Even within the cozy walls of Jihad Watch, not infrequently denizens pop out with unsettlingly soft pronouncements about Muslims.
That the majority(?) of the world's Muslims are--thankfully--not fully compliant with the teachings of their "complete way of life" does not negate what it says.
At the very least, that should be "ostensibly" not fully compliant. And even that formulation fails to account for the innumerable ways in which Muslims who are not currently stabbing or exploding or found plotting to do same or holding up signs calling for Infidels to be beheaded, may well be enabling the more noticeable jihad of their more obvious brothers and sisters.
And most of all, what galls is that this is a sweeping claim not only about which no evidence is offerred -- but about which it would be well nigh impossible to verify, given how many hundreds of millions of souls (if you can call them that) spread out in over 70 countries are being so sweepingly described.
That most Muslims in the U.S. either don't want to follow Big Al's literal word (or are prevented by our secular laws from amputating a thief's hand(s), does not in any way mean that the amputations conducted by their Somali and Malian Muslim brethren represent a "hijacked" Islam.
Another sweeping claim, with no evidence offered, and of a nature such that no evidence would be possible to offer.
Those Muslims who constantly tell us that Islam IS peace are either ignorant of Islam or liars.
Is there any doubt anymore which of these two choices applies? Given the track record of this particular Jihad Watcher, no doubt "ignorance of Islam" counts as a significant explanatory factor by which to assuage his semi-conscious dread that the problem may be much, much broader and deeper than he tries to imagine in the light of his conscious thought.
Anyway, my point is, the world out there, outside of Jihad Watch and a precious few other blogs devoted to the counter-jihad, remains a place unfriendly and unpalatable (when not hostile and infuriating) to those of us who have come to our grimly lucid awareness of the problem of Islam. And it becomes acutely annoying (if not aggrieving) to find such softness on the issue as exemplified above in the hallowed walls of Jihad Watch.
I.e., if you wanna be soft, there's a whole wide world out there -- and a whole Wide World of the Web too -- that will cater to your softness all day long. At least here -- at Jihad Watch, or at some of the other precious few venues for discussion about the problem of Islam that exist as small islands few and far between among the vast archipelagos of politically correct stupidity that span the West, if not the whole freaking world -- for God's sake, can't we be a little better, a little stiffer, a little less forgiving, and have some tighter standards of analysis?
This came up yet again more recently in a Jihad Watch comments thread, when some commenter who goes by the moniker "Truthiocity" wove the axiomatic assumptions of the TMOE asymptote into a comment. Concerning a report about a Muslima in Nashville, Tennessee, who made disturbing comments to a coworker indicative of a wish, and a readiness, to commit terrorism against the Infidel, this "Truthiocity" wrote the following comment (my interjections in bold I published subsequently in a comment of my own under the nickname "LemonLime"):
They need to find out what mosque she attends.
Does it matter?
Even if she is unstable, this stuff is still being put into her head from somewhere.
Yes; that somewhere is the sociocultural atmospherics of Islam -- concretely mediated by friends, family, clerics, sermons, daily prayers, texts, Al-Jazeera TV, Internet.
... on the other hand this display of hers, if handled subtly, could lead to the exposing of a radical mosque.
I'm not saying let her off, I'm saying PRETEND to let her off, then go after the scumbags who are indoctrinating her and other muslims in the area.
Ah, there's the source of Truthiocity's problem. He apparently
thinks, when it comes to Islam, that there exists such a thing as
"radical" as distinct from non-radical. That's so 15 years ago, dude.
Time to upgrade your Counterjihad software there.
Later on in the thread, when Truthiocity got wind of my tart objections to his outrageously lax softness about the problem of Muslims, he more or less accused me of being an "agent provocateur" trying to "goad" fellow Jihad Watchers into becoming or showing "extremism".
A couple of other Jihad Watchers put in their two cents against my position (without, of course, offering any refutation of my content), while one rather limp-wristedly peeped up in my defense, and only one soul proferred a suitably assertive defense.
As I put it there -- and this should stand as the gold standard of my conviction about this matter:
The reason I find it difficult to be tactful is that this is a precious
place, Jihad Watch comments is. Nearly everywhere else in the real world, and
throughout the Internet, one regularly runs into people who minimize and
truncate the problem of Muslims into variations on the theme of the
"Tiny Minority of Extremists" meme. One dearly hopes that here, in
these hallowed halls, one doesn't have to run into that type of garbage.
And so, over a decade after 911, and sitting on this veritable
mountain-top of data that shows devastatingly and screamingly that the
problem is obviously of greater magnitude than "radicalism", one has a
right to resent the intrusion of people who sound like they're from the
freaking State Department describing the problem of "terrorism" to us.
And then to accuse me of fomenting "extremism" -- as "Truthiocity" did more than once to try to defend his softball approach from criticism -- is just adding outrageous insult to injury.
Conclusion:
Why should we be doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out ways by which innumerable Muslims are okay, are moderate, are "ignorant of their own Islam" -- are, in effect, not a threat to us and possibly show hope of reform and therefore of a way out of this horror of a growing global train wreck that is the modern Rebirth of Islam worldwide?
The problem is not ours -- it should be theirs. Muslims should be doing all the heavy lifting required to protect our societies.
And if they can't do it actively and constructively, then they will have to do it passively, by being put on planes, trains and automobiles and shipped the Hell out.
And if they can't do it actively and constructively, then they will have to do it passively, by being put on planes, trains and automobiles and shipped the Hell out.
For as long as Muslims are not solving that problem, but in fact show, in a thousands ways weekly around the world, that they are making matters worse -- whether by refusing to own up to the rampant disease of violence their beliefs foster around the world, whether by tap-dancing around our questions with evasions, whether bristling at our honest and necessary questions, whether being so Goddamned prickly and "sensitive" to our concerns about the atrocities committed in the name of the prophet they admire so much -- then we are not responsible for what we have to do to protect our societies from deadly Muslims whom we have no reliable way to distinguish from all those millions of Muslims our fellow softballers insinuate (when they do not declare, apodictically, and blithely) without proof, are harmless.
To those Counterjihad Softies I ask: Whose team are you on, anyway?
Further Reading:
The Counter-Jihad Softies: 10 Flavors of the Anti-Islam Soft Serve
Fed Up with the Counter-Jihad Softies
6 comments:
Let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that I am a Muslim that likes to have a sneaky smoke and an alcoholic drink during Ramadan, and that I could avoid being detected by my fellow Muslims who would hunt down any transgression of the rules. Imagine also, that this Muslim would have no qualms about beating up his wife in private at regular intervals for refusing sex with him. Let's say that this Muslim would also know perfectly well that the neighbourhood's imam has said it is perfectly justified according to the Quran. Let's say that this Muslim also runs a business outlet of some sort, and caters to both infidel and Muslim customers. Let's imagine this Muslim being outwardly polite to all his infidel customers (for some other Muslims enough of a reason to call him a religious hypocrite), while in the back of his mind he covets a seething disdain for infidels and a deep frustration with having to tolerate infidel customers in order to sustain a living. Imagine this Muslim being too lazy to pray 5 times a day on the one hand, but is still demanding of his wife to dress modestly according to Quranic tenets when she leaves the house.
Such a person would be deemed a "moderate".
Westerners may hypothesize that outward behavior has a direct link to the Muslim's inner reasonability, which Islam totally denies the individual. We naively assume that we can deduce a whole package of moderate characteristics, compatible with our own values, from what we can observe at the surface, but in fact we are always unable to look inside the individual's mind. It seems to me that the average Westerner is both grossly naive and too full of conceit about his capability to distinguish between the so-called moderate (who doesn't exist) and the intransigent fanatic, to realize there is absolutely no way any one can crawl inside another one's mind to see what goes on there.
Maybe Westerners are simply too full of themselves that way, we overestimate our capabilities. Maybe we also like to live in denial for the sake of comforting ourselves, sublimating our fears of what really hides behind this seemingly benign surface by turning it around. Maybe that is what we WANT to believe in spite of the evidence, rather than anything else.
Somehow, it seems to me that real Islamophobia as a psychological process is something that's fundamentally PC rather than non-PC.
1) There are no moderate aspects to totalitarian ideologies
2) Islam is totalitarian
3) Any Muslim can decide to integrate non-Islamic ways of living and eclectically choose to adhere to those Islamic core tenets that suit his personal needs at the same time.
4) this outward behavior doesn't make Muslims moderate by a long shot. PC idiots believe they can infer from such behavior that they full well know what goes on in a Muslim's mind. All the leftover Islamic rulings a "moderate Muslim" still adheres to, can't be any other than inherently incompatible with our values.
5) This outward behavior doesn't make them Westernized or able to fully abide by our norms, standards and values.
Also note I am turning into quite a fan of Daniel Greenfield's sultanknish.blogspot.com as of late:
"Moderate Islam is a mirage, a projection by desperate Westerners of their own values and culture onto an entirely different religion and culture. It is a mirage that many Muslims are eager to uphold, in the same way that desert merchants might sell goblets and bowls of sand to passing travelers foolish enough to confuse water with dust. And, like travelers who think they are drinking water, when they are actually swallowing sand, it is a deception that will eventually kill the deceived.
When the Western cultural elite look at Islam, they see what they have to see to avoid falling into crisis mode. Like the traveler who would rather choke on sand, than face up to the fact that he is lost in a desert, they would rather keep most things as they are, even at the cost of the extinction of the nations they preside over, than confront the full scope of the threat surrounding them. A threat that they had a hand in nurturing and feeding in the name of goals that seemed to make sense at the time.
It is easier to segregate a "Bad Islam" composed of a tiny minority of extremists from the generally "Good Islam" of the rulers of the Muslim world and the waves of Muslim immigrants washing up on their shores. This segregation has no objective reality, and is nothing but a psychological defense mechanism against experiencing the full reality of a disaster. From the Titanic to World War II, there are numerous similar situations in which the people in charge chose to ignore a growing crisis at a horrific cost."
From: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-mirage-of-moderate-islam.html
Anathematic Action,
Thanks for your comments. I agree mostly with your observations. I would want to suggest in addition that a very important -- if not the most important -- factor explaining the PC MC myopia is the fear of "bigotry", the fear of succumbing to an assumed inner propensity to think thought crimes of racism and then inexorably -- unless checked, of course -- to act out on them by lynching, rounding up, and ultimately ethnically cleansing if not "genociding" non-whites. Muslims have become perceived by the PC MC mainstream to be an "ethnic people" -- indeed, the most privileged ethnic people or minority of them all; and as such, to be accorded irrationally excessive favoritism and respect, including above and beyond the call of duty, whitewashing and airbrushing away the daily atrocities and hate speech that daily churns out of the Muslim world (including the Muslims in the West).
P.S.:
Just to amplify one point I made:
"... the fear of succumbing to an assumed inner propensity to think thought crimes of racism..."
-- this inner evil propensity being, of course, the peculiar if not unique distinction of White Western Man -- leading the PC MC to find the only way out, the only expiation of his shame and self-hatred, to bend over backwards to assume the White Man's Burden of helping the Brown Man. Etc.
Indeed. The fear of bigotry is one major part of it, as you say.
PC MC seeks to deliberately victimize the Muslims as an oppressed minority from a viewpoint that can only be described as a post-colonial guilt trip, analogous somewhat to the leftwing World Solidarity views of the 1960's. Multiculturalism has it that "we can’t possibly treat these people the same way as we do our own kind, because this particular background culture is fundamentally unable to attain the same standards as we do, so we have to exempt these people from having to comply with our own norms and values”, or something to that effect.
Complacently denoting Islam as a culture therefore has to lead to the Islam-critical communities collectively being branded as “a bunch of racists.”
Multiculturalism has utterly failed, as some politicians seem to want to half-heartedly admit in Europe at this time, and as a consequence, PC appeasement still wreaks further havoc on civilized societies. Muslim communities will keep self-segregating under our noses and become more Sharia-compliant over time, these communities are increasinly turning to parallel judiciaries to solve legal issues, Islamic uniformity (as the logical consequence of the totalitarian Islamic doctrine) will be enforced by moral police and in the long run, Western societies will also find that PC appeasement of the Muslim “victim” has turned into an exercise that reaps absolutely NO rewards for our civilization in the long run.
Still, most people I know don't seem to be all that bothered with it on the surface, no matter how much they feel the need to express their intuitions about Islam's detrimental effects to me in private. I sense a very tangible fear ruling in their heads, like you say.
I really despair of people and our politicians, sometimes, when I realize how much people want to cling to their shallow self-absorbed image like the proverbial "shit to a blanket", as if the fear of looking bigoted is a luxury commodity they're unable to dispose of.
I can only suppose that the MSM, beholden as they are to the political cenacles of power, are indeed well-versed in keeping the general public consumed with this fear. It has never bothered me all that much, though. Maybe that's because I am not much of a MSM consumer in the first place...
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