Postjudice?

No, it doesn't refer to the judge who replaced Judge Judy.

In perhaps the briefest blurb ever published on Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer featured a two-sentence encomium from the Canadian cultural commentator, Gavin McInnes:

“This book proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Islamophobia is not based on an irrational fear of Islam, but a rational concern. Robert Spencer eloquently and definitively proves that concern about Islam is based on postjudice, not prejudice.”

I hadn't encountered that word before, and thought it might have been a neologism on the fly by McInnes.  A quick consultation of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) reveals that it is a word.  Its coinage occurred over a century ago, in 1903, by the British writer, journalist and social observer, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936).  After that, the OED lists only three more instances of the word, in 1966, 1984, and 2002 (though a cursory search through Google Books yields a few more).  No doubt this paucity of usage is due to its angular awkwardness in rolling off the tongue (whether orally or mentally as one reads it).

There's a little snag, however, in the service McInnes enlists for it, at least as far as Chesterton was concerned:

“Prejudice is not so much the great intellectual sin as a thing which, we may call, to coin a word, ‘postjudice’, not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias that remains after.”

The second source, British novelist and activist Brigid Brophy (1929-1995), is an amusingly ambiguous if not backhanded complement to Chesterton's coinage: She calls postjudice “prejudice through hindsight”.  All the other employers of the term are as cheerlessly prosaic as McInness.

There's a more important problem with hailing postjudice as a virtue for the Counter-Jihad.  It implies a bondage to facts and dots with an acquiescence to an unreasonable inhibition about interpretations we can draw from the facts and connections we can infer from the dots.  Do there not exist contexts or situations where important decisions about our public safety cannot wait for mass-murders after the fact, or for explicit professions of extremist sedition, before some preventive measures are in order?  (One could go further and redefine our entire West-- seen by Muslims as the Dar-al-Harb -- as just such a context.)

In the spirit of that question, and factoring in a literacy about the problem of Islam (including the devastating problem of taqiyya), we note further that if we (the West) limit ourselves to postjudice, we will be limiting ourselves to noticing, ferreting out, and taking various actions against Muslims only after they show signs of "extremism" and "radicalization" -- thus implying a policy based upon the supposition that when Muslims don't show those signs (or when they may claim to be opposed to those signs), they must be harmless.

This would doom us to a Whack-a-Mo response to the problem of Islam -- no doubt one somewhat better than heretofore pursued by the Mainstream West, but still guided by the same failed paradigm out of touch with the actual nature and dimensions of that problem.

Rather than limit ourselves to postjudice (perhaps as an anxious way to virtue-signal to our PC MC cultural masters who dominate the Conversation, assuring them that we are "not prejudiced"), we need to amplify it with what I call rational prejudice.

Rational prejudice would be the reasonable extrapolation from facts and connected dots, such that we assume that even "moderate" mosques, madrassas and Islamic institutions are suspect, and that even "moderate" Muslims -- including the ultra-moderate "Better Cop" Muslims who tend to fool most in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream -- are suspect.

We can see that adopting rational prejudice as a principle would discomfit the likes of Robert Spencer and Gavin McInnes (and virtually the entire motley Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream), for then they'd have go through the painful process of a paradigm shift, from an exclusive focus on the problem of Islam, to a problem of Islam that includes the problem of all Muslims.

Speaking of the great Judge Judy (PBUHer): To anyone -- including anyone in the Counter-Jihad (which, sadly, seems to include the majority) -- who says there's no problem of Islam and all Muslims, I invoke the words of one of her tangiest quotes (and title of her book):

“Don't pee on my head and tell me it's raining.”