Interview with "CGW" -- an ordinary citizen who decided to make a difference

Introduction

"Dr. Elhagaly is no longer employed or caring for patients at Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea. We are working with his patients to transition their care to another physician."

This is what the Public Relations department of the Mayo Clinic located in Rochester in southeastern Minnesota wrote in an email on May 16. 

And why was Dr. Elhagaly "no longer employed" at Mayo Clinic?  The email went on to say:

"Female circumcision in children, referred to as female genital mutilation in U.S. legal statutes, is a felony-level child abuse crime. Mayo Clinic strongly opposes the procedure and it has never been performed at any Mayo Clinic facility."

Though this Mayo Clinic memo in its rather flat affect doesn't clarify the point, the problem was not (apparently) that they had found out that Dr. Elhagaly was actually practicing female circumcision/mutilation on his patients, or that he had been counseling others to do so; it was the fact that he had been caught red-handed delivering a paper in which he advocated the practice of female circumcision/mutilation as a time-honored form of feminine hygiene in Islamic culture and had indeed noted that it was deemed by some Muslim authorities (whom he uncritically cited) as an "honor" for the girls involved.

The Mayo memo reflects an important victory for those concerned about human rights and the law -- and particularly about the practice of female circumcision/mutilation, a practice in flagrant and hideous violation of both human rights and all Western laws.

The rather monotonal announcement by the Mayo Clinic quoted above was sent to one individual, an ordinary citizen who a couple of weeks before May 16 had taken it upon himself to do something about Dr. Elhagaly, and to inform Mayo Clinic of their responsibility in this regard.  Along the way, he garnered the support and help of many friends and supporters.

For most of us concerned about the problem of Islam, it seems like a hopelessly complex and sometimes bewildering variety of issues, too often spanning the globe in far-flung places where we feel impotent to do anything about it.  

Rarely, it happens in our backyard.  And even then, we may not know about it until it's too late; or we may still feel ineffectual to do anything about it.

One day in early May, an ordinary citizen who goes by the online name of "CGW" learned of a particularly galling outrage against human rights happening right in his neck of the woods.  This outrage involved a doctor -- a pediatrician no less -- working in a clinic in the Mayo Clinic system of a small southeastern Minnesota town called Albert Lea in the heartland of the U.S.A.   As we noted above, this pediatrician had been documented to have advocated (by expounding at glowingly uncritical length) female circumcision not clearly distinguishable from the worse crime against humanity of FGM (female genital mutilation), both of which are felony crimes for underage females throughout the U.S.A. (and even for grown women in most states).

I have asked CGW if I could interview him with a few questions about how he got this done.  He graciously consented.  

The Interview

Hesperado:  How did you first hear about Dr. Elhagaly and his advocacy of FGM? 

CGW: I first heard about Dr. Elhagaly's advocacy of FGM on May 3, 2012 during my daily perusal of the articles posted on Jihad Watch, where I saw the article titled Leading Muslim jurist: Female genital mutilation an "honor" in Islam. I followed the link in that article to the original article at Translating Jihad and subsequently read that.

Hesperado:  You mean this doctor had advocated female circumcision/mutilation in Arabic?

CGW:  Yes.  It was a paper he presented to an organization of which he is a senior member, the Association of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA).  I guess if it hadn't been for the individual at Translating Jihad, who regularly translates Arabic documents into English, we may have never found out about this American Muslim doctor's position on this issue.

Hesperado:   Yes, that website, Translating Jihad, does good work.  In fact, not long ago, in early April, they published a translation of another document relating to this Dr. Elhagaly -- namely, a paper delivered again at his organization, the AMJA, in which the Muslim members, all esteemed professional Muslims living and working in the U.S.A., were warned against working in law enforcement and were reminded that as Muslims they should "not be pleased with a legal system that does not come from Allah".

CGW:  Yes, I recall reading about that at Jihad Watch, though at the time I hadn't learned of the doctor's position on FGM.

Hesperado:  And so reading the May 3rd article was the first time your learned that a doctor working in your region of the U.S. was advocating what is tantamount to FGM?

CGW:  Yes.

Hesperado:  So your own local mainstream news media failed you in this regard -- they had failed to report a very important, and disturbing fact about a local doctor?

CGW:  That's right.

Hesperado:  What first moved you to do something about this issue?  Why this particular issue, and not any number of the 1,001 other issues and problems caused by Islam?  Did you just throw a dart at a board of Islamic Outrages and pick the first thing your dart hit, so to speak?

CGW:  I have long been a vocal opponent, both in my personal life and in online forums, of the barbaric practice known in all its forms in US statutory language as Female Genital Mutilation.

I live in a community with one of the highest immigrant Somali populations in the United States, and have heard from people in my community (both Somali immigrants and native locals) that the immigrant community here in Minnesota continues the practice of FGM, even though it is illegal in this country and in this state. 

Hesperado:  How bad is this problem in this immigrant community?

CGW:  Upwards of 98% of Somali females are "circumcised"; typically this takes the form of one of the more severe forms of the practice, including complete clitorectomy/clitoridectomy, excision or removal of the labia (both majora and minora), and infibulation, or "sewing up" of the external tissue that remains, leaving only a pencil-sized opening for the flow of menstrual blood and urine.  For graphic evidence of these practices, see this link.

Hesperado:  Let me understand you on this:  you've just listed various stages of the process, from less severe to worse, where "infibulation" is the worst form?

CGW:  That's right -- but remember, they are all just forms of the same practice, which has been deemed under our American laws to be a felony crime, no matter by what degree of severity it's practiced.  

Hesperado:  And so these Somalis are getting away with this right in our backyard, under our noses?

CGW:  Children are taken back to Somalia for the procedure, or are having it performed locally, both of which are illegal. There are individuals in various positions in municipal government agencies who have told tales of botched procedures done on kitchen tables at home using a razor blade where the children were in danger of bleeding to death, and which resulted in 911 being called; the cases have never been prosecuted due to a pervasive climate of deferring to "cultural sensitivity" here in Minnesota. None of these individuals would go on the record or pursue prosecution of these cases as they were warned that they would lose jobs, pensions, and would face physical retribution by the Somali community if they spoke out on the issue. 

Hesperado:  And you know of this through personal knowledge, but the specifics you do not, or cannot divulge, in order to protect certain individuals?

CGW:  Yes.  For example, I could provide a witness who could "name names" but that person made a pledge of confidentiality to the individuals involved and declines to go on the record.

Hesperado: Fascinating, and it's disconcerting that even with your relative knowledge of the local scene in terms of this problem, you had not heard of Dr. Elhagaly, who was right there in your general region.  That makes one wonder how many other Dr. Elhagaly's there are out there whom we don't know about -- not only in Minnesota, but in other areas of concentration of Muslim immigrants in America, not to mention anywhere in the West.

CGW:  True.  I guess we have to take these problems one step at a time.

Hesperado: Just out of curiosity, do you know if Dr. Elhagaly is himself Somali or is he just being an "ecumenical" Muslim helping his Muslim brothers from another culture?

CGW:  I believe that Dr. Elhagaly is from Egypt. This is what I found in the course of my research. Your readers can go here for more information.

And this is a cached copy of a page formerly at the Mayo Health System website. 

Hesperado: Thanks, that's interesting.  As we know, Egypt also has an incredibly high incidence of FGM itself -- over 90%.  Birds of a feather, as they say...  Now let's get back to you.  At the point when you learned about Dr. Elhagaly, what did you begin to do about the situation?  Did you have any previous experience with any kind of social activism before?  

CGW: Aside from the occasional participation in online activities, (such as Pamela Geller's effort to encourage Butterball to label their whole turkeys "halal" when they are indeed certifying them as such, both for export to the Middle East and for the broader American market, around Thanksgiving 2011), and participation in the comments sections of online forums, I had no experience with any kind of activism whatsoever.

Hesperado: What were your first steps then?  Were you (pardon the expression) flying by the seat of your pants?

CGW: My first step was to try and find out what I could about the pediatrician in question. I contacted the Mayo Clinic in a series of phone calls, trying to determine who to call to make an official complaint about what I perceived to be advocacy of an illegal procedure. The first hurdle I encountered was determining that the pseudonym of the physician was not his legal name for the purposes of employment. I asked about a "Dr. Hatem Al-haj", the name in the original article at Translating Jihad, and was told that no such physician worked there. Several of my online comrades also had this problem as they tried to contact Mayo directly. So I searched the Mayo Clinic Health System site for Albert Lea, MN and found his photo identifying him as Dr. Hatem Elhagaly. With that name in hand, I resumed calling Mayo. I was pretty much given the run-around; it was clear that the individuals I spoke to were not all that willing to address the situation. I left several messages for different individuals but never received a call back. Finally I was given the email address of an individual in the Public Affairs Department to whom to address emails. After a few exchanges, he provided me with another contact email address for the general public to use to address the issue with the Mayo Health System.

From there, I consulted an acquaintance with an interest in health-and-wellness issues who volunteered to organize a petition on the website Change.org. This petition being established, I began the process of attempting to disseminate the information that I had gathered to various organizations, websites, etc. 

Hesperado: It's interesting to contemplate that you had little experience of political activism under your belt, but you plunged in anyway, making all those phone calls until you finally tracked down at least someone at Mayo Clinic you could begin to contact to communicate your concerns.  At that point, after you had the public relations contact and your friend began the online petition, what was the next step?  Did you just sit back and wait for the petition to grow numbers, or did you have to do more phone-calling work?  

CGW: After I had left a few phone messages for several parties at the Mayo Clinic Health System -- both at the Rochester and Albert Lea facilities -- that went unanswered, I pretty much despaired of hearing back from anyone by phone and shifted my efforts to Internet communication. All of this was still happening on the very first day, May 3. Both the phone calling and initial email contact began before the petition was ever organized; that came later in the evening.

Hesperado:  And so the Mayo Clinic wasn't timely about responding?

CGW: Actually, Mayo never got back to me independently on the resolution of the matter; I never received anything from them regarding my initial inquiry except an email saying that they were investigating the matter and thanking me for my "outreach". I followed up on May 16, and received a short response stating that Dr. Elhagaly was no longer employed or caring for patients at the Mayo Clinic facility in Albert Lea. I responded, asking if he continued to be employed by Mayo in any capacity.  The reply was in the negative.

Hesperado:  How did you find that out?

CGW: This came from the Public Affairs Department.

Hesperado:  And so how did the process play out from there?

CGW: The rest of the process was pretty straightforward. I posted a few comments online during the day about my progress in getting in touch with people, as well as additional information on the issue. Once the petition was complete and ready to sign, I began a series of outgoing emails alerting people to the issue.

Hesperado:  Now I know the petition had specific people and/or entities slated to be contacted with the petition results.  Did you contact anyone else?

CGW: Yes.  Along with the designated recipients named in the petition, who each received an email for every signature added, I contacted local, regional and national media (both television and print - no response), the MN BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension), the MN Attorney General (asking the last two to investigate whether or not anything criminal was taking place or had occurred), a few hundred Mayo Clinic Health System physicians and practitioners, a few websites, some online acquaintances, friends and family members. I also posted the same information in the comments sections of several websites, especially those which had already carried the initial article from Translating Jihad. I spent the better part of a 24-hour period composing and sending out emails, with little sleep. I felt driven.

Hesperado:  Your perseverance is much appreciated by all of us concerned about this issue.  When I first saw your notices in comments threads on Jihad Watch about the petition, I just imagined some guy who had a link trying to alert other readers to sign a petition.  I had no idea of all the work you were putting into this project. 

CGW: I did receive a helpful reply from the MN BCA, advising me that they only follow up on referrals from law enforcement agencies and from county attorneys' offices. They suggested that I contact  the MN Attorney General’s Office, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice and the Dept. of Human Services Protective Services Unit. The second was already being contacted through the petition, and I had already contacted the first directly. At that point I decided not to pursue contacting the DHS-PSU, keeping the option open for a later date if necessary.

Hesperado:  After the initial point starting the whole process, and before the Mayo Clinic announced that Dr. Elhagaly was no longer working for them, did you hear from them?

CGW: No Mayo Clinic physicians/practitioners replied to me directly, but I did receive notification that one of the pediatricians that worked with Dr. Elhagaly in Albert Lea had forwarded the email to the Public Affairs Department at Mayo. I also received a supportive response from the administrator of one of the websites that I frequent. Online acquaintances posted additional helpful information and encouraging comments. One friend reported that he had posted links on 10 separate FaceBook pages that he visits regularly, as well as at additional websites.  

Hesperado:  When you said that you -- 

"...contacted local, regional and national media (both television and print - no response), the MN BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension), the MN Attorney General (asking the last two to investigate whether or not anything criminal was taking place or had occurred), a few hundred Mayo Clinic Health System physicians and practitioners..."

-- am I correct in assuming by "contact" you mean you emailed and phone-called?  Did you have a system?  Did you first try to phone-call, then if that didn't get through, you emailed?  Or did you just do one and the other in no apparent order?  Or did you just do one form (email or phone) and not the other for all these?

CGW: I only emailed them. As I mentioned previously, after an initial day spent waiting in vain for Mayo representatives to return my calls, I decided that email contact would be more fruitful, as it would provide all the information I needed to convey in a written format that could be referred to at any time, saved and passed on to others. I knew that I could effectively reach more people in a shorter amount of time by sending out an informational email. Calling and waiting on the line an inordinate amount of time to get passed around from person to person only to ultimately be forwarded to a voicemail system seemed unproductive and proved frustrating as well.

Hesperado: How did you get the email contact info for all those medical people you contacted?  In my (limited) experience, I've found that often doctors and other medical practitioners don't like their email addresses out in public for non-patients to see.

CGW:  I've had the same experience trying to get my own doctor's email address, to no avail, ultimately.

I accomplished the mass-emailing in a rather interesting way. Once I've let the secret out of the bag, I hope they don't change the system to shield their employees from further contact from the public!

When I had trouble getting in contact by telephone with anyone in Public Affairs at the Mayo Clinic who could be responsive to me, I called both the PA office and the facility in Albert Lea and requested an email address for the public to contact, warning that absence of the same would risk tying up their phone system for days with calls of complaint and protest. Upon being given three such addresses, I noticed a pattern of how the addresses were structured, using the first and last names of the intended recipients. I then began researching a list of Mayo Clinic physicians/practitioners by accessing their online database which lists all of them by name and specialty. This information in hand, I stayed up all night typing in each deduced address one by one.

Hesperado:  Amazing, all the ingenuity and patient attention to detail you put into this.  

CGW:  I literally hand-typed each address, referencing the names on each printed page one by one, spelling the names out loud to myself both as I read them  and as I typed them. I contacted hundreds of doctors in the Mayo System, primarily in the departments of Pediatrics (Community Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, Pediatric General Medicine, General Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine-Pediatric Diagnostic and Referral Clinic, Pediatric Gynecology, Pediatric Nephrology, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, Pediatric Pain Management, Pediatric Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Pediatric Plastic Surgery, Pediatric Psychiatry and Psychology, Pediatric Research, Pediatric Urology), Obstetrics and Gynecology (Gynecologic Surgery, Gynecology, Nurse Midwives, Obstetrics, Reproductive Medicine, Urogynecology), Family Medicine in Minnesota, Urology in Minnesota, Women's Health Clinic in Minnesota, along with a few other individual names. Primarily, I chose departments whose physicians/practitioners I felt would have either a direct or tangential interest in the subject of FGM.

Hesperado: When you spell it out like that, it's really staggering, and all of us concerned about this issue remain indebted to you.  Even so, it sounds like you didn't get much response from any of these people.  Did you follow-up with everyone who did not respond to you anyway, during the time before the day you were informed that Dr.Elhagaly was no longer employed (May 16)?

CGW:  The only responses I received are outlined above; and I did not follow up with any of the other parties that I contacted initially, with the exception of the request for information that I made to the Mayo Clinic on May 16. I figured that, if people were interested or concerned, they would reply to my initial email or forward it onward to the indicated parties.

 

Hesperado:  Sorry for seeming a little dense here, but I'm still unclear as to whether you emailed people independently of sending them the petition, in addition to emailing them the petition.  Or was there only one emailing of all those people, and it included the petition?  When you mentioned about how you contacted all those medical personnel including doctors etc. Did that precede the emailing of the petition, or was it the same process?

CGW:  There was only one email directly from me to the entire list of recipients. It included a link to the translation of the original Arabic article at the Translating Jihad website; a link to the doctor's employment information page at the Mayo Clinic Health System (Albert Lea website); a link to his own website, where he uses the pseudonym "Sheik Hatem Al-Haj"; a link to some information about the practice of FGM; and lastly, a link to the first draft of the petition.

Hesperado:  How long did it take for the first petition to be complete?  Was it simply ongoing until the "victory day" (May 16)? 

CGW:  The number of signed names on the petition grew slowly but steadily. 

Hesperado:  How long did it take for the petition to garner a sufficient number of names?  Like, how long did it take for 100 names to appear? 
 

CGW:  I think that it took a couple of days to reach 100 signatures or so.

Hesperado:  To whom exactly was the petition communicated ?  

CGW:  The petition letter was communicated to the Mayo Clinic Public Affairs Department, the American Board of Pediatrics (Board of Directors), the American Academy of Pediatrics (Board of Directors), the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice (Board of Directors), the American Medical Association, and the American Board of Pediatrics (Maintenance of Certification). The petition organizer did all the legwork, i.e., the research necessary to determine which organizations should receive the petition letter and their contact information.

Hesperado:  Did they receive the complete list of the petition signers as it was growing?

CGW:   No, actually, each time someone signed the petition, an email went out to each of the above-named recipients with that person's signature, generating a veritable flood of individual emails to their inboxes.

Also, a link to the petition was sent to all the recipients that I enumerated before in various medical departments and offices. I have no idea if any of the individuals with whom I communicated directly signed the petition, but the petition organizer is privy to that information. We'd need to compare lists to see.

I also posted a link to the petition online at several websites.

Hesperado:  And, of course, the petition has "morphed" into a second petition.  

CGW:    That's right.  It has been modified to reflect Dr. Elhagaly's departure from the Mayo Clinic (the Mayo Clinic has been removed from the list of contactees).   And the petition is still ongoing as we speak.  It can be seen at this link.

Hesperado:  As significant as the May 16 victory was, it's not enough that Dr. Elhagaly is no longer working at a particular clinic.  What is the purpose of this second petition?
 

CGW:  Two main purposes:  1) to urge proper authorities to revoke Dr. Elhagaly's medical certifications; and 2) to refute the statements made by followers of his that the entire petition effort has been the result of "Islamophobia" -- a word, by the way, invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in America to suppress all legitimate criticism of Islam, sharia law and Islamic practices -- which in this case serves the purpose of trying to deflect the public's attention away from genuine problems, such as a concern for the medical and health implications of the situation. 

Hesperado:  And to whom all is this petition going to be sent?

CGW:  The American Board of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, the American Medical Association, and the American Board of Pediatrics.  

Hesperado:  It boggles the mind that this advocate of female circumcision/mutilation is a pediatrician practicing in the U.S.A.!  

CGW:   Indeed.  

Hesperado:  How is this second petition going so far?

CGW:   Very well.  The total signatories at any given time can be checked by visiting the link I gave you.

Hesperado:  And that link, to remind the readers, is this one.  Well, CGW, I thank you for taking the time out to answer my questions.  I think it has been quite enlightening to any of my readers interested in the nuts and bolts of how an ordinary person can get involved and make a difference.  I wish you and the petitioners the best of luck with their goal.

CGW:  Thank you very much.

Left and Right in Black and White

The following roll call of votes from a recent U.S. House of Representatives vote shows, in vivid and stark black and white, the difference between Democrats and Republicans with regard to the issue of the problem of Islam.

The vote concerned an amendment meant to punish the New York City police department by taking away their funding for a long-standing operation they have been conducting of surveillance of Muslims in mosques and other community and private settings.

Thankfully, the amendment was defeated.  But taking a look at the link I provided above of the roll call, one sees that overwhelmingly, Democrats voted against the amendment, while overwhelmingly, Republicans voted in favor of it.  (A good brief overview of the vote may be read here.)

This demonstrates powerfully that there is more rationality resident in the Republican sociopolitical culture, compared with that of the Democratic sociopolitical culture.

Good God, with the metasasizing problem of deadly Islamic terrorism, the least we ought to do is institute such programs of surveillance of our growing Muslim populations.  Shame on our representatives for voting against this amendment.

While I have often stressed that the problem of PC MC is not a Leftist problem, but a much broader sociopolitical problem precisely because it has infected, and affected, too many among the conservatives, centrists -- as well as that often ignored sociopolitical demographic, the Comfortably Apolitical -- nevertheless, this does not mean that Left and Right are exactly equal in this regard.  My rhetorical efforts over the years in stressing the broadly deleterious effects of PC MC -- spanning across the Left/Right divide -- have been conducted in the spirit of countering what I have perceived to be a simplistic hyperbole that almost obsessively sees only "Leftists" and "liberals" as the problem; where, obviously, the Bush Epiphany (you know, George "Islam is a great religion of peace" Bush) ought to have disabused us of that long ago.

Nevertheless, May 12 was a day to remind us of the other side of the coin: the remarkable degree of irrationality cultivated by Democrats, contrasted with Republicans, with regard to the problem of Islam.

Shame on Democrats.  When are they going to wake up and see that Islam is the most virulently, and dangerously, anti-liberal ideology on the face of the planet? 

Psalm 110:1's footstool: an ottoman? Inshallah!

An analysis published in the American Thinker by Andrew Bostom helps us to make more sense of the modern history of Turkey and the phenomenon of its attempted genocides of Greeks and Armenians during its transition from an Ottoman theocracy to a Kemalist "secularism". 

We must begin with the premise that Ottoman Islam was a formidably Islamic geopolitical and cultural Rasputin -- and thus see its slow, increasing demise and disease over the 18th and 19th centuries as a spectacular catastrophe (for Muslims) in and of itself.  Then we see the kinetic acceleration of Western global superiority throughout the 19th century as another major ingredient in the process; with the tumultuously protean outburst of WW1 thus wracking the Body Geopolitic of the world (since by then the West had the entire world by its balls, mostly in a good sense, pace all the handwringing PC MCs (not a few of whom seem to be in the anti-Islam movement) who feel "ashamed" of their Western Colonialist heritage) -- impinging, among other regions, upon the dying Ottoman Empire. 

In the context of this devolving maelstrom and welter, the death of the Ottoman Empire transferrred its necessarily and intrinsically Islamic electricity Frankensteinianly from a corpse to a St. Vitus Revolution -- the "Young Turks" led by Ataturk -- animated not by greatness or freedom but by Turkish fascism and racism. 

Their feat nevertheless had to be nothing short of herculean, for no galvanizing ideology is as strong as the monster of Islam (that had, at any rate, centuries before already gobbled up Turkish pride and self-identity through "reversion"); and we thus realize, obviously, that its supposedly "secular" purgation of Islam was always partial (reflecting the Islamic limits of its astounding feat), not total -- for Islam in such an inveterately Islamic region can never be purged from the hearts and minds and psyches and culture of a people once possessed by its demon. 

Which is why, also, "modern secular" Turkey, ever since in the early 1920s it was carved out of the dead meat (mostly dark meat) of the Ottoman Empire, has been in constant tension against its own inner Islam, and has barely held the upper hand only by dint of a military dictatorship, not any kind of "democracy" the West would ever recognize as such -- free and institutionally and culturally respectful of equality under the law -- if only because, when you have a majority population ever diseased by the social disease of Islam, you simply cannot permit such freedoms (as Ataturk knew), for such freedoms would lead, with such a demon-possessed demos with its natural appetite for Islam, to more Islam, not less.  Which means, perforce, less freedom and respect for others in society. 

And now, just the other day (Turkish American CNN columnist: Kemalist secularism is dead), we see signs that the Rasputin of Islam -- never quite dead in Turkey -- is coming back to life to resume its throttle on humanity there; aided and abetted in no small measure, naturally, by the Muslims who are the agents of their own eternal sadomasochism.

Not to mention this recent story:

Thousands of devout Muslims prayed outside Turkey's historic Hagia Sophia museum on Saturday to protest a 1934 law that bars religious services at the former church and mosque.

Actually, to clarify what that mainstream news story implies is some kind of equivalency:  the Hagia Sophia had been a Christian church -- one of the greatest in history -- for centuries, before the Mohammedans brutally conquered Byzantium and its prize jewel, the Paris of the Middle Ages, Constantinople, transforming in its baseline tribalistic triumphalism the city's central church into a mosque.  Even after the "secular" revolution of the Kemalists, although the military dictatorship of modern Turkey did render the church an inert museum, it also pointedly has never restored it to its rightful owners, the Christians of Turkey.

Worshippers [i.e., Turkish Muslims] shouted, "Break the chains, let Hagia Sophia Mosque open," and "God is great" before kneeling in prayer as tourists looked on.

Yeah, modern Turkey sounds so "secular"...!
 
Further Reading:

The Conquest of Constantinople: A Jihad Planned in Prayer for Centuries

April & May: isn't this the season for bluebells and marisols...?

There's been a curious absence of both this spring at Jihad Watch, however. And, typically, nary a peep from Robert Spencer about either.

Actually, there was one tiny peep, ensconced within a comments section of an article utterly unrelated to the person in question -- Marisol, and her absence. We refer to the seemingly indefatigable busy bee who for a long while as editor and poster of articles along with Spencer at Jihad Watch seemed to be the one posting every third or so entry there -- adding, in her own style, her own salt and pepper of editorial commentary; like Spencer's, wry and acerbic, but with an indefinable twist that distinguished hers from his. It got to a point in 2011 when, as I began scanning a Jihad Watch article and reading the sparsely interlaced commentary introducing and/or interspersing its content, that I could tell, just from the style, whether it was a Robert entry or a Marisol entry -- and my guesses invariably turned out to be correct.

Spencer only piped up with his peep, apparently, because two or three readers, in the comments section to some article about a Muslim getting sentenced in Virginia, began to voice their wonderment and concern about Marisol's absence.  At that point it was approximately April 13; and Marisol's last official entry before that was on March 26.  In that comments thread, on April 14, Spencer responded to these faint queries with:

Friends:

After six years of extraordinary work here, Marisol decided it was time to move on. She asked me to make no public announcement, and I very reluctantly complied, although I am going against her wishes by posting this comment. Her consistently excellent work added more to this site than I can properly encompass in words. She is very much missed.

It seems odd that after six years of working hard on Jihad Watch, Marisol would not wish to pen at least a small farewell to all her fans.  Of course, if I saw a statement directly from Marisol indicating that it was for "personal reasons", I would immediately leave it at that.  But absent that, I have to wonder if perhaps she was not being remunerated sufficiently for her tireless efforts at Jihad Watch (if she was being paid at all); given that, apparently, she had a day job in addition, and a family to be with. Or did she come to have ideological, or methodological, or personal issues with Spencer and/or some of his close associates, that reached a point where she felt she could no longer stay?  Such non-personal reasons are the business of all of us who have a concern for the problem of Islam, and for the optimum quality and efficiency of any part of the Anti-Islam Movement. (And, somehow, something tells me Spencer did not sack her because of her penchant for unfairly banning good commenters who actually are on the side of the good guys.  But that's another story...)

Has Spencer ever had a normal parting with anyone?  I can't think of one.  Hugh Fitzgerald's was similarly fishy.  Oh well, I guess we peons of the hoi ochloi will never know what goes on in the plushly carpeted back halls of the Gentlemen's (and Ladies') Club of the Anti-Jihad Movement.

By bluebell, now, I mean that blue-state ex-Leftist non-Leftist Occupy Movement supporter Eric Allen Bell, who for a while there was the New Kid on the Block at Jihad Watch.  Spencer introduced him as a sort of ex-Leftist who had "seen the light" and who had the distinction (and honor) of having been kicked out of that rabidly radical Leftist forum Daily Kos for daring to do the unthinkable -- to actually criticize Islam.  Bell began occupying the pages of Jihad Watch quite visibly -- both in formal posts and video debates showcased as part of the Internet radio show of Jamie Glazov (recently christened with the overly cute name "The Glazov Gang"), as well as quite volubly at times in comments threads at Jihad Watch.  For more than you want to know about Bell, see my previous essay Bell's curve flatlined (in which, at the end, I link to two further essays on him).

Coincidentally enough, Bell's last post was also on March 26.  Hm, is this mere coincidence?  Anyway, if the reader combs through the 71 comments there, he will get the distinct impression that Jihad Watchers had, by that time, had it with Bell, and weren't buying whatever he was selling -- viz., his epiphany about how bad Islam is seemed, increasingly, to have cracks and holes behind the front stage of his medicine show.  Is this why the fields of Jihad Watch have not had any bluebells since the end of March, throughout the month of April, and into May now?  Why hasn't Spencer made mention of this mysterious disappearance of Eric Allen Bell?  Perhaps someone should alert the authorities?  A missing person (or missing blogger) case?  While I say good riddance to that most unsonorous Bell, I'd still like to know why he's gone, after Spencer touted him as nearly the next best thing to sliced bologna.

Interludes

Hugh Fitzgerald had a great idea many moons ago on Jihad Watch, to post links to YouTube audio selections (many of which had video), usually harking back -- as was Hugh's wont -- to the music of yesteryear (not only the Big Band era of the 40s, but on back through the early 20th century clear back in a couple of cases to the 1890s).

I cannot articulate better than Hugh himself the reason for these "Interludes" of his (which, by the way, he continues unabated in his own nook of the woods since he left Jihad Watch) -- only to say that its gist is to offer not only a respite from the grotesqueries of Mohammedans and their Mohammedanism, but also a reminder of the depth and breadth of the superiority of the West, glimpsed or tasted in glimmers or morsels of various musical and cinematic examples.

In this spirit, then, I offer up my own today:

The great Tom Jobim doing a duet with the charming Brazilian singer Elis Regina, singing his ingeniously poetic composition Águas de Março ("Waters of March").

(English translation of the lyrics.)

Postscript:

And yes -- in case any reader gets a bright idea: Brazilian music is part of the West -- since the West colonized the rest of the world and endowed it with as much of the virtues of the Graeco-Roman Judaeo-Christian principles as could be sustained by the Other, and as much as could be upheld by ourselves; even as the Other in various ways enriched our world (not the least of which may be felt as a tickle in the trickle-up effect of the waters of March running from South to North).  

At any rate, there are two Souths -- the sinister South of Boumedienne's Islamic supremacism (scroll down to "1974" in that link, if you please), and the non-Muslim South whose peoples and cultures, it is to be hoped, may some day find in the West a clearer-eyed succorer and champion for the cruel oppression they have suffered -- and continue to suffer -- under the imperialistic fanaticism of Mohammedans.

New terms for political science

Introduction

Terms for the political demographics of the West often revolve around the triumvirate  Leftist, Centrist and Conservative (or more colloquially, "Left, Right and Center").

To this list may, of course, be added such intensifiers as "hard-core" or "radical" (for Leftist) -- in order to highlight their increasing distance from a putative Center and to characterize the directionality of that distance -- along with "far-" or "ultra-" for the Right (itself perhaps already an intensifier of the supposedly staid Conservative), along with the curiously perpendicular phenomenon of terms groping for a way to denote, and tar, the false Conservative ("neo-con" and "RINO" come quickly to mind).  For Centrist, one rarely hears any qualifiers: imagine a "radical Centrist"!  The point of the term, of course, is that it reflects an avoidance of such partisan permutations of the political process.

The Comfortably Apolitical

Today, we wish to supplement this formula with a fourth term to be added to the common triad of Left-Right-Center:

Comfortably Apolitical.

This would be a "new type" insofar as heretofore it has not, to my knowledge, been inducted into the terminology of political science; though of course, it reflects a kind of person who has likely been around as long as there have been societies.

This type reflects the paradoxical greatness of the West, for it is a peculiarly modern Western phenomenon.  This is not to say that one cannot find in Third World societies individuals who seem to exemplify it; however, to the extent that in such societies the individual remains to a sufficiently higher degree enmeshed within the family, the clan and the tribe -- which are in such societies cultural phenomena themselves enmeshed within, or dominating, sociopolitical existence -- such people rarely if ever attain the blithely insouciant indifference and individualistic freedom which their Western counterparts enjoy so commonly and relatively easily (unless they immigrate to the West and cut their familial ties; and even then, they may never quite rid their psyches of being culturally haunted).  Nor are their numbers anywhere as high and widespread as they are throughout the West.

Thus, the paradoxical greatness of the modern West has developed a society sufficiently successful, prosperous and orderly as to accommodate, and even encourage, the profusion of the lifestyle of those who blithely don't care about politics and just want to get on with enjoying their lives and doing their necessary pragmatic activities of daily living without bothering to think macrocosmically -- whether politically, religiously or philosophically -- much at all. 

Of course, various forms of mass popular entertainment help enormously in this regard, in keeping the attention of such individuals distracted from deeper and broader questions and obligations.  But, on the other hand, they are not to be so glibly slighted or mocked, as though they were clearly and automatically inferior to those others more politically educated, who lead lives more directly responsible for, and responsive to, various sociopolitical concerns, whether local, domestic, or international -- or perhaps in varying degrees, all three.

Nor are we implying that this type is exclusive to modernity.  No doubt there were plenty of comfortably apolitical individuals lounging around during the Middle Ages (not to mention the Ancient World, and on back to Ages of Bronze, Iron and Gold).  The point is that the modern West has, by degree, been the most conducive to their formation, to the general respect accorded them to lead their lives as they please without hassle, and has in turn been affected most by their presence and integration into the general society, in the negative sense (not "negative" necessarily in a bad way) that their lack of participation in politics, and their symbiotic parasitism upon the system, has real effects on ongoing political issues, decisions and movements over time.

Sociopolitical

I have often used this term, and I certainly didn't invent it.  But I do have certain uses for it that may be distinct from what may be normally assumed. 

The first thing someone may ask is: "Why not just say 'political'...?"  The reason is that in certain contexts, I want to broaden the discussion to include what may be termed the "cultural" dimension of human existence.  While in one sense, the term political should, properly, already include the social and the cultural dimensions, it may easily lend itself to a truncated sense in the mind of my reader, and so my use of sociopolitical is meant to gently nudge him or her as a reminder of the broad scope my discussion is reflecting.

Another redundancy may be detected here as well:  why distinguish between social and cultural...?  This would be as good a time as any to palpate the subtle distinctions, and relations, among the three terms -- social, cultural and political.

Social denotes an organization of people which more often than not includes multiple cultures and subcultures.  The organization may be loose, or more consciously concerted, depending on various factors; but the norm is for the latter.

The specifics of the organization of society -- its structure, content and history -- insofar as it begins to convolve laws, are what we refer to as political (and thus, were we to deepen the details of this analysis, we would introduce yet another factor, the legal dimension).  Meanwhile, cultural may be loosely speaking synonymous with social, except that social could be said to be the cultural in its political dimension.  Thus any one of these three terms remains a somewhat abstract concept when treated alone, since all peoples are simultaneously and inescapable living existence in an interplay of all three modes of cultural, social, and political.  There is always a tension among these three vectors in any given society, and variation over time.  Islam perhaps reflects an ideal of the totalitarian fusion of all three more than any other society in history.

The Comfortably Irreligious

There have been times in history when a culture predominated, and in effect dictated how the society was formed and organized.  As the modern world has progressed (the modern world being chiefly a Western phenomenon, in turn superimposed upon the rest of the world in varying degrees), the trend has been toward society containing multiple cultures, and a unifying political organization keeping the society more or less coherent -- chiefly with the development of the nation-state beginning in the 17th century and increasing with each passing century.  This increasing coherence, in turn, has been dovetailed with an increasing cultivation of neutrality with respect to multiple cultures (and multiple religions, for religion is a cultural phenomenon).

Since indeed an important part of culture historically has been religion, the modern evolution of politics has seen the development and strengthening of a separation of religion and state, insofar as any single religion may be seen to dominate the organization of any given society. Since the human field of multiple societies has always contained multiple cultures and multiple religions, the modern West came to the conclusion that no single religion should dominate, for that would be unfair to the competing religions which co-exist.  This principle has been expanded more recently to include innumerable people who are either lax in their religion, or who have fallen away from its practice to one degree or another.  These would include the hard-core atheist on one end of the spectrum, to what may be termed, on the other end, the Comfortably Irreligious -- about whose formation and growth observations may be made similar to those we made above about its cousin, the Comfortably Apolitical. 

This category may include a whole motley aggregation of agnostics, atheists lite, lapsed Catholics, lapsed Christians in general, and those sorta-kinda Christians who may go to church twice a year (on Easter and Christmas, plus a wedding and/or funeral or two in between) -- all of whom share roughly the same attitude about religion: more or less pleasantly thoughtless indifference, unless cornered by an inquisitive pollster or neighbor or friend rudely demanding answers about "religion" and "what they believe" -- at which point the indifference may acquire some degree of annoyance and then avoidance, since the whole point of being Comfortably Irreligious is to remain as comfortable in their comfort zone as feasible, avoiding talking or thinking too much about the issue in their daily life.  (To avoid the threat of discomfort to their comfort zone, when pressed such a person might just blurt out responses that may sound superficially religious, agnostic or atheistic (depending on the stance of the questioner) -- just to get the inquisitors off their back.)  A subcategory in this regard worth noting is the "I'm spiritual I'm not religious" person who is comfortably indifferent to religion, but who may well un-self-reflectively (because of historical illiteracy and modern prejudices against religion) pursue one or another spiritual path calculated to appease a mildly gnawing existential need in the pit of his otherwise unexamined psyche.  (Needless to say -- or, alas, perhaps there is need to say -- the very specious distinction of spiritual and religious is itself a red flag signalling an illiteracy about the history of religion & philosophy.)

Laws

Finally, as we hinted above, a word may be said about laws.  The legal dimension of existence is the nuts and bolts, so to speak, or the very nerves and muscles of a society's organization (which, as we noted, is its political dimension).  A society cannot be organized without laws. And the sphere of laws, meanwhile, may be seen to extend from the physical -- their physical enforcement which includes physical punishment of those who break or resist them -- to the metaphysical: their moral underpinnings, which reach back in history into the realms of philosophy and theology.  

Thus, there is some complex tissue of contiguity between society, through its political organization structured by laws which themselves derive much of their noetic substance from philosophy and theology and not merely -- pace the materialist atheists -- from inanimate and animate matter (electricity and chemicals in human brains).  This unavoidable contiguity sets up a tension between the concerns of modern secularism, by which a separation of religion and state has become deemed to be an indispensable feature of optimal order and fairness among humans, and the claims of the religious, who rightfully point out the historical provenance of all human laws in various religions, even if some of those same religious people may seem oblivious to the problem of the multiplicity of concrete expressions of that provenance in the field of multiple cultures and religions -- a problem that has been, not without flaws (for nothing in this life is perfect), worked out through the paradigm of the "neutral umbrella" of modern secularism.

In the modern West, this latter problem has dwindled to a relatively mature (if sometimes annoying) field of discussions between individuals or groups with religious concerns, on the one hand, and those who reflect and/or represent the dominant secularism of the age, whose own values are massively respected in laws (and massively reflected in popular culture).  In the Muslim world, however -- which, increasingly, is interpenetrating into the Western world through immigration and aggressive (as well as slyly clever) Islamopologetics, and through the West's PC MC "respect" for Islam -- this latter problem has never been adequately worked out.  In fact, the worldwide trend among Muslims seems to be toward a revival of a particularly and substantively Islamic resistance to the modus vivendi achieved in this regard by the modern West.  

This modus vivendi, by institutionalizing a neutral umbrella which accommodates various differing cultures -- thus respecting their difference but not tolerating among any one of them any supremacist agenda they may harbor in terms of forcing their meaning of life upon others through laws or sedition -- has done more than any other time in history to accommodate the growing, amorphously abounding numbers of the Comfortably Irreligious and make them feel comfortable in society, rather than ill at ease (or worse), as they would under a more theocratic shadow. (Indeed, this modern secularist accommodation in terms of pop culture (movies, tv, celebrities, light journalism (think NPR podcasts and the like), music, and various vulgarized middle- and high-brow arbiters of the Arts) has become so rich and broad and massive, it is no longer the Comfortably Irreligious who feel ill at ease being themselves, but rather those who choose to be more unapologetically religious, embarrassed to admit that, for example, they may go skulking off to Branson, Missouri just to experience some wholesome Christian-friendly entertainment amid the seas-to-shining-seas of godless pop culture all around them, promoted out in the spanking sunshine of American, and Western, culture.)

Insofar as the Islamic revival resists joining the rest of humanity on its ongoing adventure of modernity, we have not so much a "clash of civilizations" as -- as George Will aptly pointed out years ago -- a clash of epochs.  And, for all the flaws and ills of Modern (Western) Progress, the answer to its defects is not the application of some Regress, according to the Fall of the Arabic Spring under Islamic Savings Time setting the clock back a millennium to a Winter of a Dark Ages all over again.

Further Reading:

A deeper analysis of the sociopolitics of the modern West

Secularism: The Neutral Umbrella

Those politically correct 1940s and 1950s!

A few months ago, thanks to the blogger Logan's Warning, I discovered information that fairly clearly indicates that even Eisenhower was PC MC about Islam (see Proto-PC MC: Those Conservative 1950s!).

In that article, I reported how on June 28, 1957, on the occasion of the opening of a new "Islamic Center", President Eisenhower

...praised the Islamic world’s “traditions of learning and rich culture” which have “for centuries contributed to the building of civilization.”

And if the reader reads the full article he will find additional affirmations equally, it not more nauseating, from Eisenhower.

It is apropos here to mention an important article which Diana West published on her blog almost three years ago -- Nation-Building in Afghanistan: It Didn't Work the First Time.

I hereby quote copiously from what West wrote in that article (the bold emphases are hers):

The United States of America has already tried improving Afghan safety and quality of life, and on a colossal scale, and it just didn't stick. And back then, between 1946 and 1979, there was no Taliban "insurgency" complicating the social work of nation-building.

This decades-long episode of US-Afghan history has been erased from our national consciousness, pricked only by the odd "remember when" news report. Such national memory loss is probably due to the fact that these US efforts to improve Afghanistan -- centered in Helmand Province, by the way, the Taliban-spawning, opium-growing region into which 4,000 US Marines "surged" this summer -- have themselves been erased from Afghanistan. Of course, for nation-building utopians such as McChrystal -- those from Right to Left who see different peoples and different cultures as interchangeable markers on a games board -- reality never tempers the fanaticism.

Back in 2002, Nick Cullather, a history professor at Indiana University, excavated our long-forgotten but long-sustained presence in "New York in Afghanistan," which was organized under the rubric of "the Helmand Valley Authority." The centerpiece of the massive project was an ill-conceived dam project-plus designed by none other than Morrison Knudsen, builder of Hoover Dam, Cape Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge. Cullather writes:

In late September 2001, while looking for lecture material related to the war that had just begun, I came across references to the Helmand project. It initially appeared to resemble rural development schemes I was studying in Southeast Asia, but closer examination revealed the project’s unusual scale and longevity... It came under American supervision in 1946 and continued until the departure of the last reclamation expert in 1979, outlasting the theories and rationales on which it was based. It was lavishly funded by U.S. foreign aid, multilateral loans, and the Afghan government, and it was the opposite of piecemeal. It was an “integrated” development scheme, with education, industry, agriculture, medicine, and marketing under a single controlling authority.

Money quote:

Nation-building did not fail in Afghanistan for want of money, time, or imagination. In the Helmand Valley, the engines and dreams of modernization had run their full course, spooling out across the desert until they hit limits of physics, culture, and history.
...

U.S. officials described it as “a major social engineering project,” responsible for river development but also for education, housing, health care, roads, communications, agricultural research and extension, and industrial development in the valley. The US ambassador in 1962 noted that if successful, HAVA would boost Kabul’s “earnings of foreign exchange and, if properly devised, could foster the growth of a strata of small holders which would give the country more stability.”

This billiard-ball alignment of capital accumulation, class formation, and political evolution was a core proposition of the social science approach to modernization that was just making the leap from university think tanks to centers of policymaking...

Development, economists Walt W. Rostow and Max Millikan of MIT assured the CIA in 1954, could create “an environment in which societies which directly or indirectly menace ours will not evolve.”

___________________

Yeah, right.

Surprise me for a change

Introduction:

I haven't checked the Jihadica website in about a year, and it's always a treat to see it evolving predictably (i.e., not really evolving at all) along its self-imposed paradox of a vector which combines a sincerely concerted and talented attention to real details about "Islamist extremism" around the world, with an axiomatic prejudice rendering impermissible certain interpretations of those details -- to wit, the metastasizing data of the problem of Islam around the world which that attention otherwise notices quite clearly, and studies quite diligently.

Before I get to what I found there recently, the reader might wish a little background on what the Jihadica project entails.

In an essay I wrote here two years ago, Another particular mechanism of the PC MC template, I described the Jihadica project thusly:

The folks at Jihadica focus their study of rebel militant violence on Muslim groups. A curious tension is generated by such analysis, a tension between two poles:

1) a prejudicial axiom guiding the analysis that resists unifying all the complex disparate data of various jihad groups under the umbrella of their common motivator, goal and blueprint: Islam

and

2) a genuinely and intelligently pursued scientific analysis that does not ignore or suppress the real data of these various jihad groups.

The more that the folks at Jihadica engage in their analytical project (#2), the more they amass a mountain of dots that positively scream for connection; but their eternal loyalty to the prejudicial axiom (#1) forces them to refrain from the one most rational way of connecting all those dots: Islam.

In an earlier essay which I wrote in 2009 -- Jihadica: pulullating mosquitoes, the swamp, the camel, and no cigar -- I went into somewhat more depth examining this fundamental tension at the heart of the Jihadica project:

Jihadica is an amazing website. Its contributors, from what I can gather, seem to be remarkably intelligent and learned analysts who can read (and understand) one or more of various relevant languages in the sphere of terrorism analysis—including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and probably several others.

They probably also work for various think tanks and/or government agencies, and Jihadica represents a kind of moonlighting venue for their work, as well as perhaps a useful storehouse for the fruits of their labors possibly even pragmatically related to their “day jobs”.

And yet, for all their amazing work, one gets a sense, after spending some time reading through some of their archives, of something rather odd, and monumentally misplaced about their whole enterprise...

However, because they have their “extremism detector” set on high and are apparently willing to notice a massive and globally widespread array of data indicating such “extremism”, they themselves put a paradoxical strain on their guiding axiom....

The tensional juxtaposition of Jihadica’s guiding axiom with the sheer quantity and quality of data increasingly conflicting with that axiom leads its theoreticians to resemble madly industrious taxonomists trying to catalogue and organize an explosion of data dizzyingly complex and exponential in its mutations, pullulations, variety, causes, effects and dispersal. A considerable relief of their exhausting industry could be gained by simply rejecting their guiding axiom—namely, that Islam itself is not the source of all this massively myriad data they are studying.

Their taxonomy thus acquires the burden of a great deal of needless protean complexity by their implicit insistence that Islam itself is not the problem, and that the problem is really “extremist perversions” of Islam reflecting implausibly explicable and seemingly randomly generated epidemics of “radicalization” of otherwise ordinary—and therefore of course heretofore harmless—Muslims.

Discussion:

So what did I find about a week ago when I decided to check up on Jihadica after a year?

Same old same old -- though they have got a new look, vaguely resembling a post-modern artist's impression of the rough, battle-scarred underside of a submarine or perhaps a metal military bunker; perhaps to add a bit of gritty no-nonsense "on-the-field" panache to their otherwise quasi-academic and intellectual endeavor.

At any rate, in what could have been an interesting essay examining the "scope" of the problem of Islamic terrorism ("Countering Violent Extremism, Pt. 2: Scope"), the writer, Will McCants, pretty much from the get-go makes a wrong move.

If the folks at Jihadica just stuck to their day job -- dutifully collecting and cataloguing the bewilderingly complex and ever-metastasizing taxonomic data generated by Muslim "extremists" around the world -- that would be one thing. But when they insist on supplementing that important but perhaps menial task with interpretation and analysis of what that data means, they invariably start edging out onto thin ice. This happens because, as I noted above, they tend to delimit their attempts at interepretation and analysis by an artificial stricture they impose upon themselves -- namely, the stricture that assumes, without a shred of evidence proferred to support it, that mainstream normative Islam cannot be the substantive direct source of the data about worldwide terrorism which they are meticulously amassing, organizing, interpreting and analyzing.

So in the article I mentioned above, the Jihadica analyst McCants is examining the phenomenon of the "scope" of Islamic "radicalism" and in doing so, within his first paragraph, slips on the thin ice of his paradigm. All of us concerned about terrorism wonder about its "scope" -- which, in a nutshell, means:

How many Muslims around the world are actually enabling such terrorism, and what kinds of enablement are we talking about, and how can we distinguish these aiders and abetters of terrorism from the supposedly harmless Muslims we assume must exist in large numbers (else we would be forced to face the horrible conclusion that over one billion Muslims are our deadly enemy)?

Needless to say, McCants doesn't approach the problem this way; for that would be to think outside the box (in which, alas, he is firmly and comfortably ensconced). He writes:

In my previous post, I proposed a minimal definition of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) as reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means. I also suggested that the spectrum of support ranges from those who are vulnerable to becoming supporters to those who are engaged in criminal activity. There are pros and cons associated with intervening in each group. The three groups at the far right of the spectrum are the easiest to identify because they have either consistently voiced their support for a terrorist organization or taken action on its behalf. Although they are extremely difficult to dissuade, focusing on them risks less blow back from the broader communities of which they are a part. There is also less risk of straying into the policing of thought crimes. Conversely, the two other groups, “vulnerable” and “radicalizing,” are theoretically easier to dissuade than the others but they are far, far harder to identify. Because they are harder to identify, focusing on them risks alienating the broader communities of which they are a part and can easily stray into the policing of thought crimes.

I lodged a comment on their website (which no one bothered to reply to, of course), responding to this attempt by McCants to deal with the problematic reality of Islamic terrorism through his curiously roundabout and surreal methodology dictated by the axioms under which everyone at Jihadica, apparently, labors. I hereby polish up my comment to make my point at this juncture:

Concerning the two layers of the onion labeled “vulnerable” and “radicalizing,” McCants writes that "they are theoretically easier to dissuade than the others but they are far, far harder to identify. Because they are harder to identify, focusing on them risks alienating the broader communities of which they are a part".

This means that we have yet another group to add to the Escher-like spiral of the problem of "Islamism" (that is, the problem artificially generated by avoiding the problem of Islam proper): namely, that apparently broader and apparently more innocent category of the all too easily alienated Muslims who resent the measures we have to take to protect our societies from their deadly fanatical brothers and sisters.

The harmlessness of this broader category is, of course, apodictically assumed by McCants without a shred of proof. After all, they must be harmless; for they number too many. The prospect that these millions and millions may be actually enabling the extremism at the heart of Islam that radiates out into the manifestations which Jihadica analysts notice on their delimited radar screens is, quite simply, unthinkable. So it is not thought. And in fact all thought is concentrated, under the Jihadica paradigm (which is just a more intense and professional version of the general PC MC that continues to addle the hearts and minds of most Westerners today) upon finding elaborate and complex ways to avoid thinking it.

And yet, although assumed to be harmless, McCants can't help but factor them in as a relevant factor in the problem of the pullulation of Islamic (sorry, "Islamist") extremism around the world. That's the unremarkable, and incessantly repetitive, paradox at the heart of the Jihadica project. reflecting the incoherently nougaty center of PC MC in general on this issue. For, being good taxonomists, as dutiful and otherwise talented students of Islamic (sorry, "Islamist") extremism, they can't help noticing the minions of dots of data that keep multiplying in dizzyingly copious ways like perpetually exploding kaleidoscopes under their lens. They notice them indeed, and they meticulously catalogue them. Then, unfortunately, they start to think about them and analyze them, under the rules of their impaired and bankrupt paradigm.

Thus, the "broader communities of which they [the "extremists" and the "potentially radicalizable" Muslims] are a part" reflects a vast population of Muslims that constitutes a broadening of the "scope" of the problem which McCants can't help but notice.

He notices, but is too afraid to venture out onto this broad terrain where, deep down, he knows its ground is riddled with holes from which will pop the multitudes of moles which our Western governments will continue to have to whack in order to keep just barely one step ahead of another 911 -- or another several 911s. McCants is timid to venture out because, deep down, he knows that it will lead him to the unthinkable conclusion: Islam itself is the problem, and thus also, as it inexorably follows, are all Muslims who support and enable Islam. I.e., McCants has glimpsed the broader horror: hundreds of millions of Muslims spread out in a diaspora all over the world in nearly every country on Earth, may be seriously part of the problem of which terrorism is the fiery flare-up popping up in various places all over the world.

So McCants shrinks back and redoubles the Escher-like complexity of the Jihadica methodology whose very raison d’être is to protect Islam, and most Muslims, from culpability.

P.S.:

An example of the subtle paradigm under which these Jihadicisits seem to be working:

In his essay on Zarqawi, "A Portrait of the Terrorist as a Young Man," another Jihadica analyst, Joas Wagemakers (praised, incidentally, by McCants in the latest essay there, "Joas' Oeuvre"), mentions two of Zarqawi's ideological idols, al-Qayyim and Ibn Taymiyya of the 13th-14th centuries, and writes this:

Although Ibn al-Qayyim is generally a favourite among radical Muslims for his uncompromising and strict views on various issues – like his teacher Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) – the fact that he was persecuted and imprisoned because of his ideas may also have inspired al-Zarqawi.

The way Joas phrases this he makes it sound as though Taymiyya's and Qayyim's ideological rivals -- scholars of the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria at the time (early 14th century AD) -- were by apparent implication not themselves "radical extremists" and were rather persecuting Taymiyya and Qayyim for being "radical extremism". Joas gives no proof of this insinuation; it is subtly and subliminally indicated by the closely related assumptions that

1) mainstream Islam cannot possibly be intrinsically extremist itself, and that

2) any Muslims or Muslim group who persecute ostenible "extremists" (such as Taymiyya and Qayyim) must ipso facto by logical contrast, be not "extremists" themselves -- a logical conclusion that does not necessarily follow and for which proof would have to be adduced to be persuasive.

It is, in fact, a logical conclusion that is spasmodically generated when one assumes as a given the PC MC paradigm about Islam -- that Islam itself is not extremist, and that anything we deem extremist which happens to be seen to be practiced by Muslims and defended by them as Islamic, cannot in fact be Islamic, but must be non-Islamic extremism.

Who is to say that Taymiyya and Qayyim's Mamluk punishers were not themselves extremists? It's not as if we do not see every day violent clashes among different Muslim extremists the world over. And who is to say that either the Mamluk scholars, or Taymiyya and Qayyim themselves, were not simply extrapolating normative mainstream baseline Islam?

Has anyone at Jihadica actually laid out in thorough detail -- with corroborating evidence from all the relevant texts in the Koran (sorry, refuse to spell it correctly), Sunna and Tafsirs -- all the ways in which Islam differs from "extremist Islam"?

If they haven't yet done this, they are making rather sweeping assumptions as they continue assiduously their taxonomic project that ignores the Tree for the Forest as it pursues the ever-elusive species of butterfly (Latin name, the Muslimica Extremica Non-Islamica), and leaving the ground for our never-ending all-too deadly game of Whack-a-Mole.

But I suspect that Joas and his colleagues and agreeing readers at Jihadica are so deeply inculcated with their paradigm -- to wit, that mainstream baseline Islam is not extremist and that "extremism" is rather, and only, a "twisting" or "hijacking" of it -- they neither notice such insinuations when they read them nor when they themselves casually regurgitate them by dashing them off as parts of their analyses of the problem of "radical extremist Islamism" as opposed to the problem of Islam proper.

Thus we (i.e., the folks at Jihadica and by extension all PC MC Westerners) are telling the Muslims whom we label extremists what Islam is, and what the, by definition, un-Islamic extremism is which they are practicing. Indeed we are telling Muslims what Islam is, and isn’t. And, of course, under certain propagandistically opportune circumstances, many Muslims (including many Muslim “extremists”) are only too happy to let us continue this enterprise — as long as it leaves Islam qua Islam smelling like a rose.

Islamic conferences

— members of a Methodist conference, posing for a photo

What goes on at various Islamic conferences around the world?

Not, apparently, what one would expect at, say, a conference of Methodist ministers and laity (e.g., take a look at this document of the proceedings a 2011 Methodist conference in Louisiana: mostly, the activities detailed in unremarkably thorough fashion are mind-numbingly banal and boring minutiae of procedural bureaucracy; and otherwise involve efforts to help the poor through charity and outreach). 
At Islamic conferences, on the other hand, there are apparently more important things to discuss -- such as the fine points of who is the Enemy and in what contexts and under what textual pretexts is it licit to fight and kill the Enemy.

As documented at Memri.org, (which regularly translates from Arabic into English key documents out of the Muslim world), Shaikh Qaradawi presided over a discussion at a major conference among Islamic clerics (held in 2003 in Stockholm, Sweden, of all places -- Allah help us) in which he supported the following statement articulating the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the context of the justification for terror attacks: 

It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb is not protected. Because they fight against and are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled the protection of [their] blood and [their] property...

As we know (or should know by now), "Dar Al-Harb" is the entire non-Muslim world; and "the people of Dar Al-Harb" are all non-Muslims of the world.

I.e., the lives and property of all non-Muslims are licit for Muslims to take -- on the vague pretext that we "fight against" and/or "are hostile towards" them.

Notice too that Qaradawi doesn't say "If they fight against Muslims..." but rather he says "Because they fight against Muslims...". I.e., it's already assumed that the natural state of non-Muslims is to be fighting against Muslims and/or to be hostile towards them. 

This is a clear legitimization of terrorism by Muslims against any Unbelievers anywhere in the world where it is perceived by Muslims that those Unbelievers are "fighting against" and/or "are hostile towards" Muslims -- couched of course by Qaradawi in phraseology providing sophistical wiggle room for loopholes by which he could try to argue that he does not support terrorism against "innocent" people; etc.

Conclusion:

Take a look at the tafsir (= exegesis) of Ibn Kathir, one of the most respected and authoritative and mainstream of all Koran commentators, and read what he has to say about Koran verses 5:32-33, where he argues that the unbelief of Unbelievers is tantamount, if not equivalent, to "waging war" against Muslims.

I.e., according to this Islamic conference at which Qaradawi presided, following the mainstream logic of Islamic tradition as represented, for example, by Ibn Kathir, our very existence as Unbelievers -- as people who do not submit to Islam -- is itself, ipso facto a casus belli for Muslims to wage "defensive" war against our offensive nature as non-Muslims. For, as non-Muslims, we dare to continue to live our lives without Allah's guidance, and to organize our societies by setting up polities and laws that ignore the laws as set out by Allah in the Koran and by His Last Prophet, Mohammed, as documented in the Sunna -- and as clarified by Islamic scholars throughout the ages, from Ibn Kathir in the 14th century, to Shaikh Qaradawi in the 21st century.

Operation: You Gotta Be Kidding

A recent report on Jihad Watch, about some Iranian book making the claim that Leonardo Da Vinci had taken the Shahada (and had therefore become a Muslim), but that this historical bombshell had been suppressed by the West for centuries, had me spill my coffee and fall off the ceiling.

That takes more chutzpah and horseshit than even Dan Brown is capable of.

Then it hit me: how to explain one of history's persistent mysteries:

Rumor has it that Da Vinci was having a difficult time getting just the right facial expression from his subject, and she had several sessions in his art studio with him over several days during which he continued to feel uninspired by the Muse; until one day, almost by chance in passing a bit of badinage with her, he happened to mention on a facetious lark:

"Signorina, penso che si convertono all'Islam e di viaggio per Istanbul dove vivrò tra i turchi..."
("Miss, I think I shall convert to Islam and travel to Istanbul, where I shall live among the Turks...")

-- at which point Mona could not help but unsuccessfully stifle a smirk.

"Perfettissima! Non muovere nemmeno un muscolo...!"
("Absolutely perfect! Don't move even a muscle!")

Understanding Islam anthropologically

Someone recently noted in a Jihad Watch comments section a common phenomenon among Muslims:

Islam's inability to withstand criticism is damning and telling in the extreme.

That person then rhetorically asked

What is Islam afraid of?

The Western mind will never fully grasp the pathology of the Muslim mind, but we can certainly do better than to Occidentalize it (the sociopolitical equivalent of the anthropomorphization of God), which only tends to lead us further astray, even if it may comfort many among us who still retain residues of PC MC with the thought that, somehow, Muslims are more or less like us.

(A further tip to that commenter whose rhetorical question I quoted above would be to please try to avoid the habit of personifying Islam as though it were a human agent -- e.g. "What is Islam afraid of?" -- which only adds silly padding to insulate the questioner, and his audience, from the direct confrontation with Muslims which is the cogent point here.)

So, rather than scratch our heads and try, through psychology or common sense based on our experience, to fit the Muslim into the mold of the model of Western Man, we should pull out the theorization of our modern anthropologists. While, alas, the discipline of modern anthropology has been significantly corroded with the irrationality of PC MC as seen in the excessive neutrality and/or "respect" and even admiration for the various forms of backwardness among the primitive cultures its practitioners have been studying -- cf. that excellent study in this regard, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony -- nevertheless, there are a handful of more intelligent analysts among them (not all necessarily accepted in the proper pigeonhole of academic Anthropology) who did not tend to reduce the Other to the egophanic Western I.

First off, then, it will be helpful to note that Muslims are not recoiling from, and lashing out at, criticism of Islam on an ordinary mental level, but on the level of the pre-frontal-lobe sympathetic limbic system: the level at which the primitive polytheist shudders in the dark at the gods and demons in the shadows cast by fire in the night; the level at which he regards his totem or his fetish to be "sacred" or "taboo" and thus to be cordonned off from all "impurity".

Islam, Allah, Mohammed, the Koran (among other things) are thus in the Muslim psyche to be an inviolable circle of sacred objects to be protected from anything perceived to be negative, whether it's a physical attack or a critique or mockery, or even thoughts. Anything perceived this way is physicalized as an enemy, and the response is biochemical, pre-rational defense.

With Muslims and their Islam, we are thus not dealing with a rational mind here, but with the pre-rational mind.

Now, while other religions retain this pre-rational admiration and awe for the numinous -- see The Sacred and the Profane (Mircea Eliade), The Symbolism of Evil (Paul Ricoeur) and The Idea of the Holy (Rudolf Otto) -- they have also (par excellence, the West) long ago learned to integrate and develop noetic illumination of same, which opens up the mind and its wondrous capabilities to apply reason to pre-rational and para-rational experiences thus sublimated as "existentialism" and "mysticism".

An important by-product of reason in this regard is the evolution of mankind from being and behaving on the level of a ring of monkeys protecting their stone-&-mangoleaf shrine from Outside Attackers, to theologians and a well-educated laity (indoctrinated would be the proper, and deliciously incorrect term to use here for an intelligent religious pedagogy by which followers of a religion become relatively reasonable) who while suffering the pain of indignity at any mockery or attack on their religious symbolisms, nevertheless have learned to respond in an enlightened way -- at worst by dialing 911, at best by having pity and compassion on the mockers and praying for them.

This is why, incidentally, debates with Muslims are doomed -- unless their sole purpose is as demonstrations of exploitation of Muslim behavior by us as spectacles for the benefit of the non-Muslims among us who remain illiterate about the dangers of the fanatical and fundamentally primitive pathology of Islam. To take seriously a debate with any given Muslim would be like taking seriously a debate with a raging monkey protecting its Green Coconut God (which a Margaret Mead, Dian Fossey, or Jane Goodall would have lovingly encouraged).

The only point, and problem, of such debates, is to make sure the primate behavior of Muslims is coaxed to the surface so that the spectacle of the pathology of their sick society may have a better chance of getting through the dense skulls of our fellow Western idiots who persist in "respecting" the sick societies of non-Western culture -- with Islam being the #1 Poster Child of all Non-Western Cultures To Be Respected: if only because they are the most under the spotlight (because, of course, they keep calling attention to themselves by continuing to behead and explode).

For, perversely, according to the perverse logic of PC MC, the more the Muslims are held up for the criticism and ridicule (not to mention the condemnation) their Islam so richly and unquely among all other cultures deserves, the more our fellow Western idiots tend to resist the point of the pedagogical spectacle of such debates -- if only because such data the Muslims themselves exhibit through their words and deeds illuminated by our critiques is a force opposing the pull of the force of PC MC "respect"; and the PC MC in his increasing tensional discomfort tends to go into contortions and spasms of denial, and digs in to continue to defend the indefensible, even as the primary cause of the latter continues to metastasize all around him. 

I continue, nevertheless, to have hope (as threadbare as it seems to be getting) that enough exposure to Islam over time will have the effect of a slow stillicide to break through the irrationally thick heads of the PC MCs our our Western mainstream.

Note:

"PC MCs" include not only Leftists, but also the vast majority of Centrists, Conservatives, and the Comfortably Apolitical who abound in the modern West. Without these latter three significant proportions of the modern West's demographic, Leftists would have long ago been marginalized on this issue. And, closely related to this, the ethnicity of Muslims (however wondrously diverse it may be around the world with more colors and hues, including a couple of sticks of chalk white, than a jumbo pack of Crayola crayons) would long ago have been seen to be the irrelevant datum it is for the problems pertinent to Islam and to the seditious words and deadly deeds it generates from among too many of its followers all around the world.

The shortest sentence in the Bible.

 

The Gospel of John recounts how early in the morning while it was still dark, on the "first day of the week" (i.e., Sunday), Mary Magdalene took a walk to see the cave where the Romans had allowed the wealthy Jew Joseph of Arimathea to deposit his body; and she saw that the giant stone which the Romans had put to block the cave entrance (in order to prevent the followers of Jesus from stealing the body and then claiming that some miracle had occurred) was gone.

Mary immediately ran back to tell Simon Peter as well as the "disciple whom Jesus loved" (whom scholars assume is John himself). Peter and John went there to see for themselves. They ran there, in fact, and John in his eagerness to see, outran Peter and arrived at the mouth of the cave first. He peered in, and saw the burial linen clothes lain, but no body. He did not venture in, however, perhaps out of timidity. Peter, a little bolder, went past him and entered, and saw on closer inspection the linen clothes and the napkin for the head folded and placed apart. John followed him in, and confirmed the fact: the body of Jesus was gone.

It is at that point that the text mentions that Mary had accompanied them, and apparently had merely stood outside of the cave all this time. Peter and John at that time hied home, while Mary lingered, and wept. Soon enough, she looked into the cave, and she saw two angels sitting at places where had been lain the head and the feet of the body of Jesus.

The angels asked her why she was weeping, and she answered that "they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where to". At that moment, she turned around and saw a man behind her, but didn't realize it was Jesus himself. The man also asked her why she was weeping. Assuming the man was just some local gardener or upkeeper, Mary pleaded with him that if he had taken the body, to please tell her where he had taken it.

Then comes the shortest sentence in the Bible: one word, the most personal word, a person's given name, or what has come to be known as one's Christian name.

In response to Mary's pleading, the man she thought was just a gardener or handyman simply looked at her and said:

"Mary."

And that's all he needed to say, and she knew.

He didn't say, "It's me, Jesus! I've risen from the dead!" He merely told her, in effect, I know you by simply speaking her name -- personally, directly and familiarly.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

(Source: John 20:1-16.)

There are no seasons in the Muslim wasteland

“How can it be an Arab Spring when people are being killed every day?”

This was the recently reported rhetorical question of the Christian Patriarch of the Maronite Church in Syria.

That's Syria, where pro-Sharia Islamic supremacists are gaining a foothold.

Syria, where an Islamic cleric supporting the rebellion against Assad has issued a ruling that it is "permissible" to kill the men, women and children of the Alawite minority (a minority, this cleric adds, which all the Muslim sects "hate").

Syria, where Christians fear worse persecution from the "liberators" who wish to topple the Assad regime.

Somehow, I doubt that the Patriarch really knows the answer his rhetorical question poses, for one senses, even in his sincere dismay, a hint of the psychocultulural residues of an inveterate dhimmitude in him (e.g., when in the same article, he is reported to add: “We are with the Arab Spring but we are not with this spring of violence...”).

His rhetorical question is, thus, not ruthless enough. And that is what the wages of Islam wreaks on the minds of those it has conquered: an ultimate passivity, and an anxious hope for some form of conviviality with what is assumed, in a bleak, semi-conscious fatalism, to be an endless co-existence with Muslims.

At any rate, the answer which the Patriarch has not fully digested in all its horror we could imaginatively pen not in the words of a Thomas Edward Lawrence ("of Arabia"), but of a horribly imagined Thomas Stearns Eliot in Arab garb:

The Wasteland of Islam
by T.S. (Taslim Sarwar) "Tom" Eliot

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Jihad out of the dead land, mixing
Sharia and Shaheed, stirring
Dull skulls with spring blood.