Ruthfully Yours: An example of the "Counter Jihad Mainstream"

I've explained my term, the Counter Jihad Mainstream (CJM), before.  Essentially, it means that the mainstream Counter-Jihad -- voices out there bigger, more successful, and seemingly more established, than the civilians who read and follow them -- are not as far as they think from the broader Western Mainstream when it comes to the problem of Islam and the problem of Muslims.  I measure this by how the CJM tends to insist on a Two Islams model joined to the hip of a Two Muslims model: i.e., there is a bad "Islamism" of a Minority of "Islamists" -- and there is the relatively benign Islam of the multitudes Muslims who are supposedly not "Islamists".

Maybe, to the CJM, the "Islamists" are not a Tiny Minority, as the broader Western Mainstream would have it, but they are still a Slightly Larger Minority, logically leading to the supposition that the majority of Muslims (even if not the Vast Majority) just wanna have a sandwich.

Anyway, I don't mean to disparage the Ruthfully Yours blog -- after all, I have it on my blogroll.  It has many useful articles; but only useful if the reader has healthy instincts about the defects of the mainstream memes.

Here are some examples I found by a random sampling of recent articles there:

German Lesson: Islamist Enclaves Breed Jihadism: Islamist enclaves in European cities are a bigger problem than the infiltration of trained jihadists from the Middle East, by Andrew McCarthy

Well, this one is easy.  I don't even need to read the article.  The sincerely serious use of the term "Islamist" already shows the analyst (the dubious Andrew McCarthy) is assuming that there is an "Islamism" distinct from Islam (else he wouldn't use the artificial term which, by the way, no Muslims use -- except pseudo-reformer snakes like Maajid Nawaz). (I also have a problem with the terms "Jihadism" and "Jihadist" which tend to distinguish Muslims who explode from Muslims who just wanna have a sandwich.)

Then there are the two glowing reviews (here and here) of the new movie directed by Peter Berg, starring Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, and others, Patriot's Day.    First of all, there is no way in hell that a mainstream Hollywood movie (you can't get much more mainstream than Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg) is going to do justice to the Islamic angle -- the central point -- of the Boston Marathon jihad.  And second of all... oh wait, there's nothing more to say about that.  Neither of the reviewers, Marilyn Penn or Armond White, even mention the Islam angle in their reviews of the film (also, a search for "Jew" yielded nothing, indicating a glaring omission of the fact that one of the Boston Marathon mass-murderers, Tamerlane Tsarnaev, had previously murdered Jews in Boston).  Why is Ruthfully Yours, a blog dedicated to the problem of Islam (and radiating problems) publishing reviews like this? There are plenty of venues out in the broader Western Mainstream avoiding the heart of the matter about the various acts of war Muslims have been perpetrating against us; the Counter-Jihad should rise to a higher standard (unless, perhaps, it too believes most Muslims just wanna have a sandwich and that, therefore, the problem is only one of a Tiny Minority of Extremists). 

My third example is by the otherwise good journalist Giulio Meotti who reports on the ongoing persecution by the Saudi government of a Saudi blogger.  The problem is that Meotti (and the Gatestone Institute article which Meotti appeals to, by the dubious Denis McEoin) treats the blogger, Raif Badawi as some kind of noble victim:

Unfortunately, the UN members did not respond to this appeal by Ensaf Haidar, the fearless wife of the most famous blogger of the Arab world, the gentle Raif Badawi, imprisoned and flogged by the Saudis for his secular ideas.

This instinct in the CJM, to assume that Muslim victims of Islam are somehow free of the fanaticism of their own Islam, tends to reinforce our Western tendency to exempt a certain number of Muslims (the number is never pinned down, of course, but would tend to lend itself to hundreds of millions who don't seem to be doing anything wrong at the moment) from our rational suspicion.  If Raif Badawi is a Muslim, how could he not know that his own Islam explains and justifies the harsh treatment of the Saudi government against him?  (Ditto for his "fearless wife".) Even if he is going through the difficult psychological process of sincerely disengaging from the psycho-cultural Gulag of his own Islam, that is not our problem, not our White Man's Burden.  It may be a tragedy that innumerable Muslims could be undergoing this difficult process; but the nature of Islam, and the danger it poses, is too great and complex for us to take on that added burden which, if we continue to do so, will surely bring us down.

My last example, for now, is by the creator of the blog, Ruth King, in which she aptly discusses the problems Jews and Christians are facing with the revival of Islam; but then she has to praise the Egyptian President Al-Sissi as a reformer.  Apparently, she hasn't read the scores of reports by Raymond Ibrahim over the years (right up to the present) documenting the unsurprising fact that the new Egypt isn't much different from the old Egypt (and that, therefore, we must reasonably assume that Al-Sissi is just another example of a Good, or Better Cop).

Conclusion:

Such examples as I list abound in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, curiously inter-mixed with more robust analyses that on certain key points would contradict such softness.  This, in turn, indicates a general state of incoherence to (what should be termed) the Anti-Islam Movement in the West.

Further Reading:

A Google page of previous essays of mine on this general topic.