Know thine Enemy -- and Know thy Friend...

On a recent Jamie Glazov video, he interviews Stephen Coughlin, the prescient and mostly lucid Counter-Jihad analyst who made a big splash into the public consciousness (at least the tiny public nucleus of the Counter-Jihad) when in 2008 he was pushed out of his job at the Pentagon after Muslim Brotherhood operatives complained to the White House about his work.  His crime was that, in his capacity as a terrorism analyst for the government, he had been probing the Islamic motivations of our enemy a bit too close for comfort.

In this video, in the context of discussing Coughlin’s new book Catastrophic Failure, Glazov asks him for his thoughts in broad brush strokes concerning his take on the Problem of the Problem -- which in this context is the ongoing situation whereby Muslim Brotherhood influence has successfully infiltrated the national security concerns of the U.S. government, such that a “see no Islam” dictate has effectively become the rule of thumb in Washington (except, of course, when you want to praise Islam to the skies). 

As the interview unfolds, we see that Coughlin has taken it upon himself to use his years of expertise in the national security world of the Beltway to focus on what might be termed the “problem of the Problem of the Problem” -- specifically on how it is that our representatives in law enforcement and in the intelligence community have over the years since 911 failed abysmally in their primary obligation to protect their society.  And this abysmal dereliction of duty is caused, Coughlin says, mainly because these representatives of ours have forgotten about the dictum of the Art of War, “Know thine enemy”.  Or it’s not so much that they forgot it, but it almost seems as though they have been willfully suppressing it.

Coughlin is very persuasive in his handle on this tragicomic situation and all the data that substantiates his bleak assessment.  He has a sure grasp on the mechanism or description of the phenomenon; but he falters whenever he verges tentatively in the direction of explaining why there has come about such colossal fecklessness among our own people with regard to the problem of Islam.  In this sense, we could say that while Coughlin is quite good at “Knowing our enemy”, his grip is less sure when it comes to “Knowing our friends”. 

Back to the Glazov interview:

Glazov:  “As you write, ‘There is now a preference for this political correctness over accuracy.  But it has reached such an extent that we’re actually ignoring what the enemy… himself is saying why they’re operating.’  So the enemy is saying ‘we’re doing this because of this’ – and we’re ignoring that and listening to these… we could say Leftists and progressives, and they’re telling us what the threat is.”

Coughlin: “I think we’ve gone way beyond that, actually.  I think we’re at the point right now where you are forbidden to talk about the enemy’s explicitly stated basis of their threat doctrine, which categorically drives everything they do, to the point where know that doctrine gives you the ability the forecast future actions – which I have to tell you I’ve done flawlessly.  It’s not just that the Left is doing this, but the people they bring in to help them are people like the Muslim Brotherhood…”

One thing we notice from this brief exchange between Glazov and Coughlin is that both agree the culprits of this situation are the “Leftists”.  While Coughlin adds that of course Muslim Brotherhood influence is to blame, we know they would not enjoy the traction they do enjoy if they had no enablement from Useful Idiots on our side.  And this agreement to characterize all our Useful Idiots as “Leftists” is rather ironic, given that Coughlin goes on to name two prominent Useful Idiots, both Republicans in the Bush Administration:

Coughlin: “…in 2007, there was a shift in our war-fighting foreign policy under Secretary Condoleezza Rice, where she decided that that the ‘moderate’ Muslim Brotherhood was the counterweight to ‘radical’ al Qaeda and then operated on that; and then Secretary Chertoff in 2008 came up with this paper that flooded through the entire national security universe that with the help of these ‘moderate’ American Muslim friends – almost all of them Brothers – we could no longer use words like ‘jihad’, ‘caliphate’, ‘shariah’, ‘umma’ against an enemy that unconditionally and categorically defines themselves in those terms.” 

Glazov then goes on to note, and Coughlin confirms, that he himself was punished and after Muslim Brotherhood leadership “demanded a purge” and the Pentagon complied with that demand (Coughlin says he was named on one of the lists of people the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to be purged, a letter they wrote to the White House, “demanding that I be stopped”).

Glazov: “…imagine during the Cold War – this is the image I got from reading your book – the Cold War, and we go to the KGB to advise us on how to fight the Soviet Empire!”

Coughlin: “Yes – and the first thing the KGB tells you is, ‘there is no KGB’ and because you hired us as consultants’, and [because] it would be an international incident for them to get mad, you better do what he says – and in fact that’s exactly what has happened.”

…

Glazov: “…you write how the Muslim Brotherhood and our enemies, they already know our desire to delude ourselves.  And you write that the enemy has, quote “successfully calculated that they could win the war by convincing our national security leaders of the immorality of studying and knowing the enemy.”  So the enemy now knows that we’re afraid to know them.”

Coughlin: “Well, I think it goes beyond that.  I think they know we’re afraid to know them because in fact they’re doing the training inside to tell us it’s immoral!  I mean, it’s that bad!”

Coughlin knows that our friends don’t know our enemies, and have even dug into a position that resembles willful denial, with elaborately useful ways of bending over backwards to be helpful to our enemies.  It is willful on one level, I maintain, but not on another level -- for to be “willful”, it would have to be operating in full knowledge.  This is more a situation of twilight state in between willful and not willful -- a species of denial where the person has a dim apprehension of where such knowledge might lead him, to a place he’s too afraid to go, so he chooses to cloud his mind and obfuscate awareness before full knowledge has a chance to happen. 

This sounds like a curious state of mind.  What on earth could cause this?  This question is similar to the question posed by Robert Spencer in his editorial remarks appended to the recent case of the Muslim student who stabbed four people at his college in California.  Referring to Sheriff Warnke of the county in which the attack took place, Spencer notes that he seemed to have enough data and dots to connect to conclude that the Muslim perpetrator in question was in fact motivated by Islam, and yet he continued to tell the public that the attack had nothing to do with Islam or terrorism.  Spencer then asks:

“What is the motive of these people? ” 

The motive, I say, is to protect the vast majority of Muslims whom they anxiously think will be “tarred with a broad brush” of “bigotry” and “racism” if one shines a light on the central motivation of Islam in attacks like these -- the same Islam that in myriad cultural & psychological ways binds all those hundreds of millions of Muslims together into a cohesive cultural identity.   

This is what I discussed in a recent essay, A shift from Islam to Muslims. 

Further anxiety is added to this impulse by the perception that Muslims are an ethnic people (or a wonderful diversity, tapestry, mosaic, quilt, stir-fry of ethnic peoples) -- an ostensible fact that almost immediately triggers the PC MC hot buttons of White Guilt and the autophobia of our own uniquely white Western tendencies & proclivities toward “racism” and “bigotry”. The sort of tissue or mush of thoughts and feelings that forms this point of view has apparently affected the majority of Westerners -- on all sides of the political spectrum and throughout all subcultural and religious persuasions -- in a kind of paradigm shift of worldview over the past half century or so (with historical roots going back further, of course).

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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.

Once we get this far, we can begin to examine the behavior of this Friend: We ask ourselves, what more precisely is this Friend doing when he continues to indulge his reflex spasm to defend Islam? And why? I continue to maintain that the primary motivation afoot here is a fear of “bigotry” and “racism” (where the sneer quotes indicate an irrationally and anxiously Orwellian perversion of actual bigotry and racism -- which indeed should be eschewed by all good men and women).  This fear, in turn, wouldn’t make sense if these PC MCs who indulge this anxiety did not racialize Islam and Muslims.

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.

Knowing our friend, then, I maintain, reveals that the main thing going on with them when they persist in defending Islam is an anxiety and a semi-conscious fear -- the hand-wringing anxiety that worries about succumbing to “bigotry” and “racism”.  So in their minds, the issue shifts from Islam to Muslims -- and their overriding concern to avoid “tarring all Muslims with the same brush” -- which they fear would happen (along with “backlash” against Muslims) if we pay too much attention to the Islam that motivates the terrorists; for our friends know, even if only semi-consciously, that it would be the same Islam which unites all Muslims. 

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”.