The function of the "Bad Cop" Muslim

Muslim cleric: “Offensive Jihad means attacking infidels in order to conquer their countries and bring them into the fold of Islam”

That's a recent headline on Jihad Watch (only the 700,000th such headline in the past 13-odd years since Jihad Watch has been reporting on the growing mountain, or volcano, of the evil lava of data spewing & pullulating out of the Muslim world, increasingly spilling into our own world).

Over the years I've developed & discussed the concept of the "Good Cop" Muslim and the "Better Cop" Muslim -- the former, with his standard-issue bromides of "Islam is peace" and "we Muslims don't believe in taking innocent life" good enough to fool the broader Western mainstream, but not the slowly growing movement of awareness in the West ("the Counter-Jihad"), who, in order to be fooled, require a subtler, more sophisticated taqiyya: hence along come the "Better Cop" Muslims, like Maajid Nawaz, Zuhdi Jasser, Asra Nomani, Shireen Qudosi, Tarek Fatah, Irshad Manji, etc., et al. (qaeda).

While the intended audience for the Good Cop Muslims is the broader Western mainstream, these Better Cop Muslims have a different target: the Counter-Jihad.  And, alas, all too often the Counter-Jihad shows signs of being vulnerable to their oily wiles.  (Even the attitudes of "I'm not sure whether to trust Zuhdi Jasser, he just seems confused" (as Robert Spencer once put it preposterously, "his heart is in the right place") or "I'm not sure whether to trust Maajid Nawaz, he seems to be motivated by vanity" are signs that Nawaz and Jasser have succeeded at least in part -- sowing confusion in their audience and reinforcing the Counter-Jihadist's disinclination to cultivate rational prejudice against all Muslims.)

The "Bad Cop" Muslims, unlike their "Good" and "Better" co-religionists, are honest about Islam -- in effect saying "I weel keel you!".  The gold standard of this subtype would be the Muslim cleric squatting in Great Britain, Anjem Choudhary, who among other ejaculations of Islamic honesty, boasts that Muslims will some day "fly the black flag of Islam over 10 Downing Street".  The main function of "Bad Cop" Muslims, like the cleric featured in the headline above, is to be a contrast to the Good Cops (and to the Better Cops).  Naive & simple-minded folks in the Counter-Jihad (unfortunately they abound) think that by trotting out various Bad Cop Muslims they will help to wake up their somnambulant fellow Westerners.  What actually happens when the typical Westerner, whose heart & mind is pleasantly deformed by Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism, encounters a Bad Cop Muslim is that he immediately assumes that Bad Cop Muslim is just an "extremist Islamist".  And along with that assumption follows the axiomatic ejaculations, such as "that extremist Islamist only reflects a Tiny Minority of Extremists who are twisting Islam, and the vast majority of Muslims just wanna have a sandwich."

Thus, the net effect of the Bad Cop Muslim is to actually reinforce the view that there is no systemic, metastasizing problem of Islam.  The Counter-Jihad will likely never get through to the broader Western mainstream that in fact, the Bad Cop Muslims agree with their "Good" co-religionists, since the Counter-Jihad itself hasn't developed sufficient antibodies to the more refined Good Cops, the Better Cops.  Also, even if a typical Westerner grudgingly concedes that, sure, okay, there are extremist "aspects" (or "elements" as Robert Spencer has put it, elliptically) of mainstream Islam, there quickly follow rejoinders we have come to know all too wearily:  "But hey, all religions have extremist aspects; and anyway, the vast majority of Muslims  are moms and pops like the rest of us, just trying to get through the day working jobs to put food on the table for their kids; etc."  And the Counter-Jihad, as long as it avoids the paradigm shift -- from a problem of Islam to a problem both of Islam AND of all Muslims -- like the plague, has nothing to counter this camelcrap with.

Further Reading:

I've written many essays on this general theme.  See this Google page of a few of them for more details & analysis.