Jihad Watch readers are unanimous in their praise of the latest David Wood video in which he deftly articulates the gaping holes in the sanctimonious concerns of the rabbi (Rabbi Jerome Davidson of the Great Neck Synagogue) who disinvited Pam Geller from addressing an audience there on the problem of jihad.
I agree that this presentation by Wood is eloquent and
superbly elegant. However, it comes at a price of leaving an important
factor unmentioned.
The important factor, if mentioned and woven into Wood's argument,
likely wouldn't do much to relieve the fundamental incoherence of the
sentimentally doddering rabbi. Nevertheless, in the interest of an
appreciation for the full scope of the facts, it would be apropos not
only of a love of the truth, but also of more effective tactics in our
war of ideas with our fellow Westerners (a war of rational persuasion
that would be senseless if all -- or even a sizeable minority -- of our
opponents in this regard were Leftist Marxists with horns-and-a-tail).
The factor I am alluding to is not a fact; but it is a likelihood
reasonably inferred from mountains of data and oceans of dots to be
connected:
The vast majority of Muslims are savages.
Now, the reason why individuals like the good rabbi would recoil from such a prospect are two-fold:
1) his Western ethics come with an unavoidable "app" or "plug-in" --
namely, the PCMC-refined principle that a People of great numbers,
dispersed around the world, of long historical provenance and cultural
heritage, and (most importantly) seemingly "ethnic", cannot possibly be
mostly savage. It's simply unthinkable -- and therefore it is not to be
thought, and whenever anyone dares to even seem to imply it (even while
protesting that they never meant to, and never did, say that -- as do
Geller, Spencer, and Wood), they are to be ostracized as beyond the pale
bigots. The absolute most the rabbi would be willing to concede would be, of course, the tried and true TMOE meme: a Tiny Minority of Extremists.
2) Deeper than his righteously felt ethics updated by the
above-mentioned PC MC app, the rabbi's reflexive reaction is also
motivated by an apparently contrary, if not contradictory, sentiment
(or, rather, pressentiment): Deep down, below the threshold of his
conscious thought, he suspects and fears that there is something
horribly wrong with Islam, and that far more Muslims zealously support
it than his conscious thought is willing to admit. When the rabbi
recoils from Geller, he is as much recoiling from a putative violation
of his preciously defined ethics, as he is from his deeper suspicion
that the "bigots" may be right about Muslims. Geller thus reminds
the rabbi of that deeper fear, and instead of facing it and shining a
light on it to study up on Islam and read the damn news about Muslims,
he redirects and projects onto Geller his fear. (The reason the rabbi suppresses and redirects his fear should be clear: to raise it into his conscious thought and follow its logic would undermine the precious ethics that make him feel good about himself, on which, through his ethical narcissism, he has built all his self-worth and the worth of the society he supports.)
This factor, which has effects as described above, however, is being
suppressed by both sides of this debate. Neither side seems to want to
advert to, and shine a light on, the problem of the vast majority of
Muslims (if not the dreaded A-word: the problem of all Muslims) -- the
rabbi, out of his incoherent mixture of feeling good about himself
ethically + his semi-conscious dread of Muslims; the Counter-Jihad
luminaries by their canny refusal to mention the problem of numbers at
all and in fact to go out of their way to insist they never meant to say
anything of the kind.
But come on; to many of the rest of us sitting on this mountain
higher than Everest of data about what Muslim say and do (including the
crucial data of the False Moderate and taqiyya), this insistence sounds
increasingly strained and counter-factual (if not a fantasy); and one of
its seemingly primary functions -- to persuade our opponents in the war
of ideas that we aren't tarring all Muslims with a broad brush -- isn't
working, and has never worked in all the time it's been anxiously
deployed.
To reiterate: One does not have to apodictically assert that all Muslims are in fact deadly savages. It is likely that many Muslims exist out there who will never harm a fly. That's not the point. The point is that, given the mountains of data and oceans of dots we have about Muslims and their Islam, we find ourselves in a predicament where we cannot sufficiently tell the difference between the deadly Muslims and the harmless ones. The solution to that predicament is not our responsibility: it is the responsibility of Muslims themselves to clear it up. Not only have they not done so in the last decade, the predicament is getting worse.
As far as I'm concerned, Muslims tar themselves with a broad brush --
all day long. But I guess I'll have to wait until after they
mass-murder at least a million of us in various locales around the West
before the Counter-Jihad develops the moxie to say it.
