The Hesperado

Secularism: The Neutral Umbrella

2012-01-26T18:19:00.001-08:00

Introduction: The religious value of secularism

The virtue of secularism for religion indicates a broader role for the former, transcending the perennial conflict by which religion is considered, both by theists and atheists, to be arrayed in opposition to secularism. In fact, I propose that secularism embodies a central virtue of religion—specifically, of modern Western religion that has differentiated into eschatology: Judaism and Christianity (we are not accepting pirated (per)versions of same; e.g., Islam).

The central virtue to which I refer stems from the etymology of the word ‘secularism’. The word comes from the Latin word, saeculum, which literally means a “long period of time”, an “era” or an “epoch”. It came to be used, during the long period of time historians used to call ‘Christendom’ (spanning roughly from the 4th century C.E. to the 16th century C.E.), to refer to the counter-pole of the eschaton: ‘this world’ or ‘this life’. Augustine himself inaugurated this usage, in his famous phrase, the saeculum senescens, or “the Age growing old”. In Augustine’s formulation, this Age growing old is all of history, as it waits patiently for the Second Coming of the Lord to end history.

What Augustine (354-430 C.E.) did not foresee, however, was that, although the Age seemed to be winding down and deteriorating in his time, with the decay of the Roman Empire (even after its Christianization beginning with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 C.E.), the Christian West would slowly but surely over the centuries increase in health, vitality and dynamism. Christian theologians continued to use Augustine’s phrase of the saeculum senescens even as late as the 16th century (if not later), but the spectacular facts of Western progress all around them belied the essential assumption of that phrase, that all of history is just winding down as we wait patiently for the eschaton.

Discussion: Eschatology and This Life

The astounding and marvelous ascendancy of Western Progress—which began in the High Middle Ages, but really picked up steam after Christendom began to dissolve institutionally in the late 16th century—has generated a new fact for the religious consciousness; i.e., for the eschatological consciousness: the Saeculum, this world, this life, all of history—are obviously not going away any time soon (though every age has its doomsayers and alarmists and conspiracy theorists, and the specter of an Islam Redivivus in our time is stimulating them yet again).

Not only is the Saeculum not going away any time soon, it is continuing to thrive and progress, notwithstanding our current threat, as mentioned parenthetically above (which, due mainly to Western blindness and naivety based in PC multiculturalism, may result in horrific casualties and dislocations in the near future, but will not be able to dismantle the overall structures of the West).

With the reigning fact of the Saeculum, the religious-eschatological consciousness has two options on how to digest it: a) stubborn resistance, rejection of Western Progress and its values as ‘un-Christian’, and an obstinant and fantasizing obsession with ushering in the Last Days; or b) readjusting the religious mind in order to respect the Saeculum in its integrity as representing the context by which the process toward the eschaton (as well as its mysteriously paradoxical frustration) happens at all. What we mean to say in (b) is that Christian eschatology from the very beginning was based on paradox and mystery: only the Father knows when the end of history will come, Jesus himself said. Many of the admonitions and prescriptions for life which Jesus pronounced imply a call to the Christian to acculturate himself to the way this world and this life continue to be, and while he is to pursue the values that become luminous in the light of the imminent eschaton, he is also to remain patient while waiting for that eschaton, and much of the new ethics of the Christian seem to be based upon abiding by the structures of the untransfigured world.

The existential situation as presented in the New Testament, however, is not that simple and copacetic: there is actually a great tension—sometimes apparently self-contradictory—between the urgency of an imminent eschaton, on the one hand, and the call to abide patiently while history wends its mysterious way toward that eschaton. This tension has oftentimes not been managed very well in the history of Christianity, and after the dissolution of Christendom, the West was wracked by sociopolitical cataclysms based on deformative, mostly Gnostic, responses to that tension (with the French Revolution, Communism, Fascism, and Nazism, as well as the more amorphous cultural diseases of the West in the last 200-odd years).

The very dominance and vitality of the Saeculum highlights and energizes the mystery of the eschatological tension which is at the heart of the Christian’s existential posture throughout his life. It is easier, and more facile, for the Christian to cultivate the goal of the eschaton when the world is “winding down” and deteriorating all around him. In that situation, the Christian can comfortably denigrate his surrounding world and its societies and institutions, and just hunker down to wait for the Apocalypse.

But the real challenge arises when the surrounding world is not in fact winding down, but is growing and progressing by leaps and bounds. The Christian must then search more deeply within himself to get in touch with the mystery of the existential tension that is the heart of the spiritual Exodus from this world to the next, rather than rely on external, superficial and materially based markers. And of course, as we intimated before, a vibrant and vital era (or any era, for that matter) may also be beset by various problems and crises, which may be exploited by the eschatologist impatient with the perdurance of the Saeculum. How impatient the eschatologist gets depends on how much of the Gnostic virus he has. Such challenges and crises, and the quasi-apocalyptic responses to them, are as old as the hills, and themselves only become absorbed into the ongoing mysterious warp-and-woof of the History that, contrary to the impatience of the Christian (and the post-Christian Gnostic), apparently just won't go away.

By and large, modern Christians have digested the sociopolitical dominance of secularism maturely -- as have all those millions of Western Christians who exist throughout the West (as well as various parts of the non-Western world) in various stages of decomposition by which we call them "secularists" of various flavors of spirituality, agnosticism and atheism). While the former have by and large learned to integrate the dominance and vitality of the Saeculum into the wider tension between this world and the next world, between this life and the next life, between History and the End of History, the latter have learned to respect the "neutral umbrella" of the secularist modus vivendi by which religious people of all stripes are accorded full equality of rights (as long as those rights do not presume to involve the arrogation of any particular Absolute Truth into laws affecting those who disagree with that Absolute Truth), and are by and large accorded respect (with some measure, inevitably, here and there, of criticism, condemnation, and even sometimes mockery thrown in, as befits freedom of expression).

Conclusion: The Neutral Umbrella of Secularism

The most important virtue of the system of modern secularism is its organization of the Meaning-of-Life component of society under the aegis of what may be termed the neutral umbrella it provides.

By this term is meant an overarching neutrality with regard to the Absolute Truth. The world has always been populated by individuals and groups who claim that they, and they alone, possess the patent on the Absolute Truth. Much of history has involved violent conflicts among these various individuals and groups. The wisdom of the modern West is that it has learned and recognized, after centuries of bloody conflict and bitter dissensions -- not to mention various forms of intolerance and oppression stifling freedom of expression -- that the best way to organize society with the least degree of such conflicts is by erecting an overarching neutrality by which no single Absolute Truth has undue influence over laws.

Currently, the only group that persists in believing in forcing the Absolute Truth on society through laws (and remember children, laws require violence to enforce, unless of course everyone conveniently agrees with you) is Islam. Muslims, following the encoded blueprint of their holy texts passionately and fanatically, believe this is the best way for all Mankind. And they are committed, due to their encoded blueprint, to try to realize this, through violence when they are able, and through stealthy deceit when they are unable to use violence successfully to bring about that end. And that's why, needless to say, Muslims qua Muslims do not belong in the modern world.

Further Reading:

Secularism: The Supermarket of the Gods

The Church-State Tension

Church and State: Separation or Tension?

The Modern West and the Bible: Paradoxical Progress

Croppers, Ego Quoque, Utraquism, Theocracy and Neutrocracy

Dante's Dual Ultimate

Seven Wonders of the Modern World

School's not out yet

2012-01-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

As a brief postscript to my last post on Eric Allen Bell -- the Leftist who made such a big initial splash this past week with his defection from the Leftist party line by actually rousing from his Rip-Van-Winklish nap of politically correct multi-culturalist slumbers, not by spastic reflex hitting the snooze alarm after the thousandth Islamic atrocity, but actually waking up to smell the Arabic coffee (well, in its decaf form) -- I notice, as I continue to read the ever-growing comments to the Jihad Watch article devoted to his valedictorian essay at the grotesquely Leftist rag the Daily Kos (of which Bell was a frequent contributor and participant over the years), that many of the Jihad Watchers are growing tired of Bell.

But not because of his squishy and incoherent nougaty center of softness on Muslims (ludicrously juxtaposed to his supposedly no-nonsense toughness on Islam): rather, Jihad Watchers are growing weary and wary of Bell for his economic and political Leftism -- and not just your ordinary garden-variety Leftism, but a strangely Buchananish conspiracy-thinking Occupying anti-"Corporatist" hybrid of sumpn' -- totally, however, unrelated to the problem of Islam.

As far as Jihad Watchers are concerned, apparently (with extremely rare exceptions, as noted in my previous essay), Bell's creamy nougat center by which he wants to continue to allow millions of Muslims to immigrate into the West, and finds absolutely no danger in that metastsizing prospect (because all the American Muslims he's met are just so awfully friendly and Westernized, you see) is just peachy keen by them.

Makes one wonder what exactly these Jihad Watchers are "watching", anyway.

For What the Bell Tolls

2012-01-23T01:06:00.000-08:00

A vibrant flurry has been triggered recently at Jihad Watch by the defection of a Leftist, one Eric Allen Bell, at that notoriously ultra-Leftist online community the Daily Kos -- his defection being his temerity to notice that Islam is a dangerous ideology furthermore hostile to liberal values, and to publish three articles there articulating this.

This heresy of Bell's would be a hard enough pill for PC MCs to swallow (who, pace "Wellington", one of the Jihad Watch readers who insists stubbornly and against the facts that people on the political Right are significantly up to speed on the problem of Islam, continue to compose the vast majority of all Westerners whether on the Left, the Center, or the Right). In the hard-core Leftist, which constitutes the bulk of the membership at the Daily Kos, it becomes a toxic chemical inducing epileptic seizures.

Oh, Eric Allen Bell (the defector in question) may claim with disarming disingenuousness that he's "not a Leftist" per se and that he has an affinity for a whole pastiche of supposedly across-the-spectrum positions; but it's clear from his many comments he has written in the comments sections of the two Jihad Watch articles devoted to the circumstances of his defection that he is solidly Leftist (with his only even vaguely tenable claim to some form of centrist nuance being his support of the "right to life").

At any rate, the bigger story here is that the Jihad Watch community, with their unquestionable Leader at the fore, are gushing and fawning so promiscuously over this new idol of an ideological victory, they are willing for the most part to overlook his severely asymptotic tendencies -- though, as some of those tendencies continue to slip unavoidably out from more and more comments he makes in response to other JW readers (and Bell is conscientious about responding in a timely and relatively substantive (not to mention candid) manner to the comments, concerns and questions of others), I have noticed a JW reader or two (or three) begin to grow just a tad chilly and impatient about Bell's United-Nations-cum-New-Agey-style humanitarian bleeding heart for the "good Muslims" whom he knows must exist presumably by the millions, and many of whom, naturally, he has met "personally" (inflation of anecdotal evidence -- a staple of the asymptotic not to mention the PC MC -- what would they do without it?).

I.e., Jihad Watchers are so anxiously desperate to see signs of hope -- and what could be more hopeful than to see a major rift in the vast iceberg of PC MC in the form of "one of them" crossing over to Our Side? -- they will treat the defecting newcomer like visiting royalty and wouldn't dare to try to vet him on where he stands on the most crucial aspects of the primary problem in which we all have a stake. No, all that matters is that he -- a member of the Daily Kos's inner circle -- snubbed his nose at them about Islam, and then got banned by them. Who cares what his precise beliefs, beyond abstract platitudes, are about the problem of Islam, and the problem of Muslims?

This is not to add the crucial corollary -- namely, that quite a few Jihad Watchers are already rather comfortably asymptotic themselves, and so they couldn't see anything wrong with the tenor of Bell's stand even if they were literate enough about Islam to be disposed to do so. As far as they are concerned, Bell rings true, and he's a Leftist. And that's all that matters.

Who cares that Bell effectively wants the West to perpetuate the ongoing metastasizing influx of more and more Muslims, logically by the millions over the next half century, into the very fabric of our societies and their institutions, all in the name of the abstract principle (and feel-good emotion) of making sure we remain humane? As far as Bell is concerned, this massive immigration, increasing exponentially as we speak, portends no danger, because "nearly all" the Muslims he has personally met seem to be good people who respect democracy. And we all know that the instant a Muslim relocates to the West, and then becomes a citizen, or is born here of immigrant parents, he or she magically becomes a harmless supporter of human rights!

Well, that settles that! Nothing to worry about, then!

And what a happy, convenient coincidence that our concern for the evil, unjust and dangerous ideology of Islam will force no difficult choices on us in order to defend ourselves. We can have our cake and eat it too -- we can just oppose Islam: we don't have to actually oppose the human beings called Muslims who practice, promote, support and/or enable Islam. That's the great news Bell is tolling for the town square! We can preserve all our humanitarian impulses and policies, we can respect the rights of all the millions of Muslims (other than the tiny minority among them who explode and gun people down in broad daylight, of course) under our laws, and we can somehow continue to be vigilant about protecting our liberties and liberal values from Islam!

A three-fer as easy as Apple Pie Allah Mode! We can have it all! I smack my forehead and say: Now why didn't I think of that!?

Conclusion:

I enjoin the reader to peruse the two very long comments sections to the Jihad Watch articles devoted to Bell:

Independent thought on jihad and Islam at the Daily Kos

Truths about Islam and human rights that were too much for the Daily Kos

In these, as I said above, Bell himself weighs in quite often, and the reader may well see whether or not my misgivings have merit. The holistic reader may also expect to find a precious few salutary crumbs of dissension from the party line -- from readers "dumbledoresarmy" and "Infidel Pride" and, most emphatically and refreshingly albeit a tad crudely and imbued with excessive pessimism, from"Wildflower Jones"; otherwise among a pathetic handful of others one could count on the left hand of a Muslim convicted of theft (two posts by "Kinana of Khaybar" provide massively documented data that should lead anyone with a lick of sense to become wary of the problem of Muslims -- and not merely the abstract "problem of Islam" -- but, of course, Bell only responded with a limply oblique thanks to the first post and has ignored the second one; and the added irony is that "Kinana of Khaybar" is not significantly any less mushy about the problem of Muslims than Bell is).

Bell by his own admission has only lately woken up to take notice of Islam (that's like waking up to Katrina a month after the levees broke), and to begin to acquaint himself with a minuscule portion of the vast mountain -- yea, the veritable mountain ranges -- of horrible, grotesque, ghoulish, alarming, deadly, outrageously anti-liberal data spewing out from them like dripping, sputtering, gushing and exploding evil lava that is Islam put into practice by Muslims all over the world in words and deeds now, and throughout the years, decades, and centuries.

But Bell has not really read, and has not really digested, those mountains of data. For if he had, the ridiculous stars in his eyes would clear up and give way to a grimly, sadly, lucidly determined realism. He would stop trusting the friendly secular Muslims he has had so many nice conversations with, and even more preposterously using these personal anecdotal experiences as a basis for trusting all American Muslims, without ever asking them the tough questions -- and follow-up questions -- that would as sure as the night follows the day serve to coax the "Inner Extremist" out of them, such that the mask would slip.

Then, perhaps, he'd see for perhaps the first time in his naive life, once he takes off his Miss Universe rose-colored spectacles, that there are people, groups and cultures out there in the world that do not think like Eric Allen Bell. And perhaps he'd finally have the epiphany (alas, all too rare) that really wakes up the Leftist and the PC MC: the epiphany every infant who grows up has sooner or later -- that the world is not just an extension of his navel-gazing Ego and of his loving white parents. And that there are incorrigible wolves out there in human clothing, and that to build a long and productive and relatively happy life, for yourself and for the ones you love, you must be prepared to take care to defend against those wolves, and that "dialogue" is usually not possible with them. Not only is it usually not possible for such a grim necessity, it is often positively reckless to expect it and to cultivate it, and if you do, it is all too liable to endanger yourself, and your loved ones and neighbors.

It's called Appeasement of monsters, in the vain hope that there are no monsters, only misguided humans who need our help to regain their humanity.

Or, if a Bell concedes there are some monsters, he must limit their reality to a Tiny Minority -- while their remaining millions and millions of gang-members around the world, all their minions of brothers and sisters, since they are so numerous and seem to be mostly Ethnic People with "cultures" we must "respect", and they often smile and are friendly when Bell meets them -- why, they cannot possibly be monsters; they cannot possibly be in collusion with the monsters who adore the same Founding Monster, Muhammad, whom they also adore; they cannot possibly be enabling their fellow monsters in some kind of sick and twisted relationship of mass co-dependent Stockholm Syndrome enablement. No, that cannot be, because that's not how humans (= white suburbans like Eric Allen Bell) are.

For all the happy carilloning of his recent advent, Bell still seems far from growing up in this regard. And until he shows us signs of having done so, he deserves no gushing, fawning, undeserved praise. Only guarded encouragement, and tough advice on how to keep progressing.

One thing is for sure: the anti-Islam movement (such as it is) ought not to be promiscuously embracing a Bell like he's the latest thing since sliced cheese, or like schoolgirls swarming the Beatles when they were fab. We should be polite, respectful, but at the same time firmly expect him to submit to a vetting process so we can see where he stands. And when that's clear, if we find him wanting, we should tell him in polite, respectful, but no uncertain terms why and how, and why, as such, he must sit over in the corner -- perhaps doing something useful for us like licking envelopes or folding flyers -- while the grown-ups handle the problem of Muslims.

Bottom Line:

Bell does not toll for us, unless he agrees to the following non-negotiable positions on the anti-Islam platform:

1) We cannot tell the difference between harmless Muslims, even if we agree they exist in large numbers, and the dangerous Muslims trying to deceive us in the service of their grand, protracted plan to subvert the New Rome -- the modern West -- standing in the way of Islam's right to dominate the world.

2) ...

Actually, there's really no need to adumbrate further positions. For, Bell already has made the move of precondition before that: the recognition that Islam itself is evil, dangerous and anti-liberal. From there, it's on to step #1. (The fact that quite a few Jihad Watchers themselves seem stuck and unable to take that first baby step -- such as the aforementioned "Wellington", who ought to know better -- is another, aggrieving problem which my ulcers, high blood pressure and brain aneurysm cannot handle right now.)

The child learning about the horror, the catastrophe of Islam, must take the next step -- step #1 -- from recognizing the problem of Islam, to recognizing the problem of Muslims. Namely, that the danger of Islam remains inert until it is put into practice, in myriad ways, from explosions to enablement, by Muslims.

Bell has shown a glimmer of an auspicious beginning. Let him not squander it in perpetuating the PC MC paradigm upon which he has been weaned his whole life, and allowing it to neutralize and soften the deadly edges of what he is starting to learn about the unique problem of Islam.

It's time for Bell to get cracking, for Liberty's sake.

Islamic Democracy: The Winner of the "OXY" (the Oxymoron Award) of the Century

2012-01-19T17:14:00.001-08:00

Since the demos (Greek for "the people") of any Muslim society is diseased, any endowment of sociopolitical power (kratos, the Greek word for "power", whence we get the "-cracy" suffix for words like democracy and theocracy) to that people will be as diseased as the human material composing it.

That's why the various tin-pot banana-republic dictatorships (some bigger bananas than others -- e.g., the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran, or Ataturk and the Kemalists of Turkey) which have been marginally and grudgingly amenable or pliable to pro-Western policies are, to quote Jack Nicholson in the movie by the same name, "as good as it gets" for any Islamic polity.

Historically and right into our present, Islamic polities have fallen into 4 categories:

Theocratic Monarchies

Ipso facto fanatical and supremacist-expansionist, with their expansionism only checked by limitations of real life -- i.e., superior non-Muslims around them, or competing Muslim polities in the context of internecine violence which has been endemic to the disease of Islam from day one; with the perennial goal being to unify under a Caliphate but this, as with other ideals in Islam, more often than not frustrated by the limitations of reality (including the reality of their own many-splendored disease inherited by Mohammed's madness, which is their obsessive-compulsive blueprint for politics and laws in this life, and Paradise in the next life).

Theocratic Fascism

E.g., just to pluck a few from a turban: the Taliban, Al-Shabaab of Somalia, Sudan, North Nigeria, certain periods of post-Colonial Algeria, the MILF of the south Philippines; and what may very well unfold in certain parts afflicted by the virus of the "Arab Spring".

Tin-Pot Dictatorships

This is the most common form of modern Islamic polities, due to the constraints imposed upon Muslims by a stupdendously superior and globally influential West. Some have been marginally pro-Western (e.g., Egypt under Nasser and Mubarak; Indonesia under Sukarno and Suharto; Tunisia under Bourguiba and Ben Ali, Morocco under Mohammeds V and VI, Iran under the Shah, Turkey insofar as the Kemalists hold sway) while some have been rather anti-Western, such as Libya under Kaddafi, Pakistan, and Saddam's Iraq (even if, like Pakistan, they may pretend to be in accord with various Western requests and/or make veiled threats of not behaving, in order to get $$$$$); while some have been more or less monarchic (e.g., Iran under the Shah).

And, as I noted above, some of these tin-pot dictatorships have been of brassier mettle than others (e.g., Iran under the Shah or Turkey under Ataturk) -- but all share the basic infirmity of the disease of Islam, which forever hinders any society from truly evolving and progressing on its own without the help to the tune of trillions of $$$ plus human ingenuity and expertise loaned out to them by Western Kuffar, such as for example we have seen with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the past half century, essentially a profoundly retrograde and demonically barbarian country which would have collapsed into sheer tribalistic violence had it not been for the serendipitous geological accident of oil along with the willingness of Europeans and Americans to help them with the technology and managerial expertise necessary to extract, produce and export it.

Did I say "4 categories"...? Oh yes, the fourth would be:

Progressive Islamic Democracies

You know, democracies that actually, astonishingly, jaw-droppingly respect Human Rights as defined by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights -- i.e., as defined by rational human beings.

Examples? (All I hear is the sound of crickets chirping, or camel spiders crepitating alacritously across the twilight sand, or mujahideen sharpening their blades in some dark hovel, or "Muslims who are ignorant of their own Islam" scraping out the last of their baba ganoush from their bowls after Ramadan sundown...)

Conclusion:

Now, if only we can remember what is precisely and appropriately "as good as it gets" with Muslim polities, we'll be halfway to sanity and safety in this century of this new millennium of an unprecedented revival of Islam.

Clearly, as we slowly recover our former rationality with regard to the problem of Islam and adapt it to the specter of an Islam Redivivus which includes the historically unprecedented mass immigration of Muslims into the West, along the way there we have to reconfigure and tighten up our definition of Jack's wryly sage and jadedly realistic advice.

Such that, for example, given their outrageous behaviors in fomenting international sedition against the West, polities such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen should not be tolerated, and should be treated as hostile entities at war with us -- if not engaging in outright hot war, certainly pursuing a cold jihad against us -- and at the very least, for fuck sake, not deserving of one red cent. For such polities, to count once again as being "as good as it gets" in terms of a Realislamik, they'd have to rehabilitate their behavior radically. Since, however, those terms subsist in a framework of ruthless realism about Muslims, there would be little or no expectation of such reform ever, let alone in the near future, evolving; and thus our policies would proceed accordingly.

Further Reading:

Realislamik

Diana, Diana, Diana...

2012-01-17T13:18:00.000-08:00

The otherwise impeccable Diana West lurches incomprehensibly off the rails recently:

"I Support Mitt Romney for President," so she emblazoned on January 10 on her blog.

You know, Mitt "Jihadism isn't Islam" Romney.

You know, Mitt "Islam is one of the world's great religions" Romney.

You know, Mitt "the great majority of people in Islam want peace for themselves and peace with their maker... [and they] want to raise families and have a bright future" Romney.

You know, Mitt "I believe people of the Islamic faith do not have to subscribe to the idea of radical, violent jihadism.” Romney.

That Mitt Romney. (Sources here and here.)

If that wasn't bad enough, she provided only a flimsy defense for her stand -- something about how others have unfairly criticized him for some economic issue that's apparently of greater exigent moment than the global threat of Islam; while in a drive-by parenthetical comment, she dismisses the only candidate even remotely approximating an anti-Islam stance, Santorum, by Bushbrushing him (as if Romney's Islamophiliac pronouncements aren't solidly Bushish themselves).

Some sources on Santorum who, with regard to the problem of Islam, is so far, to quote Jack Nicholson, "as good as it gets":

Tough, literate words about the Muslim Brotherhood and some other information

Some salutary comparisons with WW2 in a speech

"We are not fighting a war against terrorism -- we are fighting against radical Islam"

While it's unfortunate Santorum has to qualify Islam with the asymptotic term "radical", at least he doesn't completely sanitize Islam altogether behind a cordon of sweeping respectability, as does Diana's darling Mitt.

No publicity is bad publicity

2012-01-14T16:31:00.000-08:00

Some trenchant counter-examples to my title and little photo gallery come to mind, of course -- Charlie Sheen, Mel Gibson, and that gold standard for famous Hindenburg disasters, Gary Hart, to name a few -- but let's not spoil the fun, shall we?

Anyway, just last month in December of 2011, Robert Spencer began promoting a new blog by a Muslim female who had decided to take the big step of leaving Islam after 35 years of living in the hell on Earth a Muslim (particularly a Muslim female) usually must endure -- even if most endure it quite happily.

Spencer has been featuring a lengthy excerpt of every latest blog entry on his own blog, Jihad Watch, with a link leading the reader to "read the whole thing" over at her blog, entitled aptly enough, "Liberated".

As the reader began reading her entries, beginning with the first one, it soon became clear that her title is tinged with a bitter irony; for she still remains in a Muslim country, and as yet has found no way to escape to the free world. She is "liberated" only in interiority, in her mind and heart; not in public. Nor does she feel unambivalent about such a major decision, as otherwise, materially, she leads a relatively comfortable life with a passably good job, a nice car, and other amenities. The one thing she does not have is the basic dignity all humans deserve -- the freedom to choose what meaning of life (if any) she wants to subscribe to publically, without fear of public opprobrium, social and legal ostracization, or -- too often in Muslim milieus, the punishment of death for apostasy.

As a Muslim apostate living in a Muslim country (she dare not reveal which one), she is living in the Gulag Ummapelago -- worse than the Siberian Gulag of Solzhenitzyn's famous novel, for this is no far-off region to which dissidents are sent; it is simply daily life in any given Muslim country (with variations from country to country, reflecting the wonderful "tapestry" of "diversity" that makes Islam "not a monolith" -- but still unconscionably violating socially, legally, politically and spiritually the spirit and letter of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights).

At any rate, soon after "Liberated" began penning her blog essays, people began to voice hints of suspicions about whether she was a real person, or perhaps just a fictitious concoction, perhaps created by Spencer himself. Among other alleged clues, her English seemed too polished for a female Muslim who had never been to the West, had spent her childhood in Pakistan, then moved to some other Muslim hellhole. These suspicions were not merely voiced by the usual trolls and Muslim sprites and demons that haunt Internet forums and chat rooms; they began to be broached by some loyal readers of Jihad Watch. Therefore, "Liberated" began addressing these concerns formally in her blog essays. The situation became serious enough at a certain point that Robert Spencer himself wrote an essay published on her blog trying to allay those concerns and to assure the readers that "Liberated" is a real Muslim apostate and that her sad story is all too real.

Along with these suspicions of her reality were indiscriminately mingled (or mangled) the related, but distinct, issue of whether Spencer and the other man active in the promotion of "Liberated", her very close friend and mentor Ali Sina (an ex-Muslim himself, who subscribes to the "millions of Muslims are leaving Islam every day" mantra that is supposed to proffer hope for a dubiously quick solution to the problem Muslims are causing the world), have not perhaps been duped by a clever Muslim pretending to be an apostate. Certainly, Spencer and Sina are smart individuals who know a great deal about Muslim shenanigans and tactics, and probably are able to vet the potential infiltrator. However, they are not a perfect dynamic duo, like Superman and Batman, and one should therefore always reserve a healthy dose of skepticism in the back of one's mind, even as one goes ahead guardedly to support "Liberated" in her new venture.

All this flack about her sincerity, her reality and the possibility of some kind of elaborate ruse which her blog could represent have generated a remarkable amount of traffic on her new blog. I don't know how many blogs within a mere few weeks of their creation garner so many comments for each and every essay, but I dare say it's rather rare. Let's take a look at the stats for the seven essays for her first month, December: Her first essay of December 22, 86 comments. Her second essay, 91 comments, Third essay, 98. Fourth essay, 160. Fifth essay, 110. Sixth essay, 173. Seventh essay, 197.

Then there's our current month, January: So far, we have: First essay, 72 comments. Second essay, 168. Third essay, 157. Fourth essay, 161. Fifth essay, 185. Sixth and latest essay, 102. And apparently the buzz about her blog has reached far and wide in the Blogosphere as well. Also, it's garnered 151 followers (and counting) in the span of less than a month's time, which is a lot on Blogspot (though it may seem insignificant compared with juggernauts like Facebook).

It's safe to say that if there hadn't been the initial controversy about her identity, the blog would not have made the splash it did, and it may well have foundered into relative obscurity, with at best only a handful of polite, boring and mostly insubstantial comments per essay -- you know, like my blog. As it is, along with the usual dreck that every blog and discussion forum cannot avoid, there have accrued on Liberated quite a few interesting and substantive comments appended to all her essays (and, to toot my own horn, many of them from moi), and it promises to become a major blog in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement. In addition, unlike some anti-Islam blogs, its owners don't seem to indulge in that curious penchant for discouraging interesting meanderings into off-topic, or reasonably provocative, subject matter; and indeed, there seems to be no censorship to speak of at all. This too is a good sign, conducive to a thriving discussion community (albeit one that inevitably will attract the usual requisite trolls and the dreck that comes in their wake, which one always hopes will be kept to a tolerable minimum.)

In sum: The "bad publicity" of her initially dubious bonafides, then, has turned to a felicitous start for a blogging career, so far. No need to turn one's nose at that!

Warning Labels

2012-01-09T08:37:00.000-08:00

A repost deserving a re-read: My old essay Warning Labels.

2012-01-04T14:43:00.000-08:00

The Marxist doctrine of Politically Correct Multiculturalism — which is now ascendant virtually throughout the West...

So Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna apodictically announces a recent post. It's not just that I've spent years writing essays refuting that simplistic way of looking at PC MC; it's not just that I probably wrote over 100 comments in various ways trying to correct this simplistic view in the comments fields of various articles at Gates of Vienna over the years; but Baron Bodissey even once featured an essay devoted to my argument, and he claimed at the time to have been at least partially sympathetic with it.

My response there was as follows:

PC MC is not "Marxist". If it were, then that means that (to name a few) Eisenhower, Rudolph Giuliani, McCain, Glenn Beck, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Texas Republican Governor Perry, and nearly the entire body of professors who count themselves as supporters of the philosophy of Eric Voegelin (a staunch anti-Communist and traditionalist who was often deemed "too conservative" for most people) are all "Marxist" -- for every one of these listed as parroted PC MC givens about Islam and about Muslims.

Soon thereafter, someone signed "ABC" posted this retort:

PCMC is Marxist and it is also Capitalist. Both left and right sing its praises. Those that oppose it sit outside this duality.

Cue the head-banging-on-desk emoticon again...

The poisoned fruit of Gnostic alienation

2012-01-04T07:46:00.001-08:00

I have been analyzing the problem of the West's myopia to the problem of Islam for years, in often lengthy detailed essays.

I have come to the conclusion that the problem (which, for want of a better term, I label PC MC -- "Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism") is precisely not "Leftism", precisely not "liberalism", precisely not "cultural Marxism", precisely not "Socialism". That is indeed the whole point of coming up with the label PC MC in the first place: to denote a phenomenon insufficiently diagnosed by those other terms flung about with glibly consternated abandon by self-styled "Conservatives". While those sociopolitical diseases (all more or less synonymous, though suffering from imprecise terminology) certainly have influenced PC MC in certain ways, they are not dominantly represented by PC MC, and therefore they are not dominant and mainstream in the West -- as is PC MC.

The Oslo mass-murderer, Anders Breivik, according to these excerpts from his writings, repeatedly equates PC with "cultural Marxism", identifies it as the force that is destroying the West, and a couple of times mentions "the Frankfurt school" as a fundamental source of the cultural malignancy he felt was destroying the West.

Breivik's grievous misconception reflects a profound alienation from his own West. It is essentially the same type of alienation reflected massively and copiously in the writings of Baron Bodissey, Dymphna, Fjordman, El Ingles, Seneca III, Lawrence Auster, and numerous other commenters (some of whom have blogs, some of whom only participate in discussions in comments threads) who more or less support the anti-Islam movement. A typical example of this is on display at a recent Gates of Vienna essay (which over the years seems to have become a veritable warehouse or greenhouse for the fecund growth and cultivation of such speculations), both by its writer and among nearly all the commenters.

This alienation leads logically to the actions of Breivik: Breivik's attacks were paramilitary acts of war against an enemy he had come to consider evil monsters destroying his civilization. His demonization of the internal enemy is essentially the same (only less sophisticated, as befits a front-line soldier) as that of Baron Bodissey, Dymphna, Fjordman, El Ingles, Lawrence Auster, and numerous other commenters (some of whom have blogs, some of whom only participate in discussions in comments threads) who more or less support the anti-Islam movement.

The only other difference between them and Breivik -- other than his relative lack of intellectual sophistication -- is that he took seriously the Red Alert Emergency directly implied by this alienated viewpoint, and began actually shooting and killing the Enemy Who is Destroying the West.

Meanwhile, Baron Bodissey, Dymphna, Fjordman, El Ingles, Lawrence Auster, and numerous other commenters (some of whom have blogs, some of whom only participate in discussions in comments threads) who more or less support the anti-Islam movement sit back in their online armchairs ethically horrified at the acts of Breivik, yet they continue to sound the Red Alert Emergency about the West being controlled and destroyed by Evil Marxists.

Who is more logically consistent? The one sounding the Red Alert Emergency warning of the West being controlled and destroyed by Evil Marxists, but doing nothing about that Emergency? Or the one who takes action and begins fighting (and killing) the Evil Marxists who are controlling and destroying our West?

As for the former: What are they expecting? That the Evil Marxists will round them up and begin to kill them all, and yet they wouldn't put up a fight to defend themselves? Or that, prior to the rounding up and killing, they won't do anything to pre-emptively prevent it?

Or do they expect that a pan-Western Civil War will begin to unfold and the Good Conservatives would begin fighting (and killing) the Bad Marxists? And who will win this pan-Western Civil War? Will they try to help by assisting those who are actually doing the fighting (and killing) of the Evil Marxist enemy? Or will they sit aloof and wash their hands of the Civil Warriors defending the West, as they have consistently done so with regard to Breivik?

Or do they expect the West to keep on coasting along as it is, with no violence and no unraveling into general chaos and mayhem, while they continue Blogging and Complaining forever about some Impending Doom that never seems to actually happen, while physical action by them is never, apparently, actually required?

Breivik simply acted out the logical conclusions massively, copiously and obsessively present in the writings of Baron Bodissey, Dymphna, Fjordman, El Ingles, Lawrence Auster, and numerous other commenters (some of whom have blogs, some of whom only participate in discussions in comments threads) who more or less support the anti-Islam movement.

If these individuals were ethically horrified by Breivik's acts, then they are incoherent hypocrites, and strangely dense in being blind to the direct lineage leading from their quasi-Gnostic alienation from their own West to the poisoned fruit of Breivik's acts.

I am frankly astonished that these individuals cannot see this. Or, perhaps I shouldn't be: for, the same deluded state of mind that obsesses about a Gnostic alienation from one's one civilizational structures may well carry with it certain ophthalmological defects obstructing clear vision.

What one expects, so long as one considers them reasonably intelligent, is that they recognize this dilemma, and try to articulate intelligent distinctions between their alienation and Breivik's alienation. Instead, however, they affect a posture of absolute and utter discontinuity between their alienation and Breivik's alienation -- a posture so belied by the content of their writings over the years as to fall into the category of two logical fallacies for the price of one:

the Emperor With No Clothes Who Is Trying To Have His Cake and Eat It Too.

(Note: the preceding is predicated upon Theory #1 for explaining Breivik's motivation.)

Further Reading:

"Breivik's Law" (and therein is further included more links to other pertinently related essays)

The Persian flu is a persistent bugger...

2012-01-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

Recently in a Jihad Watch comments field, a JW reader named "Bunty Hoven" replied to a comment from Sassan Darian (unsurprisingly, from his name, defending the "Persian People"):

I'm not going to comment on whether the killing was an honor killing or not, but it was interesting that you said "Iranians are not religious (the people, not the regime)". I'm not sure exactly why but I always suspected as much. It makes it extra tragic that they live under religious tyranny. I hope and pray for the day when Iranians are free.

Also recently, I noted in the comments field of the new blog of a Muslim "closet apostate" who calls herself "Liberated One", a reader wrote, in response to my persistent doubts about Muslims in general:

Just look at iran, the majority of the people is sick of islam but they live subjugated by a ruling minority of religious tyrants.

I responded:

There's no solid indication that a majority of Iranian Muslims have grown sick of Islam. They are only sick of the current regime. They still don't realize what their real addiction is that they need to kick: Islam itself. Diana West amply showed reasons why we should be skeptical of the stubbornly popular notion within the anti-Jihad movement that Iranian Muslims are somehow different from all other Muslims:

Take a Breath on Iran

Iran's Protests "Not Meant to Be Anti-Islamic"

"Their Jail is Islam, and Changing the Thug from One Warden to Another Won't Set Them Free"

Blushing for Bret

And she wrote and documented much, much more.

Debbie Schlussel also wrote on this:

Not Easy Being "Green"

I summarized some of the issue in my essay The Persian Flu.

More generally, during this long "Arab Spring" this past year, I've noticed quite a few people within the ragged edges of the anti-Islam movement who, although remaining appropriately skeptical of "The People" (i.e., Muslims) in Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, etc., suddenly develop a case of amnesia about The Persian People (i.e., Muslims), and point to Iranian demonstrations as a great sign of hope that the Iranian regime -- and its Islam -- will soon be toppled.

Robert Spencer, for example, had the appropriate reflex response to the Libyan demonstrators shouting Allahu Akbar! in their recent "democratic" overthrow of Kaddafi's regime -- and yet, when Persians did it (during the demonstrations of 2009), he gyrated gymnastically to find ways to excuse such Islamically supremacist ejaculations and find them hopeful.

What these various Persian flu victims need is to get to their Hesperado Pharmacy ASAP, get their shots, bulk up on medications, take a few days off work, go home, have a few cups of hot chamomile tea under a blanket, and try to sleep off this ridiculously naive and ungrounded optimism they maintain about the Persian People.

Finally, in this general context, a long-time reader of my blog (and long-time commenter on Jihad Watch) named "Nobody" has noted a crucially pertinent historical fact (though it still requires a citation for verification). During approximately the 13th to the 14th centuries, after Persia had long been Islamized for a good 500 years, Persia experienced an interesting opportunity, a window of time lasting some 8 generations, during which non-Muslim Mongols invaded and conquered Persia, and offered the Persian people unprecedented religious freedom:

When Persia was conquered by the non-Muslim Mongols and the center of the Ilkhanate empire of Hulegu Khan, the local Infidels -- Zoroastrians and Christians -- had full religious freedom that they didn't have under the intial Arab rule or subsequent Safavid rule. The Persians -- who were by then overwhelmingly Islamized -- did not revert, even though they had no Islamically driven incentives not to. For the first 8 generations of the Ilkhanate, Persia was a non-Islamic state, but the people chose to remain Muslims. It was only after the 9th Ilkhanate ruler married a Muslimah princess and embraced Islam that the Ilkhanate too Islamized, destroying that opportunity. Luckily, that desease did not spread as far as Mongolia.

The News from Lake Mo-Begone

2011-12-31T05:04:00.000-08:00

Brought to you by Powdermilk Falafel -- made from couscous raised in the rich swamplands of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley by Kurdish bachelor farmers; so you know they're not only good for you, but halal. . . mostly. Couscous that gives shy mujaheed the strength to get up and do what needs to be done. Mashallah they're tasty, and expeditious!

Also brought to you by Abdul's Pretty Good 7-11, where Aziz "Ace" Stollensen makes sure to include the tipbox into his monthly zakat to overseas "charities".

And don't forget your Prayerful Oatmeal -- "Radical Fundamentalist Militant Extremist Islamism in a box", or even think of leaving Stu's Market without some Al-Shabaab Lamb Kabobs and Uncle Mushfiq's All-Goat Triple Halal Sausage Links in your cart: "Ass salami, you likem!"

* * *

Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Mo-Begone. Rasheed and Hassan stopped off at the Twitterbox Cafe on their way to the Camelback Tap, to pass along the gossip about Imam Inqvist of the Lake Mo-Begone Lutheran Mosque, who they claimed had apostasized...

"He must be killed, doncha know!" Banafsha said without mincing words, as she set their rhubarb mazurkas on the counter.

"Ya sure, you betcha, Banny."

The other guys on the stools nodded their assent.

"I hope you Habibi have some good news."

And oh they did: Bob Krittermeyer told them the latest: Hussein, the youngest son of Ibrahim and Aisha, had martyred himself in the Dar-al-Harb for Allah! Allah-Looyah! He is in Paradise now! Inshallah!

Meanwhile, over in the corner, Imam Dagwood of the Our Lady of Perpetual Jihad Sunni Institute, raised his Turkish coffee to toast them.

Other than that, they'd heard that the Lake Mo-Begone Mad Wahhabis softball team was getting their paintball guns ready for spring training...

As for the stoning of Ingmar Salhab, the widow who claimed she'd been raped but couldn't get four Norwegian bachelors to back up her story, that had been put off another week, so Yusuf "Joe" Hansen claimed, because of the heavy snows, even into late April this year. Joe oughta know -- he's got an ear to the Grand Mufti of Styornborn County, ever since he was honored to be chosen to marry his ten-year-old daughter.

Well, that's the news from Lake Mo-Begone.

Lake Mo-Begone: Where all the Muslims are wrong, all the goats are good-looking, and all the Dhimmis are above average.

Assalamu Aleikom wa Rahmatoh Allah wa Barakatoh.

___________________________________________

Note: The word woebegone does not mean "devoid of woe" but rather means a situation or condition that has "gone to woe" (as in the saying "gone to the dogs"); meaning succumbed to, or beset by, woe. Ironically, the word "begone" in all other contexts is used to rid one of something, as in the Biblical saying, "Satan, begone!" If only my pun "Mo-begone" meant that, instead of what Leftists like Garrison Keillor through their richly saturated PC MC are doing their best to enable: a West gone to the Mohammedan dogs.

The unearthly Hesperado

2011-12-30T07:28:00.000-08:00

About Daniel Pipes, Lawrence Auster notes in a recent post on his blog:

...(and I remain the only writer in the world who has pointed out his massive contradictions, no one else seems to care)...

I guess I'm not in the world.

But in fact, I have written several times about the methodological and theoretical flaws of Daniel Pipes in his analysis of the problem of Islam (even coining, I think, the phrase "the Pipes Dream" to denote his fundamental contradiction between condemning Islam and salvaging Islam).

Such as:

Pot Shots at the Pipes Dream

The Pipes Dream through a Glassman darkly

Asymptote vs. Asymptote: The New York Times vs. Brigitte Gabriel

Asymptotic vs. Holistic Analysis: a clarification

The Pipes Dream, revisited

Muslim Profiling in a Nutshell

A Litmus Test for the Intelligent Infidel

The above essays (which, incidentally, go back as far as 2006, while many of them go back to 2008) represent only the ones that feature Pipes more prominently; in addition, readers will find Pipes mentioned in the context of his "Dream" in over 30 other essays.

Not only this, but I have also credited Lawrence Auster with providing a good analysis of the Pipes problem. Indeed, I wouldn't begrudge Auster petulantly for ignoring me, and thus withhold from praise the very Auster piece I quoted from above, which I'd say is another good installment of a sound thrashing of Pipes by Auster (even if peppered with the typically Quixotic hyperbole whereby Auster is valiantly all alone in the World comprised by all that Auster can see).

For, it's not like Auster doesn't know who I am and hasn't read my blog before. Indeed, a few years ago, we corresponded quite a bit; and he has in the past referenced my blog a few times on his blog. Apparently, in the last couple of years I have written one too many negative critiques of his approach and methodology (i.e., in Austerspeak, these would be "vicious attacks"), and so I guess he'd rather just ignore me as though I don't exist.

The Catholic Church and Islam & Muslims

2011-12-28T21:11:00.001-08:00

[They don't make Popes like this anymore: Pope Urban II, calling for a crusade against the Mohammedans in 1095]

Both of the quotes I present below are from the Second Vatican Council (known more cinematically as "Vatican II"). I'm not sure yet if they are pronouncements ex cathedra -- which would mean they are considered infallible by the Catholic Church.

Whether they are or not, they are disturbing and, frankly, unacceptable statements for all who have taken the time and trouble to learn about the ghastly, grotesque evil which Islam embodies through and through. The alleged exceptions to this evil -- such as the miswak toothbrush, exemplifying a culture of quaintly pleasant dental hygiene; or various traditions of hospitable manners to strangers; etc. -- are not only superficial window dressing and hence irrelevant to the pernicious evil at the core and at the bloody peripheries of Islam, but become supreme insults to the intelligence and decency of all good men and women when adduced to defend the monstrously indefensible Islam. Got it? Okay, let's move on.

1) From the Papal pronouncement Lumen Gentium ("Light of the Nations"), promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1964:

...the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind. Nor is God far distant from those who in shadows and images seek the unknown God, for it is He who gives to all men life and breath and all things,(127) and as Saviour wills that all men be saved.(128) Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.

2) From the Papal pronouncement Nostra Aetate ("In Our Age"), promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

Further Reading:

Understanding the Crusades (a good essay by Marian Horvat, Ph.D., setting the Crusades in a more general framework with which we are concerned here)

Saint Leonella (an old essay of mine occasioned by the massacre of the Catholic nun and nurse Sister Leonella Sgorbati, an Italian who had spent 40 years of her life helping Somalian children, including Muslims, and who in 2006 was shot in the back by two Muslims inspired by a Muslim cleric during Friday prayers who called on his congregation to go out and hunt down Christians, because of the "offensive" remarks made by the Pope about Mohammed).

Drumroll please...

2011-12-28T07:42:00.000-08:00

Today I add a double whammy to my blogroll:

First, Mohammed -- a good overview; which is just that: eminently readable yet substantive, with links to citations where apt, and not apt to make one's eyes glaze over, as other accounts (cough! Spencer's Life of Muhammad cough!) tend to do.

Even the villains of history should be part of every person's pedagogy -- and all the more acutely appropriate when the minions who adore and follow that villain as the uswa hasana (beautiful model of conduct; cf. Koran 33.21) and al-insan al-kamil (the perfect man; good luck finding a source) are fanatically hell-bent on subjugating us and killing us to facilitate the grand strategy of that subjugation and/or if we resist the rightful domination of Islam.

Speaking of that grand strategy: My second addition to my blogroll -- the Stealth Jihad depends upon violence -- is a pithy summation I wrote a while ago articulating why the "Stealth Jihad" is not non-violent, as so many in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement (including its very coiner, Robert Spencer!) persist in simplistically implying.

What does Robert Spencer do? An attempt at an impartial overall assessment

2011-12-27T10:13:00.000-08:00

Spencer essentially does 4 distinct, though closely related things:

1) publishes reports about Muslims from other sources

2) publishes reports (usually from other sources) of what various Muslims write and say

3) discusses the various problems Muslims are causing based on #1 and #2, as well as on #4 (see below)

4) reproduces, in a discursive fashion interpolated usually with unremarkable paraphrastic interpretation, the writings of various Muslims of history -- including Muslim scholars of Islamic law, Muslim historians, Muslim exegetes of Islamic holy texts, and the Islamic holy texts themselves where pertinent.

It is only in part with #3, in the context of #4, where some may argue that Spencer sometimes errs, insofar as his contention or implication may be disputed: namely, that mainstream normative Islam -- not as defined solely by the holy texts of the Koran and the Sahih Hadiths themselves but also by the legal theory and codes based on legal theory, and the practice based on the theory and codes, as well as more broadly though amorphously the behaviors of large numbers of Muslims in various diverse places around the world -- is itself hostile to non-Muslims in terms of violent intolerance and supremacist expansionism.

Readers of my blog (and especially of my long retired sister blog, Jihad Watch Watch), know that I also have taken Spencer to task for poorly constructed or downright wrong interpretations radiating out of the data that documents the problem of Islam. That is not at issue here.

Returning to the point of today's essay: That there exist now, and throughout the history of Islam, innumerable Muslims who express in words and deeds such hostility to non-Muslims in terms of violent intolerance and supremacist expansionism -- and who themselves claim to base their expressions in Islam -- is indisputable fact. The only leeway for dispute here consists in the following two sets of questions:

a) Are these innumerable Muslims expressing mainstream, normative Islam? Or are they expressing a minority view that does not represent the Islam as defined by the Koran and Sunna, the Islam as theorized by the vast majority of Islamic representatives (clerics, legal scholars, etc.), and the Islam practiced by the vast majority of Muslims?

b) Whether we can answer (a) definitively or not, the following questions are pertinent:

i) are the problems caused by an indeterminable number of Muslims around the world in their inciting words and in their deeds -- both based so they claim on Islam -- of a sufficient magnitude and metastasis to render them an exigent concern for non-Muslims?

ii) How exigent is this concern?

iii) What should be done about it?

iv) And closely related to these questions is the question, are Muslims sufficiently addressing the problems that are emanating out of their Islam?

With respect to #1 and #2 above, we have ample evidence to suggest persuasively that the questions of (b) are to be answered (i) Yes, (ii) Very exigent, (iii) Measures more serious and substantive than we are taking currently, and (iv) No, respectively.

Readers of my blog know how I answer the questions of (a).

Note on #1:

This is the main activity of Jihad Watch. It probably comprises the bulk of what Spencer does. A simple sample of one month's sources on Jihad Watch verifies that for the most part, Spencer is not making stuff up, but simply re-publishing from other sources.

Consider the month of November of this year. What follows is simply a list of the sources from which Spencer and his editor Marisol derived their reports for that month. November does not remarkably differ from any other month of this, or any other, year since Jihad Watch began several years ago.

The list is nearly complete. I left out pieces that were mere interpretation essays, or blog pieces advertising or reporting on Spencer's tour of Australia, and the like. Such types of pieces constitute a tiny fraction of the overall output.

While some sources on the following list may be arguably of dubious reportorial merit (e.g., World Net Daily), and the credibility of others perhaps need to be further clarified (e.g., such Third World news sources as Compass Direct News or Free Malaysia Today, etc.) they are outweighed in quantity by the reputable sources.

Once the reader scans down the list, the charge that Spencer is making stuff up becomes absurd. Further substantiation of the merits of his sources is guaranteed when they are read; and only a severely obtuse person, or an ideologically deformed person (of the PC MC or the Islamic varieties), would not become increasingly disturbed, repulsed and horrified from reading story after story documenting the dangerous pathology of Muslims around the world.

Here's the November list:

The Times (of London)
Fox News (no one of credibility disputes that Fox News is an unremarkably mainstream and credible news source)
Associated Press
ANSAMed
Asia News
Voice of America
Minivan News
Evening Standard
Associated Press
Yahoo News
Evening Standard
CNN
Bloomberg News
Jakarta Globe
AdnKronos International
Compass Direct News
BBC News
Associated Press
Associated Press
The Telegraph
The Daily Mail
Los Angeles Times
MSNBC
The Guardian
Associated Press
Associated Press
CNN
Indo-Asian News Service
Free Malaysia Today
The Telegraph
The Telegraph
The Malaysian Insider
The Telegraph
The Guardian
Haaretz
The Telegraph
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse
Associated Press
The Independent
YNet News
Reuters
The West Australian
Haveeru News Service
BBC News
CNN
Asia News
NewsCore
Herald Sun
The Daily Trust via AllAfrica.com
AAP
World Net Daily
RFI
CNN
The Daily Mail
Associated Press
The Jerusalem Post
The Jerusalem Post
BosNewsLife
Agence France-Presse
Asia News
Associated Press
World Net Daily
Detroit News
Asia News
CNN
ANSAmed
Reuters
The Uptowner
CNN
The Jerusalem Post
Express Tribune
Associated Press
Agence France-Press
Reuters
Asia Times
Washington Post
BBC News
Asia News
Reuters
Asia News
The Guardian
ABC
New York Daily News
Washington Post
ABC News
CNN
Associated Press
ABC News
The Nation
CNN
Commentary
Agence France-Presse
New York Daily News
The Daily Mail
The New York Times
The Hill
The Daily Mail
Jakarta Post
Al-Arabiya
Reuters
Associated Press
Associated Press
Associated Press
Christian Science Monitor
The Malaysian Insider
Reuters
Reuters
New York Post
The Jerusalem Post
Reuters
Agence France-Presse
Asia News
Reuters
Agence France-Presse
BBC News
BBC News
Bloomberg News
Associated Press
Haaretz
Associated Press
RIA Novosti
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse
ANSAmed
The Guardian
World Net Daily
IPT News
Charleston Post and Courier
Associated Press
Washington Post
Reuters
National Review Online
Associated Press
Associated Press
Reuters
The Telegraph
All Voices
Boston Globe
CNN
Associated Press
Jakarta Press
Asia News
AFP
The Media Line
AKI
Time Magazine
Bloomberg News
Associated Press
Israel National News
Reuters
Associated Press
Bikyamasr
The Telegraph
MEMRI
Herald Sun
Reuters
Compass Direct News
Compass Direct News
Compass Direct News
The Jerusalem Post
Associated Press
Agence France-Presse
Washington Post
Agence France-Presse
The Daily Mail
CNS News
Agence France-Presse
Reuters
UPI
YNet News
Associated Press
The Jerusalem Post
The Washington Times
Associated Press
BBC News
Asia News
Asia News
Asia News
World Net Daily
BBC News
Jakarta Globe
CBS Los Angeles
Al Quds
Express Tribune
Associated Press
YNet News
AFP
Associated Press
Compass Direct News
Ahlul Bayt News Agency
The Daily Caller
Norway News
Sydney Morning Herald
Express Tribune
Al Arabiya
Miami Herald
The Telegraph
Associated Press
New York Times
Associated Press
MSNBC
Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse

Spencer and Auster: It's more complicated

2011-12-26T06:28:00.000-08:00

Robert Spencer and Lawrence Auster, among many others in the (still inchoate) Anti-Islam Movement, persist in having a simplex, if not simple-minded, grasp of the Western paradigm by which the problem of Islam remains largely unrecognized.

Today's example -- on his blog, Auster writes:

"I will adopt Robert Spencer’s ironic device of referring to jihadists and sharia followers as “misunderstanders of Islam.” The label conveys that fact that according to all Western liberals and mainstream conservatives, true Islam is moderate and peaceful Islam, while those Muslims who, from the rightly guided caliphs of the seventh century to our own day, follow Allah’s and Muhammad’s instructions to wage war on, terrorize, subjugate, enslave, and kill non-Muslims do not understand true Islam. Instead, they have hijacked Islam and perverted the religion of peace into a religion of war and terror. According to Western liberals and mainstream conservatives, the people who correctly understand Islam are the Western liberals and mainstream conservatives themselves, not the actual Muslim leaders, authorities, imams and clerics for the last 1,389 years. Indeed, according to these Western experts on Islam, the worst misunderstander of Islam who has ever lived was its founder."

Spencer has repeated his detection of this "liberal" trope or meme of the "misunderstanders of Islam" a gazillion times. And a closely related one is his oft-repeated ironic retort that some fanatically bellicose Muslim du jour in the news "must be an Islamophobe" (a particular meme or trope I addressed in my recent essay here, An Anti-Islam Manual -- "Never Leave Home Without It").

The problem with the detection of this trope or meme is the premature ejaculation implied in its crowers. One gets the distinct impression from Spencer or Auster (and from their followers who parrot what they crow) that this phenomenon they are describing sums up the problem of the general Western "liberal" misapprehension of the problem of Islam. This, in turn, would imply that all we have to do is somehow communicate the facts about how mainstream Islam is in fact itself fanatical, extremist, supremacist, violently expansionist and anti-human rights and -- voila! -- the "liberals" will see the light and we as a society in the West can get on, in relatively unanimous agreement, with doing something pragmatic about the problem of Islam.

If only things were that simple and easy. In fact, the PC MC paradigm has far more up its sleeve than one mere meme or trope -- or a pair of relatively synonymous memes or tropes. Furthermore, the PC MC mentality has the added bonus of not requiring consistency or coherence, in case any of its multiple memes or tropes collide logically with each other and don't make collective sense.

Thus, whenever and wheresoever we in the (still inchoate) Anti-Islam Movement try to refute the "Misunderstanders of Islam" meme or trope with the copious evidence we have at our disposal showing that in fact the violent supremacist expansionist Muslims around the world are understanding mainstream Islam with unremarkable and traditional accuracy, the PC MC person -- after, that is, he has wasted our time dancing around the issue with elaborate hemming and hawing and a dizzying kaleidoscope of red herrings and straw men and ego quoques and any other logical fallacies he's brought along in his kit-bag -- remains blithely unfazed: for he has a fall-back position.

The fall-back position is ingenious, albeit incoherent on closer inspection (though, again, incoherence is water off the PC MC duck's back): "Why," so the PC MC person says, unruffled as he stands with his back against the corner we have forced him into by the sheer bulk of the data we have marshalled, "most Muslims aren't following Islam fully anyway: Most Muslims are just like most Christians, who just go about their lives with ordinary worldly concerns and aren't fanatical about their religion -- and besides, most Muslims don't even really know their own Islam anway. So these violent Muslims you keep pointing out -- they just reflect a relatively small minority among the 1.2 billion Muslims around the world, you see? There! Now, may I go? I have a triple-decaf frappaccino to get to..."

I.e., after the PC MC person can no longer dance around with his "Misunderstanders of Islam" meme or trope and the related "Islamophobe" meme or trope, he whips out his handy-dandy "Tiny Minority of Extremists" meme or trope -- in this case, easily adapted to imply that the "Extremists" we have to worry about are in fact following, not "hijacking", Islam.

"So, go ahead and worry about Islam, if you must," says the PC MC person who has even gotten that far only after the exhausting Dance Marathon he has put us through, "just don't worry about most Muslims, since they're just lax and ignorant like most everybody else is these days. Hold on -- my Android is vibrating...gotta get this... let's do brunch sometime...!"

And, unfortunately, this latter meme or trope is more like jelly in terms of refutation. How can we possibly demonstrate that the majority (let alone the vast majority) of 1.5 billion people spread out in a world-wide diaspora of different societies and cultures are all dangerously extremist? Obviously, we can't. We can compellingly infer it, from the ever-burgeoning mountain of data pullulating out of the Muslim world in our time, and throughout history. But, alas, there remains enough of wiggle room and fudge factor there for the PC MC people to exploit; which they do, all day long.

And even were we to refute this latter meme or trope, the PC MC person would have others to pull out of his kit-bag.

As I explained in my above-linked essay, nothing less than an Anti-Islam Manual will suffice to enable us consistently to refute at every corner and turn the many-splendored paradigm of the PC MCs and begin the process of their sociopolitical defeat as their precious paradigm comes undone and is slowly but surely deconstructed. But no one of influence in the (still inchoate) Anti-Islam Movement seems to care enough about this problem to help jump-start it. In fact, in certain ways, they continue to benefit from our ongoing co-dependent Dance with the PC MCs (and their Muslim apologists).

As long as a Spencer or an Auster persist in implying that the myopia of the "liberals" is a simple matter, they continue to imply that the problem is one of mere "stupidity" or, for the conspiratorially inclined, "evil". While Spencer has recently shown signs of finally coming up to speed, more or less, on one specific cog of the PC MC mechanism, its anti-racist device (here, and here), overall his analyses remain saddled -- as do those of Auster and nearly everyone else in the (still inchoate) Anti-Islam Movement -- with an overly simplistic comprehension of the PC MC paradigm.

Sans an appreciation for the complexity of the Quantum Ignorance of that paradigm, we will tend to perpetuate our relative impotence in the pedagogy necessary to wake up our fellow Westerners -- that is, when we have not already edged over into the darker conspiracy theory by which millions of our fellow Westerners, being "evil liberals", are seen as beyond hope and must be battled in an armchair Civil War to be followed logically by an actually bloody Civil War.

Spencer's simple-minded prescription for airport profiling

2011-12-23T19:54:00.000-08:00

Robert Spencer writes (for the second time in recent memory):

... the whole TSA security apparatus exists because of Islamic jihad terrorists, and yet, as I have pointed out many times, it will never be adequate to stop those jihadists. The TSA is always prohibiting or restricting or searching things pertaining to the method of the previous jihad attack attempt -- shoes, liquids, etc. -- but they have no way to anticipate or head off the method of the next attack. And they waste huge amounts of time, money, and resources by pretending that everyone is an equal threat to launch a terror attack -- Baptist grandmothers in wheelchairs just as much as young Pakistani Muslim males. And now, seizing terrorist cupcakes.

This part is fine. It's where Spencer goes from here that is the problem:

The only answer at this point, and even it is not perfect, would be to institute Israeli-style profiling of air passengers. The Israelis have run an efficient and terror-attack-free air service for years, without all these invasive security measures.

Two problems here:

1) Israel, being a tiny postage-stamp-sized country with a minuscule fraction of the air traffic the sprawling gigantic U.S.A. has to deal with, has the luxury of being capable of controlling its airports more effectively.

2) And because of #1, Israel can control its airports with less overtly discriminatory profiling.

Conclusion:

Because of the size and complexity of a country like the U.S.A. we would be forced to institute a kind of profiling that even Spencer would disapprove of -- i.e., as I have called for before, simply not allowing Muslims to fly on planes at all, and identifying Muslims in part by whether they look like Muslims.

And, of course, this applies to all social venues; not merely airports.

Further reading:

(As the reader will note on sampling some of these further links below, Spencer has, characteristically, waffled and weaseled on this issue of profiling before, leaving a mess of incoherent logic behind to be cleaned up.)

Profiling

Racial Islamic Profiling

Muslim Profiling Revisited

Muslim Profiling Revisited Part Two

A note on the need for racial profiling

Muslim Profiling in a Nutshell

Muslim Profiling in a Peanut Shell

Racial Profiling and the Problem of Islam

Racial Profiling and the Problem of Islam -- Part Two

Auster's Islamo-illiteracy, again.

2011-12-23T15:05:00.000-08:00

I've written about certain important lacunae in Auster's Islamo-literacy before -- as in my notice last April, Lawrence Auster's Islamo-illiteracy, concerning his apparent gullibility about Sufism being more benign than other forms of Islam.

Today, I note a much easier and more elementary gap in his knowledge. He writes in an essay on his blog today:

...it is simply inevitable that modern people will object to the fact that this man--whose behavior is the model for all Muslims--married a nine year old girl, and it is inevitable that they will express their objections. [bold emphasis added]

Where's that obnoxiously blaring buzzer sound they use in game shows to show that a contestant is wrong when you need one?

From volume 5, book 58, number 236 of the hadiths collected by Bukhari, the most authoritative collection in all of Sunni Islam (and respected by the Shia as well):

"...he [Mohammed] married 'Aisha when she was a girl of six years of age, and he consumed [sic; meaning "consummated"] that marriage when she was nine years old.

Incidentally, this report is repeated numerous times in Bukhari, as well as in another very authoritative collection, that of a Muslim named "Muslim".

Meanwhile, other hadiths further flesh out the repellant perversion of Mohammed with regard to Aisha, as for example volume 1, book 4, numbers 229-233:

Aisha had to wash and scrape the semen stains off the Prophet's clothes before he went to prayers...

It is not clear from the surrounding text whether Aisha was 9 at the time she was dutifully scrubbing Mohammed's cum off his garments, or whether she was 10, 11, 12; or 8 or 7 or even 6. Does it really matter? On this basis alone, all Muslims are damned (whether or not they choose to try sophistically -- though far less cannily than B'rer Rabbit -- to wiggle out of the sticky tar of Bukhari).

The Muslim next door

2011-12-22T06:34:00.000-08:00

A 39-year-old woman, working as a pharmacist in sleepy, sunny, suburban La Palma, California.

Her name isn't Kristen, or Casey, or Shannon -- it's "Oytun Ayse Mihalik" -- and she's of Turkish extraction, but no doubt she's a pleasant, personable, reasonably attractive woman who smiles for her customers at the pharmacy of the mall where on her lunch breaks she may do a little shoe-shopping and drink a decaf caramel latté from the Tully's there.

Had authorities not learned, and had news reporters not reported, that Ms. Mihalik at some point recently traveled back to Turkey in order to wire thousands of dollars to help fund terrorist attacks against U.S. military personnel -- no one would be any the wiser that she was capable of supporting terrorism, and quite eager to do so.

In addition, the news report from Associated Press (as reported in Jihad Watch) indicates rather cryptically that she may have been dipping her toes into home-grown terrorism as well:

...court documents reveal Mihalik's arrest is "related to national security investigations in other areas of the United States."

It is eminently unremarkable and reasonable to assume that an individual willing and committed enough to travel thousands of miles to send thousands of dollars to terrorists who are killing American personnel in some foreign country, would also not be averse to aiding and abetting, in one form or another, terror cells here in America.

But one would never know that about Ms. Mihalik seeing her step out from behind the pharmacist's counter with a friendly smile dimpling her pleasant cheeks from within the frame of her colorful, moderately unassuming veil resembling an accessory not much different from the scarves we've seen on Jackie O. or Hillary. Nor even when she steps outside into the La Palma, California sunshine to the parking lot to get into her 2008 Toyota Celica, even wearing fashionably white and smartly modern jeans, all the while talking to someone on her Android cellphone in a charming foreign language, to drive off on an errand, perhaps the optometrist appointment she had been putting off for her new prescription.

The only way we'd know she could be involved in terrorism is her identity as a Muslim. Given the ever-mounting mountain of data out there about Muslims around the world, throughout history and into the hot news of the present, such an identity by itself, with no other information known, should be sufficient to warrant an extremely low threshold for suspicion of seditious intent and activities.

Or we can continue to play Muslim Roulette and wait until after attacks far worse than 911 occur.

Satan and Islam: another reverberation

2011-12-20T08:38:00.001-08:00

In a couple of previous essays here (e.g., Islam's Darker Source, as well as Islam and the Psychology of Satan: The Tragicomedy of Hell on Earth, I have flirted with taking a stab at explaining Islam as, in effect, a religion created by Satan.

The first problem with such an explanation is that I am not a Christian (nor a Jew, a Zoroastrian, or Muslim -- all of whom believe in the existence of Satan). As I explained in the second-linked essay above, I approach this from a comparative religions viewpoint, considering Satan as a mythopoetic symbolism -- which, incidentally, does not mean that, just because it is not considered a literalistic truth, it does not symbolize a reality.

At any rate, in addition to the glimmers of Satan in Islam I touched on in the two essays linked above (the temptation of a Paradise that is really a Hell; and the broader more overarching jealousy of Satan against the Man-God, Jesus), my attention was recently aroused by further echoes or parallels in this regard from the Koran, helpfully provided by the Jihad Watch reader "traeh", whose website of Islamic texts (Quoting Islam) I have put up on my blogroll (though I don't think he realized the full import of the quotes he was pointing out).

In the comments section of a Jihad Watch article about how the University of London College (sounds a tad redundant, eh?) is holding, or has held, a Christmas service featuring Koran readings, "traeh" pointed out some Koran verses that go profoundly against the Bible. I now quote from his comment.

For example, in Qur'an Chapter 42, Verse 11:

The Creator of the heavens and the earth. He hath made for you pairs of yourselves, and of the cattle also pairs, whereby He multiplieth you. Naught is as His likeness; and He is the Hearer, the Seer.

Compare Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 26:

Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness

In the Judeo-Christian conception, human beings, made in God's likeness, are children of God the Father. In the Qur'an, Allah never calls himself "Father," and in several places denies He has any sons or daughters. Rather, human beings are only Allah's servants or slaves. "I have only created jinns and men that they may serve me." (Qur'an 51:56)

End quote.

These two contrasts between the Bible and the Koran indicate a fascinating possibility. They document the envy of Satan for God's creation and His special creation, his creatures the human beings. While this envy is never spelled out in the Bible, it did become part of the Judaeo-Christian mythologoumena of Lucifer/Satan found copiously in the intertestamental literature. One study of the period, for example, cites a typical idea expressed in such writings:

After Lucifer along with all the angels is commanded to adore God's latest creation, Adam, Lucifer says:

"I do not have it within me to worship Adam... I will not worship him who is lower and later than me... He ought to worship me..."

As the authors of that study note: This Luciferian envy "is cognate with the idea of angelic opposition to the creation of Adam, a subject that recurs in [early] Rabbinic literature..."

And let us recall that this intertestamental literature, which included much apocryphal, heterodox and outright heretical and Gnostic texts, continued to flourish throughout the first few centuries A.D. reflecting, and in turn causing, much of the heated debates and strife of the developing theology of the early Church. As Christianity slowly gained dominance by the latter part of the first half of the new millennium, those undercurrents of non-orthodox and anti-orthodox belief and literature never vanished, but only went more and more underground, finding expression in various sects that kept popping up here and there.

Until one hot day in the desert they found massive expression not merely in an odd little sect doomed to die out and remain only in the dusty pages of anti-heretical writings, but rather in what would become a major world religion: Islam.

Those passages from the Koran we quoted above indicate an envy on the part of Allah against humans -- an envy whose supposed victory one can see is to be ensured by the apodictic counter-claims against the Judaeo-Christian view of Mankind.

"No!" thunders Satan with his Allah-mask on, "Mankind has not been created in the likeness of God -- Mankind is nothing more than an animal, which I have created to be my slave!"

Seen from a certain angle, it becomes painfully clear what is going on. Satan could never handle his primal trauma -- the creation of, and favor for, Mankind by God. Satan wasn't about to ever forget that horrible wound. He nursed it throughout history, and finally found a way to assuage his pain -- an ingenious way: the creation of a major religion that avows fanatically to worship God, and God alone.

Indeed, the genius of Judaeo-Christianity is not so much its crystallization of monotheism, as its elevation of Man, finding supreme expression precisely in the Trinity, wherein the Human God is part of the Godhead. Pace many of the fiercer Protestants (particularly Calvinists) who resemble more Muslims than Christians in this regard, this theanthropology found natural expression in, for example, the famous dictum of the Patristic theologian Athanasius:

"God became man, so that man might become deified."

Thus, one could say that Islam is not so much an assault against God and right worship of God -- but rather an assault against God's Creation and the crown jewel of His Creation, Mankind. This Judaeo-Christian theanthropology reflected a proper esteem for humanity, which made all the more grievous his fall from grace, and the tragedy of history requiring salvation. An esteem, and a tragedy, that was to find its fulfillment in the event of God becoming Himself human in Jesus Christ in order to recapitulate the life and death of man -- and, one hopes, the arighting of his original destiny. For, after all, as St. Paul symbolized, Christ was the "second Adam".

The mystery of Lucifer is that such a good, and apparently perfect, angel would begin to succumb to the itch of envy at this last creature, and allowed that itch to gnaw at his interior being until it transmogrified into a monstrous rebellion. Along the way, as history devolved, he found a grotesquely clever way to, let us say, channel his churning hatred for creation and its star. He founded Islam.

And through Islam, Man is seduced not so much to hate God directly, as to hate himself, to hate Creation, and to hate all other humans who do not join this cult of self-hatred.

Another little dig at Bostom from beyond the grave

2011-12-18T10:17:00.000-08:00

Over a year ago, in my essay here titled Chutzpah Watch, I noted how, when Robert Spencer exacerbated his slight against his ex-friend-and-colleague, Andrew Bostom,

"...nobody notices when Spencer reaches calmly out from beyond the grave of his collegial friendship with Andrew Bostom to twist the knife in his corpse."

At the time, Spencer's egregious posthumous backstab involved an article at Jihad Watch where he praised a new book on Islamic anti-Semitism by a Martin Gilbert while, in the same breath, claiming that

"...there has not been any serious scholarly study focused wholly and exclusively on Islamic antisemitism as such..."

-- obviously and pointedly ignoring Bostom's The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (which previously, before he and Andy had fallen out due to some mysterious back-room squabble privy only to members of the Gentlemen's Club, Spencer had touted as the greatest thing since sliced cheese).

Well, over a year later, Spencer felt, I guess, like reaching out from beyond the grave yet again to take a little dig with his spade at the settled earth of their dead friendship under which Bostom was supposed to be resting in peace.

In the context of a Jihad Watch article (The truth is spreading) in which Spencer proclaims that the anti-Islam (sorry -- the "anti-Jihad") movement is showing real signs of spreading and progressing, evidenced mainly by other people borrowing terms Spencer over the years has coined by which to refer to the problem of Islam, Spencer sees fit to write, no doubt not without a grin broadening his robust beard:

The professor of medicine and sometime anti-jihad researcher Andrew Bostom makes frequent use of another term I coined: "Islamorealism."

Auster's priorities

2011-12-17T22:16:00.001-08:00

Lawrence Auster writes on his blog:

The transcendent issue in this election, on which the survival of American liberty depends, is the repeal of Obamacare. My long-time position (which could change depending on new facts and circumstances) is that I will vote for any Republican nominee who seems to be genuinely committed to repealing Obamacare.

No, he's dead wrong. The overarching issue in this election, as well as previous, and subsequent elections, is the problem of Islam. Bottom line: If there were a candidate who supported "Obamacare" and yet were also anti-Islam, I would vote for him in a heartbeat. Auster, apparently, wouldn't. That speaks volumes.

Similarly, if there were a candidate unabashedly supportive of the homosexual agenda who was also anti-Islam (*cough! Pim Fortuyn cough!*), again, I would vote for him in a New York minute. Auster, apparently, wouldn't. When Auster described the respective problems thusly:

Islam... [and] homosexual liberation—two of the major forces threatening our civilization from without and within...

-- which of the two would he choose to oppose, if the rubber met the road and he had to choose?

About people like me, readers can be confident they know where I stand. About Auster, one never knows. And how many other issues would Auster add from his hectic schedule of Commenting on All Things Emergent Under the Sun? With his penchant for labile hyperbole, "major forces threatening our civilization" probably applies to half a dozen other sociopathologies he just happened not to mention that day. And anyway, we saw up top how "Obamacare" rises above the specter of Islam like a larger Godzilla would loom over a mere garden snake. (Sorry, I got Austerianly carried away with my rhetoric there...)

Auster is yet another "conservative" for whom Islam is a problem, yeah sure; but not the "real" problem. Somewhere down the to-do list, doncha know, after we take care of all the non-Islamic Enemies Within and Under Our Bed. For its intellectual and political leadership, the Anti-Islam Movement does not need individuals for whom the problem is treated more as a hobby to be shelved aside for supposedly more urgent hobbyhorses -- than as the unique, and uniquely overarching, danger that it is.

I guess it's not so dire a dilemma after all, eh Bob...?

2011-12-13T17:07:00.000-08:00

The other day, I quoted Robert Spencer articulating (twice!) an eminently reasonable conclusion which, by his own words, he has repeated on his site Jihad Watch "many times" -- to wit:

... a fact that we have pointed out many, many times at Jihad Watch: there is no reliable way to distinguish jihadists from peaceful Muslims.

And:

... what we have pointed out many times over the years: that there is no reliable way to distinguish between Islamic "extremists" and Islamic "moderates".

This conclusion is eminently reasonable to the careful reader of Spencer's site, by virtue of the mountain of data about the various facets of the problem of Islam which he has been amassing there for years and reporting each day.

Now Spencer, true to form, sees fit to articulate a breezy formulation that, in a glib flash, totally undermines that deadly-sober conclusion. In discussing a Muslim reality TV show, he notes that its episodes happen to:

"...depict Muslims who by their own account aren't observant, and so not reading the texts and teachings that Islamic jihadists use to justify violence..."

And from this, Spencer concludes:

"... and so they're not the kind of people who would have given rise to any suspicion of Muslims in the first place."

Well, that settles that, I guess! No need to worry about the Muslim Roulette problem any more!

Contrary to Spencer's own previous words (which he himself says he has repeated "many times"), he now contradicts himself (as he has numerous times in the past on this precise point) and asserts that, apparently, we can tell which Muslims are dangerous and which ones aren't!

So, I guess you can relax now, Bob (De Niro, that is).

Update:

A reader at Jihad Watch named "glenkille", commenting just today (December 18) on Spencer's thread concerning how much progress the anti-Islam (sorry -- the "anti-Jihad") movement is making as reflected in the wider and wider use of various terms coined (so Spencer claims) by himself and his colleague Pam Geller, wrote:

Robert, I picked up an excellent phrase here on JW a week or so ago. Unfortunately I forget who said it. The phrase, 'Muslim roulette' refers to the problem of how to distinguish between a "moderate" muslim and a jihadist.

Muslim Roulette

2011-12-11T07:31:00.000-08:00

Robert Spencer, creator and editor of Jihad Watch -- a kind of daily ticker-tape UPI newswire service which relentlessly reports and republishes an ever-mounting mountain of data of various news stories and analysis from various sources from around the world providing massive documentation of the multifariously grotesque and metastasizing pathology of Islam -- has noted:

... a fact that we have pointed out many, many times at Jihad Watch: there is no reliable way to distinguish jihadists from peaceful Muslims.

And:

... what we have pointed out many times over the years: that there is no reliable way to distinguish between Islamic "extremists" and Islamic "moderates".

If these observations are cogent, and if the dangers they imply should alarm us -- and only someone who has not taken the time and trouble to familiarize himself with the mountain of data about Islam would be reluctant to agree -- then what we are faced with, increasingly, as millions of new Muslims continue to immigrate into the West, and as the West continues, insanely, to support and aid various Islamic regimes around the world, is a situation and dilemma which may be expressed by the following vivid metaphor and analogy:

Imagine you have two guns on the table before you.

You know that one is loaded, and the other is not loaded.

But you don't know which is which.

Even though one gun is clearly labelled "loaded" and the other is clearly labelled "unloaded", you also know that the labels cannot be trusted to be accurate.

Now let us say that in order to get something you need -- food, money, or the safety of a loved one -- you are told you must pick up one of the guns, point it at your own head, and pull the trigger. And you must do this several times.

Or, for our metaphorical analogy to better approximate our actual situation we find ourselves in, in the real world, we may say that there are not merely two guns on the table, but two groups of guns: on one side of the table is a single gun, or at best a couple of guns, labelled "Tiny Minority of Loaded Guns". On the other side is a whole pile of guns, over 20 of them, all labelled "The Vast Majority of Unloaded Guns". And you are being asked to pick up every last gun from the latter pile, point it at your head, and pull the trigger, not once, but several times each. And yet still, you remain unsure of the accuracy of those labels, for you cannot trust the judgment of the people who affixed them.

Finally, let us add this detail: Let us say that, unlike the Christopher Walken character in Deerhunter, you are not being forced at gun-point to play this cruel but deadly game -- that, in fact, you have a third choice: to stand up and refuse to play this game by the arbitrary and reckless rules which Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism, in its mainstream dominance, has been trying to impose.

And you can do this, because the West, as bad as certain sectors of it may have gotten, is not a totalitarian society: it remains the freest, most intelligent and most decent collection of societies in the history of mankind. Its current fashion of PC MC may remain quite powerful in its influence; but as a fashion, it can go as quickly as it came. And it will. The only question is not whether -- but only how quickly and reasonably it will do so, avoiding the kinds of catastrophic mistakes the West made the last time it dragged its heels waking up to the danger of an evil expansionist culture, the Nazis and Fascism, when, having acted sooner, it could well have spared the lives of millions, and the horrible dislocations caused by a global war.

And so you stand from the table and refuse to make this silly choice, because over time, after learning about Islam and Muslims, you have come to the reasonable conclusion to deem all of the guns on the table equally lethal -- and this insane game, as a consequence, irrationally reckless.

Enough is enough. Surely we can do better than to continue, out of misguided good intentions gone grotesquely mad, to convince ourselves to play this suicidal, unconscionably illiterate and ill-informed game of Muslim Roulette.

Spencer does a Bostom on Chesler?

2011-12-09T09:33:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, due to the apparent rules of the Gentlemen's Club in the Anti-Islam Movement (sorry, I meant the "Anti-Jihad Movement"), we peon civilians rarely find out about major rifts between the great moving-and-shaking and jet-setting luminaries who informally lead our Movement-That's-Not-Yet-A-Movement -- rifts in which we have a stake, because they could adversely affect the effectiveness of our collective concern to try to wake up the West to the dangers of Islam -- until suddenly we see odd little signs indicating them.

One of them caught my attention this morning, on browsing through Jihad Watch (which I still do with my morning coffee, since Spencer's reportorial excellence through his site's ticker-tape amassment of the mountain of data about the pathology of Muslims remains among the best on the Net, even though he and his editor Marisol banned me unfairly over a year ago from participating in its community of commenters).

So, in an editorial introduction to a story about a Canadian feminist unsurprisingly supporting the outrageously anti-liberal and anti-feminist values of Islamic culture, Spencer details meticulously his own contributions to this important subtopic, which could be seen as a subcategory of PC MC -- namely, the systemic failure (with exceptions that prove the rule) of Western feminists to condemn Islam as they should, given their own liberal values and the monstrous repudiation those values confront in Islamic culture.

As I read along in Spencer's adumbration of one article after another which either he had written by himself, or had written in collaboration with others, the back of my mind began wondering if he would mention the major article on this subject which he wrote a few years ago with Phyllis Chesler.

Finally, at the end of his list, he did indeed mention it. But, damned if Spencer didn't pull a Bostom again.

There was one exceedingly odd detail about this particular mention, compared with all the other mentions: He failed to name his co-author. In every other article he lists, he meticulously mentions each co-author. Then, suddenly, on the Chesler article, his wording suddenly becomes strangely detached:

I also coauthored the monograph "The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam" (available as a pdf here).

This omission is curious for two reasons:

1) It comes after a list of other related articles where he didn't omit the names of any other co-authors but rather took the trouble to detail their names each time;

and

2) The name he is omitting, Phyllis Chesler, in that one particular item, is arguably the single most important person and activist in this field of calling attention to the failure of Western feminism in its response to the treatment of women in Islamic culture.

This reminds the reader of another time when Spencer began seeing fit to omit and neglect the name of another major figure in another important subcategory of the overall problem of Islam -- namely, the issue of anti-Semitism in Islam: that major figure being Andrew Bostom, who edited perhaps the single most important compendium to date on the subject.

It's none of my business, generally speaking, if Spencer has a petulant spat with some friend or colleague; but such pettiness does become my business -- and the business of all of us who are concerned about the dangers of Islam -- when that spat impinges on the optimum effectiveness of the anti-Islam movement, and when the spatter (or spattee) is making money off of me through his anti-Islam (sorry, "anti-Jihad") activities (I purchased one of Spencer's books, and by clicking on Jihad Watch numerous times a day 365 days a year for seven years, I contribute my small part to his fame).

Further Reading:

Cracks in the Gentlemen's Club: The Bostom Incident

Chutzpah Watch

Robert Spencer slights Bostom again: Roland Shirk got the memo

No need for censorship, when you have self-censorship

Creationism and Evolution Theory: Both Are Flawed: Part 3 and Conclusion

2011-12-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

Preface:

The first two parts may be found here:

Part 1

Part 2.

It's not absolutely necessary for the reader to wade through Parts One and Two, but it would be nice (particularly any reader who wishes to try to refute my arguments).

Introduction:

At the end of Part 2, I left off just prior to delving in specifics into the topic of speciation. For the purposes of my argument here, speciation may be defined as:

the process whereby one species over a long period of time and through genetic mutations (triggered in great part by environmental changes), transforms into a different species.

And what is a "species"? Well, I went into that in Part 2, where I wrote:

"... a "species" is not a fact, but a symbolism, given meaning through an interpretation based upon certain facts. The word species denotes a symbolism equivalent to the archaic word kind -- made general through the King James Bible as, for example, in the phrases "after his kind" or "after their kind" from the first chapter of book of Genesis:

...

"And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. [1:24]

...

"The equivalent symbolisms species and kind simply denote the mysterious fact of differentiation we experience among all life forms. The latter happens to be archaic and, in addition, burdened with coming from a "religious" context; while the former is the modern, and therefore "approved" term. Philosophically speaking, however, both denote the same phenomenon. Alongside with this mystery of differentiation is a parallel, or counter-mystery: that of the apparent interrelation of all living beings. Together, these two mysteries form a paradox..."

End quote.

The conventional view in modern biology is that most if not all instances of speciation in the long history of biota (spanning hundreds of millions of years) have involved a protacted series and process of "stepping-stone" transformations. I.e., a shrimp does not transform straightaway into a platypus: rather, through a long process involving innumerable in-between stages, a shrimp transforms into a fish, a fish into a salamander, a salamander into a frog, a frog into a land lizard, a land lizard into a crocodile, then a crocodile goes through numerous stages of animal leading to some form of mammal; etc. There is implied therefore an order of incremental gradations whereby one of two species that are taxonomically distant from each other can become the other only through those gradations.

Which two species are specifically supposed to be involved does not matter here; it's the mechanism that is being philosophically analyzed. In this mechanism, the function of long epochs of time, then, is not as a willy-nilly event whereby any species may become any other species without rhyme or reason; but rather reflects an internal parallel order of seemingly reasonable transitions shading off from one species to another, with a sufficient number (i.e., probably a staggeringly high number) of "in-between" stages bridging such outlandish-seeming transmogrifications that would have to have thus occurred frequently -- from, say, a hummingbird straight to an elephant (which, no matter how much time is allowed for, would never seem reasonable or plausible).

These gradational changes are the "mutations" so near and dear to the evolutionary biologist, and without which he would be left with no mechanism at all. And in the scheme of this mechanism, these mutations are supposed to be guided by the non-intelligent hand of "adaptation" to external environmental changes and the necessities which those changes, by chance, happen to impose upon living things.

As part of this "adaptation" is the notion, supposedly logical, that it presupposes a "survival of the fittest" -- with "fitness" understood as anything that helps a species continue to thrive rather than not thrive. This concept often seems to be employed in a rather circular way; for any species that is extant is presumed to have "survived" thus far because of a presumed "fitness".

All this would be the fine-tuning of the mechanics, so to speak, of the overarching premises of the theory of evolution itself. The long essay to which I linked in Part 1 elaborates and articulates an exhaustive and devastating refutation of this mechanism by pointing out, relentlessly and meticulously, its logical flaws. It really simply has to be read in its entirety to fully grasp. The length of that essay is not redundant or superfluous: it is necessary to the argument it is constructing. I don't think it can be summarized, unfortunately; though further on in this essay here I will attempt a stab, at least, at adverting to an adumbration of some of its salient points.

Discussion:

So: Why do biologists feel the need for the mechanism of speciation?

Put another way, why is the mechanism of speciation so crucial for evolution theory? The answer is rather obvious: evolution theory is a way of explaining (by, ultimately, explaining away) the fact of differentiation in biota. Differentiation -- of any phenomenal field -- may be explained in either of two ways:

1) by reducing the differentiation to an underlying sameness which internally developed into differentiated phenomena

2) by positing an external cause of the differentiation.

Creationists do #2; modern scientists through evolution theory do #1 (or claim to be doing #1).

(Of course, a person could blithely refrain from feeling the need to explain all the wondrous diversity he sees around him in the natural world. But to those with the itch of curiosity about the reality that surrounds them, this simply won't do.)

Each of these two camps, however, in their undue focus on one or the other pole of the mysterious paradox of living things (the paradox of Differentiation/Sameness), tends to neglect the tension unifying the two poles. There's a good reason to tend to neglect one or the other pole: the whole point, for such reductionists -- whether they be immanentists, like modern scientists, or whether they be literalizing transcendentalists, like Creationists -- is to ignore or destroy the tension, not to preserve it. As the 20th century philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) used to say, the tension is not going to go away if you deny it; for it is an unavoidable part of the structure of reality.

And, speaking of the devil, so to speak, it may be apposite now to quote at length from Voegelin, whom I had mentioned in passing in Part One. Examining the response of the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to the problem of this paradox of the differentiation and sameness of living things, Voegelin frames it thusly, in terms of:

[t]he theory of the descent of the species... even including... an explanation for the current fixity of the species...

By "fixity of the species" Voegelin means the fact of the differentiation of living things, a fact that is a phenomenon apparently in conflict with a claim of the essential underlying unity of those living things. By "species" is meant each living thing represented by a class of others that seem to be of the same kind, to which one sees a multitude of contrasts in other living things of other classes. Thus, we see a lion, and all lions, in contrast with a dragonfly, and all dragonflies, etc. And as this observation is multiplied to include all living things we have encountered, we have a multitude of different "species" as a collective datum which then requires explanation, or a "theory".

Of course, it's not like all these multitudes of different kinds of living things don't have anything in common with each other; but on the other hand, they are sufficiently different from each other to demand from our philosophical (let alone human) curiosity some kind of explanation.

Indeed, as we expostulated at length in Part Two, it is the combination of difference and similarity, and the cognitive dissonance of that combination, which establishes the paradox, and which arouses our curiosity the most, and which has led to the modern dilemma about this matter. Either these species have existed as different entities for eternity, or they have a beginning -- by having been created. Or, so modern biology has come to say, they somehow came into being through a process convolving each other -- a process that may be traced back to some primal event of inanimate matter becoming some rudimentary form of animate matter (some kind of protoplasm, which then "evolved" into single-celled organisms).

Apparently, Kant was the first major modern thinker to tackle this problem in light of the then emerging, still gropingly incipient field of modern biology. For the most part, as we shall see, Voegelin approves of the way he did it (which is no mean accomplishment, as Voegelin was known to be ruthlessly finicky about his standards for good philosophy).

Returning to the Voegelin passage:

Nineteenth-century theories of evolution, especially Darwin's, added factual details to Kant's theory and improved it by removing many objective difficulties, but they changed nothing in the basic framework. On the other hand, compared to Kant's theory, the theories of the nineteenth century actually represent a huge step backward on account of the decline of theoretical culture and the consequent naiveté with which relatively insignificant details are considered important and lauded as progress in treating the question, while the crucial speculative-theoretical basic questions are overlooked.

Voegelin is here broaching a kind of cultural rift that occurred historically, in dealing with the question of this philosophical problem aroused by the differentiation of living things, whereby most modern philosophy had become degraded, according to Voegelin, and could no longer deal with questions of transcendence without reducing them to categories that implied tactics of a denial of transcendence: what Voegelin calls "immanentizing" tactics; with a very few philosophers remaining, such as Kant, who still retained enough of the standards of classic philosophy to respect the transcendence factor -- even if only in respecting the irreducible questions that point to that factor.

Back to Voegelin:

Kant deals briefly but thoroughly with these crucial questions in a few sentences appended to the well-meaning consideration of the possibility of a real descent of species. He points out that if the radically immanent theory of evolution were accepted, researchers would have to ascribe to the universal mother, with her generative power, an expedient organization geared to all the creatures that have come forth from her and without which the appropriate forms of the animal and plant worlds would be impossible.

By "universal mother", Voegelin means the unifying cause of all living things -- a reductive cause which, as we pointed out in Part Two, biologists may try to deny they are indulging in their disingenuously delimited focus, but to which all the logic of their theory of evolution nevertheless points (unless they are positing an eternity of different species changing into other species; which they are not -- and which, at any rate, would be no less incoherent).

Voegelin again, now quoting Kant:

"They [the radical immanentists] have then only pushed the basis of explanation further back and cannot claim to have made the development of those two kingdoms [plant and animal] independent of the prerequisite of ultimate causes. " In this one sentence the idea of the inner law of evolution is carried to its conclusion—at the same time that its theoretical significance is blunted. The turn to the theory of evolution has the theoretical goal to explain the building principle... of each species based on the preceding evolution of species. If this idea is followed to its logical conclusion, the law according to which species develop moves closer and closer to the beginning of the history of evolution, until the first life-form is endowed with the evolutionary tendency for the entire living world...

I.e., the tandem parallel function of speciation -- functioning like some vast web of interrelations and gradual reconfigurations of species into other new species (with, of course, many older species remaining behind, most likely eventually to die out) -- is not extrapolated back in time forever: modern biologists do not posit an eternity of speciation backwards in time. Indeed, they seem to posit an increasing complexity of life forms as time progresses (e.g., homo sapiens developing out of more primitive forms of mammal) and, by logical extension, an increasing simplicity as one goes further back in time.

This speculative regression leads, logically, to some beginning point in some single entity (a cell, or some kind of protoplasm) that, again logically, is the "mother" of all life after it. This primal "mother" furthermore must contain within it the potential for all the development and complexity that unfolds from it; else where did that complexity come from? One supposes modern biologists could posit a form of the Lucretian model of atomic complexity, whereby the stark simplicity of the original atoms, through the sheer fact of combinations and recombinations of hitting each other at odd angles and forming random clusters, over a long period of time generates a complex structure where none existed before.

Thus, in the materialist Genesis of all living beings, enough of this basic simple protoplasm came into existence through chemical/electrical accidents happening hither and thither wherever the right combinations of chemicals and electricity occurred; and then enough of this protoplasm went through a sufficient number of environmental changes to begin to "adapt". And over time ("millions and millions!", as Carl Sagan used to say so juicily, of years), to increase in complexity. With enough time, so the modern scientists supposes in a rather curiously childlike way, nearly anything can happen -- even the development (with the aid of environmental changes and "mutation") from simplex protoplasm into increasingly complex life forms.

Voegelin noted this logic of backward extrapolation of animate to inanimate matter:

... finally speculation pushes back beyond the first life-form into inorganic matter, from which the former spontaneously originated. The "explanatory" law that was intended to be immanent thus turns again into a transcendent one, into a law that "precedes" the evolutionary series of life.

What Voegelin refers to here as "transcendent" is not meant to be a religious category, per se, but simply to denote a mechanism that stands outside the structure that was supposed to have been explained. Of course, it is related to the religious category, for it is an unintentional manifestation, or spasm, on the part of the modern scientist, in the direction of appealing to metaphysical transcendence as he pursues his scientific curiosity about this particular ultimate question.

The interrelations among living things and their inherent properties was supposed to explain their differentiation and underlying sameness -- but the logic of the theory leads to a non-living entity (inanimate matter) preceding, and initiating, the realm of living things.

Thus, that realm of living things no longer provides the explanatory mechanism it was supposed to have, for in light of its inherent logical conclusion:

... the types of organisms, the species, in spite of their supposed historical descent from each other, nevertheless stand again side by side, inexplicable through each other since the conditions for the development of any one species cannot be found in the one that precedes it historically and generationally, but only in the law that stands outside the whole series of species.

The "law" that is, of some inanimate material entity or process.

And so:

... Kant's argument that the theory of evolution merely shifts the real origin of the species back to the origin of evolution not only takes the theory of evolution to its logical conclusion but also destroys it as meaningless as far as its explanatory purpose is concerned. It does not explain what it was intended to explain, in fact, it explains just as little as Leibniz' principle of continuity or Herder's or Goethe's idea of morphological kinship. The kinship relationships of the living world are primary phenomena just as the life of the species and the life of the individual organism are primary phenomena, which one can see or not, but there is nothing about them that needs to be explained.

I.e., the Differentiation part of the paradox of Differentiation/Sameness remains un-dissolved into the Sameness part -- even though dissolving Differentiation is precisely the goal of the immanentist materialist project of evolution theory. The paradox, and its indissoluble tension, remains intact, within the very terms of the logic of the formulation put forth by the immanentist materialist. I.e., through his own mechanism, the immanentist materialist fails, even though he thinks he succeeded. (Again, the essay to which I linked in Part One among many other useful things goes into this facet in exhaustive and meticulous detail.)

Voegelin again:

The primary phenomenon of life becomes visible in a threefold way: in the living individual, in the species, and in the interconnectedness of the entire living world. It is impossible to use a part of this phenomenon to explain the same phenomenon in another of its manifestations.

On theoretical principle of the logic involved and its consequences, Voegelin concludes:

The life of the individual cannot be explained through the life of the species, as the theory of series has attempted to do; the life of the species cannot be explained by the totality of the phenomenon of life, as the theory of evolution attempts to do; and the totality of the phenomenon of life can most definitely not be explained through the laws of non-living nature [as physicists and cosmologists implicitly attempt to do].

In the substantially genuine movement of the spirit, the theory of evolution has come to an end in [Kant's] Critique of Judgment— although in the history of derivative theories on this issue, theories that move ever farther away from the center of the spirit, evolutionary theory did not flourish until the following century [i.e., the 19th century].

Then, on a point concerning speciation, and the distinction between speciation and simple intra-species mutations, as well as the lack of evidence we have of actual organisms who occupy the myriad "stepping stone" stages supposed to have existed during the grand epochs spanning the process of species becoming other species, Voegelin adds:

Kant appended a note to his radical destruction of the explanatory value of any theory of evolution in which he conceded that the fact of bodily kinship was not impossible. It was not, he remarked, totally absurd and a priori impossible that, for example, certain water animals might gradually evolve into marsh animals and, after some further generations, into land animals.

"However," [Kant wrote, as Voegelin quotes him], "experience gives no example of it; according to experience, all generation that we know is generatio homonyma. This is not merely univoca in contrast to the generation out of unorganized material, but it brings forth a product that is in its very organization like the one that produced it; and generatio heteronyma, so far as our empirical knowledge of nature extends, is found nowhere." This sentence, written in 1790, still applies word for word today; biology has nothing to add to it.

Voegelin wrote that last sentence in the 1970s. Modern scientists may protest that there has been much progress in genetics since then, as well as much observation of microsopic biota manifesting the stepping-stone gradational process crucial to speciation. However, all this new information has merely illuminated the Sameness pole of the tension Sameness/Differentiation: it has not provided a solution which is the goal of modern biology -- to dissolve that tension in favor of a unifying theory of Sameness that would prove that the Differentiation is only superficial.

No one to my knowledge has put this modern scientific project quite in the following terms:

What modern scientists seem to be doing through evolution theory is trying, speculatively, to eradicate species altogether (in terms of their "fixity" of mutual difference), and in its place to posit a vast biological Melting Pot of simply Life (i.e., Biota) which exhibits a multitude of variations, but which is ultimately all one material phenomenon. This may, in great part, explain why modern biologists and their supporters often tend, in their defense of Evolution Theory, to conflate the mechanism of intra-species change, and inter-species change (speciation). This may not be merely a lapse in logic on their part. They may well be doing this because, at bottom, they don't see a difference between the two realms. Their whole project of Evolution Theory is to reduce the realm of different species to a realm of one overarching species: Biota, conceived by them as merely a subtype of the matter/energy that composes the entire universe.

As part of this grand project, the wonder of the differentiation of all living things is to be replaced by the wonder of the unifying sameness of all living things, endowed with their Genesis out of Matter/Energy by the biologist's brothers in the fields of Physics and Cosmology -- who, meanwhile, in their turn, continue with their higher project to subsume or sublimate this particular wonder into an even higher wonder: the Genesis of the entire Universe. This latter ultimate project -- i.e., the materialist Creation of Everything -- will, apparently, have to wait until Stephen Hawking or any of his intellectual heirs finds the key to it.

Thus, let's get back more closely to that sentence by Kant that Voegelin claimed had -- still, nearly 200 years later (1970s), not been refuted by modern science. I shall quote for our purposes the relevant portion:

"...according to experience, all generation that we know is generatio homonyma... and generatio heteronyma, so far as our empirical knowledge of nature extends, is found nowhere."

The terms generatio homonyma and generatio heteronyma simply denote "biological reproduction resulting in offspring of the same kind of animal", and "biological reproduction resulting in offspring of a different kind of animal", respectively. Of course, we may subsitute "species" for "kind".

Now, modern biologists indulge in principally two tactics with regard to Kant's (and Voegelin's) claim, when it's brought up (these days usually only by inept Creationists):

1) They assert that modern science already has evidence of generatio heteronyma

2) They confuse intra-species modifications with speciation.

With #1, there are two problems:

a) With regard to biota that are not microscopic, it would be physically impossible to have direct evidence of generatio heteronyma because the epochal durations of time such an event requires is simply too long. This leaves indirect evidence -- the famous "fossil evidence" biologists used to crow about, but which has tended to be less mentioned, now that they have what they think is better ammunition (genetics and microscopic speciation). The problems with "fossil evidence" are manifold, and have been dealt with by others (and the anonymous author I linked in Part One refutes it -- even back in 19th century -- quite capably). I will not go into it here in detail, except to mention one of the more glaring problems: the major assumption of evolution theory requires literally millions (if not billions) of in-between stages existing (and dying, if not dying out) over epochal durations of time between the supposed development of one species into another (and certainly between such extremes as, for example, a fish and a land mammal); and yet the "fossil record" all over Earth is curiously sparse, with giant gaps in time and in space. Were evolution theory fact, we would be literally stumbling over a multitude of in-between stages of animals every time we dug a hole to plant crops or bury someone or lay foundations for a building. They would be everywhere. Simply because there has to have been so many, according to the premise of evolution theory. But they're not there. Modern biologists have not provided an adequate explanation for such an elementary, and massive, lacuna in their theory.

b) This leaves biota that are microscopic -- tiny creatures, often single-celled organisms. The problem here is that with organisms so minute and simplex, the line between an intra-species mutation and actual speciation becomes more a line superimposed by the observing scientist, rather than a line found in the data observed. I.e., it's more a phenomenon of taxonomic terminology, than it is of the nature of the data being organized.

With #2, the problem is self-evident. However, it does bring up the complication to which we referred just above, and earlier when we began talking about speciation in the first place: the very definition of a "species", which is the very crux of the whole theory. Put simply, if one defines "species" too promiscuously, one can find new "species" all over the place, where in fact only intra-species variations are at play. If, however, on the other hand, one solidifies the differentiation into a dogmatic "fixity", one is in danger of erecting a barrier to the other pole of the mystery, by which the differentiation of all life does indeed seem grounded in some kind of sameness of interrelation.

The progress of genetics science certainly illuminates the Sameness part of the mysterious tension of life; but it does not prove speciation. The Creationists probably would not insist on denying the increasing fact of Sameness indicated by genetics, as long as they can preserve the giant Thing they call God -- their deus ex machina to explain the mystery of life in its origin and structure by positing a literally thingly activity of "Creation". Each side of this modern argument continues to insist on trying to find an end-run around the tension of the mystery, rather than rest in its restlessly disturbing facticity.

It might be apropos now for an excursion on classic taxonomy vs. new biology.

Afterword: The Classic Taxonomists and the New Biologists

As evolution theory was evolving (pun intended) throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century, there developed a bit of an underlying tension or friction between the new biologists and the more traditional taxonomists. The latter thought of themselves as more classical, "truer" scientists, and could trace their intellectual lineage back to the great Aristotle, who spent a good deal of time observing, collecting and speculating about various plants and animals. While biological taxonomy did not die out in the Middle Ages, it may have dwindled somewhat. By the 17th century, it was progressing more and more, and by the 18th century would truly flower.

With their intellectual pedigree grounded in so many centuries, the early modern taxonomist sometimes tended to regard as upstarts the newer biologists and their preoccupation with the new-fangled concept of "evolution". Taxonomists were more dignified and economical, calmly and dutifully employing Occam's Razor on the manifold data of the various living things they so carefully collected and organized. The classifications they developed by which to put that bewildering manifold into some order and clarity, were supposed to simplify, elegantly; not complicate, extravagantly. Plant and animal life is multifarious enough, without adding more complexity to it.

Taxonomists thus tended to avoid "multiplying" new species, and rather cultivated a conservative perspective that would include as many mutated and permutated variations of a given species as possible, before finally deciding to draw new lines on the taxonomic map, so to speak, delineating a whole new animal out of the old.

At the same time, taxonomists by the very nature of their chosen profession and passion, respected, admired and remained fascinated by the varieties of life -- not only with respect to the differentiation of species, but also with respect to the amazing differences one finds within any given species. It was particularly this latter preoccupation that engaged the mind of the classical taxonomist, as he delighted to dote on the innumerable minute details by which one moth, or one lichen, or one riparian amphibian differed from another. This was the source of their conservatism in this regard: they respected the intra-species differentiations because they respected -- and even loved, after a fashion, in the Naturalist sense -- the particular species in question; and did not therefore wish to indulge in a promiscuous, labile and effusive manner in the frantic "discovery" of one supposedly new species after another where, so the taxonomist soberly believed, none was there.

Alas, the scientific (and sociocultural) fashion changed as time went along, and taxonomists were relegated to simple custodians and lab techs employed by the evolutionary biologists. Of course, they could continue their passion out in the field and back in the laboratory; but increasingly they had no say at all in the larger picture of what their endeavor meant. The paradigm had shifted, and they had become mere collectors of the data whose interpretation was now solely in the hands of the evolutionary biologists and their new framework. Most taxonomists probably didn’t care; as long as they could continue to do what they loved most: after all, it was the collection and classification of plant or animal data that was their passion, and if these new upstarts wanted to make extravagant extrapolations about that data, on their revolutionary evolutionary career, so be it. And, of course, many taxonomists, as modern scientists, went along with the new fashion and became believers in the new theory; even if they had little qualification -- more than the evolutionary biologist, to be sure, but still not enough -- for drawing such sweeping generalizations about the development of all life.

Even now, in the 21st century, there may exist quite a few taxonomists who harbor their classic conservatism in this regard, but who mostly keep quiet about it, thankful for their jobs in academe or as participants in various government programs by which they can get paid doing what they love the most. Why rock the boat and make a big stink about any doubts they may have about the cogency of evolution theory? The evolutionary biologists can continue to get the larger federal funding grants, and can continue to hold sway surf-riding the crest of the wave of Modern Science in the field of biology. The humble taxonomist meanwhile remains entirely free to continue to wade into some marshland in Timbuktu or near the Great Lakes in his rubber overalls to patiently, lovingly examine a certain exemplar of the pupae of the splendenroides [Toxorhynchites (Toxorhynchites)], collect it in his glass case, and bring it back to the lab for further study and comparison -- without ever needing to bother his mind with the more ethereal propositions of the grandiose vision of which his colleagues are such fervent (and well-paid) acolytes.

Indeed, if many taxonomists had their way, there would be far fewer species in existence -- if only because fewer would be so deemed.

And let us not forget, that the tried and true condition for a "new species" -- that, for example, two particular species of mosquito (whatever they may be) cannot produce offspring -- does not by itself prove generatio heteronyma; even if the indirect inference thereof it seems to provide is so avidly seized upon by the evolutionary biologist as irrefutable evidence. I.e., that supposed speciation qualification only proves that some mosquitos can mutate until they can't reproduce with some other mosquitos. It does not by itself prove, however, that any mosquito will, given enough time, eventually become a dragonfly -- much less, down the line another few million years, after innumerable in-between mutations have occurred (whose multitudinous abundance for some curious reason never seems to be found in the ground as part of a trail of millions, even billions or trillions of fossils including all other life forms), an eagle, or a wombat, or a rhinoceros, or a human being.

Still asymptotic after all these years: The case of Bosch Fawstin

2011-12-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

About a year ago, in December of 2010, I posted an essay here of the same title.

Not much seems to have changed this past year. Most in the anti-Islam movement (particularly the more moving-and-shaking luminaries among us) still seem to be asymptotic.

By "asymptotic" I refer to those who are, in various ways and flavors, sorta kinda anti-Islam. To put it another way, their anti-Islam inclination seems to result in various statements or analyses that equivocate and soften their criticism of Islam.

There is a whole spectrum of asymptotic positions -- from the low end, where they are in danger of shading off into being virtually PC MC, to the upper reaches, where they just can't seem to take the last step to a full and total condemnation of Islam and of all Muslims.

Probably the most egregiously asymptotic figures in the still inchoate anti-Islam movement are Jamie Glazov and Daniel Pipes. Indeed, the latter is almost the gold standard, or poster child, for the term.

And speaking of Pipes, an important facet of the definition of asymptotic, in addition to its relative softness and squishiness about the problem of Islam, is its essential incoherence -- and Pipes exemplifies that in spades. (Lawrence Auster has done a good job of bringing that incoherence to clear relief.)

Now, regrettably, we must add a new name to the list of Asymptotics: Bosch Fawstin. And, judging from a recent essay of his published on the website Frontpage.com (of which Glazov is a major figure) and republished on Jihad Watch, he seems to be rather on the low end of it (though not as bad as a Glazov or a Pipes).

After his provocative opening salvo, "My name is Bosch and I'm a recovering Muslim" -- Fawstin writes in his very first paragraph:

... fortunately for us, Islam hasn’t been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn’t able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t.

The remainder of his essay is chock-full of incoherencies, insofar as, interwoven among gymnastically flexible contortions otherwise, they effectively contradict the purport of the two sentences quoted above -- assuming, that is (as Fawstin goes on to make clear), that his hypothetical category "Muslims who don't take Islam seriously" apparently reflects a vast worldwide demographic sufficiently numerous and widespread to make a difference to the danger which Islam activated by Muslims poses to our societies. (For, it they don't make a difference, why mention them?)

Other than unsubstantiated claims to support the viability of that hypothetical category, Fawstin offers only anecdotal evidence:

"I’ve been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don’t care about Islam."

First of all, he's only one person; and he's relatively young (he looks about 40-something tops; perhaps late 30s). Assuming his "entire life" spans say from age 18 to the present (though we'd have to eliminate the last couple of years during which he's been provoking Muslims with his brazenly blasphemous artwork), we have one man's experience with Muslims for approximately 20 years.

Assuming then that he hasn't been "around" Muslims 24/7 365 days out of every year during those 20 years, we can safely put the number of Muslims of his experience at about 250 -- approximately one Muslim per month for those 20 years. Unless he is going to make the rather extravagant claim that he has known one large Muslim family for every month, or even every week, of those 20 years; or that he has known one Muslim per day for 20 years; or that he is seriously including in addition the scores or even hundreds of Muslims with whom he has had only the barest, most fleeting experience in passing -- claims that, needless to say, should be summarily dismissed.

Further making the safe assumption that this number of approximately 250 Muslims isn't scientifically geographically representative of all Muslims around the world, but probably reflects a skewed demographic not only limited by geography, but also perhaps by sociocultural criteria (perhaps tending more toward urban and academic types, encountered largely in Western settings?), we are left with a rather paltry shred of anecdotal evidence. This is not counting the vagueness of his evidence. What does "being around" Muslims constitute? How can we weigh the usefulness of that phrase, in terms of exculpating those Muslims he has been "around" from being dangers to our society?

Assuming the most reasonable form of Fawstin's anecdotal evidence, even if we had five thousand Fawstins to bring forward their similar anecdotal evidence, we'd still only be talking about approximately 0.1% of the Muslims of the world. And even that number would be dicey, full of holes, as we've argued above, in terms of verifiability of their allegedly innocuous nature.

For Fawstin to use this personal anecdotal evidence in a serious vein as some kind of substantial underpinning to his argument reveals a serious emotional deficit impairing his judgment. ( I do not add an intellectual deficit, because he seems to be an intelligent person.) One not unlikely source of that emotional deficit may be indicated by the mere fact that a person who looks as white and Western as Fawstin chose to become a Muslim in the first place, and has chosen to be "around" Muslims his entire life. What motivated him to become Muslim in the first place? Why has he been spending so much of his time around Muslims all these years of his life? Did he undergo some kind of brain replacement surgery to undergo the transmogrification from his previous Muslim life to his present anti-Islam life? What explains the new Fawstin and how do we know it's any different from the old, Muslim Fawstin?

While it's of course good that he jumped ship and left Islam, nevertheless these kinds of questions need to be answered by him with frank and substantively responsive answers; and any way they are sliced, they would seem to point to problems with Fawstin's rational faculties.

All this may go a long way toward explaining why he's asymptotic which, as I have defined it before, is the retention -- to one degree or another -- of the mental disease of PC MC in the heart and mind of the otherwise anti-Islam person. I.e., Fawstin never fully left Islam. He is retaining a bit of it in his heart and in his mind, if only by absolving innumerable Muslims, perhaps the majority around the world, of their Islam without demanding that they first leave Islam before he pronounces them safe and okay for the West.

& & &

I was also disappointed in reading the comments to the Fawstin essay by Jihad Watch readers. With a rare exception (and just now I noticed one other one), they all pretty much gullibly lap up Fawstin and seem to agree with his incoherent mush (perhaps, at best, figuring that as long as he left Islam and is working against it, that's good enough for them).

As I wrote in my previous essay a year ago:

After all the evil and lethal crap that Islam oozes and spews -- not merely over the centuries, decades, years and months -- but just in any given past week, I continue to see Jihad Watchers (or we may call them "Counterjihadists" or "Anti-Shariaians") pull their punches with regard to what we should do about the problem.

And, of course, Islam does not ooze and spew all this evil and lethal crap by itself: it only does so as long as Muslims do it, and/or as long as Muslims enable their brothers and sisters to do so. There is no excuse for any Muslim (other than one severely brain damaged in a literal medical sense) to remain a Muslim -- given what Islam stands for, and given what innumerable Muslims are saying and doing all over the world now, and for 14 centuries.

An Anti-Islam Manual -- "Never Leave Home Without It"

2011-12-01T17:53:00.000-08:00

The PC MC template has many different ways -- not just one -- of fending off damning data about Islam.

So, when Robert Spencer -- after reporting some data about some Muslim du jour who expresses fanatical intolerance, and furthermore bases that fanatical intolerance on his Islam -- routinely asks his sarcastic rhetorical question:

Is this Muslim an "Islamophobe"...?

-- this otherwise good question will, alas, have little effect on the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist, since he has many arrows in his bag of tricks (to mix metaphors).

Namely, he will pull out the handy "TMOE". I.e., that Muslim whom Spencer is citing, and any other similarly fanatical Muslim he cites, is not representative of the majority of Muslims (who are deemed to be either "moderates" or "lax" or "ignorant of their own Islam", or any combination of these), but rather reflects the Tiny Minority of Extremists which, of course, every religion has (look at Waco, abortion clinic bombers, the Crusades, etc.). And he will often go further and point out that Spencer (and anyone else who dares to point out the antics of that Tiny Minority) is actually tending to facilitate that extremism, by insinuating that it represents more than a tiny -- and therefore inconsequential -- slice of the Islamic "diversity" around the world.

The Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist has thus moved the goal post. Now, our data is apparently ineffective, and we must martial a new argument, and round up more data to try to sway the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist. We thus would expend much time and labor (if we cared to try to persuade the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist, a frustrating and often futile effort) amassing data that shows a much broader systemic problem in Muslim societies (including, for example, poll data demonstrating majorities in certain Muslim countries supporting fanatical aspects of Islamic law, such as capital punishment for religious blasphemy and for apostasy).

Were we to do that, this would not settle the matter, unfortunately. At that point, the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist would pull out yet another trick from his kit-bag: Muslim countries have been the victims of Western "meddling", whether under Colonialism, or under the post-Colonialist regime of the British and the French, and then quickly succeeding them, the Americans; and thus the pathologies they seem to show are a result of a relatively new fanaticism aroused in reaction against the West's various intrusive and damaging and self-serving policies -- because the West is just that way, you see: it intrudes in non-Western societies for greedy purposes and damages their delicate cultural eco-systems. That's just how we roll. And, of course, the non-Western Others are never responsible for the systemic pathologies their societies may manifest. It's always our fault, somehow. So the self-hating Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist sees it.

And these are only three tricks which they deploy. There are dozens more where these came from, all interrelated in complex interlocking fashion which, though incoherent, all together comprise a well-oiled machine, as long as the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist doesn't think too carefully about what he's saying. And he can do that, blithely as the day is long, as long as we continue to fumble and don't immediately have ready and informed rebuttals to each and every point they raise, as well as to the constellations of points they like to shower us with, as they remain in constant motion dancing like a butterfly and (so they think) stinging like a bee.

Indeed, much of the time, it seems, even our learned analysts out in the front lines of debate tend rather to enable that complex obfuscation, when we should be trying to dissipate it through immediate refutation with evidence, and through a simplification of debate to stop their evasions and prevarications in their tracks -- whether in dealing with the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist, or with Muslim apologists for Islam.

Moral of the Story:

If the still inchoate anti-Islam movement would get its shit together and put together an Anti-Islam Manual, we would have immediate and effective ways to counter the PC MC template.

Such a Manual, by virtue of its comprehensiveness and concision rendering obsolete all other sources of anti-Islam rebuttals of Islam apologism, would help us enormously -- all of us, from the jet-setting round-table-participating leaders like Robert Spencer on down to us lowly civilians -- to begin to cut through, and hopefully over time to dispel, the PC MC fog that dominates our cultural airwaves throughout the entire West.

For, one of the advantages that template enjoys (aside from its mainstream dominance) is that its complex multifarious bag of tricks exploits our usual inability to respond in real time and with decisively massive and irrefutable evidence to their various obfuscations. With an Anti-Islam Manual that is electronic and in everyone's iphone or PMP or laptop, we would always, at any given instance, whether online or in the street or at a social function or at a public forum, be able -- as fast as we can text and scroll with our nimble fingers -- to refute the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalist on any given point he raises. More often than not, perhaps, even in that new circumstance, he would remain obstinately pro-Islam; but at least in that situation he would perforce (after a few rounds in the ring) be reduced to merely standing there slack-jawed and stammering, if not speechless, in his obstinancy. And who knows: we may, not all that infrequently, enjoy a KO.

Over time, this would have a stillicidal effect in our favor on our surrounding mainstream socioculture, since its dominant Weltanschauung is not statically fixed in stone. It only took a half century for it to evolve into mainstream dominance; and so it can devolve -- perhaps as quickly. But this is less likely to happen, if we don't get our act together soon and put together an Anti-Islam Manual.

And none of us, who is awake and who cares about the problem of Islam, would leave home without it.

One anonymous civilian cuts through the "Anti-Jihad" horsefeathers

2011-11-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

Robert Spencer today at Jihad Watch put up a round-table he and three others (the glaringly asymptotic Andrew McCarthy, as well as Bosch Fastwin and Baroness Cox) had about the issue of the "moderate Muslim".

For all their intelligence, these Four Muzzketeers could have spared themselves much time and oxygen (and intelligent, albeit unintentional, obfuscation -- particularly from the sincerely confused Andrew McCarthy) by simply stating what one lone commenter wrote in the comments section:

Sorry, but I don’t accept that this widely-assumed-to-exist sub-category of supposedly non-problematic Muslims exists at all, regardless of what labels we use. Even the most genuinely nominal, congenial, peaceful, cooperative Muslims out there are still, in some small way, contributing to the problem that we face simply by identifying themselves as Muslim at all. Their chosen self-identity alone contributes to the momentum of the Sharia agenda on a broader level.

Think about it this way: If you knew that the ideology that you were identifying yourself with taught all these horrible and destructive things, and you genuinely felt that they were horrible and destructive, and you could see that there were many people all over the world that shared your ideological label carrying out these horrible and destructive instructions every hour of every day, causing misery everywhere, why on Earth would you continue to identify yourself with the ideology at all? Would we not have considered a “nominal” Nazi, or a “nominal” State Shintoist during World War 2 to be problematic no matter how genuinely casual they might have been about it?

We need to stop kidding ourselves. It’s perfectly legitimate to hold people responsible for the ideologies with which they associate themselves, no matter how casually they do it. Casual, cooperative Muslims don’t need “space,” they need to be held to account.

The commenter's pseudonym de plume is "out of context (TM)" -- and frankly, he should be getting paid more than Spencer or McCarthy.

For I doubt that Spencer would agree with this commenter on the precisely, exquisitely crucial comparison of the nominal Muslim with the nominal Nazi. Indeed, Spencer effectively rejected that comparison some five years ago on his blog, in a discussion he had with readers who took sincere issue with his eely gingerliness on avoiding frank condemnation of Islam and Muslims.

Spencer is supposed to be better than McCarthy; but at the end of the day, for our intellectually articulated position in the (still inchoate) Anti-Islam Movement, we may have to rely on the simpler, blunter civilians among us who can translate the mountain of data about Islam and Muslims -- data which Spencer is otherwise so good at organizing and reporting -- into a no-nonsense platform he (and other quasi-leaders) seems incapable of, or unwilling to endorse.

Ubi es, bene es.

2011-11-24T14:07:00.000-08:00

Ubi es, bene es.

That's Latin. It translates as: "Where you are, it is good."

It itself is a translation from a very old Greek manuscript (the Greek is ὅποῦ εἶ, καλῶς εἶ ).

Introduction:

The text from which this phrase derives is a chapter within the Apophthegmata Patrum ("The Sayings of the Desert Fathers"), entitled "Concerning Father Phocas" -- though it is really about another Father named Jacob, about whom Phocas tells a story.

All these "Fathers" in this collection are monks who lived mostly in the desert regions of North Africa, particularly Egypt, in the first six centuries A.D. -- i.e., in that wonderful era before Mohammed was born and before his maniac minions stormed out of the desert to ravage the world around them. During these six centuries, Christianity grew by leaps and bounds throughout the Ecumene; and sometimes in strange ways, generating a dynamic fecundity of heterodox controversy and internal debate and dissension -- all revolving around the astoundingly weird event at the heart of Christianity: of God becoming a man.

And not just any old god -- with which hundreds of permutations the Greek and Roman and Mesopotamian polytheisms (the dominant civilizations of the Mediterranean) were rife -- but the supposedly magisterial and monotheistic God of the Israelites, a people whom this God had "chosen" in order to reveal a new relationship between humans and the divine: a relationship fraught with problems, and promise. Indeed, the crucial rift at the heart of Judaeo-Christianity -- between Jews and Christians -- involves the fact that many Jews at the time, and certainly most of the leading clerical classes, were theologically and culturally outraged by the implied presumption -- the blasphemy -- of the claim of divinity of this human being, this Jewish Mensch (if not Meshuggeneh), Jesus of Nazareth. And this outrage led to the crucial event around which the Gospels of the New Testament revolve: the execution by crucifixion of Jesus, the God Who became Man.

At any rate, as Christianity evolved in the centuries after that point, and in the meantime Christianized the Roman Empire itself (with the help of a Roman Emperor, Constantine, who converted to this relatively new religion), the subject of Christology became a heated topic among Christians, as they tried to work out what exactly the Incarnation meant.

Among the many disputes and controversies in this regard, and among the many treatises that survive from that period about them, the searing pneumatic experience suffered by Father Jacob of the existential tension aroused by the wonder of Christology stands mostly forgotten, wedged silently among the thousands of dusty pages of the Patrologiae Graecae et Latinae (also having been republished in one or two compendiums of Desert Father sayings which, at best, when they do not remain unchecked-out of a few university libraries, may sit largely unread as coffee table books in the pleasant foyers of divinity schools and comparative religions seminar facilities here and there).

The story of Father Jacob:

To summarize, Father Phocas describes his brother in the faith Father Jacob as a most pious and "simple man"; remarkably so, apparently. But as becomes clear, part of Jacob's piety involved a good deal of inner spiritual turmoil.

Over a long period of time, he became quite vexed by the Christological controversies that were embroiling the Christians of his time, particularly in the urban centers (e.g., Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Caesarea, Nicomedia; not to mention Rome, Nicea, Chalcedon, Constantinople; etc.). While the monks of the desert were, on purpose, far away from those urban centers, it is reasonable to suppose that there existed quite an efficient network of communications bringing the news from the cities to the various widely scattered huts and caves where they dwelled -- perhaps first reaching the somewhat more organized lauras (cells or communities of monks) and from there, through lone couriers, out to austerer outposts in the barren wastes.

So, young Father Jacob had been hearing the news of frequent and major dissensions and rifts among Christians, and it caused him deep consternation. What wracked Jacob's soul then, unfortunately, never disappeared from the history of the Church. Christianity has always been rent into factions: this is the scandal it suffers, and probably will suffer until the eschaton. It continues to this day, only tamed into non-violent civility by the reconfiguration of sociopolitics into a secularism that forcefully over time has separated the realms of religion from the realm of laws and politics in any concrete sense. And this has not been merely a process of external imposition by Secularists upon Christians; but to a great extent has reflected a change of heart and mind, over a long time, of Christians themselves, as they have come, for the most part, to accept this modern order with remarkably maturity and mellowness (often, to the annoyance of the more fundamentalist purists among them, to the point of actually embracing secular values that may seem "un-Christian").

A deeper and broader mystery one may palpate, by which the scandal of the Church may be emblematic, as a sort of macrocosmic microcosm, of the general, perennial problem of truth itself, in tension with the multitudes of uncertainty of human existence in the chiaroscuro of the "cloud of uknowing" through which our one and common sun out of the cave, the Heraclitian Logos, remains ever less than fully in view.

At any rate, as a result of this problem, Jacob retreated further into isolation, and began fasting and praying nearly all the time, dressing himself in the garment fit for someone to be buried, from the depths of his broken heart earnestly entreating God to answer why these scandalously fractious disagreements among Christians were happening, and what it all means, and will it ever be healed?

Many days into this (the text specifies "forty" (quadraginta), perhaps harking back to Jesus's forty days and nights fasting in the desert and his "temptation"), while he was thus wrought up in his spiritual anxiety, suddenly one day a young child came into his habilitation, who seemed to have a joyful countenance.

Immediately, the little boy asked Jacob, "What's the matter? Father Jacob, what are you doing?"

Then suddenly the boy appeared to Jacob as a man, beatifically shining. Jacob answered him as "Lord" now, knowing Who it was.

"Lord," Jacob replied, "you know what's vexing me. One group of Christians tell me, 'Don't leave the true Church.' Then another group of Christians tell me, 'Don't listen to them: they have been seduced by the Diphysites'..."

[Note: The Diphysites being those who, in trying to understand the weird miracle of God's incarnation as a human, posited two "natures", one human and one divine, with an apparent implication that the two natures remained bundled together, so to speak, but not really synthesized as one; these being opposed by the so-called Monophysites, who wanted to emphasize the oneness of Christ, rather than seem to split him into two -- the problem there being, however, the tendency to devalue the unique, and uniquely difficult-to-unify, qualities of the divine and the human.]

Jacob was thus describing the terrible dilemma he was in, spiritually and mentally, whereby he felt literally pulled apart by the dissensions among his fellow Christians disagreeing on how to put Christ together, so to speak.

"Not knowing what to think or where to turn," Jacob added, "I have been led here to this place where you found me."

And then the Lord responded to Jacob:

"Where you are, it is good." (Ubi es, bene es.)

I.e., where Jacob stood right then and there -- in tension, earnestly and existentially seeking a way out, but attentive to, and thus suffering, the fullness of that tension without opting out for an easy release by joining one or the other faction -- "is good". It is those who seek a way to solve that tension, it is implied, who are not "good", insofar as they are prematurely presuming a solution that the mystery of this life cannot offer.

It is true, immediately consequent upon that extraordinary epiphany which this desert saying recounts, it adds, as a final sentence, that the Lord told Jacob:

"Now go to the doors of the holy Chalcedonian Orthodox Church."

This ultimate sentence may be something tacked onto the story by later redactors, to ensure that its rather startling praise of a measure of agnostic existentialism not be construed as a license to stray from the orthodox Church as eventually defined, through majority consensus, at the great council of Chalcedon on the basis of the Nicenoconstantinopolitan Creed developed by the previous great Councils at Nicea and Constantinople; or that final sentence may be a way to say that the very same agonic posture of agnostic existentialism that Jacob achieved and suffered is the heart of Church being more intellectually and administratively clarified by those Councils.

Or it may be some kind of paradoxical combination of both of these.

Aisha: The Mother of all Stockholm Syndrome "Victims"

2011-11-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

From the most authoritative collection of the sayings (hadiths) of Mohammed, collected by Bukhari, which along with the Koran form the basis for all Islamic law:

Narrated ‘Aisha, the mother of the faithful believers: “I requested the Prophet permit me to participate in Jihad, but he said, ‘ Your Jihad is the performance of Hajj ’.”
(Book 4, Volume 52: Hadith 127)

I've noticed many in the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement (hopefully someday to become the leaner and meaner A.I.M.) continue to harbor notions of sentimentalism about Muslim women, as though all of them (or most of them) are the hapless victims of the Muslim men, and are therefore not part of the problem of Islam which in various ways is threatening the world. Indeed, the logic of this sentimentalism would be that not only are they passive victims and not actors -- but as such, we ought somehow to save them from their oppression.

Along with this sentimentalism, I have also noticed among others a healthy awareness of the phenomenon of "Stockholm Syndrome" and how this complicates the simplistic Victim/Oppressor model -- effectively transforming the victim in that context into an enabler of their own oppressor. And if that oppressor is endangering society, then that victim may well become part of the danger from which society must protect itself.

Add to this the complication that Stockholm Syndrome manifests itself in varying degrees -- not simply according to one inflexible mold. Thus, one victim's enablement of their oppressor may be purely passive; another's may be more active; and another's may become quite enthusiastically participatory. Not only from the above hadith, but also from others in the same collection, as well as Muslim histories (Siras), it is part of Islamic lore that Aisha actually participated in military jihads, and perhaps led at least one of them (the so-called "Battle of the Camel" that is supposedly the first violent rift among Muslims creating the Sunni-Shia split).

At any rate, the fact that Mohammed effectively raped her when she was a child of 9 (and likely molested her for the three years prior to that, after he had married her at age 6), and that he thus abused her physically and emotionally, thus overpowering her and perverting her own sense of self and ability to develop a personal will on her own as every child should -- all this certainly is a tragedy, multiplied by the billions throughout the history of Islam and throughout the families and societies of Muslims in Muslim lands today; but it should not cause us to lower our guard against Muslims who may seem to be merely victims but who more likely are also enablers of the very same danger which continues to endanger our societies.

I.e., if Aisha were alive today, she would be defending Islam, and stoking the fire of hatred against all non-Muslims, a hatred perfectly mainstream in Islam and solidly based in its holy texts which directly and massively inform its laws by which Muslims are to organize their own societies and by which they are enculturated to regard non-Muslim societies around them as "filthy" and as their perennial "enemies".

Orthographic Note:

The Bukhari hadith I quoted at the top is, of course, an English translation from the Arabic. It is typical that it contains sloppy orthography. When I quoted it up top, I had cleaned it up for clarity. The original translation reads like this:

Narrated 'Aisha:
The mother of the faithful believers, I requested the Prophet permit me to participate in Jihad, but he said, "Your Jihad is the performance of Hajj."

The reader can immediately spot the problem. The colon after "Aisha" signifies that what follows are the words of Aisha, what she "narrated"; however, it's clear that the phrase that follows, "the mother of the faithful believers" is not part of her own words, but is her title (indeed, a title by which she is known in Islamic tradition, from the Arabic Umm al-Mu‘minin). Thus, the colon should come after the word "believers", while after "Aisha" there should be a comma, and "The" should not be capitalized. Furthermore, there should be quotation marks beginning what she said (her "narration"), beginning at "I requested..." and ending with the internal quote she is reproducing from Mohammed -- which, being an internal quote, itself should be enclosed in single quotation marks. All this cleaning up I had to do myself because of the orthographical sloppiness that seems to characterize Islamic translations (and many Third World texts in general from their various cultural heritages). This is not quibbling: such sloppiness can easily multiply, and result in semantic mistranslations and mistakes.

Note:

I first saw the above Bukhari hadith quoted in a Jihad Watch article about the recent Muslim who was prepared to mass-murder New Yorkers, had the F.B.I. not stopped him in time. Apparently, that Muslim (a Dominican-American once named Jose Pimentel, before he found the Absolute Truth and changed his name to "Muhammad Yusuf") had several hadiths he had put up on his own blog, for his "spiritual inspiration" no doubt. After all, according to an ABC news report, he “spent much of his time on the Internet… and maintained a radical website called TrueIslam1.” Perhaps he had acquired his hadiths from the website of the University of South California, The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement (a disingenuous change -- as Robert Spencer perceptively noted back in 2008 -- from its former name, the USC-MSA (Muslim Student Association) Compendium of Muslim Texts, which provides translations of several hadith collections.

Let us see if the sloppy orthography matches, shall we? Okay, let's see... "Book 4, Volume 52: Hadith 127"... Immediately, the reader is confronted with another problem with Islamic (and Third World) sources: a bewildering organization system. At the site of The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement under its Bukhari hadiths, we are led to a numbered list from 1 to 93. So, first thing I do is click on "4", assuming it means "Book 4". It takes me to Book 4 all right -- but not to Volume 52; rather to Volume 1. So how do I find Volume 52? I try going back to the first list, and clicking on "52". I get to "Book 52" in "Volume 4". Wow. There are only 93 on the list; I doubt they will get up to Volume 52, if at 52 I'm only at Volume 4. Sure enough, clicking on "93" only yields "Books" in Volume 9. And there are apparently no further things to click on after that.

So now we must pursue the possibility that the citation provided in the recent terrorist's hadith is incorrect. Let us glance over this list at the site of The Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement to see if their titles might lead us to the right place. Nope. I'd have to read through all of them to find it, if it's there. I tried two or three that might be the right ones; but no luck. Oh well. Back to more important things -- like doing my small part in trying to wake my fellow Westerners up to the escalating problem of exploding Muslims.

Update:

A reader (see comments below) directed my attention to a website of Islamic sources, the Al Muhaddith Project. I went there, did a search for "jihad", and found the Bukhari hadith in question, but guess what: the numbering system is completely different: it cites the hadith as from "Volume 3" and then notes "3.84" which one would assume means "verse 84" of Volume 3.

The English translation is also slightly different from the one on the New York City Muslim's blog, but that's to be expected; for translations from one language to another often vary. This website to which my reader referred me originates from the Emirates, so my reader tells me, and so is authentically Islamic. Its translation of Aisha's hadith is even better, at least in terms of content, for the purpose of my essay, showing how eager Aisha was to roll up her burka-sleeves and get jihadist:

Narrated Aisha (mother of the faithful believers):
I said, "O Allah's Apostle! Shouldn't we participate in Holy battles and Jihad along with you?" He replied, "The best and the most superior Jihad (for women) is Hajj which is accepted by Allah." `Aisha added: Ever since I heard that from Allah's Apostle I have determined not to miss Hajj.

In orthographic terms, it is only slightly better. The "mother of all faithful believers" part, at least, is appropriately presented as not part of Aisha's words, but as her title. The problem with quotation marks, however, is still not ideally dealt with. The reader notices the little problem where it says "Aisha added..." That is obviously not Aisha's own words, even though it is presented in the same body of narrative text.

The only way to rectify that would be to go back and do the quotation marks correctly, using both single marks and double marks; or somehow visually show that the "Aisha added..." is the hadith collector again.

Thus:

1)

Narrated Aisha (mother of the faithful believers):
"I said, 'O Allah's Apostle! Shouldn't we participate in Holy battles and Jihad along with you?' He replied, 'The best and the most superior Jihad (for women) is Hajj which is accepted by Allah.' "
Aisha added: "Ever since I heard that from Allah's Apostle I have determined not to miss Hajj."

Or:

2)

Narrated Aisha (mother of the faithful believers):
I said, "O Allah's Apostle! Shouldn't we participate in Holy battles and Jihad along with you?" He replied, "The best and the most superior Jihad (for women) is Hajj which is accepted by Allah."
Aisha added:
"Ever since I heard that from Allah's Apostle I have determined not to miss Hajj."

Note that in the original, that annoying Arabic apostrophe is present the second time Aisha is mentioned (viz., ‘Aisha), but not the first time. In my re-creations of correct orthography in #1 and #2, I have taken out that annoying Arabic apostrophe altogether, so it wouldn't distract.

Lawrence Auster's political taxonomy

2011-11-19T09:21:00.000-08:00

Before I get into the complexity of my analysis, let me begin with a pithy summation of the problem of Lawrence Auster's political taxonomy:

In order to explain the rather curious (and seemingly escalating) phenomenon of conservatism becoming more "liberal" in recent history, Auster seems to have developed a loose taxonomy based upon a division of "true conservative" and "liberal" -- where the latter category seems to mutate into a multitude of permutations more than microscopic mites might at Chernobyl. One particular type of mutation that seems quite important to Auster is the mutation whereby any given conservative he doesn't like becomes classified as some type of "liberal", or infected with the "liberal" genetic mutation. And if one reads Auster's blog over a long period of time, one gets the sense that nearly every conservative out there is somehow a "liberal".

Discussion:

With regard to the problem of Islam, I certainly agree that the vast majority of conservatives are PC MC -- but whether being PC MC makes one a "liberal" or a "Leftist" is another matter. Indeed, I have been using that acronym for years now precisely to function as an alternative to the L words -- precisely in order to avoid calling conservatives the L-words and rather to find a more reasonable explanation for the phenomenon.

(Note: my quote marks around the words liberal and Leftist throughout this essay do not necessarily at all times denote "sneer quotes", but rather, for the most part, reflect the complex historical and philosophical problem of such labels, and the apparent disregard for, or incomprehension of, that problem apparently evident in Auster's analysis in this regard.)

But we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves.

Taking a step back brings us to the question of Auster's standard and/or criteria for the type of conservative he likes; and who, therefore, earns the right to the putatively appropriate term of the true conservative -- logically then also providing criteria by which to exclude oodles and oodles of other conservatives out there as "false conservatives" (apparently the majority, if not vast majority, of them). The criteria are multifarious and of course involve what could be called old-fashioned values in a general sense; and tend at times to veer into queer (in the old-fashioned sense) territory, vaguely reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's quaint and charming evocation of the "good old days". What this means in concrete terms is not so much central to our analysis today, and in any case would embroil us in lengthy digressions concerning a dizzying array of various issues of the day.

The reader may detect in the foregoing a tonality of somewhat veiled sarcasm. I admit it's there, but it is aroused not so much by a disdain for old-fashioned values but rather for the promiscuous, incoherent and labile methodology (if one can call it a methodology) by which Auster tries to make sense out of the aforementioned phenomenon of a liberalization among conservatives seemingly run rampant. Nor does my sarcasm intend to convey that this phenomenon is a trivial concern -- at least not with regard to one of the most pressing issues of our time: the problem of Islam.

And that provides a neat segue into a recent representative remark by Auster, in which he alludes to

...a comment Jim Kalb made recently at VFR [Auster's blog]...

to the effect that

...liberals totally misconstrue the nature of Islam because they believe that liberalism “fully realizes what’s right and just and fulfilling,” which “makes it the natural way to look at things.”

Auster then massages that further:

Therefore all human beings, including Muslims, must be liberals—or at least aspiring liberals—just like us. That liberals in general and Americans in particular think everyone in the world is really “like us” is of course nothing new; it’s a point that I, for one, make all the time.

Auster and Kalb are quite right, mostly, about this mindset and its drastically deleterious effects it has been having on the West's response to the problem of Muslims in our time. And, as Auster has noted many times on his blog (quite accurately), this mindset is not merely limited to liberals or Leftists, but also informs and inspires the hearts and minds of the vast majority of conservatives. Are we to then conclude that the vast majority of conservatives have become transformed into liberals and/or Leftists? Or that they have come under the bewitching spell, or have acquiesced to the power of, liberals and/or Leftists? None of these conclusions are adequate because of the massive and preposterous enormity -- demographically and culturally -- which they presuppose. In terms of the scale necessary for them to be true, they presuppose the type of thinking that is characterized in conspiracy theories.

Unless we step back and rethink the phenomenon.

As far as I know, Auster has never seemed to posit an etiology for this phenomenon. How did this happen? How did the vast majority of conservatives become infected with "liberal" attitudes, in various ways, in varying degrees, about sociopolitical issues? The hypothesis that makes the most sense -- and which best steers clear of that type of conspiracy theory thinking to which we alluded above -- is that it reflects a long historical process, perhaps going back a century or two, or more.

This process, furthermore, can be illuminated by a reminder: Graeco-Roman philosophy and Judaeo-Christian revelation, the four pillars of Western civilization, contained the seeds of the concept of universalism, which unfolded with their synthesis in Christendom.

This classic Western concept of universalism presumes precisely what Auster and Kalb noted about "liberals" -- namely, that all humans are part of Mankind and share certain good qualities endowed by God (the bad quality of the fallibility of sin which was conceived as a mysterious counterbalance to the good qualities has, perhaps, been all too easily glossed over by "liberals" and "Leftists" in their translation and deformation of their own Western heritage).

When Westerners began to encounter various multitudes of "the Other" throughout the world beginning in earnest in the 16th century, this idea of universalism was not scrapped. When encountering obviously regressive and primitive savages in various parts of the world, the assumption that tended to prevail was that the humanity of those savages -- a humanity modeled after Western standards -- while perhaps most often not evident on the surface, nevertheless was latent, and needed to be coaxed and nurtured, most often through the method that was mainstream in those times, Christianization. The major difference between the Western Colonialists of yore and our Western PC MC Neo-Colonialists today is that the former were more often than not quite willing to take aggressive measures against any particular savages whose recalcitrance to the project of humanization became evidently stubborn and dangerous; whereas the latter, as we know all too painfully well, tend to bend over backwards to ignore, placate and excuse the savagery of the savages of our day -- most especially with regard to the Mother of all Others, Muslims.

I.e., liberals didn't invent the notion that non-Westerners can become civilized; nor did they invent the notion that civilization is presumed to be a Westernization; nor did they invent the notion that Homo Occidentalis is the model of humanity: these ideas were widespread throughout the great era of Western Colonialism that spanned nearly a half a millennium, and which was profoundly informed by the Christian pedagogy that had grown and ripened throughout the epoch of Christendom -- even if, by the time Western Colonialism was in full swing, that epoch was beginning to crack under enormous pressures of a transformation into modernity. The symbolism of humanity as a Western model generously extended to all Mankind is not an invention of liberals. It is an invention of Christendom, with Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian underpinnings. The "liberals" of our time (going back to, say, Wilson, if one must mark a recent beginning point) have simply added their own warped spin to it.

While "liberals" therefore definitely crank up and contort this presumption of universalism -- mainly by having utterly lost the brakes of reason by which the Western Colonialists of yore tended at least, for the most part, to be able to recognize the various limits of the various savages they were trying to help -- nevertheless, the underlying universalism is the same. And in fact we see it today in innumerable Christians who wish to convert Muslims to Christianity -- presuming that such a project is doable because, after all, all humans are really Christians at heart, if they only heard the Good News. And a million Muslims are converting to Christianity in Africa every day (so goes the rumor based upon the mere opinion of some imam on Al Jazeera a few years ago)! This presumption is no less reckless than the "liberal" presumption that motivates our projects of "democratization" in the Muslim world; though the latter currently has far more concrete deleterious effects because it is the enthusiastically pursued worldview du jour with the backing of powerful Western governments. It is the new raison d’être of Neo-Colonialism, with Muslims as its chief object only because Muslims are making the most noise around the world, misbehaving the most, and causing the most problems -- which have to be solved, of course, by us through our project of helping Muslims rediscover their inner Western humanity.

Postscript:

With regard to the complex constellation of other sociopolitical issues unrelated to the problem of Islam which also inform Auster's political taxonomy, they are not relevant to this analysis (except, in certain respects, for the one issue of the problem of blacks, for the PC MC project of anti-racism is perhaps the crux of the PC MC myopia to the problem of Islam); except insofar as they may reveal what I described above as the "promiscuous, incoherent and labile methodology (if one can call it a methodology) by which Auster tries to make sense out of the aforementioned phenomenon of a liberalization among conservatives seemingly run rampant."

At any rate, Auster is generally quite right about the problem of the Western approach to the problem of Islam; but I think he's rather drastically wrong about the framework -- the political taxonomy he has developed -- through which he explains it.

Further Reading:

On the complex question of the history and philosophy of Western universalism and its symbolism of humanity, see the following:

Wildersianism and the "inner Westerner" inside Muslims

Wildersianism (the new Wilsonianism) and the distinction between Islam and Muslims

Christian Wilsonianism at Jihad Watch

Correction: Christian Wildersianism at Jihad Watch

More on Christian Wilsonianism

"Christian Wilsonianism" continued...

And perhaps most importantly:

Four phases of Western universalism, and the humanity of Muslims

Odd oversight at Jihad Watch

2011-11-18T06:10:00.000-08:00

• • •

The main function and value of the site Jihad Watch (which is its singular excellence) is its incessant ticker-tape reportage of the deeds and words of various Muslims around the world manifesting a systemic problem in Islam -- a problem that is increasingly impinging upon the rest of the world.

As part of this reportage, there is the important subcategory of the West's continuing myopia to that systemic problem in Islam, on which Jihad Watch has also been regularly reporting. Within this subcategory, we have seen the rare exceptions of various Western leaders and analysts showing glimmers of an awareness of the nature and dimensions of that systemic problem. And those rare exceptions Jihad Watch also notes, regularly -- and all the more so when they are significant. (Indeed, Jihad Watch for many years now has showcased a kind of election or awards ceremony, in which readers vote on who is the "Dhimmi" and who is the "Anti-Dhimmi", both nationally and internationally -- Dhimmi meaning a non-Muslim who more or less voluntarily submits to the dictates of Islamic rules: an acutely ironic term for modern Westerners who are not (yet) under the rule of Islam but who, out of a deluded PC MC "respect" for that monstrous culture, adopt attitudes tantamount to the dhimmitude of Westerners of yore in the context of lands conquered and occupied violently by Muslims.)

Anywho:

It's been about 72 hours now since on the morning of November 15, Lawrence Auster's blog -- which isn't even an anti-Islam blog per se but rather is geared to a dizzingly hectic punditry about Everything Under the Sun Including the Kitchen Sink (entries there include, amid a kaleidoscopic swirl of Emergent News, e.g., musings about how politicians who drink out of water bottles in public are manifesting some kind of symptom of a broader pathology in "liberal" society; or making disapproving pronouncements on the supposedly improper fashion attire of various female politicians; etc.) -- first reported the refreshingly bracing chutzpah of an American politician (a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, Rick Womick) who said, in public and unequivocally, that he doesn't want Muslims to serve in the U.S. Military, because he doesn't trust Muslims.

Let's pause to inspire that breath of fresh air, deeply with eyes closed and mouth smiling.

Now exhale.

And, Womick gave a good reason for that distrust: the Islam which Muslims follow explicitly enjoins them to consider as an enemy of Islam anyone or any polity which finds itself fighting against a Muslim land. And Rep. Womick rationally concludes that in such a cultural context -- based upon holy texts and innumerable clerical sermons and rulings over the years and decades and centuries -- one cannot trust American Muslims to not wig out and start killing their own fellow American soldiers, as has already happened at least twice (to which we would add the countless plots by American Muslims, who didn't happen to be in the military at the time, to mass murder Americans on the basis of the fact that Americans, by being part of a polity that happens to be at war with a couple of Muslim countries (actually, at war in order to help the supposed Vast Majority of Peaceful Muslims within those countries from the Tiny Minority of Extremists who are attacking them), are ipso facto legitimate targets of what we would consider mass murder, but which Islamic law considers simply killing the enemy in wartime (and that time of war is indefinite, in the view of Islam).

Anywho:

As Auster noted, this is the first time an American politician has made a public statement this refreshingly bold about the problem of Muslims.

So why hasn't Robert Spencer seen fit to note it on his own blog devoted to the problem of Islam and to the problem of the problem (the problem of the West's myopia to the problem of Islam)? Indeed, it should have been noted prominently on a blog like Jihad Watch.

Is it because Spencer perhaps disapproves of Womick's position, as going too far against Muslims in general -- against whom Spencer avowedly claims (see my essay immediately below) to have no problem? Or is Spencer leery of being contaminated by the potential fallout from catching Womick's cooties, lest the wrath of the PC MC mainstream come down on Womick and all associated with his crime of bigotry? That doesn't sound all that brave for a person who has often in the past enjoined others to stand unflinchingly tall in the face of the PC MC mainstream's unfair vilifications of those who would dare to condemn Islam. Is it because Rep. Womick somehow fell afoul -- perhaps socially and utterly unrelated to anything political -- of Spencer's hip-joined Partner-in-Anti-Jihad, Pam Geller (a search on her site, Atlas Shrugs, yielded zero hits for "womick")? Or is it because Spencer has long made it a policy of studiously avoiding Lawrence Auster -- even, as with his erst friend Andrew Bostom -- to the point that he doesn't want to be in a position to have to give a hat tip to Auster?

Who knows what goes on in the Gentlemen's Club.

Whatever the reason, somehow I doubt it's just because of a simple oversight. And it's an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise fine record of the primary raison d’être of Jihad Watch: its reportorial function in the still inchoate Anti-Islam Movement.

Speak for yourself, Mr. Spencer

2011-11-13T09:21:00.001-08:00

Robert Spencer's incompetent, not evil, twin Dr. Roberto Espencero, on the Spanish soap "Como El Jihado Revuelvo" ("As the Jihad Turns")

In a recent notice on his site Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer reports on, and analyzes, a new propaganda venture by Muslims trying to whitewash Islam and American Muslims called "All-American Muslims".

Again, as I noted in my essay directly below (and in numerous lengthy analyses on my now retired blog Jihad Watch Watch), Spencer has certain excellent skills -- reportorial, and analytical within limits. However, he needs to keep his analyses under control, lest he continue (as he has been doing for years) making statements like the following, as he did in the aforementioned notice:

But Americans aren’t suspicious of Muslims who are trying to get married, open clubs, and play football. Americans are suspicious of Muslims who are trying to blow up American buildings, subvert American freedoms, and assert the primacy of Islamic law over American law. The problem people have with Islam is not with every Muslim person.

Speak for yourself, Spencer. And who is Spencer speaking for here anyway? "Americans" in general? If so, I dare say he'd be considerably off the mark, for there are many indications that the majority of Americans either don't care about Islam and/or think it's "bigoted" to be worry about Islam. If Spencer is intending (and failing) to be more precise here, he may well mean "those few Americans who have woken up to the problem and danger of Islam".

If it is the latter, the statement suffers no less from a major flaw: Who is Spencer to say, and to speak for, the way we few Islamo-realist Americans think and feel about Muslims? In fact, any reasonable Islamo-realist would be suspicious of the seemingly All-American Muslim which Spencer describes as "who are trying to get married, open clubs, and play football" etc. Doesn't Spencer remember Maher "Mike" Hawash, who precisely fit that stereotype of the All-American suburban husband (though a Muslim Arab he had become an American citizen by 1990) working for the Intel corporation with a pretty white wife and children playing little league, who one day felt the perennial call of jihad and left his wife, sold his house, and went off to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan? Of course Spencer remembers (for he reported it on Jihad Watch).

Indeed, what makes this worse is that Spencer over the years has published innumerable reports of Muslims who seem to blend in with Western society and values, but who have turned out to have jihadist and terrorist sympathies, and often active involvement in them. And these reports have led him, reasonably, to utter a statement many, many times over the years to the effect that because of the facts that keep coming to light about so-called "moderate Muslims", we cannot reasonably distinguish the harmless Muslim from the dangerous Muslim.

But then, the second Robert Spencer, his not evil but incompetent evil twin with the eyepatch, turns around and makes statements that logically contradict that elementary principle.

The problem people have with Islam is not with every Muslim person.

To which any self-respecting anti-Islam person would respond: "Oh...? Says who...?" Why does Spencer have to interject these distracting, unhelpful, and downright specious points in his analyses -- points, furthermore, that contradict innumerable other points he has made (not to mention the veritable mountain -- nay, burgeoning, quaking, lava-spewing mountain ranges -- of data he has been amassing and reporting) over the years about Muslims?

At any rate, I would hope most of the sane reasonable people who make up the small minority of Those Who Have Woken Up to the Danger of Islam and of Muslims disagree emphatically with Spencer in this regard. We have precisely a problem with "every Muslim person" -- only because there is no adequate way to tell whether any given Muslim -- no matter how cheerily he smiles and waves at us wearing a Cosby sweater over the white picket fence as he is putting out his recycling to the curb before he gets in his 2011 Saturn to go off to work as a doctor or engineer while his pretty wife without a hijab gets in her own Prius to take the kids to day care before she goes off to her own job as a bank manager or dental hygienist -- can be trusted, given all we know (or should know, by now) about Muslim behavior and Islamic culture.

To begin to grasp the full breadth and depth of the problem I am briefly recounting here, one would have to peruse (and I mean "peruse" in its original and accurate meaning -- meaning "read thoroughly and carefully") the last ten or so essays on my now retired blog, Jihad Watch Watch. One of them I link below.

Further Reading:

Apple Pie Allah Mode

Robert Spencer's Two Hats: Keep Your Day Job

Robert Spencer's "Leftist" label-gun: Imprecision of terms on the problem of the problem

2011-11-08T14:24:00.000-08:00

By my phrase "the problem of the problem" I refer to the secondary problem. The primary problem, of course, is Islam. The secondary problem is the modern West's persistent myopic inability to recognize the primary problem.

In terms of the primary problem, Spencer's analyses are usually quite good, with one glaring exception: his inability (or unwillingness) to logically conclude, from the fact he himself has avowed -- namely, that we cannot tell the difference with sufficient certitude between the Muslims dangerously following and/or supporting Islam's dangerous dictates, and the Muslims who are not dangerously following and/or supporting Islam's dangerous dictates -- that therefore all Muslims must be considered equally deadly. When we say "logically conclude" we don't just mean dashing off parenthetical comments here and there once in a blue moon (only to be apparently contradicted by some other comments elsewhere); we mean, of course, explicitly and regularly articulating that conclusion in such a way that it becomes recognizable, both implicitly and explicitly, in his writings and speeches, as an important (indeed, if not the most important) leitmotif of the overall diagnosis of the primary problem.

Other than that glaring exception, as I say, Spencer's various analyses of the primary problem are very good -- and even better are his more just-the-facts-ma'am reportorial descriptions and debates based upon them.

On the secondary problem, however, his analytical powers falter. Again, on the purely reportorial level -- calling attention to the problem in its various facets -- he is doing great work. And part of the excellence of that reportorial work he does is his unstinting willingness to expose Islamophiliac idiocy no matter where it may manifest itself on the political spectrum. Spencer never pulls his punches if the culprit is some Republican politician or conservative pundit. He never revered Bush just because Bush was a supposed conservative Republican with an all-American twang. Whenever Bush -- or any other Republican or conservative -- said or did things that demonstrated Islamo-ignorance, Spencer spared no mercy and called a spade a spade. And he continues to do so with regard to prospective Republican candidates for the next election (e.g., Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry).

However, this brings us to our central point. The point being that the secondary problem -- the modern West's myopia to the primary problem (Islam) -- is not merely a "Leftist" problem. It's obviously massively a problem generalized and thriving throughout all political points on the spectrum, on all levels of society, in all venues of public life, throughout the entire West. One has only to have been reading the Jihad Watch ticker-tape newsfeed over the past 10 years to see the mountain of evidence indicating such a disheartening fact.

Now, one conclusion to explain this disheartening fact would be that Leftism has conquered the entire West. But that would lead us to the absurd corollary conclusion that the vast majority of conservatives and Republicans throughout the West are Leftists -- or, even more preposterously, are being held captive against their will by powerful Leftists.

Obviously, we must look elsewhere for a reasonable explanation. It's a very complex question, which I've analyzed numerous times here in lengthy essays going back years. Suffice it to say now that over the past half century or so, the West has seen a slow, what might be termed "Lefticization" of the Right. Or, put another way, many of the values and virtues of Leftism have seeped into the general mainstream.

This has not been a merely nefarious phenomenon, reflecting the dastardly designs of some evil, powerful cabal of "Gramscian" Elites seeking to mutate the West with the infection of some alien belief system. This has been part and parcel of a broader, deeper process of Progress in the West, unfolding certain vectors inherent to, and latent in, the virtues of its Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman heritage. However, one wouldn't want to err on the other side and try to claim that this phenomenon has been entirely beneficent. It has been a mixed bag, reflecting good intentions, and genuine progress in terms of ameliorating many ills in society; but, at the same time, along with those good intentions there have been pursuits, some rather grandiose and comprehensive, of various forms of social engineering projects through public policy that have resulted in various degrees of sociocultural damage.

But the aforementioned description is broad and generalized. For readers seeking a more detailed analysis, see my essay, A deeper analysis of the sociopolitics of the modern West. What concerns us here is how this process has impinged on the problem of Islam. The process of the "Lefticization" of the mainstream (including the Right) has not succeeded on all issues, but it has apparently been a spectacular success with regard to one issue: the problem of Islam, and how to routinely and doggedly deny it.

This process of "Lefticization" of the mainstream I call, for want of a better term, PC MC (Politicaly Correct Multiculturalism). With regard to the problem of Muslims, PC MC is no longer a problem of mere "Leftists". It has infected the hearts and minds of nearly everyone in the West, on all points of the political spectrum, and in all stations of life from lofty jet-setting Elites down to ordinary assistant school directors in Dubuque, Iowa, or the Deputy Sheriffs of Putnam County, Georgia, or to head librarians of a small college in Topeka, Kansas, or to lowly bus drivers in Madison, Wisconsin; etc. These days, outside of the Blogosphere, apparently, and outside of a few rag-tag public demonstrations that in a couple of large cities once in a blue moon draw at best a piddling 2,500 (many of whom are probably just journalists and curious bystanders anyway), you'd practically have to drain the swamps of deepest, darkest Mississippi to find a bonafide anti-Muslim human. Even many individuals who count themselves (and/or who are counted) as within the anti-Islam movement (which is not yet really a Movement yet anyway, and which is usually termed "anti-Jihad" rather than "anti-Islam") are rather soft and mushy (when they aren't incoherently fuzzy) when it comes to drawing out, and boldly avowing, the logical conclusions of their learning curve about the pernicious nature of Islam, and of the disturbingly metastasizing behavior of Muslims around the world in recent news, recent history, and throughout the entire historical career of Islam.

With regard to this particular cultural victory of the PC MC Zeitgeist, the vast majority of liberals, conservatives, Leftists and Right-Wingers, Centrists, and all those who are more or less casually apolitical -- all of these types of Westerners, throughout the West, all agree (with grudging, minor exceptions that prove the rule) on three principles carved in eternal stone:

1) Islam is relatively okay, no worse than any other religion;

2) any serious geopolitical and social problems and dangers which seem to be caused by Islam are really caused by other factors (i.e., by the West in its essentially "racist" nature -- among whose ill effects includes its "meddling" in the Third World -- whose "shame" it is doomed to work off for all eternity);

3) the vast majority of Muslims are relatively good decent people and even the slightest hint of suspicion about their complicity with the pernicious dangers that seem to be emanating out of their Islam is evidence rather of our own evil racism which has to be vigilantly suppressed and nipped in the bud lest we "become like them" and "go down the slippery slope" toward rounding up Muslims and putting them in concentration camps and committing genocide against them.

Many other principles radiate out from these three, which I won't elaborate here. (One example being that, because of #3, the fact of more and more dangerous Muslims pullulating out of the general pool of that vast majority of harmless Muslims has to be accounted for somehow other than actually blaming Islam, Islamic culture, and the Muslims who enable Islam; and so the ruling paradigm of the TMOEWATHI which is supposed to plug that leaky hole becomes increasingly strained, more and more past the point of ridiculous absurdity -- which, alas, doesn't seem to phase our majority of mainstream Westerners who have become enculturated by PC MC.)

The incoherence of Robert Spencer's analyses in this regard may be expressed by the inconsistency by which, on the one hand, he is not shy to criticize conservatives whenever they manifest a PC MC "respect" for Islam and for Muslims; while. on the other hand, he tends to locate the blame for this problem generally speaking in those dastardly "Leftists", when the crux of the problem cannot be located there if the vast majority of conservatives continue to "respect" Islam and Muslims in terms of PC MC -- unless one is to try to say that the vast majority of conservatives throughout the West are Leftists (an absurd conclusion with which Lawrence Auster continually flirts yet whose rhetorical consequences he, in his typically passive-aggressive way, unfailingly skirts).

Solving this analytical problem by calling the vast majority of conservatives Leftists? We won't even go there, girlfriend. Obviously, the problem is much broader, deeper and more complex for handy-dandy partisan labels to be able to handle adequately.

So where does Spencer go, for relief from the logical pressure his analytical incoherence leads? Nowhere, apparently. He simply remains suspended in mid-air in his incoherence, and will probably remain so until an assertive interviewer some day calls him on it and won't let him prevaricate until he gives a straight answer. To be generous to Spencer, however, it could very well be that he hasn't given this rather complex problem much thought, and so rather than weigh his formulations more carefully, he opts for the lazy way out by reachinig for that convenient L word ("Leftist" or sometimes "liberal" will do) by which to denote the bugaboo that explains, and continues to sustain, Western dhimmitude.

When Spencer recently penned an unusually lengthy essay analyzing "Multiculturalism" I read it eagerly, to see whether he irons out his apparent inconsistency and incoherency in this regard. Alas, while his first few paragraphs seemed promising, he ends with that same recourse to the lazy L word:

The underlying reason for that is that Multiculturalism, in the final analysis, is not really about respecting all cultures equally at all. The very idea of that is manifestly absurd in any case—as if Nazi Germany and ancient Athens, or human-sacrificing Aztec Mexico and Catholic Spain—were essentially moral equivalents. But while it is true that thinking seriously about this core multiculturalist principle immediately lands on in the quicksand of Relativism, that Relativism is not in itself the ultimate focus or goal of the multiculturalist initiative. Since Multiculturalism was fashioned in the hard-Left groves of post-Sixties academe as a stick to use to beat the West, and particularly the Church, why shouldn’t feminists coo over the forced and feigned happiness of oppressed Muslim women while insisting that perfectly happy Christian women are actually miserable? Denigrating and ultimately destroying the Judeo-Christian West, not stamping out some putative racist devaluation of other cultures, is the point of the whole multiculturalist enterprise.

Another example among multitudes which one could adduce to demonstrate Spencer showing a similar recourse to the L Explanation we see in his unusually lengthy introduction to a Jihad Watch report about the recent slaughter of Christian Nigerians by Muslim Nigerians.

Notice how well he analyzes the problem for the first 324 words of his introduction -- then in the final sentence (which I have bolded for emphasis) botches the whole thing by reducing the problem to "Leftists":

Occasionally people ask me what I mean by referring to Misunderstanders of Islam on this site, or ask me to stop baiting the irony-deficient by doing so. In doing so, I am making a point, of course: we're constantly told by the mainstream media, government and law enforcement that Islam is a peaceful religion that doesn't justify terrorism, and that those who think otherwise are laboring under "misconceptions" or misunderstandings about the religion. Yet that explanation leaves us with the curious phenomenon that so many Muslims apparently misunderstand Islam -- not simply in the fact that they commit violence, but in that they do so explicitly and proudly in the name of Islamic teachings on jihad warfare against unbelievers.

And so here we go again: Muslims in Nigeria murdered 67 people, and all the while they were shouting "Allahu akbar," Allah is greatest. In other words, they were proclaiming that their god was superior to that of the people they were murdering. Apparently they believed that this superiority was manifest in the fact that they were the murderers, rather than the ones who were being murdered.

Then Islamic apologists for jihad terror in the U.S. have the monstrous temerity to portray Muslims as innocent victims of the "Islamophobia" of those who point out that jihad terror, and call for resistance to it. They even portray Muslims as equivalent to German Jews of the 1930s, as if they were innocent victims of a campaign against them that is ultimately genocidal in intent. The analogy ought to appall and disgust every free person. And stories like this present one are one reason why. Jews in Germany perpetrated no aggression, made no predictions of conquest and subjugation of the larger society, and never committed violence in the name of their religion. Modern-day anti-jihadists are fighting for freedom against violent absolutist thugs who justify Islamic violence and array themselves against the freedom of speech and other basic rights. The Leftist/Islamic supremacist Orwellian campaign to demonize anti-jihadists, whitewash jihad, and cast the aggressors as victims is, quite simply, evil.

Sure, Leftists are one important piece of the puzzle, and the radical ones among them are truly evil in their hatred of the West and their virtual alliance with anti-Western Muslims. However, these do not represent the West. They are a minority, likely a small minority. The bigger problem is the vast numbers of conservatives, centrists and comfortably apolitical Westerners who also enable Islam by refusing to condemn it; by refusing to notice the mountain of facts out there that should move any decent intelligent humane person to condemn it; by refusing to pursue the logical consequences of such a condemnation; and adding insult to injury by tending to condemn those few among us in the West who are calling attention to the pernicious danger of Islam and of all Muslims who enable Islam.

So how does Spencer explain the fact that the vast majority of conservatives, centrists and comfortably apolitical people throughout the West are also enabling, by "respecting", Islam and Muslims? Who knows? I don't think even Spencer knows, because he hasn't given it much thought.

It's so much easier to reach for the label-gun, than it is to think things through.

Further Reading:

Spencer's Two Hats: Keep Your Day Job

God, Lawrence Auster can be dense sometimes

2011-11-07T16:21:00.000-08:00

In a notice on his blog, Lawrence Auster indulges in a crotchet he's mentioned several times before: namely, the ostensible hypocrisy of the double standard which liberals engage in when on the one hand they champion sexual freedom (including a belief that morality should not constrain such freedom in the public marketplace of popular culture and politics), and on the other hand they sieze upon the sexual indiscretions of a conservative politician. (In this case, it involves Herman Cain; and it should go without saying that the issues of making allegations unfairly before evidence is determined, and whether he really did the things he's accused of, are important in their own right, but tangential and irrelevant to the matter at hand here.)

Sure, if that was all that was going on in situations like this, Auster would be right. But he's like a monomaniacal bulldog with blinders on, who sees only one tangent, and chomps down on it with a vengeance and won't let go ever again.

The painfully obvious and elementary additional factor going on here, to which Auster is in his typically eccentric way remaining utterly, blissfully oblivious (if a hectic obsession may be termed "blissful") -- a factor that is relevant with perhaps all the cases similar to it (like, for example, the notorious foot-tapping-in-the-rest-room-stall incident involving Republican Larry Craig, or the liaisons with prostitutes by conservative evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, etc.) is this:

1) It's a fact that conservatives (including certain rather actively vocal and visible conservative Christian representatives along with many of their followers) regularly reiterate the principle of limiting sexual freedom through a morality that in many ways directly contravenes the counter-morality of more sexual freedom (deemed simply "immorality", of course, by their conservative opponents, who have a point but not a simplistic one) espoused by the liberals.

2) When, then, a given conservative who represents that morality is discovered to have been indulging in sexual freedom (albeit covertly to escape notice), that is simply a blatant case of hypocrisy, of failing to live up to the standards by which they routinely condemn liberals -- in short, of abysmally failing to "practice what they preach".

3) Liberals who seize upon any of these indiscretions by conservatives that happen to come to light (and/or which have been ferreted out by diligent research-cum-investigations) are simply putting 1 and 2 together, and richly exploiting the hypocrisy.

And it's understandable why liberals would do it: after all, politics has been a fiercely competitive dog-eat-dog world not only for years and decades, but centuries. Indeed, when one reads about the political harangues and acrimony that went on in this great Republic throughout the 19th century, our current imbroglios rather pale in comparison with the red-blooded, robust gusto of the political wranglings of yore.

The broader fact which Auster's blinkered focus seems unable to see is that, in their respective contexts, both sides are wrong. The liberals are wrong for being so promiscuous (pun intended) with the supposed virtue of free sex without regard for its various effects on society. And conservatives are wrong for not owning the abject shame of the hypocritical double standard whenever one of their peers indulges in precisely the sexual freedom his, and their, ideology is supposed to oppose with such valiantly lofty integrity.

And, as should be clear, both sides are right. The liberals are right for pointing out the hypocrisy of the conservatives when these incidents happen. And the conservatives are right for continuing, on a different level unrelated to the hypocrisy, to articulate the principles of public morality (even if in this or that instance or point they may not always be cogent or correct). It is a mutual dilemma, with four "horns", so to speak, apportioned out among the two sides. The unremarkable degree of intelligence it requires to discern these four aspects of the issue evidently escapes Auster.

In this regard, Auster is not only being obtusely monomaniacal, not only rhetorically reckless; he is only exacerbating the shame of the conservative hypocrisy. There is only one way to salvage the conservative integrity of their stand on morals with regard to sexual freedom: Whenever one of their peers gets caught red-handed violating those morals, he should be roundly condemned, and not a peep should be uttered against liberals in that regard.

Only once did I hear a cogent, and interesting seeming exception to this: but it was delivered in a calm, mature and intelligently reserved manner; by William Bennett, some time back in the late 80s I believe. He was referring to this same issue, of the hypocrisy of particular conservatives who are caught violating their own principles. And Bennett responded something to the effect of, "Well, at least we have principles to violate."

But Bennett's witty riposte only acquires rhetorical verve when the particular violation in question is handled by conservatives with appropriate shame and opprobrium against their own; not with antics of juvenile mud-slinging back at the liberals.

Creationism and Evolution Theory: Both are flawed -- Part 2

2011-11-06T11:01:00.001-08:00

Part One may be read here.

Preliminary Remarks:

First of all, it's necessary to state some obvious truisms: When scientists merely collect and organize data, then their science doesn't need philosophy. When, however, scientists begin to weave complex interpretations or theories on the basis of the data they have collected and organized, philosophy necessarily intrudes -- at the very least in the sense that the language and logic by which anything complex is expressed involve philosophy. This becomes even more pertinently so, to the extent that the complex subject in question goes beyond the What and the How, and begins to impinge upon ultimate questions of the Why, the Whence and the Wherefore.

Science-minded supporters of Evolution Theory may object about Part One, and now Part Two, that my entire argument is not backed up by specific scientific evidence. But that's the whole point. It's not refuting Evolution Theory on the level of scientific evidence, but on the level of the theory's philosophical premises, claims and assumptions.

Which provides a neat segue to our next point: A theory is not a fact: A theory is an interpretation based upon facts. As such, any theory is always vulnerable to flaws in cogency, insofar as it may not be extrapolating its assumptions optimally from the facts in question. Evolution, therefore, is not a fact: it is a conclusion within a complex interpretation that is based upon a collection of facts. Whether or not that conclusion is cogent or not, is the question, and the problem which philosophy, not science, is capable of determining.

It is dismaying to encounter so many otherwise intelligent science-minded persons -- including scientists themselves -- who assert obtusely that Evolution is a "fact". This obtuse assertion reflects a confusion of categories so elementary, it's painful.

Furthermore, the distinction of fact and interpretation does not denote a reality quite as simple as one might suppose. Facts are not necessarily indisputibly and simply actual and true. I.e., facts are not as simple as is generally supposed. In fact (pun intended), many if not most "facts" we take for granted as such are interpretations which have become "compacted", so to speak, into fact-form; and usually in practical terms it is not a problem to treat them as such -- though occasional testing of any interpretation that has come to be treated as fact is not a bad idea, philosophically and sociopolitically speaking.

Sheer facts that are actually facts and not fact-form interpretations are perhaps hard to come by, for psycho-culturally, humans with their inescapable propensity to overlay experience with language tend to receive, perceive, and then conceive, the raw data of experience with culturally pre-fab meanings. Without language, reality to humans would be experienced as, in the words of William James, "a great blooming and buzzing confusion". The instant we begin to make sense of that confusion, we imbue and endow the data it contains with meaning within webs of interlocking meanings -- an activity that usually cannot avoid interpretation, as opposed to mere acknowledgement of a brute "fact". Individuals don't make sense of that confusion alone: they depend upon language, which is a social and cultural enterprise, in turn dependent upon long and rich histories of peoples, societies, and cultures. And more often than not, an individual most of the time is not really thinking about his interpretations by which he makes sense of the welter of data around him: most of the time, he merely uses convenient interpretations already available in his culture around him, which he has been assimilating all his life. Even if an individual seems to dispute this or that interpretation, in doing so he may well be merely availing himself of someone else's counter-interpretation. Political disagreements in the marketplace of ideas among politicians and civilians alike is replete with such activity, where actual thinking -- in terms of attending to the data and weighing the evidence which the data constitutes, in order to construct cogent interpretations based on that evidence, and then testing those interpretations in order to come to a judgment on which to base ethical action -- rarely occurs. It's so much easier to just pick some particular interpretations out of the supermarket of ideas -- on either side of the aisle (pun intended) -- based on what satisfies one's emotions.

In addition, and probing the matter more deeply, it could be said that reality itself is essentially a chaos without sense -- until humans through their act of articulating sense out of it endow it with structure. This is not to say, however, that the "chaos" is ontologically all of reality, and the meaningful structures we perceive in it are merely figments of our imagination or epiphenomena. The real situation is more a paradoxical interplay between the two (and would be a way of doing a properly philosophical exegesis of the mythopoesis of a "genesis" out of "chaos" -- whether that mythopoetry be Judaeo-Christian, or Babylonian, or pre-Christian Greek, or any number of other myths of comic origin). This, however, opens up a complex can of philosophical worms that will take us too far afield of our present discussion.

Interpretations, in turn, do not exist by themselves, but depend for their sense upon a complex web of associated interlocking interpretations; and this complex web in turn, as we suggested above, is unavoidably ensconced within language, culture and history. Nevertheless, most of the time, philosophically speaking, and practically speaking in terms of the basic activity of science of data-collection and its corollary in pragmatic translation into workable technology, these broader and deeper philosophical questions present tangential distractions which would delve unduly into the semantic overlays which complicate the facts of raw data. Sometimes, however, aspects of these more complex dimensions become important components in a philosophical problem relevant to modern science -- as is the case here with the facts from which Evolution Theory has been constructed, and the interpretive construction itself.

Discussion:

Now it is time to allude to the very linchpin of this philosophical problem generated by both Evolution Theory and (ironically) by Creationism, which may be denoted in one word: speciation.

The concept of speciation is based on the symbolism species. Yes: in keeping with our previous discursion above, a "species" is not a fact, but a symbolism, given meaning through an interpretation based upon certain facts. The word species denotes a symbolism equivalent to the archaic word kind -- made general through the King James Bible as, for example, in the phrases "after his kind" or "after their kind" from the first chapter of book of Genesis:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, [and] the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed [is] in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. [1:11]

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good. [1:21]

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. [1:24]

Etc.

The excellent philosophical refutation of Darwin I linked in Part One begins and bases his thesis upon these passages of Genesis; and he may seem to be conflating a spurious religious claim with a more nuanced logical argument, which then would tend to irritate and repel the sensibilities of the modern science-minded person; but his instincts and methodology were sound, and the religious aspect of his argument need not impinge upon the latter's logical cogency.

The equivalent symbolisms species and kind simply denote the mysterious fact of differentiation we experience among all life forms. The latter happens to be archaic and, in addition, burdened with coming from a "religious" context; while the former is the modern, and therefore "approved" term. Philosophically speaking, however, both denote the same phenomenon. Alongside with this mystery of differentiation is a parallel, or counter-mystery: that of the apparent interrelation of all living beings. Together, these two mysteries form a paradox, of the kind with which philosophy has found reality to be rife: the insoluble paradox.

Insoluble paradoxes point to the ultimate questions which cannot be answered, but which themselves point to certain truths, among them, truths of transcendence in terms of an ultimate source of all reality, an ultimate destiny of all reality, and an ultimate reason for the structures of all reality. These truths, being mysteries, cannot be known as to their Why, but only, as it were, as to their That. This transcendent That, then, is experienced in tension with, and beyond, the What of thingly reality -- and, of course, in some kind of genetic relation to it, as source and sustainer. And where the What's That flows into the realm of human ethics -- if only because humans and their dimension of social existence are participants in the very same reality of which the What is in tension with the That -- we then find generated innumerable varieties of what have become classified as mythological, philosophical, and religious explications throughout various cultures in history, ranging all the way from dogmas insensitive to the mysterious paradox from which they derive, to more sophisticated articulations more sensitive to transcendence in its mysterious paradox of knowable, yet unknowable. This little digression, however, while perhaps necessary, may broaden our scope unduly if we continue to dwell on it. It is enough to keep it in mind, as an implicit philosophical context for our discussion at hand.

Let us return then to the sub-paradox, as it were: the paradox of all living things being simultaneously differentiated, yet related.

The project of spurious religious thought has been to solve this paradox in an all too facile manner, by erecting the kinds of Genesis into a dogmatic fact which then is used to ignore the other half of the paradox. Meanwhile, from the other side, the project of modern science has been to solve this same paradox by promiscuously elevating the mystery of relations among all living things into a universal, albeit complex, web of ontologically congenital causation -- thereby unraveling and eliminating the mystery, and wonder, of irreducible differentiation, through a transformation of the kinds of life into specious species (pun intended).

To be sure, the wonder of differentiation remains, in the modern science-minded sensibility; but that is only a temporary wonder (at least for the scientist whose sights are set higher than the lowly taxonomist or naturalist), subsumed under a higher wonder: that of the ultimate sameness of all this biotic differentiation, all ultimately derived from the one undifferentiated aboriginal "primal soup", and beyond and prior to that, to some primal inanimate "soup" of chemicals and energy; which, in its turn (handing the crypto-mythological torch to the physicists-cum-cosmologists), derives ultimately from some etiology for the universe itself (or that silly and needlessly penultimate formulation "multiverse") rendered in terminology as incoherently unintelligible as the worst prose of a Derrida or a Baudrillard (if not of some ancient Gnostic tractate), though dressed up as respectable science funded by government grants in the millions.

This higher wonder of the modern scientist is really a religious or spiritual wonder, yet all too often denied to be so by the scientist: it is the wonder of explaining the genesis of Everything. Though the modern scientist may affect a disingenuous professionalism about this ersatz religion in which he is indulging, he may as well be one of those unhinged scientists out of sci-fi movies or fantasy novels whose enraptured face is bathed and maniacally beaming in the blue light of his wondrous invention that will finally solve the Mystery of Existence. Crypto-alchemy, as it were; or we may even go so far as to say that modern Physics, whenever it strays beyond its appropriate limits, is a crypto-Metaphysics (even as it persists in thinking of itself as an anti-Metaphysics).

And even if the evolutionary biologist may claim not to presume such a grandiose cosmogonic agenda, he knows he is doing, in terms of of that overall project, his important part which, along with his brothers and sisters in the fields of physics and cosmology, is not compartmentalized into separate and unrelated disciplines, but rather is assumed to be conjoined to them in a unified ontology which they all share, a new ontology historically (and in some ways sociopolitically) rooted in the modern tradition of the Enlightenment's project of rejecting and replacing theology as anything more useful than, at best, a quaint relic of the past and, at worst, a pernicious impediment to modern reason both in its pursuit of the life of the intellect and in its advisory role in shaping society. And even if the more comprehensive, and official, linguistic articulation of this new ontology of Unified Theory tends to be left up to a handful of exegetes, like a Stephen J. Gould or a Stephen Hawking, a whole host of axioms and givens have come into general parlance for Modern Man supposedly based on that exegesis, which he can use to state general Truths about Reality as though everyone agrees; and, at times when duty calls, to mock and dismiss and sneer at those who may disagree for reasons respecting the West's heritage of classic philosophy and religion.

Now, evolutionary biologists who protest that they are not presuming to derive all life back to a single biotic entity; and then that, in turn, back to inanimate matter -- and then all inanimate matter, logically, back to some ultimate archeology of the universe through a Big Bang or a String Theory (or whatever happens to be the latest fashionable cosmogonic myth dressed up as non-mythic science du jour) -- are being rhetorically (and transparently) sophistical, trying to fend off the equally spurious Creationist with whom they may happen to be sparring at the moment. And such puerile sophistry usually works, only because the Creationist is usually no less deficient in philosophy himself, and no less deformed by philodoxy; even if his philodoxy happens to be arrayed in dogmatomachic opposition, as the dust has settled historically between the two prevailing dogmas of modernity -- that of religious dogmatism and that of anti-religious dogmatism, respectively -- to the other side of the modern coin of little price but, alas, of great currency.

The Creationist in these little debates may have the relatively sound instinct to bring up the problem of the chain of causation back behind the realm of speciation to the "primal soup", and thence to inanimate matter, and thence to the Big Bang; but his philodoxic deformation renders him ill-equipped from there to actually wield the points of that instinct in any effective way. And in the eyes and ears of most modern Westerners, who are casually more or less unthinkingly secular-minded, the scientist invariably "wins" against the Neanderthal troglodyte religious bigot who crawled out of the sludge of the Scopes trial (or took time off from planning to lynch gays or murder abortion doctors) to come into the studios of NPR or PBS or the BBC where the brazenly slanted "debate" has been hosted.

So: earlier, we mentioned speciation. That part of the discussion will round out our entire thesis, and will come in Part Three.

Stay tuned.

Can we torch the offices of Time magazine now...?

2011-11-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the fire-bombing of the offices of the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo which had published Mohammed cartoons which Mohammedans -- in their pathological obsession with religious "blasphemy", of course -- found "offensive", a pundit for Time magazine (one Bruce Crumley) essentially blamed the French newspaper (while implicitly letting Muslims off the hook) for being too provocative and therefore guilty of goading and inviting Muslims to attack them.

Meanwhile, the editors of Charlie Hebdo announced that not only will they go ahead with publishing Mohammed cartoons, they will publish more of the same.

An excellent commentary on this incident has come to my attention.

It is from UK journalist Nick Cohen, from whose recent essay on the matter I derived my blog title today. I've not made a study of Nick Cohen's writings over the years on Islam. Apparently, he is deemed to be a Leftist (though that label should always be taken with a grain of salt, concerning the issue of Islam); and he may well be an asymptotic analyst about the problem of Islam. In this case, however, he's spot on the money. (Note: in the following quote, I found it necessary to add a phrase, which I put in bold, to make his point clearer):

If believers in freedom of speech and of the press were to find Time's arguments in favour of censorship "stupid and unnecessary", and in response they decided to torch the offices of Time, they would on this reasoning be no more responsible for their actions than the Parisian fire bomber. Time would have been "begging" for it. It would have deserved everything it got.

On a similar note, one could propose another hypothetical (I thought of this after reading a comment from a normal civilian, one "Kepha", a commenter at the Jihad Watch article on this incident):

Suppose -- a hypothetical case -- that after one of the innumerable displays of snide mockery of Christian values one has seen for years, even decades, throughout the West (think the "Piss Christ" exhibit, the statue of Mary in elephant dung by another "artist", the constant barrage over the years of relentless and brazen ridicule of Christianity by the extremely popular TV shows South Park, The Simpsons, the Conan O'Brien show, Saturday Nite Live, as well as live stage shows of the magician/comedians Penn & Teller, or movies like "Life of Brian" or "Dogma" etc. -- just to name a few -- some Christians decide to firebomb the offices of any one of them.

We know what would happen. The very opposite response from Western journalists and pundits would happen.

Time or Newsweek or any other of the mainstream news media outlets would defend the artists or journalists who were attacked -- while they would roundly condemn the Christian attackers, without a shred of the sophistical equivocation they use routinely to subtly defend the precious sensibilities of perennially "offended" Muslims.

Islam and Free Speech

2011-11-03T16:16:00.000-07:00

Here is a partial list of the violent intimidation Muslims around the world have been threatening and/or perpetrating in the last few years, all in the name of their religiously pathological abhorrence of "blasphemy" along with their utter disdain for the right of free speech in a free society:

(Thanks to the commenter "traeh" for providing this list in a comment on Jihad Watch, which I have tweaked here and there slightly)

Monty Python comedian (self-censors in fear of Muslims)

Yale University Press (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

Metropolitan Museum of Art (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

National Archives of Canada (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

French newspaper (after being firebombed for printing a cartoon of Muhammad, the next day the paper prints that cartoon again, and more! Bravo!)

Hollywood (self-censors by canceling a movie project about Jews in Malmo, Sweden, after learning of frequent Muslim threats and acts of violence against Jews in Malmo);

Talk-show host David Letterman (At Al Qaeda website a frequent commenter calls on Muslims to cut out Letterman's tongue and kill him.)

Paris Dipersico, author (beaten by two Muslim men for writing things "against Islam," such as "Islam is a religion of 'peace', and Muslims will kill you to prove it.")

Director of the museum in the Hague, Wim van Krimpen (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

UK religious studies teacher Gary Smith (Muslims hit him over the head with an iron bar, fracturing his skull, hemmorhaging his brain, breaking his jaw, and slashing his face, for not teaching Islam as they deem appropriate)

Norwegian politicians (Iraqi-born cleric Mullah Krekar threatens politicians with death if he's deported from Norway).

State Senator Greg Ball (receives suspicious package with greeting "Asa Lamu Laikum Dead Man Walking," (the first part of which is Arabic for "peace be upon you") ;

2010 Tennessee candidate for Congress Lou Ann Zelenik (death threats from Muslims);

Barrister Tom Zreika (seeks police protection after non-stop phone threats from Muslims);

Japanese translator of Rushdie, Hitoshi Igarashi (murdered);

Norwiegan translator of Rushdie, William Nygaard (shot);

Italian translator of Rushdie, Ettore Capriolo (knifed);

French singer Veronique Sanson (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats, changed name, abandoned her career, and went into hiding);

The producers and creators of famous TV cartoon South Park (self-censor in response to Muslim death threats);

Journalist Lawrence O'Donnell (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

Cartoonist Lars Vilks (house firebombed);

French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker (in hiding, under government protection);

Dutch Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (murdered by a Muslim member of an international cell of Muslims);

Author and former member of Dutch parliament Hirsi Ali (death threats and full-time bodyguards);

Author Salman Rushdie (in hiding after years of death threats and mass demonstrations by Muslims to kill him for the crime of "blasphemy", under UK govt. protection);

Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten (bodyguards hired);

British teacher arrested for the crime of "blasphemy" by Sudan government, Muslim crowds and clerics call for her death;

Jyllands Posten again... (five jihadists discovered planning to shoot as many people as possible);

Atheist Sabri Husibi (death threats from Muslims);

Lyricist Javed Akhtar (death threats from Muslims);

Cartoonist Kurt Westergaard (almost killed by a Muslim with an axe);

Director of the film 2012 and the British potter Grayson Perry (self-censor in response to Muslim death threats);

Lawyer Majed Moughni (death threat from Muslim);

Magicians/comedians Penn & Teller (admit they are afraid to mock Muslims for fear of death, even though they continue to mock Christians without any fear);

Author Taslima Nasreen (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

Disc jockey/musician Jakub Rene Kosik (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

Coptic Orthodox priest Zakaria Botros (Al Qaeda bounty of $60 million on his head);

Pop star Deeyah (hires extra bodyguards);

Politician Shiria Khatun (forced by Muslim threats to her children to dress in a "less Western" manner);

Christian minister Dr. Peter Hammond (death threat from Muslim);

Actor Omar Sharif (Muslims call for his murder);

Artist Sooreh Hera (self-censors in response to Muslim threats and forced into hiding);

Artist Sarah Maple (gallery workers threatened, gallery window smashed, 24-hour police protection);

Paul McCartney (death threats from Muslims);

150 Austrian Coptic Christians (Austrian interior ministry found jihadist list targeting each of them for violent attack);

100+ Canadian-Arab Christians (each one targeted on an Al Qaeda website);

Volvo and Ikea (threatened by terrorist group);

UK Muslim scientist Usama Hasan (self-censors in response to Muslim death threats);

Islam expert Robert Spencer gets a death threat; and another death threat; and another death threat; and yet another...

UK Random House book publisher (office fire bombed over fiction novel about Mohammed and Aisha).

Conclusion:

As I noted in my intro, this is only a partial list, spanning only the last few years. Many more such examples of the thuggery and intimidation which the pathological social disease called Islam cultivates may be adduced -- and these are all happening in the West. In addition, probably thousands of similar cases are left undocumented, or poorly documented, in various Muslim countries, where non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, pagans, and atheists) as well as Muslims deemed to be insufficiently "pure" live in constant fear of the totalitarian hatred of Islamic society, when they are not lynched and murdered.