Textual Islam means Islam in its purest and most dangerous form. Over centuries, Muslims learned to adapt, mainly by ignoring or choosing not to find out about everything that Islam taught. It was a lot easier to do this in a time of mass illiteracy. Now, with the most militant Muslims spreading their message through the Internet, it is harder to ignore what is being said.

So opined Hugh Fitzgerald parenthetically in a recent essay on Jihad Watch.

This implies that textual inculcation is the only type of significant inculcation (of a religious culture or ideology) and, by extension, a perniciously deadly & seditious ideology cannot be inculcated (in terms of a sophisticated sociological/anthropological cultural atmospherics) without textual means. Or, perhaps worse, it implies that if we can say it is possible for a perniciously deadly & seditious ideology to be inhibited wheresoever & howsoever textual means are lacking, we ought to incline to give Muslims the benefit of the doubt and assume that the ostensible appearance of a “lax Islam” means an actual, relative lack of Islam.

If we’ve learned anything on this bloody, raging mountain of data on fire -- Mt. Jihad Watch -- on whose upper slopes we sit here in our midsummer tragicomedy of the wild wood of our midlife in the middle of this second decade after 911, it should be that, when it comes to our appraisal of Muslims, we should apply Hesperado's Rule:  always err on the side of assuming the worst.

And that wasn't the only asymptotic spasm Hugh had that day (maybe he was having a bad hair day):

I don’t know how those who are “moderate Muslims” deal with the disconnect: that is, they know perfectly well to what extent the members of the Islamic State are merely putting into practice the teachings and texts of Islam without any moderating force, and yet they have to deny this, have to keep saying, not only to Infidels but to themselves, that this is “not the real Islam.”

Here he is being way too generous with the seemingly moderate Muslims, almost as though he were reaching for a way to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is the precise opposite of the inclination we should cultivate -- given, that is, the aforementioned bloody mountain on fire of data about Muslims which we know (or should know, by now).

If the only definition we have of the dangerous Muslim is the violent jihadist (and the stealth jihadist who is supposed to know their Islam full well and who is thus pursuing that stealth jihad in tandem with the violent jihadist), we will be at a loss to explain all the Muslims Who Seem to Just Wanna Have a Sandwich -- without simply giving them the benefit of the doubt and effectively functionally assuming they are just like anyone else (categorized under various mutations and permutations, like the famous rose, of the Moderate Muslim By Another Name Who Stinks Just the Same).

Hesperado's Rule of Reverse Engineering:

At any rate, the proper methodology the Counter-Jihad should apply whenever we encounter Muslims who aren’t exploding (or stabbing or shooting or beheading -- or lying about the exploding, stabbing, shooting and beheading) -- is not to assume the best about them (that there must redeeming reasons for that lack of conspicuous extremism).  Rather, we should begin with the axiom that Muslims -- any and all Muslims -- are nefariously fanatical (which = normatively fanatical -- a fanaticism informed by the supremacist expansionism encoded and enculturated in Islam, the fanaticism that endangers us all in myriad ways, overtly in violence or covertly in taqiyya stealth).  Then, from there, it behooves us to reverse engineer an explanation for why any number of them seem to be un-fanatical and un-extremist -- i.e., effectively un-Islamic -- for stealthy Islamic motives.

Thus, to pick one example of thousands we could pluck from a fez: When we encounter a seemingly moderate and reformist Muslim like the Tunisian President Béji Caïd Essebsi, who has made a point of distancing himself from the “Salafists” among the Ennahda party that has been trying to dominate the Arab-Sprung “Jasmine Revolution” of Tunisia, who doesn’t sport a zebibah on his forehead, and who in the wake of the most recent Tunisian jihad attack (there have been others, just as calamitous, in recent history) claimed that “Islam is not Islamism” (where the latter is bad, the former made of sugar & jasmine and everything nice) -- we should not glibly assume Essebsi really is a reformist moderate; we should rather figure out ways to explain why he is behaving and speaking as though he were a reformist moderate, given our presumption, cultivating a ruthlessly rational prejudice, that he obviously must know damn well that “Islamism” is Islam and that there is no “reform” or “moderation” that would not utterly destroy that putrid welter of toxic waste otherwise known as Islam.

Afterword:

By the way, for those whose asymptotic lenses prevent them from seeing clearly, the interpretation of the data I am objecting to implied in Hugh Fitzgerald's locutions (viz., that any time we see data that ostensibly shows Muslims seemingly watering down their Islam, we must take that at face value as genuine -- i.e., certain Muslims really were/are watering down their Islam for reasons X, Y, and/or Z; etc.) -- is itself an engineering of the data. 

Given everything we know (or should know, by now) about Muslims and their Islam -- including stealth jihad, taqiyya, and the False Moderate (not to mention the additional little details such as their perennial imperative and blueprint to conquer us, destroy our societies, and mass-murder those among us who resist; their fanatical resolve to do so; and their fanatically psychotic hatred of us), it thus behooves us to reverse-engineer the PC MC paradigm.   

By the latter term I refer to that disastrous template/framework by which (among a litany of grievous fallacies) we as modern Westerners feel obliged to assume that we must give Muslims the benefit of the doubt.  The PC MC Weltanschauung (if that is not too lofty a word to use for a current fashion of thought, endowing it with more substance than it deserves to be credited with) survives in between the cracks and floorboards of the Counter-Jihad in the form of the more decaffeinated (and sweetened with Sweet'N Low) flavor I call "asymptotic" (thanks to Hugh Fitzgerald for unintentionally -- and likely grudgingly if at all -- giving me the idea).

Further Reading:

Realislamik