The Psychology of the Counter-Jihad Softy

A lot could be said on the subject; and Lord knows I like to indulge in all the complexities of an issue.  But I'll try to be brief (and maybe post installments now and then on this, rather than attempt an exhaustive expatiation).  At any rate, the reader can sample this Google page of previous articles I've written circling this topic.

For now, I just want to focus on one curious dynamic.  For years, as I kept noticing the chewy, nougaty softness of the typical Counter-Jihadist ("sure, Islam is horrible, but not all Muslims are bad!  Just deport the few Salafist Extremists, monitor the Salafist Extremist mosques, stop the immigration of the Salafist Extremists, educate the majority of Muslims who just wanna have sandwiches, and we'll solve the problem..."), I kept thinking that surely, they would begin to adjust their rosy-colored perspective with every fresh atrocity Muslims would perpetrate and/or plot.  Lord knows there's been no short supply of Mohammedan atrocities over the years (along with various types of taqiyya deception), for those who have been paying attention.  And if anybody's been paying attention, it's been precisely the Counter-Jihadists. 

But every time Jihad Watch or Front Page Mag or Atlas Shrugs, etc., would report yet another frightfully gruesome attack by Muslims, I would notice a strange resiliency in their underlying nougat.  For those many years while I participated in Jihad Watch comments (and off an on, Front Page Mag), I would bring this up in various ways, often provocatively, and the more I confronted them assertively, the more they recoiled to defend their nougat.  And yet -- here's the oddity -- they would defend it often in terms, or in a context, of reasserting their tough, no-nonsense Counter-Jihad bonafides.  This, of course, is where they differ from the mainstream Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist (PC MC), whose terms & context are not Counter-Jihad (much less, Allah forbid, Anti-Islam), but merely one of being "against terrorism" and carefully & clearly detaching that from anything remotely smelling of anything to do with Islam.

It then struck me recently that it is the very fact of the alarming nature of the problem of Islam -- its frighteningly grotesque ultra-violent fanaticism coupled with the vertiginously escalating worsening of its effects around the globe (and increasingly in our West) -- that actually fuels their softness.  Deep down, the Counter-Jihad Softy shares the same fear of being "bigoted" and "racist" against Muslims; but he can't admit this consciously.  Instead, the psychological impact of the indigestibly horrific data they are digesting, by a curious dynamic, actually strengthens the Counter-Jihad Softy's resolve to be soft on Muslims.  In a sense, it's the same dynamic that the PC MC indulges; except that it becomes more tortured because of the Counter-Jihad Softy's willingness over the years (unlike the PC MC) to expose themselves to, and educate themselves on, the many-splendored horrors of Islam.  The increase in their antipathy to Islam exerts a profound temptation on them to draw the logical conclusion -- that their antipathy has to extend to Muslims as well (not as "hatred" --  that's a red herring -- but as the grimly sober appraisal of the systemic threat we are actually up against) -- but something inside them resists this.

What is this something?  One reasonably assumes it is the persistence of residues of PC MC in their hearts & minds.  Of course, for the average PC MC, this sets up no psychic tension, since they are proudly PC MC already.  But for the Counter-Jihad Softy, it must produce a powerful cognitive dissonance, since they are otherwise so viscerally opposed to PC MC.  What they do with this, apparently, is transfer all the psychic energy of this inner tension to Islam and largely ignore the problem of Muslims -- with the exception, of course, of various permutations of the dysphemic categories, such as "Extremists" or "Salafists" or "Radicalized Muslims" or "Activated Muslims" or whatever will do the trick to divert them from the awful contemplation of the possibility that all Muslims are beholden to that global military-supremacist cult.