“This menace, and the misinformation about this menace...”

 

 

The titular phrase for my posting today derives from the final paragraph of a recent essay by the fine essayist, Hugh Fitzgerald, in years past enjoying the role, in a way, of Poet Laureate of Jihad Watch, currently and for quite a while now continuing to blog in his own nook of the woods, at “The Iconoclast” (ensconced in New English Review, linked on my blogroll).  

 

The phrase (which the reader will note I ever so slightly polished) neatly encapsulates the Problem, and the Problem of the Problem; and the essay that is its context amplifies and deepens further.

While I took Fitzgerald to task many times, sometimes robustly, in my now retired companion blog, Jihad Watch Watch, it was always meant in a spirit of constructive criticism.  He remains one of the very few voices in the Counter-Jihad (“such as it is,” as Diana West has wryly put it) who seems remarkably, and refreshingly (albeit relatively) free of the asymptotic tics, reflexes, spasms, burps and farts which, in various musical combinations seem to afflict so many other analysts herein.