Paradigm Shiftless

In promoting his new book, Confessions of an Islamophobe, Robert Spencer has put up various brief postings over the past weeks approaching it from different angles.

In one report of how, when certain "Republican" students invited him to speak at Stanford, "Leftists" were "in an uproar", Spencer goes on to quote from the campus newspaper article about it based on their interview with Spencer, which he describes as "unusually even-handed for a campus paper".

Buried in the middle of it is perhaps the most important point in the entire issue of the whole damned mess of Islam, the West's myopia to Islam, and the Counter-Jihad Mainstream's myopia to the aforementioned:

When I asked him [Spencer] why he thought students were oblivious to the nature of the threat that Spencer will talk about, he called out the media. “The mainstream media conflates reasonable, intellectual critiques of Islam with attacks on Muslims as people,” he said. He hopes that the event, billed as an “honest conversation,” will help to clear up some of those misconceptions…. [bold emphasis added]

After all these years, Spencer apparently hasn't taken the trouble to figure out, and examine carefully, why it is that the mainstream media conflates these two things; and whether they don't have a logical reason to do so.

And of course no one "in the Counter-Jihad" (much less outside it) will notice, and ponder.

In the sleepwalking wake of the latest terror attack this week in New York City, we see, for the thousandth time, the broader Mainstream repeat their anxiety about the prospect & potential for just such a conflation.  Just take a look at the Jihad Watch stories this week.  And as sure as rain follows more rain, the "Counter-Jihad" (such as it is) stands its irrational ground, refusing to face the fact that its assertive condemnation (Spencer's gingerly "intellectual critiques" notwithstanding) of Islam inextricably involves a condemnation of all Muslims, since being a Muslim at the very least obviously implies a support for and solidarity with the Islam being condemned (or "intellectually critiqued" in Spencer's namby-pamby formulation) by us.

As long as Spencer, and the rest of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Leadership along with its more or less fawning Civilians, ignore this, it will not undergo the crucial paradigm shift that has perhaps the only chance of saving the West from eventual destruction by Muslims by the time this 21st century comes to its close (give or take a few decades).

That chance will require social expansion (which eventually becomes sociopolitical influence); but social expansion will be unlikely to ever occur as long as the two Mainstreams are talking past each other.