The dreaded "A" word

Robert Spencer some time ago (back in June of 2010) wrote on Jihad Watch, in response to a New Yorker article whose author implied a conflation of the Nazi Holocaust with our current alarms about the metastasis of Islam around the world:

...neither Ayaan Hirsi Ali nor anyone else is talking about rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such. It is a peculiar leap of logic to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations.

The logic of PC MC in this regard is not really peculiar, nor is it a leap.

The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try to assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing this, but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is precisely a person who supports (or at the very least enables), and derives inspiration and existential identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not condemning the former?

Whenever this issue becomes forced into explicit response, the Anti-Islam analysts usually try to do an end-run around it, by hypothesizing that many (or most?) Muslims "don't really know their Islam", or are "lax Muslims who don't really practice it", or indeed may be "reformists" of one stripe or another. These hypotheses (with no solid grounding in fact) serve two functions:

1) they attempt to placate the PC MCs, who control the sociopolitical discussion about Islam in the West, by in effect trying to assure them that we are not "against all Muslims"

and

2) they reflect a sincerely liberal (or Christian, or often, both) attitude that is anxiously disinclined to condemn a whole People (and you would be surprised how many individuals who insist they are "conservative" in fact hold on to this PC MC ideal).

Sometimes, a given Anti-Islam analyst's use of those hypotheses may reflect #1 and not #2; sometimes vice versa; or sometimes an incoherent mixture of the two. But it must be asked: Is it not rather illogical (if not comically preposterous) to suppose that there exist viably massive numbers of Muslims out there who do not support Islam (much less, for Allah's sake, "don't know" their own Islam)?

So we see that within the Anti-Islam Movement itself, there is lurking the same logic that leads the PC MCs "to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations."

A while ago I coined a term for those who are anti-Islam, yet still in one way or another, and to one degree or another, harbor the PC MC virus in their system:  asymptotics.  The asymptotic tendency need not be pronounced; sometimes it can reflect merely a twitch or spasm.  One example of many I could cite was one particular Jihad Watch reader's elbow spasm in response to my comment in a comments thread of the same Jihad Watch article I cited above.  I had posted a comment there which was essentially a rough draft of this essay here; and that Jihad Watcher's response to me reflects a potential for serious retardation of policy, to the extent it becomes sociopolitically influential.  (Hold on: it already is sociopolitically influential!  In fact, it's sociopolitically dominant throughout the West, for Pete's sake!  What am I thinking!)  Anywho,  I now quote just one of his anxious protestations to my comments, and my response:

"Many supposed muslims are only muslims by name"

I see you are pulling out all the hypotheses to explain how it oculd be that we are not condemning all Muslims -- "most Muslims are illiterate", now "many Muslims are not really Muslims". There are many more similar hypotheses -- all desperate attempts by sincere-minded non-Muslims to try to save the Entire People of Islam from our condemnation. One problem with these hypotheses is: how can you tell which Muslims are which? How do you discern that a Muslim ia a "Muslim by name only"? Just because he tells you he likes music and he wears blue jeans and he says he doesn't like the "Wahhabis" or the "Salafis"? I'm not going to risk the lives of my fellow citizens on flimsy tests like these.

[End quote] 

Not to mention, by the way, that the same Jihad Watch commenter quoted and rebutted above also had to remind me, anxiously, that:

1) "I am not condemning an "entire people" "
2) :"...or an "ethnic people". Islam is no ethnicity or race."


To which I replied:

You may very well not be in your conscious mind intending to condemn an entire people. But if you condemn Islam, the problem opens up, as I already argued above.

Now, what differentiates the Counter-Jihad asymptotics from the PC MCs is that the latter hold tenaciously to an abstract axiom that forever forbids them from condemning Muslims, no matter how massive is the mountain of data that damns them and their Islam. On our side, however, we have Anti-Islam analysts who with similar tenacity resist the broader logical consequences of their own anti-Islamic stance. One of those logical consequences is the condemnation of all Muslims. This condemnation is not a factual, actual indictment of all Muslims, but rather a pragmatic realization -- based on what we know (or should know) about Islamic texts, Islamic history, Muslim behavior in our time around the world, the phenomenon of the False Moderate, and, last but not least, Taqiyya -- that we must regard all Muslims with equal suspicion as deadly seditionists.   Implicit in these factors I list are two most exigent ones:  1) the potential of terrorist plots metastasizing to become a global problem far worse than they already are, whose horrific consequences of mass destruction we may well be increasingly unable to predict and interdict, and 2) our continuing inability to tell the difference, with reliability sufficient for our needs of self-defense, between the harmless Muslims who most likely do exist, and the deadly Muslims (and their enablers) whom we cannot always cleanly and conveniently pinpoint.

Given all this, the distinction many in the Counter-Jihad insist upon, by which to spare themselves the embarrassment and/or opprobrium of being "against all Muslims", is not only unhelpful (unless one thinks it is helpful to continue to try, anxiously, to placate our PC MC and/or Islamopologist critics by assuring them we are not "against all Muslims"), it may well be positively unhelpful in its tendency to reinforce precisely the dominant meme that continues to enable innumerable Muslims to pass under our already over-lax radar of self-defense.

The problem is not the condemnation, but what we do about it. We are not compelled by some invisible force to "round them up" in order to "put them in camps" so we can "genocide" them. But we will have to do something, to protect our societies from them.  And deportation based in part on citizenship-stripping is one perfectly doable option, which furthermore seems to be the only way to manage the metastasizing problem increasingly threatening the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of our fellow citizens in various unpredictable locations throughout the West in the decades ahead.  A perfectly doable option -- however much it is ideologically and psychologically resisted (including by most of those in the Counter-Jihad).

Since Muslims are demonstrably getting worse all over the world, and increasingly infiltrating the West, our current Whack-a-Mole and Close-the-Barn-Door-After-the-Wolves-Have-Got In strategy (with "radical" mosque-monitoring and cautiously selective wiretaps and surveillance of "radicals" tossed into the anxiously hopeful pot) will, in the coming decades, increasingly resemble grimly laughable leak-plugging on the Titanic.

And let us not forget that the PC MCs are exceedingly hypersensitive about this issue. Any negative criticism of Islam or by extension of Muslims is deemed to be perilously close to the slippery slope that leads to "rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such." (Just to give one example out of thousands one could adduce over the years:  When famous American sportscaster (and baseball pitcher) Curt Schilling was found out to have retweeted a comment comparing "extremist" Muslims to German Nazis, he was strawmanned in the mainstream news media for condemning "all Muslims" and for being "racist").

This too is logical: PC MCs know that if there is a potential eventuality that is horrible, the best way to prevent it is to stop it at its source,  And the source of this horrible potential they irrationally but logically envision is "another Holocaust" -- this time against poor (and, most importantly, ethnic-seeming) Muslims, precisely entails and is preceded by the thought crimes of saying too many negative things about Islam and by extension about the Muslims who support Islam (and how many Muslims don't support Islam?)

Are we going to continue to let this hypersensitivity of the PC MCs dictate this most direly important conversation?

Now, the specific reasons for this PC MC logic are many, but the two most important are:

1) we in the Counter-Jihad are -- no matter how many times Robert Spencer et al. insist otherwise -- implicitly condemning not merely a "group", but an entire People who hail from over 50 countries around the world, who have a rich culture that goes back 1,400 years, and whose culture is massively deemed by our own West to be a "world religion";

2) this entire People we are implicitly condemning is perceived by our own PC MC-dominated West to be an ethnic people (or a wonderfully diverse rainbow or "tapestry" or "mosaic" of ethnic peoples), and thus immediately and irrevocably the hot buttons of Reverse Racism are pushed; for in the PC MC climate, which is dominant and mainstream throughout the West, one cannot say anything negative about designated ethnic peoples -- or if you do say anything negative, please say it in exceedingly gingerly terms, say it fleetingly, do not press the issue, and desist politely; and we may still allow you to retain your career, let alone your reputation.

As for the silly -- but taken with deadly serious self-righteous gravity by the PC MCs (and many an asymptotic) -- notion of the inevitability of "another Holocaust" which inhibits most people in the West from going down what they imagine to be a "slippery slope" begun by a rational condemnation of all Muslims and continued by following its rationale, I articulated, on that same Jihad Watch comments thread I have linked above, a scintillating rebuttal (if I may toot my own horn).

Further Reading:

The "A" word and the proverbial tree in the forest

Update:

On January 3, 2012, I substantially massaged one paragraph in my essay here (the one that comes immediately after "[End quote]" -- because I saw that my overly terse phrase beginning with "factual" required some loosening up and clarification of its already implicit content.