The Spider and the Starfish

This is no Aesop's fable; it is Grimmer fare, and no fairy tale, this Fractured Fact (nor a straw man that has broken the camel's back)...

Stephen Coughlin, at the conclusion of his 10-part video presentation, the "Red Pill Briefings" -- during which he expatiates upon Catastrophic Failure, his Yellow-Pages-sized study of the American government's myopia to the problem of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration -- alights upon an interesting digression with a metaphor about the spider and the starfish.  Here, the West is the spider, and Islam is the starfish.  The reader will see where he's going with this by the end of the following transcript. 

Although Coughlin is not the most polished speaker, he has a personable manner and one can tell he is brimming over with relevant information from years of experience and in-depth investigation.  One can almost see him stumbling along finding the right words because his mind is just too full of vital things that need to be said at any given moment, yet he can't cram them all into a relatively brief presentation.  Nevertheless, if one sits back and relaxes, and pays attention, one will learn a lot to interest, inform, and infuriate.

Here follows the transcript of a portion of the Q&A:

How many times -- is it the first 400 times that you got fooled by this?  Where a group decides to break off from al-Nusra, or ISIS, because they want to be "moderate".  You decide to train them and give them equipment because -- now they're "moderate"!  All of a sudden they quit, and -- how could it happen...!? They all quit that group and went back to ISIS!  You see: Is this the 50th time this has happened... AGAIN...!?  It's like... so the question becomes... they... I think you [an audience member] hit ir right:  They are able to form relationships and alliances, and flip, in a way that I think is completely coherent for them....  When I say it's coherent for them, I totally acknowledge, I can track them flipping, I can predict them flipping, [but] I don't ever quite get that they flip like this!  Because, from a Western point of view, if I'm an ally of you [points to his left], I'm stabbing YOU [points to his right] in the back!  And it just seems that they... flow in a different way.  Has anyone here been to Cairo?  Okay.  You as a Westerner could never survive driving on those roads.  The way they drive is total chaos!  But they never get in an accident!  They don't!

[From the audience: "How do they do it?"]  Well, that's an interesting question; but my point is, you have to get over the fact that you may never understand that ... you can measure that they flip, but you might never understand why...  that's why it's a different culture.  By the way, I'm not making a judgement on that... I remember being in Cairo, watching the traffic go by, and if this were here, there'd be ten accidents in five minutes!  And they don't even touch each other!  How does that happen?  Three lanes in a row, ten cars...

I think there are all sorts of groups in the Islamic world, some of them brothers, some not, and they go back and forth.  A book that was popular a couple of years ago was The Spider and the Starfish, and the point of the book...  in the Western understanding, you have the head department, you have bureaus [radiating out], you have things [further out] -- and everything works on a line and block chart.  And so, you would say, "If the head of the Brotherhood is here, he must have this person here, and have that person there..."  [person in audience: "This is not the case in the Arab world..."]  It's not the case in the Arab world.  We are "spiders", they're starfish.  Each element does its thing and has its mission, but if you cut one of the pieces of the starfish off, it'll go and become a starfish... and it's ... the world's most perfect distributed information culture.  So that what you have in Islam is... if everybody stopped believing, once somebody starts reading Islamic law as it's actually designed, it can rebuild itself; it just can restructure itself.

I'm a science fiction fan -- even bad science fiction.  So I used to watch a TV show called Stargate; did anyone ever watch that show?  Well, I can't use the metaphor... but they had these transformers, and no matter how you could break them down, they could re-form into what they are....  Muslim may be completely imperfect, and any group of them may have an imperfect understanding of Islam.  But Islamic law is crystal-clear -- so much so that if you ... destroy it... they work so hard to keep you from reading Islamic law, and tell you there are many interpretations.  Now, on one level, that is not untrue, but on another level it is absolutely clear!  So I'm saying that the Muslim Brotherhood has an absolutely clear command of control, and they have total authority where they act.  Now, there may be groups out there that affiliate, and are a part, but I would say in the U.S., they're offering ... you have to know what the central core is -- and it's not a person.  Even though I would tell you... Qaradawi is the leader today; if you killed him, there are any number of people that would replace him, and never miss a beat.  [from audience:  "But in the end, they do work together for a common goal, and that's to conquer us, I'm convinced of that..."]  But I think it's also true that the minute we're gone, you're going to have... them fight with the Left, but before you have that, you'll have Wahhabis fight with the Brotherhood -- and the Brotherhood represents you know, close to a billion Muslims, and the Wahhabis represent close to a hundred million...