Better Cops

The Better Cop has been developed to improve upon the Good Cop in the Good Cop/Bad Cop ploy.

In terms of the Stealth Jihad, the "Good Mo" (Good Cop) pretends that Islam is all sugar & spice and everything nice, and that, as a Good Muslim supporting that fantasy Islam, he or she represents the norm which has nothing to do with the Tiny Minority of Extremists -- the "Bad Mos" (Bad Cops).

Just as in the Good Cop/Bad Cop game, where the two cops are working in collusion but pretending not to, the violent & hateful Muslims wreak their havoc or spout their hateful rhetoric, while the Moderate Muslims step forward to assure the anxious Infidel that Islam is "a religion of peace" and is "against terrorism" and that most Muslims are not extremists.

As Muslims have been spiralling out of control in the nearly 15 years derailing from September 11, 2001, this game has shown slight signs here and there of straining credibility.  Hence the increased need to trot out a new and improved Good Cop:  the Better Cop -- a Muslim who feels our pain, doncha know, and goes further in applying the blade of criticism for deeper cuts into the problem of Islam, knowing that the TMOE meme (Tiny Minority of Extremists) is beginning to wear thin by now (at least on the edges of the Mainstream).

It's still the same game -- but it's played to a specific audience: the warier members of the Counter-Jihad.  It's a way of infiltrating the Counter-Jihad.  Zuhdi Jasser and Maajid Nawaz are perhaps the most famous of this type (the former apparently fooling Frank Gaffney, the latter fooling Sam Harris).

Back in 2008, I wrote an essay called Stealth Taqiyya -- not necessarily a redundancy, as I explain there.  One quote in particular from that essay zeroes in like a laser to the point of today's essay:

...what I am getting at is a particular type of taqiyya that is doubly clever.
 
Contrasted with ordinary taqiyya, by which a Muslim pretends to be nice and tolerant and makes claims that Islam is nice and tolerant, the practitioner of stealth taqiyya goes further:

He begins by apparently conceding, or even going the extra mile to actually uncover, the seamy underside of Islam, its dark side. Then, deftly and cleverly, he uses his concession (or his uncovering) as a tool by which to surgically detach the dark side from Islam itself. 

Over the past couple of years, I have noticed this type pop up more and more; but, unfortunately, other than an occasional essay, I haven't kept close tabs on them enough to formulate an analysis.  The first one that came to my attention was the "reformer" Bassam Tibi who, as I recall, even enjoyed a stint as a partner of Jihad Watch, warmly embraced by Robert Spencer.  An old essay on Jihad Watch from 2006 by Wolfgang Bruno describes Tibi saying all the right things that would appeal to those desperate to believe there are Muslims who want reform:

Meanwhile, the German-Syrian scholar Bassam Tibi, a Muslim reformist, is warning the West against wishful thinking in its “dialogue” with Muslims. “The dialogue is not proceeding well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the other.”

More recently there was, for example, a Muslima named "Eilnyah" who wrote an open letter to the Great Defender of Muslims, Ben Affleck, in which she expressed the desire of herself and "those of us" for "reform" of the Unreformable Islam, and claimed that "[m]ost Muslims choose to interpret scripture in a peaceful way..."  Then there was Hamel Abdel-Samad, who wrote an open letter in Germany sort of addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which he sounds many unusual, seemingly refreshing notes sure to seduce the more suspicious among us -- such as "Whoever lives here [i.e., Germany] must take on German values!" and expressing his change of mind over years to learn to appreciate satire and humor as a way of challenging his Islamic rigidity.  And more, which one will glean from his letter.  Sounds great, doesn't it?  Only problem, he's still a Muslim, and as such he reveres Allah, Muhammad, the Koran, and Islam.  For more specifics, see my comment about him.  Then there was Muslim professor Reza Varjavand, about whom I wrote an essay back in 2014.

Hopefully, I will try to do some more concerted analysis of various representatives of this subtype in ensuing months, and will record my efforts in subsequent essays.

Today's essay features just one of many -- both the Better Cop and the gull who seems fooled by them:  Anooshe Mushtaq, a Muslima who writes commentary for various publications about the problem of Islam, and whose pics show a nice, personably secularized persona.  About her, Counter-Jihad analyst Mark Durie writes:

...it is a hopeful sign that some Muslims, such as Anooshe Mushtaq, have been willing to explore the Islamic character of the Islamic State...

And what does Anooshe say?  After a few paragraphs of the obligatory Better Cop rhetoric that apparently soothes the likes of Mark Durie as sweet taqiyya in his ears, about how dire the problem of extremism is in the Muslim world and how it finds receptive resonance among religious Muslims, she makes sure to assure the reader that:

The vast majority of Muslims, nationally and internationally, don’t support terrorist organisations or their extreme views. 

Then she follows that with the requisite equivalency-cum-tu-quoque spasm:

However, there are people in all religions who take it further than others. Radicalisation is not a new trend. With or without the internet, it has been present in all religions throughout history.

Once she has made sure to establish the Affleck Doctrine (that "the vast majority of Muslims just wanna have a sandwich"), she's back to acknowledging the metastasizing, systemic problem, nevertheless, of extremism pullulating out of the Muslim world and spilling over into our world:

...we first need to understand why some Muslims are more susceptible to radicalisation, which seems to be spreading like a plague.

Um... yeah.

Sure, Mark Durie is ostensibly correct that Anooshe directly alludes to the Religion factor (i.e., the Islam factor) in explaining the appeal of ISIS to Muslims.  That's certainly an improvement on the explanations that ignore the solidly and richly Islamic character of the ISIS ideology.  However, true to the Better Cop tactic, she's only doing that to suck the Counter-Jihad Kafir in, while with the other side of her mouth she's ready to contextualize that Religion as extremist; thus:

Islamic State follows the Wahhabi sect of Islam...  an ultra-ortho­dox sect that insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran and a literal implementation of its teachings... Strict Wahhabis believe all those who don’t practise their form of Islam are infidels and enemies.

Notice the sleight-of-hand there, implying that what Wahhabis are doing is not normative Islam, and thus distinguishing it from what inspires the "vast majority of Muslims".  Her way of explaining why this non-normative, unrepresentative "sect" of Islam is having so much broad appeal among Muslims, and why this appeal is growing by leaps and bounds, thus has to unfold into tortured rhetoric and logic -- essentially disentangling (or, rather, entangling) two convoluted entrails intertwined with each other: one putatively benign, the other a growing global cancer.

Even granted the best case scenario, her thesis begs the question why such a horridlyy thorny problem is happening at all.  The logic she (and all the TMOE Memers) assiduously avoids is that the "plague" spewing out of the Muslim world leads to the reasonable inference that there is something horribly wrong with the swamp whence it originates.  From there, a more informed investigation and appraisal of the history of Islam confirms that the source (mainstream Islam) is the reason for the outbursts and bouts (ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, Al Nusra, Sudan, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Taliban, etc. ad Islamonauseam) which we keep seeing boiling over from the global cauldron of the Muslim world undergoing a global revival.