Slip-slidin' along...

Since I had my depiphany, I haven't necessarily altered my style (though I have teetered on the edge of giving up the blog altogether): what I used to note in the spirit of constructive criticism now my gimlet eye, nearly bruised shut from jaded disappointment, sees as yet another of the 1,001 signs of the Decline and Fall of the West.

So, for example, take one of the up-and-coming Better Cops, Asra Nomani.  We see Bill Maher, the popular Leftist pundit-cum-comedian who has over the last few years become more and more anti-Islamish, positively gushing over Nomani.  Then as I was listening to an increasingly annoying podcast by Sam Harris (“Ask My Anything #2” -- where had I drunk a shot of whiskey every time he said the word “Islamist” I’d have been unconscious before the podcast ended), my intelligence was assaulted & insulted when, in the context of shining his critical light on Good Cop Dalia Mogahed, Sam lets slide this glibly sincere drivel:

“I just happened to have seen [Mogahed] on Meet The Press a few days before, sitting beside my friend, Asra Nomani, the eminently rational journalist and Muslim reformer.”

But Sam’s critical faculties are in fine fiddle when he’s exercized over Mogahed’s transparent Good Cop routine:

“And more or less every word out of Mogahed’s mouth was again a lie or a half-truth that seemed calculated to deceive a secular audience.  She was saying things like ‘the members of ISIS aren’t religious’ and that ‘they have no theological or popular support’ and ‘there is no correlation between being a religious Muslim and being a jihadist’ -- in fact, the correlation is negative, according to Mogahed; you're more likely to be a jihadist if you’re not a devout Muslim.”  And Sam concludes, sternly:  “These statements are completely dishonest.”

Sam adds that he did some digging on Mogahed, and found that apparently she had Muslim Brotherhood connections, etc.

As a Better Cop by contrast, Asra Nomani feels our pain and talks about the pathology of Islam -- and so apparently Sam has nothing to ask her for explanation (you know, little things like why she admires Mohammed as the best model for all conduct -- Mohammed, a deranged lunatic warlord who preached and practiced violence as unhinged as any that ISIS does); since he’s already concluded, without telling us a good reason why, that she is an “eminently rational... Muslim reformer.”

Sam Harris isn’t the only Counter-Jihadish analyst uncritically smitten by Nomani.  As we alluded above, we also have for instance this conversation with Bill Maher, where she slips in very subtly such unctuous correctives as:

“...where did extremism get born? It was born in Saudi Arabia... It was born out of this theology of Islam that we don’t want to accept.”

And of course Bill Maher is too incompetent to catch this sly kitman deception. Which theology of Islam?  Not the one of Muhammad?  Not the one which for centuries, long before Saudi Arabia was born, under various Caliphates rampaged around like ISIS?  The Islam she herself believes in?  No?  Why not?  On what basis does she distinguish her Islam from that of Saudi Arabia -- and from that of Pakistan, her native land, which she admits later in the conversation has the same sharia which ISIS has, and which made the sex she had out of wedlock with her boyfriend long ago a “crime”...?  And so forth.  Questions which, naturally, Maher is too busy coddling her with softballs to think of asking her.

Speaking of her “crime” of fornication, she makes sure to tell Maher -- and his millions of viewers -- that her mother took her “patriarchal” father out to dinner (in some American restaurant) in order to tell him about her “crime” and that later, Asra received an email in which her father forgave her, using Islamic language about Allah being “merciful”.  She then immediately connects this benign Islam of her parents with her ability to grow up and become a Muslim-American journalist and a friend of Daniel Pearl (whom pointedly she reminds us was a Jew, another no-no under Sharia).

Then, when Nomani was asked about the by now infamous Trump proposal (for a moratorium on all Muslim immigration), on the Bloomberg News show “With All Due Respect”, she adroitly evaded the question’s main substance, and instead shifted the focus to Trump’s business dealings with the Saudi and UAE governments.  While continuing to talk about the problem of business investments (with an explicit reference to Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s) in those governments, she frames the problem as an “existential threat of Islamist extremism” -- adding that “this ideology did come out of these countries, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, causing this crisis today.”  Oh, silly me; I thought it was spawned along with her sainted Mohammed...

On this same show, when asked how the “Muslim community” in America feels about Trump’s moratorium, Nomani slyly says that certain Muslim “lobbies” exploit this kind of rhetoric in order to fuel the fire of claims that America is inhospitable to Muslims -- which she hastens to point out is not true, that she has felt welcome in America, blah blah blah.  Thus adroitly, by arraying herself in opposition to the Muslim groups who provoke accusations of Islamophobia, she is directly massaging and supporting the idea of a Muslim presence in America which is benign, like her -- “I came as a Muslim immigrant myself at the age of 4, grew up in West Virginia...”-- and on the side of the Counter-Jihad and thus daringly reformist.  “You see?” she and Maajid Nawaz would say to the Counter-Jihad, “We Muslim Reformers are on your side, taking shots from the same defenders of ‘Islamist extremism’ who routinely attack you too...!”  Indeed, Nawaz said as much in his long Conversation with Sam Harris following on the heels of their book.

In this context, she takes the opportunity to plug a “band of brethren and sisters” she recently came together with in Washington, D.C., called the “Muslim Reform Movement”:

“Look, we’ve had a problem.  Donald Trump is creating such a hysteria, because we’ve had a failure to actually deal effectively with this issue of extremism inside of our Muslim community, and we are Muslims who want to own up to the problem, but we also want cooperation and help from the companies and the government policy makers that are sadly asleep at the wheel on many of these issues.

“...the ways that extremist interpretation, bred in the mosques in Pakistan and Karachi and south Punjab indoctrinated these young men to then one day take Danny [Daniel Pearl] from the village restaurant [and eventually behead him]... we lost our friend to the same ideology now 13 years later that confronts our country, and I thought about Danny as I was sitting here waiting to start this conversation, and I thought, what would Danny want me to be able to say to people, and I think it’s really simply, ‘Wake up, stop with the political correctness, deal honestly and sincerely with this problem...’  The Pakistani police realized that there is an interpretation of Islam that is taking these young men and turning them into criminals.  We have to be very clear and honest about it.  In this movement that we have created, we are explicitly calling out the Islamist extremist interpretation, and this is called Salafism in the history of Islamic thought -- Saudi Arabia, Qatar are the greatest incubators of this theology.  Khaled Sheikh Muhammad, the man that takes credit for killing our friend Danny, was indoctrinated by that same ideology, those two young people in California -- same ideology -- and yet we still can’t call it by the name that it should be called... call it the ‘Islamist ideology’ that it is and come up with effective strategies so that we can come to a middle path and come up with reasonable solutions and not these extreme ideas...”

Given the entire package Nomani is carefully wrapping here with brightly pleasing reformist string and a sincerely moderate bow, these vague platitudes about “effective strategies,” “a middle path,” and “reasonable solutions” -- not “extreme ideas” like Trump’s moratorium -- obviously entail the fait accompli modus vivendi of more and more innumerable millions of nice Muslims like her inside the West in the coming decades whom we must just learn to live with -- “We're here, get used to it”.

This would be fine and only mildly problematic, were there not looming ahead in the decades of this 21st century the darkening, lightning-laden clouds of a metastasizing revival of Islamic jihad and the shitstorms of terrorism and civil unrest it portends.