A Moderate "Good Cop"

In a recent Jihad Watch report -- titled Is fear of Islam unfounded? -- Reza Varjavand, a Muslim professor (of economics and finance at an American university), penned an essay on a (no doubt moderate) Muslim website exploring that title and its implications. 

Varjavand's essay sounds all the right notes -- to a gullibly naive Westerner desperate to find an authentically Moderate Muslim, that is.  To the more reasonably cynical among us, however, it is simply the sweet nothings of taqiyya whispered into Infidel ears.

Actually, Varjavand's piece is not so much taqiyya, as it is rather that other form of Islamic deceit, kitman—telling only part of the truth, in order the better to hide the part you don’t want to tell. Varjavand affects a disingenuously disarming concern couched in questions revolving around the leitmotif of his refrain, “Is this what Islam is all about?” -- a calculated rhetorical question hoping to snare the gullible Westerner who has been warmed and softened up by Varjavand's seeming concessions to the problem of Islamic terrorism.  The snare would be the veiled assertion between the lines, to the effect that "No, this is not what Islam is all about: Islam in its essence is a wonderful religion of peace, justice and tolerance, twisted by a tiny minority of extremists... blah blah blah."  Varjavand's selling point -- and his sly snake oil he's trying to sell -- all hinges on his willingness to expand that Tiny Minority (of Extremists) into a larger number to be dismayed about.  Missing from his unctuously and disingenuously handwringing concern he affects to share with us, however, are two important facts:

1) the problem of Islamic fanaticism evident in the Sunna (or its equivalent in Shia Islam), in Sharia, and in Jihad -- the problem being that this mainstream fanaticism is the same fanaticism that energizes and scripts the terrorists

and

2) the problem of Muhammad and Allah, overwhelmingly the source of all that disturbing and dangerous fanaticism in mainstream Islam.

Prof. Varjavand doesn't want to discuss these little problems, however; his kitman deftly obscures them, as he pursues the true half of his doublespeak.

We must assume Varjavand knows exactly the true answer to his disarmingly rhetorical question -- that this is indeed what Islam is all about. He can’t possibly not know. And yet, he affects to be ignorant of that key, most crucial factor.  Therefore his whole presentation is suspect. And as such, it has great potential usefulness to the Jihad -- to the extent we fall for this shell game of Good Mo, Bad Mo.  And I’m afraid many do so, even in the Counter-Jihad. Its usefulness is precisely to keep the game going — to keep propping up the paradigm of the false distinction between “Extremist Islamism” and Islam straight-no-chaser, so that the West continues to admit untold numbers of what it believes are Muslims representing the latter (assumed to be approximately as benign as this kindly professor seems to be).

There were at least two other Muslim pundits who have written such exercises in kitman that I recall,  in the last year or two. It’s quite likely they indicate that Muslims perceive that their continued deception requires a bit of tweaking or nudging in order to assure that the West remains compliantly stupid in its PC MC reflexes. I.e., Muslims may be detecting that the Sleeping Lion of the West is showing incipient signs of waking up—its blissfully bourgeois snoring actually paused a couple of times during its otherwise comatose sleep with saliva dribbling down its chin—and so what better way to try to solidify the deception of the Stealth Jihad than to make calculated statements by Muslim “intellectuals” here and there not merely “condemning terrorism” but going further to expressing disquiet about Muslim actions around the world. It doesn’t take much to appease the Sleeping Lion of the West: it just needs a chunk of meat now and then to be slipped into its insensate maw now and then.