The "Better Cop" Muslims aren't really trying to fool the Western Mainstream; their target is the Counter-Jihad.
As activist Muslims must have realized years ago, the Western Mainstream is relatively easy to fool, since, as Useful Idiots, they are so anxious to please Muslims. Indeed, often Muslims don't even need to lift a little finger, for PC MCs, unwittingly and witlessly, do most of their pro-Islam propaganda for them.
The Counter-Jihad, however, presents more of a challenge. And since it has shown signs -- albeit still glacial -- of growing, indicating a slow -- albeit achingly slow -- tectonic shift of the West wising up to Islam, many Muslims apparently have realized they better try to infiltrate it in order to subvert it. Just in case.
And while the standard-issue, garden-variety "Good Cop" Muslim has proven to be perfectly workable to fool the Western Mainstream most of the time (since merely repeating such mantras as that "Islam is peace" and "most Muslims are nice people and believe in democracy" work like a charm to fool the anxious-to-please Western Mainstream), obviously the Counter-Jihad isn't going to fall for that.
So, today's essay speculatively probes the question, how would a Muslim taqiyyist up his game and become a "Better Cop" -- a better used car salesman of the monstrous Lemon of Islam, with a spiffier suit and a snazzier tie and an oilier sales pitch -- in order to sell that disastrously toxic & dangerous heap to a consumer who should know better?
The first answer is that those in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM) are not, as most of them seem to imagine themselves, immune from the wiles of taqiyya -- it just takes cleverer taqiyya to get into their pants, so to speak. And the reason for this is that most in the CJM are not, as they seem to imagine themselves, perfectly immune from PC MC. People in the Counter-Jihad didn't come from Neptune; they grew out of the same cultural soil as the rest of their Westerners around them, the vast majority of whom are PC MC in varying degrees because PC MC is just that dominantly fashionable as a worldview throughout the West. It stands to reason, then, that a number of Counter-Jihadists would have retained at least traces of PC MC (a phenomenon I have analyzed before as "asymptotic").
The dynamic is probably as close to what elementary logic would dictate: The higher the degree of PC MC in the heart & mind of the Counter-Jihadist (i.e., the more asymptotic he is), the more likely he'll be vulnerable to the soft-soaping bull of the Better Cop.
However, the Better Cop's job isn't done yet; he's not going to win over a Counter-Jihadist simply by standing there and smiling. He does at least have to go through the motions of some sales pitch.
And what does that sales pitch entail?
First, he has to go farther than his "Good Cop" brothers & sisters -- he has to actually criticize Islam, to show he's a cut above the Mohammedan norm. He has to "feel our pain" about all the problems that Islam has been causing the world. For you see, a Counter-Jihadist is not going to fall for the ordinary TMOE meme (the meme that claims that the violent problems perpetrated by various Muslims around the world are due only to a Tiny Minority of Extremists whose motives & inspiration have nothing to do with the normative Islam of the vast majority of Muslims out there who just wanna have a pita sandwich).
So the Better Cop has to take the bull by the horns (or the camel by the ears) and go after Islam itself -- in effect, to concede that, yes, there are elements of Islam that are motivating and inspiring terrorism around the world, in the form of "Wahhabist" and "Salafist" "extremism".
Hidden in that seemingly refreshing concession, however, are two clever ploys:
1) Seeming to be anti-Islam, but really protecting Islam.
A subtle sleight-of-hand whereby the Better Cop lures his gull with the "big print giveth, and the small print taketh away". I.e., with one hand, so to speak, he gives the appearance of criticizing Islam itself, while with the other hand he protects Islam by contrasting it with "Wahhabist" and "Salafist" "extremism" which is supposedly not what mainstream Islam is all about. The better the Better Cop is at his parlor trick, the more he is able to juggle this equivocation -- with slick rhetoric making his audience think he's making deep cuts of criticism into Islam itself, while at the same time magnifying the influence and power of the Tiny Minority of Extremists who are inspired by Islam, but yet still aren't practicing "true" Islam. In a sense, what is really going on is that the Better Cop is selling the same TMOE meme as are the Good Cops, only the "MOE" (Minority of Extremists) may be granted grudgingly to be larger than "Tiny".
2) Making sure to protect the (vast?) majority of Muslims from (too much) criticism.
One way the Better Cop does this is by carefully focusing all our criticism on the Islam of the Extremists, with subtle locutions calculated to give the impression that it's not "true" Islam. Although they won't bluntly say, as Good Cops do, that the terrorists are only "hijacking" and "twisting" Islam, their logic leads to that conclusion. The other way is by another feat of equivocation, whereby the Minority of Extremists vacillates from being so small, it's just a marginal problem which all societies have -- to being described in terms that make it seem like a big problem indeed, so as to foster the optical illusion of being tantamount to a description of Islam itself. When the Better Cop is talented, as Maajid Nawaz is, for example, he can go back and forth with ease like an acrobat, all the while telegraphing with subtle cues that this does not reflect on "most Muslims".
One thing the Better Cops never do is talk much, if at all, about the problem of taqiyya; though I wouldn't put it past the defter ones to "get out in front of that one" too, by "owning" the problem in the full light of their critique -- then perhaps deflecting from the devastating implications of it (namely, that one cannot trust any Muslim at all) by trying to make it sound like "we" can "usually" detect taqiyya if "we" have educated ourselves enough in the tactics of the "Salafists". Again, on the one hand rhetorically magnifying the problem in order to assure the listener that he, the Better Cop, appreciates the full gravity of the situation; while on the other hand concluding with a facile solution to it that carefully avoids the aforementioned devastating implication.
Most of all -- and this is something that dawned on me when I read and watched the Sam Harris / Maajid Nawaz collaboration -- the Better Cop offers us Counter-Jihadists a way out of the horrible dilemma which our growing knowledge of the horror of Islam has put us in: Over the increasingly alarming post-911 years, we are slowly realizing that the problem is Islam itself and all Muslims, but because of residues of PC MC in his heart & mind, he's too afraid to really think that thought crime through. Along comes the Better Cop to help him out of this quandary. Through his understanding rhetoric that feels our pain, he soothes us into relaxing into the prospect that here, in the flesh, we see a real reformer Muslim (or at least the viable possibility of one). Then when the Better Cop throws in plenty of secular Western mannerisms and phrases, and cracks a few casual jokes (even a couple of "groaners" to show us how human he is), we feel deep down an enormous relief to have found a Muslim who veritably personifies the Moderate Muslim we had been, all along, hoping against hope existed somewhere (even if long ago we had given up on that term in our bitterly jaded cynicism). Now we can be anti-Islam and at the same time be friends with a personable Muslim -- and likely many more where he came from --- who agrees with us and likes us! For, there must be many more Muslims like him out there in the wide world -- after all, he tells us so, and he wouldn't lie to us, would he...?
Further Reading:
Essays on the Better Cops
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