Another Better Cop: Umar Lee

Umar Lee may not be as famous as Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, or Irshad Manji (or even Asra Nomani or Tawfik Hamid), but fame and a conspicuous careerism aren't the only vehicles for the stealth jihad.  Merely being a Muslim who, by affecting to be "moderate" and who pretends to be appalled by Islamic "extremism", can have its own ripple effect in society (as long as the Muslim in question communicates these taqiyya memes in his virtual and non-virtual lives), conducive to fostering a vague and complex confusion in the minds of the Unbelievers as they continue to grapple with the problem of Islam, reinforcing in subtle ways their own psychological inhibitions about cultivating a rational prejudice against all Muslims.   

Thus we have Umar Lee, apparently a perpetual student, expressing dismay back in 2013 at the uglier side of Islam.  For example:

“We can talk about the grievance industry, CAIR, etc., trying to hype up the threat of Islamophobia. Islamophobia is very minor. You want to talk about religious bias? You convert to Christianity in Saudi Arabia, you’re murdered. You convert from Islam in so many Muslim countries, it’s the death penalty. Why are Muslim societies so afraid of missionaries? Why are Muslim societies so afraid of freedom of speech? Why are Muslim societies so afraid of the Gospel? Why are Muslim societies so afraid of the message of Jesus Christ? If you believe Islam is the truth, why don’t you believe Islam can compete in the marketplace of ideas? Obviously you don’t, or you wouldn’t kill people that convert to Christianity and put missionaries in jail.”

This was when he announced with fanfare that he was leaving Islam -- only to flip-flop shortly thereafter and announce that, in fact, he was returning to Islam.  But that long quote above is a good example of what I call the "Better Cop" -- saying all the right things and sounding all the right notes that would make the typical Counter-Jihadist swoon in admiration and pat Umar on the back and sincerely wish him all the luck to continue on his path to the truth, etc.  The thought that this deeper seemingly anti-Islam rhetoric could be feigned for taqiyya purposes -- precisely to fool the Counter-Jihad and lull them into an acquiescence that accepts an indeterminable, innumerable number of Muslims to continue to come into the West -- doesn't seem to occur to those in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream.

Three years before that, in 2010, Umar was perhaps less self-disciplined, and hadn't realized that a better way to wage stealth jihad was to go into a deeper cover; and so he was not so adept at preventing Mohammedan wardrobe malfunctions.  I.e., his mask slipped:

As samu alaikum. I normally ignore apostate kufar like you who are seeking to make a quick buck selling their islam is bad tale for white liberals to eat up. I will not go on and on here about your yuppie kafir ass and your ignorance and neocolonial mentality. What is provoking this email is when i learned you challenged ibrahim hooper, an old man, to a wrestling match. I am calling your kafir yuppie ass to a fight with no rules and we can do this at any number of masjids. Of course my prefernce is to do this in yemen, somalia or pakistan where instead of fighting i could cut your neck with the sword of islam and watch you squeal like a bitch like daniel pearl. 

This screed was a public letter to another Muslim whom he deemed to be takfir.

So, fast-forward to 2017, Umar Lee seems to have been perfecting his Better Cop mask so that there won't be any slippages.  He attended a private lecture of Professor Jonathan Brown, a convert to Islam who holds a distinguished Chair at Georgetown University.  Brown was reported on Jihad Watch as having given this lecture in which he actually defended slavery, sex slavery, and underage marriage as being sanctioned in Islam.

At the time, Umar Lee jihad-of-the-penned a brief article in which he expressed his "shock" at what Prof. Brown avowed.

As I pointed out in a comment I contributed to Umar Lee's little blog, there's one little problem with Umar Lee's reaction:

Umar Lee’s dismay at Prof. Brown’s positions is salutary, but there’s only one little hitch: Prof. Brown is merely reiterating what Prophet Muhammad said and did, according to the Sunna. The only way out of this corner Umar Lee has painted himself into would be to reconstruct a Muhammad markedly different from the mainstream Muhammad documented by the Sunna. The only problem with that, in turn, is that it would be an extremely minuscule and heterodox aberration from the mainstream Islamic norm, with no significant effect on the dominant Islamic memes that have been plaguing the world for centuries and are now undergoing global revival, increasingly threatening various parts of the world. The effect it and Umar Lee’s modern Western protestations are likely to have, however, have nothing to do with the Muslim world — and everything to do with lulling Westerners into thinking that there abounds in the world a viablly large demographic of peaceable Muslims (like Umar Lee) with modern Western sensibilities.