Hugh Fitzgerald, a solid member of the Jihad Watch team (after a long hiccup) whose wonderfully verbose and erudite essays of yore were numerous and popular, and as such, a solid representative of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, penned an essay he titled thus:
"A Tunisian moderate remains, alas, a Defender of the Faith".
That's another reason why Hugh's a solid representative of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream: He, like it, still believes in the Rose By Another Name That Stinks the Same (i.e., the Moderate Muslim nuanced, not eliminated, by his analysis).
The first question that comes to mind from Hugh's title above is: Are you surprised? Evidently, he is. Let us read further.
After quoting the article reporting this --
The Tunisian businesswoman, who co-founded the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet which won the 2015 peace prize, said Muslims who practice their faith calmly and respectfully are “victims of a semantic problem” when “terrorists” are described as “Islamic terrorists.”
Hugh editorializes:
"In other words, don’t ever describe terrorism as “Islamic terrorism,” because that will make the good, moderate, Muslims, the ones who do not engage in or support terrorism, feel bad, make them the real victims. And who knows what they might do in response?"
This is catty and disingenuous, given that Hugh himself does not promote zero tolerance of all Muslims. And what the non-terrorist Muslims might do in response is not the only concern in the Mainstream: What we might do to them hangs just as ominously in their PC-MC-haunted minds.
Hugh then embarks on a crash course of Tunisian history:
"In 2015, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to four Tunisian groups that had been engaged in a “national dialogue” to head off violence between the secularists and the Islamists in Tunisia. The reason such an effort succeeded in Tunisia, while failing everywhere else in the Muslim Arab world (think of the continued violence in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain, which began with the “Arab Spring”), is that the Arab secularists have always been strongest in Tunisia..."
See? I told you Hugh does not proceed on the basis of zero tolerance of all Muslims. Already, less than halfway into his analysis, he is invoking Muslim "secularists" with a straight face. These are no more secularists than the Nobel laureate he had just finished exposing as a jihadist of the pen.
Fast-forward to the more recent Arab Spring (i.e., the Jasmine Jihad in Tunisia), Hugh continues:
"...after some terror attacks by Muslims even more extreme than those in Ennahda, a convinced secularist, 89-year-old Beji Caid Essebsi, was voted in, as a representative of the French-educated and secular Tunisian elite. They have been among the main beneficiaries of France’s mission civilisatrice, and wanted to ensure that Tunisia would not relapse into a medieval Muslim mire."
This "secular" Tunisian elite Hugh keeps invoking; did it not occur to him that they too, like his Nobel laureate, are defenders of the faith no less? And that as such, they are all waging jihad of the pen? I.e., that they are all jihadists?
Apparently, Hugh, and the rest of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, have not graduated along their learning curve to the realization that when assessing any and all Muslims, we must reverse engineer the phenomena. As I explained in my essay written over one year ago, Reverse Engineer (and, coincidentally, centering my argument around another essay of Hugh's as well as a reference to the Tunisian Spring), whenever we see what appear to be moderate Muslims (or Hugh's rose by another name, "secularist" Muslims), we must ruthlessly withhold our generosity and presume with rational prejudice that there must be some Islamic (i.e., evil and extremist) reason why they are appearing as this un-Islamic mirage; and from there, our analysis should unfold. Hugh, on the other hand, presumes with generous prejudice that the mirage of "secularism" is real, and from there his analysis proceeds on the shifting sand dune he thinks is solid ground.
And what's this business of parsing out a Taxonomy of Extremism?
"Muslims even more extreme than those in Ennahda..."
How could such a phrase spring forth from the bosom of the Counter-Jihad, 15 long, beleaguered years after 911?
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