As we mentioned above, we all know the famous dictum of the Art of War -- “Know thine enemy”. This has a mirror image, so to speak, in the terms of the dictum of a new Art of the War of Ideas: Know thy friend -- where our “friend” is our own fellow Westerners who persist in whitewashing the problem of Islam. Surely, these fellow Westerners cannot all be dastardly Leftists with horns and tails. The way some in the Counter-Jihad demonize these Leftist “friends,” they transmogrify, through their rhetoric, into veritable enemies.
When we look more closely at the matter (and when we get out once in a while) we see that it seems that most of the Westerners who persist in whitewashing Islam are indeed “decent moms and pops like the rest of us” -- another mirror image. If cogent and if true, this is hopeful, for that means that a critical mass of the West is amenable to persuasion on this matter over time, even if they currently seem rather stubborn in their pleasantly deluded shibboleths of multiculturalism.
Over the years, I have noticed that the best the Counter-Jihadists can come up with to refute this primary tendency is to repeat the mantra “Islam is not a race” (often couched as a rhetorical question, “What race is Islam again…?”). The mantra by itself is good enough; but it evidently isn’t up to the task of grappling with a neurosis as deeply entrenched as PC MC is. It also glosses over the fact that whenever a person’s attention is adverted to Muslims in nearly any context, they indeed see people who “look ethnic” -- a repeated experience which even if only subliminally reinforces the racialization of the issue in which PC MCs routinely indulge.
Our friends thus are not demons with horns and a tail; they are relatively sincere, decent, intelligent fellow Westerners who really think they are doing the right thing by protecting Muslims from “bigotry” and “racism”.