It must be true; therefore it is.

Concerning my previous essay on pseudo-reformer Zuhdi Jasser, a reader "30donkeys" wrote:

Thank you for taking the time to expose the insufferable Zuhdi Jasser.

It took a long time indeed.  When I first thought I'd write a piece on that Frank Gaffney interview with Jasser, I thought I could dash it off in one sitting.  As I rolled up my shirtsleeves to delve in, however, it soon became apparent that Jasser's tissue of sophistry -- even the one small example of it I had selected from a longer interview -- would require a diagnostic analysis that attends to the multitude of fallacies, red herrings, and subtle half-truths of which his tortuously specious apologetics of Islam reeks, and with which it is tediously riddled.

This brings up an interesting subtopic in the realm of ideological warfare, and one of the key tactics used by both stealth jihadists and by the Soviet Communists during their long war of subversion against America and the West -- namely, the tactic of generating such a complex tissue of distortions & disinformation (practically inextricable from its webs of half-truths), that any intelligent attempt to expose it is forced to match its jungle of details with an even greater welter of complexity, inevitably causing the eyes & ears of most audiences to glaze over.  The only way to cut through this would be for the lovers of truth to resort to low-brow demagoguery, an unfortunate act of desperation sure to attract those doing the right thing only half-assedly (at best), and for the wrong reason.

I opted for the intelligent mode of response, spending hours weaving together my critical analysis of Jasser's performance in meticulous detail (my essay was 4,582 words total).  In the light of our likely doom, however, it amounts to a hill of beans, compared with the mountain ranges of data (and oceans of dots screaming to be connected) about the global revival of Islam in the 21st century abounding all around us, which our dear old West continues to ignore to its peril.

I wrote above of Jasser's "specious apologetics" and note that specious according to Noah Webster (PBUH) means "seemingly plausible but actually fallacious" as well as "deceptively attractive".  Well, Jasser's sophistry may be deceptively attractive to gullible naïfs like Frank Gaffney, but to those of us who can see the nose on our face, it's lipstick on a vicious jackal.

Indeed, to summon another old fable, Gaffney's performance with his Muslim friend -- "whose intelligence, whose courage, whose tenacity, and whose leadership has meant more to me personally" -- amounts to an anxiously earnest, almost desperately willful entreaty to himself (and by extension, to the rest of us Westerners) to convince himself (and us) that when he gazes at the Emperor strutting about buck naked with his wee willie hanging out in full view, he is seeing the Emperor completely attired in his splendid royal garb.