An important report appeared on Jihad Watch the other day: a former Homeland official, Philip Haney, gave an exclusive interview with Breitbart news, in which he said a few soberingly interesting (but to me, unsurprising things) -- the most important of which was his conviction, after years of study of the problem of Islamic terrorism, that the notion of the “self-radicalization” of these supposed “lone wolves” that keep popping up in various places throughout the West is a myth. As Haney put it:
“As though nobody knew anything – that’s completely preposterous,” he said. “If you know anything about the Islamic worldview, family and community is ultimately central to everything they do. The concept of operating alone is anathema to the Islamic worldview. They just don’t do it.”
More specifically, he said:
I had my own superiors making these kind of statements incessantly. When I was sitting there with evidence, for example, about the Ft. Pierce mosque -- not only was there another person that blew himself up in Syria, but there’s an individual who is teaching a radicalization course who is on early release for weapons charges and tax fraud. And then his own FATHER is vice-president of the mosque. [caps for emphasis in original as italics]
One “irony” from my title is that Haney himself used the term “radicalization” matter-of-factly -- though evidently it's because he probably believes that the Muslim world may be divided up into “radicalized” and “non-radicalized”. We may (and should) fault him for this naivete; but that's another matter, for another day. His other point, however, is useful. One thing about the nature of the problem of Mohammedanism that the West hasn't learned (or has forgotten and needs to remember) is how assiduously Muslims are able to network. I maintain that this is a unique feature of Islam: that, amid its ostensible “diversity”, it is strangely coordinated along intricate grapevines, so to speak; much like a vast army of ants (indeed, of army ants -- or jihad ants). For Westerners ever unwilling, due to degrees of the PC MC neurosis in their system, to “paint Muslims with a broad brush”, the various features of Islam's ostensible diversity serves to distract them from thinking the thought of Mohammedan unity. One of the aspects of its uniqueness, indeed, is its ability to be unified while simultaneously appearing as complex as a jungle and riddled & rife with internal cracks, fault lines, and internecine hostilities.
A couple of essays of mine have touched on this (though it's a field that sorely needs more in-depth research -- which, if there were an Anti-Islam Movement, might get underway before Muslims destroy us... but I digress...). Readers might wish to consult my essays Islam Redivivus and Western Colonialism as well as The Spider and the Starfish.
So Philip Haney has done the Counter-Jihad a great service; which, however, I don't expect the Counter-Jihad will absorb rationally by extending its logical consequences & conclusion anytime soon (and since it won't, how do we expect the broader Western Mainstream to do it...?).
The “irony of ironies” of my title that caught my eye was more a post by long-time Jihad Watch reader and commenter, one “dumbledoresarmy” (my readers may recall she is a passively countenancing member of the “Rabbit Pack”), with whom I've had unpleasant run-ins before (she has out of the blue upbraided me a few times over the years in various Jihad Watch comments threads for my supposed “bigotry” and “extremism” (the sneer quotes reflect my sneering, not verbatim quotes of terms she necessarily used). These run-ins clued me in to the evident asymptotic tendencies she must have -- and that may well be relevant to today's “irony of ironies”. (In addition, I've written about dumbledoresarmy at least three times before on this blog or my companion blog, which readers can find by browsing this Google page.)
Now, what dumbledoresarmy did wouldn't be ironic, of course, if there weren't a half-truth involved. She began by rightly seizing upon the most important point in Haney's interview:
[QUOTE]
This is very, very important.
The most important point is the one that Mr Spencer has, rightly, put in bold.
“As though nobody knew anything – that’s completely preposterous,” he said. “If you know anything about the Islamic worldview, family and community is ultimately central to everything they do. The concept of operating alone is anathema to the Islamic worldview. They just don’t do it.”
To repeat, “The concept of operating alone is anathema to the Islamic worldview. They just don’t do it.”
[END QUOTE]
So far, so good. She begins to falter, however, by amplifying this insight with an intelligent articulation of the perspective of ex-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Where she falters is not visible; it takes awareness on the part of the reader, autodidactic in the Better Cop phenomenon:
[QUOTE]
This meshes with something that Ayaan Hirsi Ali says in “Infidel”, when she is describing the Muslim Brotherhood revivalists who were active in the expat Muslim ‘community’ in Kenya when she was in – I think – her late teens. She herself somehow didn’t quite swallow what they were peddling, because she had been devouring western literature both classical and popular (especially, on the ‘popular’ side, sexy Mills & Boon and Harlequin romances that, subliminally, taught the significance of the individual human person and of one’s own desires and personal choices). But she understood what they were about, and with the benefit of hindsight, she reflects upon it (and upon the type of ‘culture’ and attitudes that Islam promotes and seeks to inculcate in both men and women.
[END QUOTE]
Two things should disquiet us in this otherwise fine analysis by dumbledoresarmy:
First is that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has increasingly shown signs of softening her stance on Islam (assuming she had taken a significantly harder line in years past, which is my memory) -- in at least two ways: She has been pushing the "Muslims must reform their Islam" line rather markedly (in major mainstream media, including in a featured op-ed in the Wall Street Journal); and she has become a friend and supporter of the transparent Muslim snake, the pseudo-reformer Maajid Nawaz. While she doesn't seem to have adopted his slyly Islamopologetic terminology of "Islamism" as the problem supposedly distinct from Islam --
“I see no difference between Islam and Islamism. Islam is defined as submission to the will of Allah, as it is described in the Koran. Islamism is just Islam in its most pure form. Sayyid Qutb [the thinker who inspired al Qaeda] didn’t invent anything, he just quoted the sayings of Mohammed”
-- as their mutual friend Sam Harris has with such gullible alacrity, she seems to have become uncomfortably chummy with Nawaz (the above-linked conversation between them oozes with amicable enabling). Nawaz, in having thus fooled not only Ayaan, but also Sam Harris and Douglas Murray (if not many others in the Counter-Jihad), surpasses the standard-issue, garden-variety "Good Cop" Muslims who just try to peddle their "Islam is peace" and "Islam says that the killing of one soul is worse than blah blah blah" camelshit, and weaves a cleverer, stealthier line of apparently conceding that Islam is problematic with one hand, but through a sly sleight-of-hand manipulating the conversation into a defense of Islam qua Islam.
Apropos of Ayaan's unrealistic call for Muslims to "reform" their (unreformable) Islam, she said this in the wake of the Paris attacks last September:
"There is a strain in Islam, that is political, that is inspired by the Koran and the prophet Mohammed, that is expanding all over the globe..."
And she went on to refer to a "schizophrenia in Islam" between "there was a peaceful character in Mohammed" and "a warlord, a military man, a beheader, a man who sold people into slaves" -- i.e., "his bad side".
Speaking of schizophrenia, we see it in Ayaan herself, in her anxious need to split Islam into two in order to assuage the cognitive dissonance that apparently has bedeviled her all these years since she, an ex-Muslim, became an Islam-critical activist.
Given this schizophrenia even in ex-Muslims, we need to handle their wisdom carefully, and be ever mindful of the gimlet eye on the problem -- which is our primary priority: the safety of our societies. We can appreciate Ayaan's courage and intelligence; but not when it contravenes our primary priority. And her insistence of Islamic "reform" is not in our best interest (the fact that the Western mainstream, such as the Wall Street Journal and Huffington Post, accords her a platform should be a hint as to the limitations of her usefulness).
Even worse when we consider the seemingly "reformist" Muslims, like Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Tarek Fatah, and others, whom I have dubbed "Better Cops".
This brings us to the second reason for dumbledoresarmy's irony: She invokes what she calls a "MINO" ("Muslim In Name Only", after the more well-known "RINO") which I have identified as one of the many permutations of what, as long as we're coining acronyms, we could call the "MOMBAN" ( the "Moderate Muslim By Another Name" which the Counter-Jihad uses to retain the Moderate Muslim meme without the overt stink of its mainstream associations) -- namely, one Tawfik Hamid, whom we must (if we are to survive this century as a civilization) assume, no matter how blandiloquently oily his charms are, is also a Better Cop: for we must assume that any Muslim who gets into the game of grappling with the problem of Islam is a stealth jihadist -- the only differences among them being how transparent they are relative to how cleverly they try to disguise their stealthy jihad.
Some other day I'll try to write an analysis elucidating why the Counter-Jihad should not even avail itself at all of the input from these various Better Cops who keep popping up; but for now it would embroil this already top-heavy essay here. Readers can peruse my various essays on the Better Cop thus far. I could express succinctly at least one of the most trenchant reasons: namely, that we Kuffar already know everything we need to know about why Islam is a pernicious threat to our societies -- we don't need some sly Muslim who claims to "feel our pain" help us with our war of ideas.
Conclusion:
The irony here is a Counter-Jihadist who urges us to be wary of the insidiously networking infiltration & coordination of jihadists -- but seems blind to the deeper infiltration of the Better Cops who pretend to share our alarm at the jihadists who follow the same damn Islam they do.
