"It’s long past time to stop that kind of kowtowing. Those of us who are defending human rights against jihad terror and Sharia oppression have nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of, and must not accept the enemy characterization of us, as that characterization itself is just a weapon in their arsenal and an attempt to clear away opposition to jihad and Sharia."
Those are the fearless words of Robert Spencer, in a recent posting relaying a report from the webzine The Rebel on how Trump actually linked to a Jihad Watch report on Facebook -- something no other major American politician would dare to do.
The irony comes in where, if the reader notices carefully, Spencer is very meticulously avoiding the M word and the I word ("Muslim" and "Islam"). Spencer is not boldly proclaiming how the West needs to wake up to honestly voice its opposition to Islam, or opposition to Muslims -- but rather to "jihad and Sharia". It becomes doubly ironic when Spencer is executing this gingerly tapdance with Ginger Rogers in the very same context in which he is calling for us to boldly cast off our politically correct shackles which inhibit us from a bold stance on this issue.
At this point, when I have brought this up, various CJMers (those who toe the Counter Jihad Mainstream line like dutiful sheep) will try to save Spencer's face by arguing that, surely, Spencer's locution that avoids the M & I words is to be taken as metonymy for Islam anyway. That argument can be dispatched summarily by simply adducing the evidence from Spencer's own mouth when he has asseverated, "I am not 'anti-Islam' " and "I am not 'anti-Muslim' " (and then proceeded to add insult to injury by getting embroiled in prickly argumentation with sincere Jihad Watch readers in Jihad Watch comments fields who were trying to show him how his asseverations were untenable).
The other justification for this singularly un-bold tap-dancing brought up by CJMers is the same one some of them used to bring up to salvage George Bush's aggrieving pronouncements that "Islam is a great religion of peace" and that the vast majority of Muslims are "moms and pops like the rest of us" -- namely, that "Oh, you see, he doesn't really mean it -- he just has to put it that way or else he would be demonized." At least two things wrong with this argument: First, it exposes the searing irony of Spencer's frequent calls for us to bravely and boldly repudiate the politically correct inhibitions which our Western mainstream imposes on us whenever we dare to criticize Islam -- if the reader will recall the Spencer quote I opened with above:
"It’s long past time to stop that kind of kowtowing. Those of us who are defending human rights against jihad terror and Sharia oppression have nothing to feel guilty about or ashamed of, and must not accept the enemy characterization of us, as that characterization itself is just a weapon in their arsenal and an attempt to clear away opposition to jihad and Sharia."
And secondly, the argument fails because Spencer is already demonized (hence the titles of my two essays, "Damned if you do..." and "Damned if you don't...").
Not only this, but the report from the decidedly conservative and anti-Mainstream webzine, The Rebel (Ezra Levant and Gavin McInnes are among its contributors) which Spencer relayed itself -- twice -- uses the unacceptable locution "radical Islam":
“Donald Trump links to JihadWatch story on Facebook proving he takes the threat of radical Islam seriously" runs their breathlessly bold headline, and in the text of the report:
“ Any possibility that Trump doesn’t take radical Islam seriously has been voided."
This raises the distinct possibility that The Rebel does not take Islam seriously.
It reminds me of a recent posting I put up just last June (The two Islams meme), where I reported that Jihad Watch reader "Alarmed Pig Farmer" (one of the precious few there who seems to really get the problem) responded to a similar incoherency by the CJMer Brigitte Gabriel. First quoting Gabriel --
… speaking about the elephant in the room, and it is radical Islam.
Alarmed Pig Farmer aptly commented:
No it ain’t. It’s Islam. The use of the adjective radical, apparently mandatory even for those who are knowledgeable and correct on Islam, will one day be proved a key to Sharia taking over the free world. The truth about Islam has to be publicly confronted sooner or later, so why not now?
When someone can show me how Islam is moderate and thus is a thing that can be radicalized, then I’ll accept the adjective radical.
Note the searing irony of Brigitte Gabriel's statement: She's boldly calling for us to point out the "elephant in the room" -- but then we find out she's not even pointing to the damned elephant! There is no such animal as "radical Islam". There is only Islam.
This in turn reminds me of the formulation of the slyly deceptive Muslim "reformer" Maajid Nawaz, which I wrote about in September of 2015 (Does not compute: The Sam Harris/Maajid Nawaz "Conversation"), where Nawaz slyly alludes to the "Voldemort effect" from the Lord of the Rings:
"Now, I took that.. Voldemort effect, of being too scared, too petrified, to name the problem, when actually it's staring you in the face -- is what has happened with Islamist extremism! And the problem is that we have been unable to name the problem!"
With one hand, Nawaz is scolding the West for being too scared to "name the problem" and thus he earns Counter-Jihad street cred for pointing this out, while with the other hand he does his sleight-of-jihad, by boldly naming the problem as "Islamist extremism" -- thus precisely protecting Islam from our suspicion, criticism & condemnation; all of which are relocated onto this artificial construct "Islamist extremism" that truncates the problem. I don't think Brigitte Gabriel has the sinister, ulterior motive of Maajid Nawaz; being Middle Eastern Christian (Lebanese), we can chalk up her incoherence to latent reflexes of dhimmitude deep in her subconscious exerting themselves perhaps without her fully being aware of it, in locutions that end up protecting the Islam that has oppressed and massacred and terrorized her people for centuries.
But what's the excuse of Spencer and The Rebel...?
