The Telltale (R) having heart (and brain) trouble...

A recent Jihad Watch report is headlined:

"Iowa caucus: 53% of Republicans, 81% of Democrats think Islam is peaceful"

And Robert Spencer editorialized:

"This shows the effectiveness of the constant barrage of media propaganda, the never-ending avalanche of articles and learned talking heads assuring us that when we see Muslims brandishing Qur’ans and screaming “Allahu akbar” as they kill Infidels, it doesn’t really have anything to do with Islam..."

Is that all it shows?  I thought Spencer may have been being a tad rhetorically loose in his locution there, until I read further to see this:

"In other words, 53% of Republicans and 81% of Democrats have been brainwashed to deny what is painfully obvious..."

That implies a rather dim & cynical view of millions of Americans, that they could be so easily brainwashed about such an important matter.  I realize it's been fashionable for quite some time to play fast and loose with such a dim and cynical glibness about our society (if not more broadly about human nature), but one must not allow oneself to succumb to that; one must shake it off, sit up straight, and think more reasonably and carefully about a matter of such weight and moment.   

First of all, one reasonably factors in the relative greatness and richness -- for all its faults & foibles -- of one's own West (particularly when anti-Americanism has become so deeply ingrained in the modern West's own reckless & irresponsible politically correct habit of self-hatred); and one embarks on one's speculation with the reasonable premise that such depressing statistics as are featured in this latest study reported here by Spencer cannot lead us by the nose to the most ungenerous conclusion that all those millions of relatively decent and intelligent Americans are such brainless sheep as to allow themselves to be "brainwashed" about such an important matter.  

One pauses to consider other possible, plausible explanations, surely, without reaching with such breathtaking alacrity to such a bleakly black imputation about one's own fellow man (particularly one's fellow Western, and American, man).  It seems far more reasonable (and generous -- for, the greatness of our society deserves the minimal respect we would grant it to accord it such generosity, for Christ’s sake, I say, without taking the Lord’s name in vain) to assume that such a depressing statistic reflects a broad sociological -- even sociocultural -- phenomenon that has, moreover, been going on for quite some time -- years, yea decades.  Beyond this naked assumption, if we would be, or would try to be, well read, in literature and history, we would have noticed by now that such habits of an amorphous civilizational & cultural self-criticism in the West, oftentimes lurching into excessive expression almost irrational if not morbidly so, are a prominent feature of the modern West, and longstanding.  

I know that Spencer is well read in a variety of levels of Western culture and history; so it strikes me as odd that he reaches for such a specious & facile manner of expressing the, apparently, only explanation for such a deeply depressing & dismaying statistic. 

P.S.:  The other thing this statistic shows is (as I have discussed in earlier essays here) that while the slim majority of Republicans remain unconscionably remiss in their civic duty to learn about this most pressing international danger (Islam), they do seem to have a higher degree of rationality in their sociopolitical culture than Democrats.  I.e., the Leftist deformation through its aerosol percolation in the form of the "Leftism Lite" of PC MC has not penetrated Republican culture as deeply and broadly as it has the culture of Democrats.  It's a glass half full/half empty situation; and we need to maintain reasonable perspective whereby we do not unduly emphasize one over the other, but keep the opposing significances of both in mind.