The River of the World

Concerning the ongoing propagandistic efforts of Islamopologists "to cover up and whitewash the bloody reality of jihad" which Robert Spencer aptly notes  "grow more risible by the day", he concludes:

"...but mainstream media, law enforcement and government officials steadfastly refuse to laugh." 

However, once again for the umpteenth time, an odd lacuna characterizes Spencer's editorial remarks, a lacuna I also tend to find among his many supporters (whether writers of blogs, or essays, or in that copious field of observation and analysis many may overlook, when they do not dismiss it as somehow beneath them: comments fields attached to discussion forums and blogs like Jihad Watch).

And that lacuna reflects a fixation on the dastardly Elites, while ignoring the broader problem of millions of ordinary Westerners also failing to get the grim black humor Spencer alludes to.

For, millions of ordinary Westerners -- it's safe to assume the majority (until I see good evidence to disabuse my dismal view) -- refuse to laugh, and rather earnestly continue to think (if "think" is the word) that Islam is not that much of a problem, and that the vast majority of Muslims must be good -- or at least unremarkably regular -- people like you and me ("Muslims just wanna have a sandwich" in the immortally moronic words of Ben Affleck). It's these millions of ordinary Westerners who constitute, and who personify, the real problem -- they are why our mainstream media, law enforcement and government officials are PC MC about Islam. 

This is so, precisely because the West is not a tyranny.  The temptation to think it is, however, seems to have become another way out of our grievously annoying Problem of the Problem (the Problem, that is, of the West continuing to ignore the primary Problem of Islam): Why, simply lose your hope in the West and pronounce it irredeemably rotten to the core!  Rotten to the core, you see, with corruption and Macchiavellian evil by some sinister cabal of venal billionaires and Movers & Shakers who are "really" pulling all the strings and who have knowingly allied themselves with our enemy. Sadly, I've seen a few too many Counter-Jihadsts flirt with this explanatory escape hatch, if not seize upon it rather juicily. 

Even the more rational Counter-Jihadists, however, still have a Problem of the Problem of the Problem: They persist in thinking our only problem is the mysteriously influential power of Elites -- even if they do not blatantly demonize those Elites into an implausible (if not positively conspiratorial) caricature. 

In this regard, their semi-conscious web of simplistic assumptions about Elites (which I have termed "Elistitics") is a big part of this particularly simple-minded view. So, along with the maddening myopia of our Western elites which we must endure, we now notice a new (or perhaps not so new) phenomenon, a second myopia: A myopia of the myopia -- a myopia, that is, of Counter-Jihadists to the prevalence of myopia among their fellow Westerners.

And a good deal of this second myopia is just simple-minded bravado: "We the Ordinary People get the problem of Islam, unlike all the "liberals" in Gov'mint and the Mass Media and Hollywood, and we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore, by Gum!"

Man O Man, De Nile is a bigger river than we thought. It runs through the whole world, from East to West and South to North, and even irrigates some of the soil of the Counter-Jihad. 

Hey, that could be the title of Tom Friedman's next glossy coffee-table book: De Nile: The River of the World.  I can see him hawking it as he leans his big head across from Charlie Rose's glossy table -- that is, if by some miracle from Allah Tom Friedman (and Charlie Rose) actually awoke from out of their busy, hectic stupor.