One example out of thousands I could show to illustrate our problem:
David D. Kirkpatrick, influential pundit of the New York Times, expounded on the problem of Islam in an op-ed, revealing unsurprisingly that he needs to brush up on his literacy of Islam:
He [Abu Khattala] also said he opposed democracy as contrary to Islamic law, and he called those who supported secular constitutions “apostates,” using the terminology Islamist radicals apply to fellow Muslims who are said to disqualify themselves from the faith by collaborating with corrupt governments.
The "terminology" apostate is not merely that of "Islamist radicals" (is there such a thing as an "Islamist non-radical" or a "non-Islamist radical", one wonders...?) -- it is part of mainstream Islamic law, and under that law it denotes anyone who leaves or betrays Islam, and the penalty is death.
I wanted to write Mr. Kirpatrick a letter, but I knew that just dashing off a slapdash letter of a few unsubstantiated claims would be a waste of time. To prove my assertion adequately with sources, however, had taken me 90 minutes to hunt down; and I still was not done before I had to give up and spend my time on other things. (For example, I spent over 30 of those 90 minutes trying to find a source for the claim that the Umdat-al-Salik is certified by Al Azhar University -- a claim I found in abundance throughout the Blogospheric Echo Chamber, but so far always without an adequate reference link. I never did find that adequate reference). I don't want to write to a NYT reporter merely relaying unsupported claims, nor with more un-referenced assertions from a site like Jihad Watch that he will dismiss out of hand: To have non-negotiable punch, I must have the adequate sources for my assertion.
If we had a digital Manual of all the important points of the problem of Islam, I could have dialed it up in seconds. But Robert Spencer and all the other luminaries of the Counter Jihad apparently think this isn't a high priority for the movement.
Another example regarded a typical Islamopologist that not too long ago was blowing complex smoke in various Jihad Watch comments threads, and I noticed that while many JW regulars took him on valiantly, their responses rather reflected his tactic of scattershot obfuscation, rather than dispelled it to clarify the essential facts he was trying to obscure. As I wrote in a comment there about the effects of that obfuscator -- "YGM 76700":
"[...he] is, ostensibly, fairly well adept at kitman -- weaving together plausible sounding inferences and conclusions seamlessly massaged into a tissue of lies and anti-Western hatred while managing (at least to those who aren't vigilant and literate in the issue) to keep the latter two subliminal.
"In addition to kitman, YGM 76700 is also deploying the tactic of obfuscation through complex quantity -- which is a two-fer: it not only helps to obscure the lies and the anti-Western animus; it also serves to wear down the opponents through the tedium of having to refute him -- for a thorough refutation of his long posts would require the labor of weeding through and detaching the lies from the kitman half-truths, then those two from the straw men and red herrings, a rather tiring task to the extent that he has woven a rather tight weave of a complex of warp-and-woof. It is tempting to take his Kitman Tapestry and just toss it in the trash, or rip it in pieces; and it's probably not a bad idea. But YGM 76700 is clever enough, it seems, to know that intelligent people will look at those responses and see they aren't actually refutations.
"While many responses to YGM 76700 that go into greater depth are helpful, they still don't deliver the refutation that is a result of painstaking unraveling of his carefully woven straitjackets. It would be far easier to deliver handy and effectively thorough refutations of YGM 76700 if we, as deputized Counter-Jihadists, had a digital Anti-Islam Manual."
Examples like these two can be, and have been, multiplied by the thousands in the past years in many different permutations, in many different contexts, and many different situations -- all the way from participating in public debates, to writing your Congresswoman, to having extemporaneous discussions with friends, family or new acquaintences: whether at a family gathering, at a party, in between classes, at the water cooler in the office, accidentally in the laundry room, etc.
We desperately need to have, at the ready, an organized template of Points and Counter-Points every time we find ourselves in any given situation where we need to 1) condemn some feature of Islam and/or 2) refute some propagandistic defense of Islam. This would be the digital Anti-Islam Manual I keep harping on. With such a Manual available for general use, in our iphones, our tablets, our laptops, our important role as Deputies in the Counter-Jihad would be enhanced immeasurably. And we would then begin to tip the winning edge in the War of Ideas against the Islamopologists.
Without it, we remain less effective, like unarmed deputies, teeth missing in our enthusiastic smiles as we stand there with our pants around our ankles. At any given point in the ongoing conversation about Islam, without a digital Anti-Islam Manual, the information we need to be effective in the War of Ideas suffers from the following flaws:
1) there is simply Too Much Information about any one of the 1,001 important subtopics of the problem of Islam,
2) the information is too disorganized
3) the information is far-flung and chopped up into pieces in different places
4) the information is often riddled with complicated overlaps of redundancy
5) the information is more often than not insufficiently referenced, and
6) for the most part only remarkably talented individuals -- like Robert Spencer who has instant recall and an encyclopedic memory -- are capable of firing back when obfuscators blow their complex smoke.
But, as I noted above, none of our luminaries in the Counter Jihad seem to think this is a high priority (if they even bother to give it any thought at all).
"This coordinated identity of message is something I've noted here before: Leftists and Islamic supremacists tend to parrot the same talking points, as if they were all reading from the same script."
The Islamopologists (whether Muslims or PC MCs) are, and have been since day one, ahead of us in the War of Ideas in terms of propaganda. As Spencer has noticed, they seem to have something roughly -- and fairly effectively -- functioning as a Pro-Islam Manual; while we in the Counter-Jihad are still floundering around in a sea or jungle of Too Much Information, Too Little Organized.
and
c) indulging in various red herrings of obfuscation all revolving around Tu Quoque (or rather, Ego Quoque) and Moving the Goalposts.