We hardly Hugh ya...

Sans fanfare, as nonchalantly as he exited, the Masked Man of the Counter-Jihad suddenly appeared on Jihad Watch the other day, nearly five years after he disappeared, as though nothing had happened.

I speak of Hugh Fitzgerald, who wrote essays for Jihad Watch for some six years (2004-2010) until he left under mysterious circumstances (see my essay Nagging questions for further details).  At the time he left, his input had already been flagging and sparse for months, generating murmurs & rumors.  I wondered at the time if it was a mere coincidence that, after people kept asking in various comments what had happened to Hugh, since his prodigious output had slacked off something serious over a rather long period of time -- and, after I published an essay trying to tie all the threads of this ongoing mystery together (Hugh Fitzgerald: another fleeting glimmer of the hallowed interiors of the Gentlemen's Club) -- Robert Spencer then finally made a formal announcement (A Tribute to Hugh Fitzgerald); which, however, did little to allay the nagging questions which lingered (cf. supra).

Hugh's essays were known for being tours de force, waxing literary and philosophical, often brimming with a dazzling and dizzying erudition unmatched by any other writer in the Counter-Jihad.  This does not mean, as it does for the Jihad Watch Sycophants Society, that Hugh was, or is, perfect, and beyond criticism; it only means that he was, and is, impressive and extraordinary as a contributor to the Movement.

However, compared to the high-brow razzle-dazzle of his golden age (2004-2010), Hugh's few essays penned & published at Jihad Watch upon his unceremonious return have been remarkably underwhelming.  I had noticed, also, that his writing in the long Meanwhile (2010-present) at the new home he found for himself, a comfortable nook & niche at New English Review which he called "The Iconoclast" (still his home base) was a pale version of his former self that used to brim over with the cornucopic & encyclopedic breadth of a polyhistor.  For years at The Iconoclast, Hugh has been churning out news reports alluding to this, that and the other thing from the Clash of Worlds that is the concern of the Counter-Jihad, but only appending the briefest commentary to them; whereas of yore in his halcyon days, he produced staggeringly erudite masterpieces chockfull of scintillating observation, recondite knowledge, and wit as sparklingly dry as a flute of Champagne François Secondé du Sillery, Puilsieux et Verzenay.

One hopes that Hugh will begin to flex his intellectual muscles again, more and more as he settles in.  And perhaps anon he may see fit to revive his pointed allusion to the Benes Decrees as an implied recommendation for the West currently grappling with a demographic arguably far more dangerous than were the suspected Nazi-friendly Germans of Czechoslovakia of 1946 -- viz., our problem of millions of Trojan Camels who, due to our disastrous predilection to invite them in and embrace them, have settled deep within what they consider to be the Enemy Camp of the "House of War" (the Dar-al-Harb) in order to pursue their supremacist-expansionist Reverse Hijra which out-Hitlers Hitler's Lebensraum.