- including the whole related issue of whether certain news sources were credible or not (while important as a subcategory in its own right, of course) -- also I left unremarked.
My main interest was the interesting discrepancy I found between early reports of numerous attackers, and -- at first only from you (as you were delivering Belgian news sources) -- delimitations of the attack to a lone gun-&-bombman. (People still talk about the Van Gogh slaughter as though it were a one-man operation, even though it was actually part of a cell of Muslims who hailed from all over Europe and North Africa). When a terror attack is a coordinated attack by multiple Muslims, it's that much harder for the MSN to depict it as a deranged lunatic with non-Islamic motives.
At any rate, since at the time I posed my questions to you, you were the only person I had seen insisting on this delimitation, I wondered where you got the information from that made you so certain. It's certainly possible that a reporter amid the panic (plus other bystanders) may have wrongly concluded there were multiple attackers; but that by itself isn't sufficient proof there weren't.
Hi Hesp -
"I think you're over-reacting to my questions. There's nothing in my questions which necessarily demonstrate the ill will you impute to them. I was merely asking for information. I wasn't implying anything further about you."
Okay then. "No harm, no foul," as some commenter on GoV would say.
Take care,
Sag
BTW, Hesp -
You took the conflicting reports that covered your interest at face value. My interest was in reporting without bias, set by the limits of MSM media coverage, offset by a blog in Holland that features some young www-savy people who are always the first to discover some internet based hoax. Anyway, you go on entertain theories about multiple attackers, that's your call.
But notice how a new kind of conspirational mood quickly takes hold of several commentators in that JW comments section, when it is but mentioned that news agencies report Nordine Amrani to be the "lone attacker".
This framing of mind & discussion, dictates that the lone wolf scenario must mean that there's some form of coverup going on somewhere, especially when it is clear that the attacker is a Muslim.
By "logical" extension of this deranged mode of analyzing, the mention of Amrani as the lone shooter is taken by some to be code-speak for saying that Islam is not implicated here, since ties to terrorist networks are "denied".
See the flaw in this kind of "reasoning"? A Muslim individual can't be a terrorist attacker, since always some form of organization must be behind it? Anyway, I'm not interested in that kind of single-mindedness.
Cheers,
Sag
Sagunto,
"You took the conflicting reports that covered your interest at face value."
Sure, that's what one does with data. That's the first step -- followed by sifting through the data to find out which interpretation of the data is likelier to be true and which unlikelier; and from there, (hopefully) to arrive at the truth of the matter.
"Anyway, you go on entertain theories about multiple attackers, that's your call."
I'm not entertaining a theory; I'm asking for information to provide a basis on which either to rule out -- or rule in -- the initial reports of multiple attackers.
"But notice how a new kind of conspirational mood quickly takes hold of several commentators in that JW comments section, when it is but mentioned that news agencies report Nordine Amrani to be the "lone attacker".
This framing of mind & discussion, dictates that the lone wolf scenario must mean that there's some form of coverup going on somewhere, especially when it is clear that the attacker is a Muslim."
That may often be the case; and I don't like it any more than you do, no matter how it's sliced. However, on the other hand, no one I recall had that tendency at the time of the Fort Hood massacre: it was quite sufficient that one Muslim was shouting the Takbir while massacring people and that he had been planning this alone (other than some apparently indirect inspiration from Awlaki) for quite some time. At least, it was quite sufficient for those of us who are awake to the problem of Islam: for that incident, we didn't need a conspiracy of multiple Muslims to show that any given Muslim, like Sgt. Nidal Hasan, is potentially deadly. As you well know, that wasn't enough for the mainstream, who at the very least seem to require being hit over the head with a hammer.
On the other hand, it's not infelicitous in this context to be handed on a silver platter a Mumbai-style attack now and then.
For me, at any rate, in the immediate wake of an attack, the point is nailing down what's what; not ruling things out before one has sufficient cause to do so.
"no one I recall had that tendency at the time of the Fort Hood massacre: it was quite sufficient that one Muslim was shouting the Takbir while massacring people and that he had been planning this alone (other than some apparently indirect inspiration from Awlaki) for quite some time. At least, it was quite sufficient for those of us who are awake to the problem of Islam: for that incident, we didn't need a conspiracy of multiple Muslims [..]"
And when it's across the pond many seem to need that very same kind of conspiracy. Perhaps it's due to the fact which I mentioned earlier: in one's own country it's easier for the observer of media coverage to discern what's clearly false, what's speculative and what's as factual as MSM reporting gets us.
In this Belgian case, you, and many other US observers with you, are not privy to the various ways news is "made" over here, so you have to take all of it at face value. I can understand that.
Take care,
Sag
Sagunto,
"And when it's across the pond many seem to need that very same kind of conspiracy. Perhaps it's due to the fact which I mentioned earlier: in one's own country it's easier for the observer of media coverage to discern what's clearly false, what's speculative and what's as factual as MSM reporting gets us."
That's not why the Fort Hood massacre didn't "require" the conspiracy impulse. It was because the Muslim attacker in question made eminently clear his Islamic motivation for his attack, by
a) his Power Point presentation to colleagues prior to the attack
b) his belligerently Islamic comments to co-workers in the months preceding the attack
c) his passing out Korans on the morning of the attack, wearing full beard and Islamic robes
d) his shouting the Takbir at the time he was killing (incidentally, relevant to another alleged datum -- which needs to be verified not dismissed out of hand -- about the Lieges attack).
With the Lieges attack, we seem to have no evidence of anything Islamic, other than the fact the attacker is a Muslim. The existence of multiple Muslims involved would certainly help beef up this particular inadequacy.
"In this Belgian case, you, and many other US observers with you, are not privy to the various ways news is "made" over here, so you have to take all of it at face value. I can understand that."
When it comes to news about a crime or terror attack, I see news reporters as simply transferring data from the police to the public. The job of the police in any Western country (on both sides of the pond) is to forensically determine what happened. As an adjunct to that, if reporters happen to be on the scene and/or interview witnesses independently of the police, they may add further data.
"With the Lieges attack, we seem to have no evidence of anything Islamic, other than the fact the attacker is a Muslim."
Yes, we have, like the nice little black flag of jihad on one of his rocketlaunchers, and more in that vein. Not that you'd know 'cause you're far away and relatively underinformed observer. Furthermore, I'm really not that interested in your ideas about the relation between press and police. You've become a complete bore at this point, so I thank you for some of the more interesting points you tried to make, and bow out.
Take care,
Sag
Sagunto,
Your tendency to get over-emotional and then to insult me out of the blue while continuing to fail to provide any sources for your claims (either the ones I have asked you for or additional ones you make -- e.g., the black Islamic flag on the gunman's weapon) makes you unreliable for providing crucial data with regard to the vital mission we all have a part to play in communicating the danger of Islam. I shan't be wasting my time trying to get blood from a turnip.
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