Taking the Temperature of the Counter-Jihad: 10th (and final) installment

The Counter-Jihad is ailing.  That's what Dr. Hesperado concludes, soberly, after sticking a cold thermometer up where the crescent moon don't shine.

As I indicated in a recent post, my series wasn't quite finished, and after part 9, I left it on a back burner for months.

Percolating in the back of my mind was a restless sense that I hadn't quite tied a neat bow on that series; that something more needed to be said.

I'm afraid I still don't know exactly what that "something more" is.  I'll forge ahead and proceed with what I think is a broad view of the "temperature" (or, rather, the climate) of the Counter-Jihad, and perhaps in doing so, what I had wanted to say will unfold.

In a nutshell, the overarching problem is three-fold:  a lack of organization, a lack of a center, and a sense of frustrating impotence.

Taking these three out of order, the lack of a center means a lack of a coherent, unifying platform drafted by a reasonable consensus of the membership.

And that leads us to the fact that the Counter-Jihad remains disorganized.  There seems to be no unifying consensus to the Counter-Jihad (although many in it seem to feel that just being anti-Islam in a vaguely generalized way is enough, and they even look askance at anyone who dares to raise the question I raise here).

One major reason why such a consensus is lacking is that by and large, the Counter-Jihad seems divided into three ragged factions:

1) the Softies

2) the Real Problemers

3) the Couch Potatoes (or Armchair Counter-Jihadists).

Let us look more closely at each of these types:

Our West is not anywhere near abandoning the unrealistic hope in Muslim "reform" as a way to help solve the horrid problem Islam is causing -- that is, when they're not doing their utmost to deny there's even a problem at all.  We are nowhere near beginning to gird ourselves for the grim, brute fact of the uniquely fanatical and violently supremacist nature of this inveterate enemy (when it is not mendaciously pretending to be assimilable to the modern world). Naturally, I think we need to get to that point; but we're not going to get there -- that is, in time to prevent or at least minimize horrific casualties on our side -- if even our influential (albeit unofficial) leaders of our already small and beleaguered (and ill-organized) Counter-Jihad Movement are driving our vehicle in the opposite direction, at least insofar as they continue to reinforce the notion that only Islam is the problem, not Muslims.  And often there is incoherent prevarication even on the Islam part (as, for example, Robert Spencer has many times asseverated that he is "not anti-Islam").

This problem of leadership is exacerbated by a significant demographic of "civilians" in the Counter-Jihad who more or less have this soft spot in their heart for innumerable Muslims they cannot bear to suspect of being...   followers of Islam -- the Islam they (the Softies) otherwise spend all their time condemning.

I.e., the Counter-Jihad should function as a goad & gadfly, to try to pressure & persuade our laggard Mainstream-in-Denial to wake up to the magnitude of this metastasizing problem.  Instead, the Softy Wing with its rhetoric tends to reinforce the mainstream paradigm -- not unparadoxically, to be sure; but do we really have the luxury of time to experiment like this?

Meanwhile, the Real Problemers continue to exploit the lack of a vetting process in the "Big Tent", thereby fostering mixed messages that include an unhealthy sense of alienation from the West at times verging on conspiracy theory.

The Couch Potatoes are the least harmful lot, if only because of their passivity; which, needless to add, is a double-edged noodle.  They need some direction, but their fellow Counter-Jihadists, and the unofficial leadership, aren't really providing any, other than a vague climate of inspiration that doesn't seem to be going anywhere as we sit back, feeling helpless on this Titanic course on which our West continues blithely to float adrift.

In short, the Counter-Jihad can't do its primary job (serving as the spearhead of sociopolitical change) as optimally as it should and could, if it continues to be beset by problems of disorganization and lack of a clear vision.

In lieu of what it should be doing, the Counter-Jihad basically straggles along flinging heaps of Too Much Information left and right like a Zamboni machine flings crushed ice, or before it like a bulldozer piles fresh hills of dirt amounting to veritable mountains of horrifying data, in hopes that the mere quantity of data, shoveled and dumped over time, will somehow have the qualitative effect of changing minds. 

It's hard to say (putting it mildly) if this rudderless "strategy" has been working.  A nucleus of people around the world does seem to be slowly growing in size; but so incrementally, one cannot say with confidence whether there is sufficient progress, or even any progress at all.  One does get the sense that the West is sort of floating in a state of Denial, in the eerie calm during an eye of a hurricane, hoping Muslims won't strike worse than 911, and apparently ill-prepared if they do so.  And the Counter-Jihad, as canaries in the coalmine, sense this more acutely.  And in their frustration & impotence at the dereliction of civic duty of their own West, they cannot help but feel there lurks & looms the foreboding of the eventuality that we won't really rouse ourselves from our pleasantly sleepwalking PC MC until after a series of horrific attacks on our soil, not just in America but also throughout various parts of the West.

We, the Counter-Jihad would like to avert such a protracted train wreck of a catastrophe, of course; but we remain too confused, it seems -- both in strategy and ideology -- to do much about it.

What to do about it?

Well, a summit meeting of the entire Counter-Jihad (with online input in real time from the "civilians" of the movement) would be a logical first step -- if only anyone in it gave a damn about this most exigent aspect of the problem.