Western Intelligence

I've been saying for years that our fixation on "Al Qaeda" restricts our peripheral vision to a much broader problem of Islamic extremism around the world -- and within our West (the latter largely because the West unprecedentedly in history only a half century ago invited in millions of Muslims and now feels they can't stop the inward flow, much less eject the millions already here).

The French Muslim assassin who recently in the name of Islam mass-murdered seven people (including chidlren in cold blood) called himself "Al Qaeda" because he admired them -- but that doesn't mean

a) he was a card-carrying member of their organization

nor

b) that "Al Qaeda" is all we have to worry about -- rather than Islam, straight no chaser.

Now, slowly, it seems that, at least in part, like a slug moving across a lawn of dew-gummy moss at the speed of a clock's hour hand or of a watched pot boiling, European intelligence is wising up to this fact:

...authorities say there's a dangerous twist: the emergence of homegrown extremists operating independent of any known networks, making them hard to track and stop.

"We have a different kind of jihadist threat emerging and it's getting stronger," Europol chief Rob Wainwright told The Associated Press in an exclusive telephone interview from The Hague. "It is much more decentralized and harder to track."

S.O.S. (either an urgent alert implying hope for help, or an acronym expressing jaded weary disgust)

French President Sarkozy is on record saying, with regard to the French Muslim assassin Muhammad Merah who, in the name of Islam, massacred innocent people including children in cold blood, that:

"The Muslim faith has nothing to do with the insane acts of this man."

Would the staunch conservative French politicians Marine Le Pen or Philippe de Villiers say anything substantially different?

Would any important politician -- Left, Right, Center, Libertarian, Independent, Peripheral, Perpendicular, or Tangential -- anywhere in the entire motherfucking West say anything substantially different?

I doubt it. I'd have to see it in black and white to believe it.

Then I'd fall off my chair in shock.

Ranking the Presidential candidates

When it comes to the Presidency of the United States of America (or the leadership of any Western country for that matter), I'm a one-issue man: Islam.

Actually, I'm a three-issue man: Islam, Islam, and Islam.

The bad news is that there exists no viably potential candidate fit to handle the metastasizing problem of Islam -- i.e., with the balls and brains to put on the table, front and center, one of the most important, and grimmest, facts of our 21st century:

"Islam is a deadly dangerous seditious ideology (which also happens to be a "religion"), and all Muslims who enable Islam are thereby enabling deadly dangerous sedition."

What he or she would then advocate doing about this, in terms of a platform and possibly policy, is another matter. But such a bracingly refreshing statement would be a damn good start.

Although we have no one anywhere in the West capable of uttering these simple, but direly important words, that doesn't mean all the viably potential candidates for the Presidency of the United States of America are uniformly worthless. As with everything in life, there are distinctions to make, and some are at least somewhat better than others. Unfortunately, the degrees among the choices are not that choice; but sometimes you just have to make do with inferior product, simply because the only alternatives at the time are that much worse.

I would rank them in the following way, with the best on top of the list:

Rick Santorum

Newt Gingrich.

That's it.

Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are simply unacceptable. They are so bad with respect to the problem of Islam, I am almost tempted to vote for Obama (as a protest vote registering my throat-throttled fury); or not vote at all.

But Santorum is hardly an ideal choice; far from it. His mind is a mess with regard to Islam. It would take a team of philosophers to unscramble his brains in this regard. Much of Santorum's convolution is the result of some politically incorrect instinct or intuition deep inside him, wrestling with the PC MC that continues to be dominant in his bloodstream and nervous system. What results are spasms of incoherence, as can be seen in his responses in the following interview:

...I use the modifier radical Islam. I don’t say that all Muslims are radicals; clearly they are not. The folks who are most harmed by radical Islam are Muslims in that region of the world who are living like, for example, in Iran. We have a radical theocracy that is in charge of Iran, and the vast majority of the Iranians, almost all of which are Muslims, are being persecuted and killed by that regime and tortured by that regime and are oppressed by that regime.

Where's that game show "wrong answer" buzzer when you need it? I could have used it a few times in Santorum's quote above. Oh wait, I just found the one I ordered from Ebay last year. Let's try it out.

I use the modifier radical Islam. [EHHH!!!] I don’t say that all Muslims are radicals; clearly [EHHH!!!] they are not. The folks who are most harmed by radical Islam are Muslims [EHHH!!!] in that region of the world who are living like, for example, in Iran. [EHHH!!!] We have a radical theocracy that is in charge of Iran, and the vast majority of the Iranians, almost all of which are Muslims, are being persecuted and killed by that regime and tortured by that regime and are oppressed by that regime. [EHHH!!!]

At least he has some vaguely mish-mashed instincts against "radical" Islam; but one dismally expects not much more from him than one got from George "Islam is a great religion of peace" Bush. A little more, perhaps, here and there, and enough just barely to tip the edge to move my elbow, when I'm in the slacks changing room of the voting booth, to pull the lever Santorumwards rather than towards another four Obaminable years -- but simply not enough for what we urgently need now.

I.e., just because he's marginally better than Obama doesn't mean he has any excuse for being impermissibly muddle-headed about the problem of Islam. If a purple trans-gendered lesbian with one leg and three nipples who was pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage but who was also clearly and appropriately anti-Islam and anti-Muslim were in the running, I would choose her, him or it over Santorum (or Gingrich, or any other conservative in existence today) in a New York micro-second.

Then we have another quote from Santorum:

"What must we do to win? We must educate, engage, evangelize and eradicate."

Huh? If you're spending the effort, time -- and money -- "educating, engaging and evangelizing" what is it exactly that you will be "eradicating"? Santorum likely does not mean that latter word in the violent (never mind the pragmatically effective) sense, but in the neo-Wilsonian sense Bush meant: We will eradicate "radical Islam" through "education", "engagement" and "evangelism". Good luck, Kimosabe. (Not to mention, that "evangelism" will have to be a volunteerist project unrelated to government funding. Meanwhile, Muslims are trying to find ways to mass-murder us.)

Santorum also has the strange notion that Shia Islam is worse than Sunni Islam, just because Shia Islam believes in an eschatological figure coming soon to wage Jihad (as though that is not a mainstream Islamic doctrine anyway). As with everything bad about Islam, there is no difference in substance between Sunnis and Shia -- only with terminology and semantics.

Gingrich is similarly sort of okay in a half-assed way that wearies me so I don't feel like examining his statements on the issue and getting more depressed and angry than I already feel. I have no doubt he's infected like every other conservative is with the neo-Wilsonian virus (I would love to be proven otherwise). My assessment is that -- with regard to the only issue that matters today -- he's slightly worse than Santorum, while still slightly better than Obama.

To end on something less abysmally depressing, let us turn our attention away from the 21st century, and look back. I recently learned about an American politician from a time long before the PC MC strain of mental bacterium became dominant and mainstream throughout the Western Body Public -- one William Eaton, the US Consul to Tunis. Here is how in 1799 he described Muslims in Tunisia from his experience there.

Considered as a nation, they are deplorably wretched, because they have no property in the soil to inspire an ambition to cultivate it. They are abject slaves to the despotism of their government, and they are humiliated by tyranny, the worst of all tyrannies; the despotism of priestcraft [i.e., Islam]. They live in more solemn fear of the frowns of a bigot [i.e., Mohammed] who has been dead and rotten above a thousand years, than of the living despot whose frown would cost them their lives…The ignorance, superstitious tradition and civil and religious tyranny, which depress the human mind here, exclude improvement of every kind…

Notice how Eaton in his last sentence states in no uncertain terms the hopelessness of any prospect for reform among the Tunisian Muslims. That should be one of the pillars of our present policy with regard to Muslims in general. But that won't happen -- among conservatives (remember Santorum's 3 E's: "education", "engagement" and "evangelism") or liberals -- until PC MC goes out of sociopolitical fashion. And that may take decades, and innumerable mass-murderous attacks by Muslims, as we timidly inch our way at a slug's pace toward rationality in this regard.

Sadly, there is not today in our time one conservative politician anywhere in the entire West who would have the brains, and the balls, to say words like Eaton's clearly and plainly. For, not only is the surrounding popular & political culture today hostile to such intelligence; more often than not the heart and mind of the conservative du jour -- however tough and no-nonsense he may think he is -- have become sufficiently deformed by PC MC such that he sincerely believes, to one degree or another, in some convoluted and attenuated bullcrap that obfuscates Eaton's clear vision, and he thus cannot see the data as Eaton saw and come to the obvious and intelligent conclusion Eaton derived from that data.

Were Santorum half the man Eaton was, he'd scrap his 3 E's and replace them with one that counts: Evacuation.

The Anti-Islam Movement: Some Thoughts in March of 2012

Most PC MC idiots in the West (which in my estimation comprises over 75% of the entire West) probably think that most (if not all) anti-Islam people look like the two gentlemen in the photo above.

The most accurate way to put our overall situation in the West is that awareness is growing and snowballing, but at a snail's pace that has no justification and for which otherwise relatively decent and intelligent people bear responsibility, because that avoidable snail's pace of progress in waking up to the problem of Islam will not only very likely result in the mass murder of possibly millions of non-Muslims in the coming century (along with the havoc of destruction of property, dislocation of people, and psychological trauma of terror) -- it will also very likely force the West to be forced to treat Muslims with more violence than would have been necessary, had we woken up sooner and taken the comparatively milder measures which waking up sooner enables.

Again, it's 1938 all over again, with even more massively deadlier consequences likely to unfold -- and what infuriates and aggrieves is that this gargantuan catastrophic international train wreck that is slowly unfolding before our eyes is preventable, if only the majority in the West -- including the majority of non-Leftists as well as the majority of ordinary people who are not "elites" -- woke up now and quickly, instead of decades from now while inching and groping along like retarded somnambulists who have no excuse not to wake up now and quickly.

After all, we few, we brave and proud in the anti-Islam movement, have woken up.

I'm no rocket scientist or genius. Just a relatively intelligent Western guy with a normal life and a normal education -- high school, a smattering of college -- and having an unremarkably normal outlook of open-minded tolerance tinged with liberalism here and there capable of laughing at the jokes of Dana Carvey or The Simpsons or 30 Rock (or even Andy Dick or Howard Stern, for God's sake), and even appreciating the devilishly devil-may-care mischief and insouciance of a Jack Nicholson.

I'd say most of the folks in the anti-Islam movement (such as it is) reflect a variety of social types from a variety of backgrounds with a variety of life experiences (including travel to other countries, often to a Muslim country or two): we are not all troglodytic redneck white trash by any means. Nor are we all, like Lawrence Auster, strangely puritanical eccentrics with their panties in a twist about (just to pick one of his many crotchets) how homosexuals are a threat equivalent to, if not worse than, Islam.

And yet we have woken up by now. Good God, it's 2012 and we're into the second decade of the 21st century for fuck sake, and Muslims all over the fucking world are (and have been for years, decades, motherfucking centuries) perpetrating horribly, grotesquely and ghoulishly acts of violence for reasons that are fanatically deranged, and also saying -- when not hatefully vociferating in mass demonstrations -- outrageously anti-liberal things.

The rest of the West among us (sadly, the majority) have no excuse. Shame on them.

From the "Whatever Happened to So-and-So" Department

Googling for something else, I stumbled on a Jihad Watch reader from long ago (last entries seem to have stopped in 2008) who seemed to demonstrate a remarkable knowledge of Islam and of the welter of various ethnicities and culture of the region that may be called the Cradle of Islamic Conquest -- basically the Mesopotamian and North African areas.

His nickname was "Berytius_Libanicus" and he claimed to be Lebanese. The comments he made to Hugh on this old Hugh Fitzgerald article on Jihad Watch demonstrate a deep knowledge of Berbers and Arabs in the context of Islam.

And this comment on another thread demonstrated a remarkably extensive knowledge of Shia Islam.

I wonder where he's been these past four years. I don't think he has remained, under a changed name (although I could be wrong), as I don't recall in the past four years any other Jihad Watch reader with his degree of knowledge in these and related areas. I hope he's not only still alive and healthy, but has also started a blog to share his knowledge; and I hope I can find it.

Nostrum Erratum

"That is all that Vatican II is really saying about Muslims: they’re monotheists, they say they belong to the religion of Abraham, and they revere Jesus, but not as the Son of God, and His Blessed Mother."

So saith Robert Spencer in a recent apologetic essay of his own faith.

Unfortunately, that's not entirely what Vatican II is saying. Robert Spencer is partially (and crucially) incorrect.

One of the two relevant promulgations from Vatican II, Lumen Gentium ("Light of the Nations"), promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1964, includes the following statement:

...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.

This doesn't say, as Spencer alleges, that Muslims "revere Jesus, but not as the Son of God" -- it simply asserts that Muslims "along with us [Catholics] adore... God..." -- and the statement further specifies God as the one "who on the last day will judge mankind". And guess Whom Catholics believe will judge Mankind on the Last Day? Yep. Jesus Christ as God. (Source)

Thus, the Catholic Church in its Vatican II Lumen Gentium promulgation is simply factually incorrect about Muslims. And Robert Spencer is incorrect in his explanation of what the Catholic Church promulgated in Vatican II.

In addition, a second promulgation from Vatican II, Nostra Aetate ("In Our Age"), promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1965, asserts that:

They [Muslims] adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth...

According to the doctrine of the Trinity, Muslims cannot adore God the Father (Creator of heaven and earth) as true God, without also adoring the Son as God. So once again, Vatican II is simply factually and logically incorrect.

And Muslims do not fall into that category of people who are "groping after" God in innocently vague ways out of ignorance of the Gospel: they directly, specifically, brazenly and knowingly reject the Son as God and reject God as Trinity. Indeed, the Koran, and Islamic theology based upon the Koran, is specifically and consciously anti-Christian (or, more accurately, anti-Judaeo-Christian). The Koran is an anti-Judaeo-Christian polemic, an anti-Judaeo-Christian screed, as much as it is a "religious text".

And not only that: Muslims add injury to insult, by translating this rejection, this polemic, this screed -- into intolerance, hatred, sociopolitical oppression, and horrible violence in various forms including mass-murder of Christians including Catholics. This is going on now as we type; and has been going on for 1400 years.

Catholics are being mass-murdered by Muslims -- in the name of their God! -- and yet these same Muslims "adore the same God" as Catholics!? WTF? (pardon my Arabic).

Conclusion:

The Catholic Church needs to convene a "Vatican III" to promulgate Nostrum Erratum (loose translation: "Our Bad").

Its first paragraph should begin solemnly with the words: "Oops--We got it grievously wrong the last time".

And they need to do it STAT (which, by the way, is a Latin word).

The Golden Fool

There's the Golden Rule -- and there's the Golden Fool.

We all know what the former is.

The latter just occurred to me the other day (though I've thought about it in other terms for a long time now):

"...more Muslims are turning to Jesus Christ as he is offered in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments (NOT as he is portrayed in the Qur'an) than at any time in history."

So wrote a Jihad Watch reader, recently, located appropriately in a comments thread to a Jihad Watch essay dedicated glowingly to giving Eric Allen Bell, someone so soft on Islam he's positively marshmallowy, a platform from which to show the anti-Jihad community his supposedly staunchly anti-Islamic bonafides.

And I responded:

That's an interesting statement. If it's accurate, it seems rather odd, because for at least three centuries, the West maintained an intensely intrusive presence throughout the Muslim world (with one exception, the center of Arabia) and had far more control over the people and institutions than they allow themselves to have now, since now the West is ashamed of its Colonial past. And during that long Colonial era, missionizing was also widespread and intense. So you would think that millions of Muslims would have already converted by the end of the 19th century. But this isn't the case.

In fact, Muslims mostly resisted conversion, hunkered down stewing in their hatred of the intrusive, humiliatingly dominant Infidel on their lands controlling their economies and politics, and often even their societies, and waited for the day they could revive again. Which is exactly what they have been able to do throughout the 20th century.

And with our colossal mistakes of

1) dismantling Colonialism (administratively, psychologically and culturally)

and

2) admitting millions and millions of Muslims into the West (an unprecedented disaster that had never been done before), Muslims have only become more able to wreak their terroristic jihad, not less.

I don't see Christian missionizing as a solution to the problem of Muslims. I see it as an unrelated virtue which we should allow to continue as long as it does not hamper our #1 priority: protecting our societies from the dangerous Muslims (whose numbers are legion and which -- I have to repeat for the umpteenth time -- we have no way of of distinguishing from the harmless Muslims even if they do exist, somewhere out there.

That reader later responded to me thusly:

"I am neither a Mennonite nor a Quaker, and think that Augustine was on to something with his just war theory. I would certainly fight for the defense of my country and civilization if I had to. I just question if now is the time to commit armed forces to cleaning up the entire world between Mauretania and Mindanao; or even if this is necessary. We free people in the West still have options, and Islam has its weaknesses even in the lands where it is dominant."

To which I responded:

Sometimes defense can wait until provocation; sometimes it has to be pre-emptive and proactive.

Hitler's years of ramping up in the 30s is a good example of the latter, whose appropriate response as urged by Churchill went unheeded by people who felt that the former was the way to handle it. And millions of lives, terrible destruction of land and property, and terrible dislocations were the result of that disastrous miscalculation.

Which type of defense is appropriate now in our time as the 21st century limps along with its feet flat and asleep?

Conclusion:

When dealing with ruthless and psychotic fanatics whose culture and conscience is not only devoid of the Golden Rule, they positively despise it, we cannot afford to follow the rules of the Golden Fool -- who would have us apply the Golden Rule even to enemies who would exploit our use of it in order to try to subjugate and kill us.

As an example of what I am talking about here, I here recount a recent exchange I had with another Jihad Watch reader, similar to (though decidedly more naive than) the one cited above:

"...you are saying that Christians striving to "love their God with their whole mind, heart and spirit" and to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is "morally neutral" ...

To which I responded:

No. It's good when the "others" you are "doing unto" aren't psychotically murderous fanatics trying to kill you, your family, and your fellow citizens. It becomes, however, idiotic and reckless and morally irresponsible when the "others" are, in fact, psychotically murderous fanatics trying to kill you, your family, and your fellow citizens.

"So if everyone in the world applied those admonitions in their lives, the world would not be a much better place?"

To which I responded:

Of course if everyone in the world applied those admonitions, the world would be a better place. But everyone won't. So you're sounding like an airheaded Miss Universe telling America why she believes in World Peace. And what's more important, a sufficient number of Muslims around the world won't apply those admonitions, and their unwillingness to do so will express itself (and already has expressed itself thousands of times around the fucking world in case you haven't noticed from your cave) in actions that -- again -- reflect a psychotically mass-murderous fanaticism hell-bent on trying to subjugate and kill us, our families, and our fellow citizens.

The pause that refreshes.... our memory.

Eric Allen Bell, cause célèbre for the sorta-kinda-anti-Islam Movement mainly because he used to be a flaming Leftist (worked with Michael Moore, and wrote over 100 articles for the Daily Kos, a Radical Leftism-on-steroids website) -- and who now, after his recent epiphany, barely approximates the asymptotic softness of Glazovianism or the Pipes Dream -- published an article on the Glazovianist website Front Page and on Jihad Watch, in which he describes a brief period during his transition from a Leftist to a Softie on Islam when, somewhere in the middle of this transition, he continued to criticize Spencer & Geller:

...having only recently sipped from the well of knowledge, I had not yet flushed all of the Kool Aid out of my system.

Then on page 2 of that same article, he has to add:

Yes, there are lots of peaceful Muslims all over the world who share our concerns – who are our partners in this effort, who tell their stories and love their children and love America just like we do.

I'd like to know what "lots" means, exactly. I'd also like to know where these "lots" of harmless Muslims are, exactly. Can Bell pinpoint them, and tell them apart from the dangerous Muslims we should be extremely worried about? I'd love to know how he can, if he would claim he can (but of course, he can't -- nobody can; so why put it on the table as something worthy of mention?).

One can somewhat flesh out what this "lots" means for Bell, from a smattering of comments he made in the comments sections of two other articles he wrote, also published on Jihad Watch.

For example, from the comments section to his first article at Jihad Watch:

Until a violation of the law occurs, the Muslim community has a Constitutional right to build a house of worship.

My involvement with the Occupy Movement...[!] I feel that the people are being victimized by the power elite, being lied to badly by Obama and his bosses at Goldman Sachs.

I supported the buidling of the mosque in Murfreesboro, TN because I support liberty.

We continue with more excerpts of Eric Allen Bell's many dingalings from the comments section to his second article on Jihad Watch:

I strongly support OCCUPY... [!]

I could not possibly disagree more strongly with the idea that all of the Muslims must be removed from America.

A Muslim is a human being. Islam is a religious/political doctrine. There are not the same thing.

A human being whose mind houses bad ideas is capable of being transformed.

And if those human beings will bad ideas are not transformed, then what we are doing here, which is to inform, brings with it the possibility of neutralizing or minimizing the threat.

We must never become the thing we object to. It is critical that we respect the human rights of others in our stand against Islam or else we have lost the moral high ground.

...

I made the documentary because I believed and still believe that the Islamic Center in Murfreesboro has a legal right to build and that the Islamic community there is peaceful.

Nearly every Muslim I have ever met is peaceful. That is not what concerns me. What concerns me is Islam itself and generally speak much of its leadership.

...

[quoting another JW commenter's suggestion]

"18. That no additional mosques be allowed until Islamic countries reciprocate in international relations, freedom of religion and houses of worship, and social equality."

WOW - Bad idea. Since certain Islamic countries do not recognize religious pluralism, we should not either? We should retaliate by stooping to their level? It's easy to see who will win that war of ideas and it won't be Democratic Values.

To respond to tyranny with tyranny, history has shown us over and over and over, is generally a bad idea.

...

Nearly every [American] Muslim I have met or interviewed (but not all) does live up to full Democratic standards.

...

[responding to another JW commenter's idea]

"The battle against Islam in the U.S. will be won or lost in the Congress, which needs to declare a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and pass the Winslow Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "Congress shall have the power to make laws restricting the free exercise of religions other than Christianity and Judaism, including but not limited to Islam."

It's bad ideas like that which give too much power to the government, which will abuse the power and/or be incompetent with it, that only fuel the perception that the anti-jihad movement is "fascist".

"Our way or the highway" is not how America works. American citizens have the right to have bad ideas, ridiculous beliefs and there cannot be any preference shown toward one religion over another.

The execution of the plan you outlined above will destroy our liberties in the process and introduce more of a totalitarian element to the US Government. We don't need more of that.

Did you ever see the Pink Panther cartoon where he destroys his entire house while trying to get rid of a single fly?

...

What Islam is to religion, Fox "News" is to news - deeply deceptive and even more extreme and corrupt than the others.

...

[At one point Bell outlines a "dilemma" -- i.e., he twists the Problem of Islam into his own still Lefto-utopian worldview:]

The demonization of any person so deeply indoctrinated as to imagine themselves to be a Muslim is unfair, cruel, discriminatory and lacking in humanity. The parallels with Nazi Germany start to get creepy.

Equally, to be so "open-minded" and "liberal" that one exercises no caution whatsoever and imagines all Muslims to be "moderate" until proven otherwise is clearly a hazardous and potentially dangerous position to take in a world where this tyrannical religious system and brutal political system is becoming more popular and more radicalized with each passing day.

So, what is the right approach? What actions can we take without violating another person's civil rights or their dignity, within the law, maintaining the moral high ground without abandoning the good common sense?

Is there a nonviolent resolution?

Is it possible to promote caution without promoting hate?

Conclusion:

It seems Bell needs to do more flushing out -- "lots" more -- of the Kool-Aid still coursing rather vigorously throughout his veins.

Vacation's over

Claude Guéant, French Minister of the Interior, recently became embroiled in a flap with Serge Letchimy, some French politician who hails from the Caribbean island of Martinique (still under some administrative holdover from the great era of Colonialism and no doubt some kind of "département") -- whose tan does not derive merely from sunning himself too many months out of the year at his time-share there -- and who among other multiculturalist agenda of the unaccidentally anti-Occidental flavor, agitates for its independence from France.

In French Parliament recently, the latter accused the former of essentially being a "Nazi" for the former's unremarkable observation that French civilization is superior to many other cultures.

To this preposterous charge (which, when one watches the video, went on interminably, to the increasing outrage of most of the members of French Parliament, many of whom walked out in protest), Claude Guéant decried the purport of Letchimy's charge:

...que l’on accuse de favoriser l’idéologie nazie quelqu’un qui promeut les valeurs universelles des droits de l’Homme, et rappelle qu’il y a des valeurs qui sont supérieures à d’autres car elles représentent précisément un progrès de l’humanité.

Translation:

... that one would accuse of favoring the Nazi ideology someone who promotes the universal values and rights of Man, and who reminds us that these values are superior to other values precisely because they represent the progress of humanity.

-- is, we finish Guéant's thought, scandalous and outrageous; but, alas, these days unsurprising.

This is the very precise, searingly acute nodus of the entire problem of the modern West with its own self-identity and self-consciousness, as brought forcefully (if not violently) into relief by that spearhead of politically correct multiculturalism embodied by Muslims and the Islam they brandish and lug around like a congenital ontology superadded (or grafted on) to their human nature.

What tightens the knot of this nodus past the point of reason -- past the point of some abstract philosophical experiment or meditation on our principles, to the brutely concrete point of mortally endangering our own lives time and time again -- is the perverse paradox by which the Western complex of virtues, derived from its Graeco-Roman Judaeo-Christian heritage, has itself become the source of the very same politically correct multiculturalism that weakens it.

One emblematic example: the uniquely Western virtue of transcending tribalism in favor of universalism (from which is engendered symbolisms of humanity) grows out of proportion with monstrously good intentions to embrace in its universalism violent and backward tribalists and -- here's the pièce de résistance (or, rather de reddition): Our uniquely Western virtue of universalism, congenially deformed with a lately developed gigantism (otherwise fondly referred to as "Wilsonianism", in some respects creeping into the still inchoate anti-Islam movement in the form of Wildersianism and otherwise dispersed in the pleasantly gaseous form of PC MC throughout Western societies today), insists -- on pain of being charged with accusation of "Nazism" and other similar sins -- that violent and backward tribalism of the Natives (non-Western Tiers-Mondistes) be "respected" unconditionally, and thus be appreciated to such an extent they must be put on a pedestal equalling our civilizational achievement, though they never earned it.

The problem wouldn't be quite so bad, were all Third Worlders normally undeformed by a fervently supported blueprint for rejecting the modern virtues of liberalism and human rights. Unfortunately, a third of the Third World precisely opposes those modern virtues, as is evident by a mountain of data -- not the least of which being that the O.I.C. (the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which represents all Muslim-majority nations in the world) opposes the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and substitutes for that its own version, the Cairo Declaration, which specifically provides loopholes by which to circumvent full equality for women, homosexuals and religious minorities. And these nations and their political and clerical representatives don't do this just because they personally don't like human rights or equality. They do it because their Islam dictates it, because the man they most revere in all history, Muhammad, told them so.

The West can't keep going on its PC MC course much longer, now that it's becoming increasingly clear that there exist hundreds of millions of people throughout the world (and increasingly growing within the West) whose dearly held ideology that explains the Meaning of Life despises not only human rights and equality as we cherish it, but also despises real multiculturalism itself; and is increasingly reviving its penchant for using various forms of physical violence (including most prominently and prevalently terrorism, the modern form of the ancient Islamic military tactic of the razzia) in order to do so.

It's time to wake up. The vacation's over. Time to have our friendly brown servants with their smiles of coconut-white teeth help us pack our bags and take us to the airport back home, where work needs to be done to defend it from an Islam Redivivus.

Further Reading:

Montaigne: Godfather of PC MC?

Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony

The Napier Formulation

Sir Charles Napier and cultural health

Professor Emeritus Peter Berger: A scholar, gentleman, and imbecile

I recall Peter Berger, a professor of religion and sociology, from my college days, when I took a lot of courses in history, philosophy and comparative religions, and also became a bibliovore on these and related subjects.

Berger's seminal study The Sacred Canopy was part of my curriculum (which was both formal in terms of assigned readings from professors, as well as informally culled from my thousands of hours spent over the years roaming the stacks of the college library), and figures as one among the many books that have been formative for my philosophical odyssey over the years -- though it ranks considerably lower, ultimately, than many others (for a partial list of books that have infuenced my outlook see this comment I deposited on the Liberated blog).

In a nutshell, the thesis of Berger's The Sacred Canopy was that a culture contructs the cosmos through a complex apparatus of mythological symbolisms, and that this cosmos is a kind of "canopy" of meaning.

His thesis was not meant to imply, simplistically, that the construction was somehow "false" or imaginary; nor that this means there is no reality. It had the subtler implication that what a culture conceives of as reality is not simply an external datum -- literally a given -- to be stumbled across or to be seen with the naked eye and then suddenly known. Rather, reality comes to be known through a complex process of language and ideas, which themselves subsist in a complex matrix extending to cross-cultural associations and contributions and founded back in time in the history of one's own culture and, in turn, its encounters with other cultures.

Thus, reality is not a simple fact existing "out there" -- it is a complex interpretation of a complex network of facts; and this interpetation is a project in which whole societies participate: it is not, nor is ever, the product of lone individuals (for no man is an island).

So far so good.

Prof. Berger developed an interesting and useful thesis (though by no means uniquely original) for provoking thought about various philosophical issues involved with sociology and anthropology.

But wouldn't you know it, when it comes to the problem of Islam, suddenly Prof. Berger turns into a blithering idiot.

I continue to remain amazed at how this happens, and how often.

Anywho, I was surprised to learn that Prof. Berger, now in his 80s, is still alive after all these years and -- like everybody and everybody's uncle -- has a blog.

But I dreaded the thought of finding out what his take is on the problem of Islam, for I've been burned too many times by other otherwise intelligent analysts on this issue, when I have found out that, concerning this one particular problem, suddenly their intelligence vanishes and they parrot the inanest politically correct hogwash.

So, Prof. Peter Berger's blog is called "Religion and Other Curiosities" Alas, I could not enjoy Berger's blog for too long, as it meandered pleasantly and intelligently on topics un-Islamic. As I dreaded would be the case, I soon stubbed my toe on this recent essay there, on the concept of "blasphemies".

And this is what I wrote as a comment there:

Peter Berger asserts (without a shred of evidence):

“By the way, the title of Rushdie’s novel refers to an obscure legend, not mentioned in either the canonical Koran or any reliable tradition…”

Berger is manifestly incorrect. Alas, it no longer surprises to find intelligent people who should know better demonstrating ignorance of Islam in one form or another (and invariably, that ignorance happens to tilt in favor of Islam).

Does Berger think al-Tabari is not part of “reliable tradition” in Islam? If so, Berger is required to present an argument in defense of such a position. In addition, does Berger think Ibn Abi Hatim, Ibn al-Mundhir, Ibn Mardauyah, Ibn Ishaq, Musa ibn ‘Uqba, and Abu Ma’shar do not represent “reliable tradition” in Islam? (The more likely consideration here is that Berger has never bothered to become familiar with these names and the Islamic tradition they represent — specifically, the tradition of one important part of Islamic texts, the Siyar (plural of “Sira”, or Biography; scil., of Mohammed.)

Meanwhile, the Koran certainly lays the ground for Rushdie’s florid extrapolation, when in chapter 22, verse 52, it says:

“We have sent no apostle, or prophet, before thee, but, when he read, Satan suggested [some error] in his reading. But God shall make void that which Satan hath suggested: Then shall God confirm his signs; for God [is] knowing [and] wise.”

The immediately following verse, 53, suggest that Allah permits this to happen in order to tempt the wicked and thus confirm their (apparently) unalterable wickedness.

Another part of Islamic tradition with which Berger seems blithely unfamiliar are the Tafasir (plural of “Tafsir” — “commentary” or “exegesis”; scil., of the Koran). One Islamic writer of Tafsir was Zamakhshari who, in commenting on the Koran verse we quoted above (22:52) wrote:

“Some say that Gabriel drew his attention to it, or that Satan himself spoke those words and brought them to the people’s hearing.”

Really, Berger should stick to his specialty and not dabble in things outside his expertise: namely, taking jabs at any Christianity that isn’t liberal or secular enough for his comfort zone.

Source: http://answering-islam.org/Responses/Saifullah/sverses.htm And an excellent source for the Koran, which provides 10 different translations into English — six of them by Muslims themselves — is here: http://www.quranbrowser.com/ P.S.:

Notice, by the way, how when discussing Jay Leno’s purported blasphemy, Berger has no problem mentioning the religion and the followers by name == “Sikhs”; but when it comes to Rushdie’s purported blasphemy, Berger suddenly can’t cough up the requisitely apt term “Muslim” and only indirectly mentions “Islam”. Notice too how he caricatures the alleged fierceness of the Sikh reaction to Leno:

“This seemingly trivial event [Leno's quip in his monologue about a Sikh temple] provoked a storm of fierce hostility by Sikhs in America and elsewhere, adding a presumably unwelcome dimension of religious hatred…”

But, of course, Berger provides no evidence to back up that luridly hyperbolic characterization of the Sikh reaction. In fact, all we get, from Berger’s own account, are prima facie entirely reasonable and mature reactions from Sikhs: “A Dr. Randeep Dhillou,” Prof. Berger informs us, “…sought to sue Leno for hate speech against a religion.” Wow. He sought to sue Leno! Oh, the enormity, the horror! Can we be safe from Sikhs?

And Berger continues his litany of the terrifying Sikh backlash to Leno:

“Vayalar Ravi, the minister in the Indian government dealing with affairs of overseas (so-called “non-resident”) Indians, called the incident “quite unfortunate and quite objectionable”...

Oh my God! What hatred drips and oozes from that language — “quite unfortunate and quite objectionable”…!!! I almost feel like I’m at a Nazi rally, or a KKK march, or… one of hundreds of mass demonstrations by Muslims all over the world over the decades (only increasing post-911) calling for the deaths of cartoonists and others who have “offended” Islam.

Berger’s not done with those terrible Sikhs.

“Another Indian minister chimed in by saying that “freedom does not mean hurting the sentiments of others”.

With that kind of chiming in, I don’t know how we can tolerate Sikhism and Sikhs… Seriously, these are perfectly reasonable responses from Sikhs, and they have every right to voice them. We may disagree that a joke constitutes religious “insult”, but we should not lump Sikhs in with the followers of one religion in the world who are routinely, regularly, increasingly, actually killing people and issuing death threats over their religion -- Islam.

To pick one example of literally thousands one could adduce out of a turban, we have the most emergent case that apparently is utterly off Berger’s radar: that of Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old columnist from Saudi Arabia, who merely happened to issue three TWEETS from his Twitter account in which he expressed, poetically, his ambivalence about praying for Mohammed.

For these tweets, he received over 30,000 death threats from fellow Muslims; the King of Saudi Arabia issued an order for his arrest; the Saudi Arabia’s Permanent Committee for Scholarly Research and Religious Edicts (IFTA) warned that his actions deserve “harsh punitive measures”; and the news service AFP reported that “[i]n one response, Abdullah, a lawyer, said that since Mr Kashgari was “an adult… we should accept nothing but implementing the ruling according to Islamic law” or sharia.”

And AFP went on to report what everyone should know by now (except Professors of Religion in the West, apparently):

“Insulting the prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam, and is a crime punishable by death.”

They added: “Mr Kashgari [i.e., the Blasphemous Tweeter] quickly apologised for his remarks, but the calls for his execution only multiplied….” Meanwhile, Kashgari felt his life endangered sufficiently to flee his own country; the Saudis used Interpol to track him down in Malaysia, and the government of that supposedly “moderate” Islamic country of Malaysia cooperated with the Saudis to arrest him and compel him to return to Saudi Arabia, where he could well face EXECUTION.

But Berger is too busy worrying about the mild objections of Sikhs to bother with such actual, and actually deadly, 21st-century fanaticism.

Sources for my last comment begin with this report: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/02/malaysia-sends-saudi-blogger-who-criticized-muhammad-back-to-almost-certain-death.html and continue with internal links successively, when the reader clicks on the phrase one sees “More on this story”. Jihad Watch is the direct source; but Jihad Watch is merely relaying the reportage from other unremarkably credible and mainstream sources, as anyone with half a brain (or one undeformed by ideology) could see within seconds.

Afterword:

For a couple of days, my comment quoted above remained unapproved on Berger's blog, and "awaiting moderation". However, a comment I posted three minutes later did appear published, without any problem. The only problem was that its content referred to the longer, possibly more "offensive" comment quoted above, which remained invisible. Aside from that, other comments I had posted previously on previous threads there never had to "await moderation" for days. I smelled that something was up. So I posted a third comment:

My comment which was approved makes little sense, since it is specifically referring to a previous comment I wrote earlier, but which I am told, when I visit this page, is in limbo of "awaiting moderation". Since that latter comment was posted two days ago, and the comment I posted AFTER it was published, it is reasonable to assume that it is no longer "awaiting moderation" but has already received the death knell of censorship in the name of politically correct multiculturalist sensibilities.

Meanwhile, we all are awaiting the "moderation" of Muslims.

Then: Lo and behold, the morning following my posting the above comment, I saw my first comment suddenly published after all.

Thank Allah for small favors.

(Though Muslims can thank Allah for the considerably larger favor of the continued, and prevalent, existence throughout the West -- often in positions of influence of opinion and/or policy -- of imbeciles like the distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter Berger.)

Could a Muslim ever write such a thing, now or ever...?

“...whatever is devout and contributes to good morals should not be considered profane. Sacred Scripture is of course the basic authority in everything; yet I sometimes run across ancient sayings or pagan writings -- even of the poets -- so purely and reverently and admirably expressed that I can't help feeling their authors' hearts were moved by some divine power. And perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand, and the company of saints includes many not in our calendar. Speaking frankly among friends, I can't read Cicero's De senectute, De amicitia, De officiis, De Tusculanis quaestionibus without sometimes kissing the book and blessing that pure heart, divinely inspired as it was.

“But when, on the other hand, I read these modern [i.e., current Christian] writers on government, economics, or ethics -- good Lord, how dull they are by comparison! And what lack of feeling they seem to have for what they write! So that I would much rather let all of Scotus [a Christian writer] and others of his sort perish than the books of a single Cicero or Plutarch.”

-- Erasmus, Convivium religiosum, in his work Familiar Colloquies printed in 1522.

Note:

Were we living in 1912, I probably wouldn't have to school my readers on the identities and significance of Erasmus, Cicero and Plutarch, and Scotus in order to illuminate the full purport of the quote above; but, then again, at the click of a mouse a century later, my readers can school themselves in order to correct that deficiency in their society's pedagogy.

Erasmus (1466-1536) was one of the great Catholic thinkers of Western history, and a worthy opponent in the realm of rational debate of Martin Luther, who convulsed history with his aggressively obsessive hobbyhorse at the time when the intellectual faculties of Erasmus were at their prime.

Erasmus is often called a "Renaissance humanist", which may lead the less educated reader to think he was some kind of proto-Modern Man (i.e., a Secular Atheist or somehow anti-Church). He was first and foremost a Christian. And, as a Catholic, he had been enculturated in classical reason sufficiently to, among many other things, defend human free will against the pathologically obsessive denial of human free will Luther espoused. And it was his Catholic intellectual culture, solidly appreciative of the pre-Christian culture of Graeco-Roman philosophy, that enabled him to demonstrate such magnanimity, and to trust that his Christianity comported with such broadness of mind and spirit.

Indeed, not only would it be practically impossible for a Muslim to so freely and intelligently endow pre-Muslim (let alone non-Muslim) philosophers with divine inspiration; it could be said that for similar reasons it probably would have been an extraordinary effort for Luther and other Reformation luminaries to begrudgingly and petulantly follow Erasmus in his catholic predilection which his Catholic culture encouraged.

Further Reading:

For the reader interested in expanding his horizons, take a look at Cicero's Tusculan Disputations (that link also includes two other works by him in the same volume). Of course, ideally one would want to read Cicero in the original Latin; but, first things first.

This has been the latest installment of Why the West is Great. We return you to your regularly scheduled programming...

My problem with Jihad Watchers

Introduction:

From being a part of the amorphous community of commenters in the comments fields of Jihad Watch over the years (until I was unceremoniously banned in September of 2010), I became increasingly dismayed by a seemingly dominant consensus on there: namely, the consensus that the movement should not be against Muslims per se, but only against Islam.

The Asymptotics

The Jihad Watchers who affect a tougher, more no-nonsense approach, and thus may use language about "Muslims" being the problem, nevertheless tend to qualify that whenever they get the merest whiff of the dreaded "all" word. And so, their formula seems to differ from the PC MC TMOE mantra (the problem is only a "Tiny Minority of Extremists") only by degree, not by kind.

A few years ago, I developed the term PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism), which I used (though did not technically coin) to describe the strange -- but alas, all too real -- sociopolitical phenomenon of Westerners on all points of the political spectrum -- Left, Center, and Right -- tending to persist in denial about the danger of Islam and often even going the extra mile to spasm into Islamopologist mode to defend Islam and Muslims whenever they might be criticized. I.e., I developed the term PC MC chiefly to explain why so many people in the West outside of the Leftist sphere remained myopic to the danger of Islam and even persisted in defending Islam (George Bush being the gold standard of this phenomenon with his nauseatingly repeated mantra that "Islam is a great religion of peace").

An additional sociopolitical phenomenon needed explaining, however.

Slowly, I began noticing that many people within the small and continually beleaguered anti-Islam community -- analysts & representatives as well as civilians alike -- were showing signs and symptoms of being infected with PC MC. I could not conclude, however, that they themselves were PC MC. Somehow, I needed an explanatory model that recognized and accounted for the retention of a certain degree of PC MC with regard to Islam, yet which did not succeed (as it does with actual PC MCs) in substantially hindering these people from criticizing Islam and Muslims (let alone condemning them). Thus was born my term asymptotic.

This term, as I have analyzed on this blog before, means in a nutshell:

The retention of PC MC, to one degree or another, in the heart and mind of an otherwise anti-Islam person.

And, alas, it seems from my experience of regularly dipping in to read various comments fields on Jihad Watch over the years right into the present, that the majority of Jihad Watchers are asymptotic.

(Speaking of the present, last week I decided, on a whim, to go back into Jihad Watch comments under a new pseudonym, LemonLime. Since I have long been averse to trying to not be myself just to please other people, I was not going to skulk back in and "tone down" my Hesperadish self. I was just going to calls it as a sees it. My readers can see the amusing results here, here and here -- amusing in just how much bafflingly irrational prickly ire I manage to arouse among the vast majority of Jihad Watch readers who responded to me, just by being myself. I merely posted comments that are unremarkably mature in manner and intelligent in content, with only modest shakes here and there of a bit of salt and pepper to spice things up, but -- outside of one extremely rare lapse that was begging to be indulged -- no offensive language and no juvenile language; and with a mere smattering now and again of vaguely ad hominemish insinuations wryly wrapped in diffidently and elliptically smartass locutions. And the fireworks inexplicably, but amusingly, flew.)

To get back to the main thing that bugs me about Jihad Watchers, their tendency to be asymptotic:

Perhaps the most common form of asymptotic retention of PC MC in the otherwise un-PC MC person is in the belief that innumerable Muslims exist out there who are decent and harmless. While the precise number of these innumerable decent and harmless Muslims is never pinned down (and how could it be?), that indeterminate number's function, in the asymptotic view, is to be sufficient to make a difference. I.e., "I don't know how many of these decent and harmless Muslims exist," says the asymptotic person, "but I know they must exist in huge numbers and that they are our hope."

Hope for what, exactly? There are two forms of asymptotic hope in this regard:

1) a hope for Islamic reform, to render Islam as benign and secular-friendly as all other religions have become

and

2) a hope in the eventual disappearance of Islam, when a sufficient critical mass of Muslims apostasize.

On what basis, then, does the asymptotic person believe in the existence of this hopeful demographic among world Muslims? The most common theory is a combination of the factors of ignorance and insouciance. I.e., the idea is that there exist large numbers of Muslims who don't really know their own Islam and thus don't know that the ideology which they are enabling -- if only by the sheer fact of continuing to identify themselves as Muslim -- is evil and dangerous.

And this idea is combined with a distinct yet related hypothesis: that there exist large numbers of Muslims who are so relaxed in their religiosity they are tantamount to being nominal Muslims who are not really following Islam.

Now, the asymptotic does not have actual proof of these hypotheses. The evidentiary basis for believing them seems to reside in a combination of anecdotal evidence ("I know some nice Muslims") and wishful thinking based upon an inference in turn resting on the conviction that Muslims are human.

Homo Occidentalis: The Humanity of Muslims

We now touch on a subject too complex for this particular essay -- the philosophical and historical symbolism of humanity.

(For now, I will simply state bald axioms which constitute a conclusion to a more detailed argument explored in another analysis of this subject: Four phases of Western universalism, and the humanity of Muslims.)

The PC MC defines "human" according to a measure based on Homo Occidentalis. I.e., "human" is to be Western.

Needless to say, this is an acutely ironic definition for PC MC, since PC MC is otherwise so anti-Western. This irony is easily explained as part of the general incoherence of PC MC.

But PC MC didn't fabricate this definition out of thin air. It was in fact developed in the pre-PC MC West. I.e., humanity and related concepts ("being human" and "Mankind") are Western inventions. More precisely, they are symbolizations that express the singular, if not unique, capacity of Western civilization to transcend tribalism toward universalism.

What was, in the pre-PC MC West, a paradox, has become transmuted, under the regime of PC MC, into an incoherent irony.

What was, in the pre-PC MC West, an expansionism predicated upon a self-understanding of superiority over the Third World, has become transmuted, under the regime of PC MC, into an expansionism predicated upon an incoherent equivalencism resting on the unstable foundation of toxic shame.

What was, in the pre-PC MC West, a project of saving the world by Westernizing it under the straightforward assumption that Westernization is superior to all other forms of sociopolitical organization, has become transmuted, under the regime of PC MC, into an incoherent and ultimately self-defeating project to save the West from itself by Third-Worldizing it -- in a word, Wilsonianism.

Post-911, neo-Wilsonianism has become a project of Islamicizing the West under the delusion that the West can save Muslims from Islam by simultaneously Westernizing Muslims and Islamifying the West.

From Wilsonianism to "Wildersianism"

It is of course from Geert Wilders' name that I have coined Wildersianism. We may say that just as asymptotic represents the retention, to one degree or another, of PC MC in the heart and mind of the anti-Islam critic, so too Wildersianism represents the retention of Wilsonianism in the heart and mind of the Western defender of the West.

Consider this sentiment that sits as a jewel or fulcrum in the center of Geert Wilders' address in Berlin last year:

Before I continue, and in order to avoid any misunderstandings, I want to emphasize that I am talking about Islam, not about Muslims. I always make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam. There are many moderate Muslims, but the political ideology of Islam is not moderate and has global ambitions. It aims to impose Islamic law or Sharia upon the whole world. The way to achieve this is through jihad. The good news is that millions of Muslims around the world - including many in Germany and the Netherlands - do not follow the directives of Sharia, let alone engage in jihad. The bad news, however, is that those who do are prepared to use all available means to achieve their ideological, revolutionary goal.

If the logic of PC MC is incoherent, the logic of the asymptotic mind is further infolded upon itself like a pretzel of hyper-incoherency, for it is simultaneously moving away from PC MC even as it retains PC MC -- and it is a measure of this augmented incoherency that Wilders articulated that fulcrum of a sentiment quoted above after -- and before -- a litany of reasons about Islam that should move any reasonable mind to make the elementary connection between Islam and Muslims, and to oppose the latter no less than the former.

The Wildersian distinction between Muslims and Islam is, in a further twist of transmutation, the PC MC distinction between the Noble Savage and his Culture. The latter distinction suffers under the incoherency of simultaneously

1) revering the Noble Savage together with his Culture

and

2) trying to save the Noble Savage (post-911, the Muslim) from his Culture by civilizing (i.e., Westernizing) him.

The Wildersian distinction is a twist on this incoherency: it simultaneously

1) opposes the Islam of Muslims

while it takes pains to clarify that it

2) does not oppose the Muslims of Islam.

The Wildersian is able to perform this feat of mental gymnastics by retaining, while sort of inverting, the PC MC incoherency regarding the Culture of the Noble Savage: the PC MC simultaneously reveres the Culture of the Noble Savage, and wants to save the Noble Savage from that Culture. The Wildersian simultaneously condemns the Islam of the Muslim, and wants to save Western Man from condemning Muslims by saving Muslims from Islam. This project of self-salvation depends upon the project of extricating Muslims from Islam, and this project, in turn, depends upon the theoretical distinction between Muslims and Islam.

But the Wildersian is not a Wilsonian, nor a PC MC (let alone, God forbid, a Leftist) -- so why would he be concerned about "saving Western Man"? And from what would he be saving "Western Man"? We know what the PC MC and Leftist want to save Western Man from: his "shame" of how he mistreated non-Westerners for so long; a sin that becomes tantamount to an original sin, a part of his evil nature, an ever-present propensity against which he needs, continually, to be constrained through various forms of political policy and social engineering. Now, while the Wildersian is not PC MC per se, he is asymptotic -- and recall that being asymptotic is, precisely, to retain vestiges and residues of the PC MC virus in one's bloodstream, as it were. Vestiges and residues against which, apparently, the requisite antibodies of the holistic epiphany have not yet been activated.

So: in this specific context (as articulated in the paragraph preceding the one immediately above), the Wildersian wants to save Western Man from having to succumb to the slippery slope of "becoming like them" -- like the Muslims. I.e., he wants to prevent Western Man from going down the slippery slope of crimes of humanity (the gold standard of such crimes which haunt the modern Western Man being genocide); and he, like the PC MC, knows deep down (even if he doesn't fully acknowledge it) that the metastatically deadly intentions and behaviors of Muslims worldwide are increasingly forcing us to take measures of self-defense that are not merely tough -- but drastically tough, as befits the appallingly dreadful emergency they appear to portend. In order to stave off the only reaction Western Man can adopt -- genocide -- the Wildersian looks desperately around for a way out of this dilemma, and becomes thereby convinced that somehow, the key to preventing us from that unacceptable backlash against hundreds of millions of innocent Brown People will be for Muslims to reform.

Again, this asymptotic posture differs from the PC MC mindset and policy only in degree, not in kind. And, similarly, the irrational handwringing anxiety that Western Man is incapable of handling the problem of Muslims other than through eventual genocide is another thing the asymptotic shares with the PC MC. Neither is able to consider a perfectly reasonable alternative: mass deportation of the Muslims within the West back to their own lands, where they may be as Muslim as they wish, to their heart's content. And both misconstrue, irrationally, such an alternative as tantamount to genocide, and therefore recoil from it as an arachnophobe might spastically shudder at the sudden apparition of a spider.

Wildersianism, then, depends on the hope that Muslims can be separated from their Islam, even if that hope rests incoherently on the tacit concession that Muslims are in fact enmeshed with their Islam, else there would be no need to separate them from it: To regain coherence, the asymptotic who notices this problem of incoherence then attempts elaborate theoretical gymnastics by which to try to argue that this geoculturally broad and psychoculturally deep enmeshment is not all that broad and deep. Neither side, of course, can point to smoking gun evidence for their position; though the ones claiming that Muslims and Islam are inseparable do have a massive mountain of evidence looming just over the left shoulder of the asymptotic -- a mountain whose existence and contents the asymptotic knows well enough to make his gymnastics in avoiding its implications all the more flexibly torturous.

If the reader will recall from above, this distinction for the asymptotic mind is achieved through the flimsy bases of anecdotal evidence + wishful thinking -- with the latter in turn resting upon the axiomatic assumption that Muslims are human (human meaning having the capacity for Western values); and that therefore a sufficient number of them are either a) reformable, or b) not really Islamic anyway, or c) both a and b.

Since the Wildersian distinction tries to oppose an abstract Ism ("Islam") while simultaneously embracing concrete Muslims assumed to be un-Islamically human, it leads to preposterous formulations where the abstract Ism is personified -- for the human agent that is our enemy has to be acknowledged on some level, and so is diverted away from the actual Muslim agents who hate us and are trying to kill us if they cannot dominate us, and onto the ideology that motivates them.

Thus, Geert Wilders approvingly cites Mark Alexander's adumbration of characteristics of Islam which he compares with other "totalitarian ideologies", Communism and Nazism:

* They use political purges to "cleanse" society of what they considere undesirable;

* They tolerate only a single political party. Where Islam allows more parties, it insists that all parties be Islamic ones;

* They coerce the people along the road that it must follow;

* They obliterate the liberal distinction between areas of private judgment and of public control;

* They turn the educational system into an apparatus for the purpose of universal indoctrination;

* They lay down rules for art, for literature, for science and for religion;

* They subdue people who are given second class status;

* They induce a frame of mind akin to fanaticism. Adjustment takes place by struggle and dominance;

* They are abusive to their opponents and regard any concession on their own part as a temporary expedient and on a rival's part as a sign of weakness;

* They regard politics as an expression of power;

* They are anti-Semitic.

But who is this "They" which Alexander and Wilders refer to? Some of the sentences may arguably have a locution amenable to the abstraction of an "ideology" -- but some become comical when that square peg of abstraction is crammed into the round hole of moral and even physical agency: e.g., "They are abusive to their opponents..." Alexander and Wilders seem to really think that ideologies can "be abusive to their opponents". No: it is the followers of those ideologies who are, properly speaking, abusive to their opponents.

This preposterous endowment of human agency to Islam is being done by Wilders, I repeat, because

1) as an anti-Islam analyst, he cannot help noticing the agency of Muslims and cannot help condemn its evil and dangerous nature;

but

2) as an asymptotic anti-Islam analyst, his PC MC ethics forbid him from ascribing that agency to Muslims themselves, and so therefore he must relocate it onto the abstraction Islam.

(A typical Jihad Watcher comment with regard to this may be found in the response of a commenter named "Buraq" to the well-formulated (and so far on that thread, unique) misgivings expressed by the commenter named "Denise".)

After an impassioned defense of Western superiority in general, framed by a critique of the excessive self-criticism cultivated by PC MC, Wilders then caps it off by borrowing the mantra of PC MC:

...there is no such thing as collective guilt. Free individuals are free moral agents who are responsible for their own deeds only.

The "collective guilt" Wilders is rejecting here is the Western guilt cultivated by PC MC, but unfortunately it curves back around as a double-edged sword: for this absence of "collective guilt" is not merely a feature of Western Man, but of all Mankind; and since Muslims are human, we cannot impute guilt -- or any negative quality -- upon them collectively.

The "Inner Westerner" inside every Muslim

The paradox is that the West is in fact unique among all cultures and civilizations in history in having transcended tribalism and differentiating the epiphany of universalism, expressed by such symbolisms as Man, Human, Human Being, Human Nature, Mankind.

With acute conciseness, the paradox may be rendered thusly:

The West transcended tribalism through endowing all other tribes with a common essence they themselves, through their continual tribalism, reject.

We can thus locate in the classical Western formulation -- pre-PC MC -- the seeds of the incoherence in PC MC and in asymptotic thinking (to the degree that asymptotic thinking retains PC MC).

What distinguished the classical Western formulation, however, was a more straightforward recognition, and public avowal, of the superiority of Western Man, and thus a more pragmatic, and logical, project of Civilizing i.e. Westernizing i.e. Humanizing Non-Western Man (even if we may agree now, in retrospect, such a project is in certain respects impracticable, given the refractory if not incorrigible nature of many Non-Westerners).

The idea at the heart of this project is that in every person there is an "inner Westerner" -- even if that person is a headhunter from the jungles of Borneo. If only that headhunter could get in touch with his "inner Westerner" he would stop hunting heads, is the idea.

And it is thus our mission -- our White Man's Burden (to recall Kipling) -- to help all these non-Westerners around the world to Westernize. (The Leftist and to a lesser extent his decaffeinated cousin the PC MC seem incapable of recognizing the supreme irony in that in their anti-Western attitude and project, they are perpetuating the condescending paternalism of Western Colonialism with regard to the non-Westerners of the world.)

As Wilsonianism has it (which continues with full force in our time in the neo-Wilsonian projects to secularize and "democratize" our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan who hate us), it's a win-win endeavor: Westernizing is not only good for them, it's also good for us! It's good for the whole world!

The PC MC continuation of classical Westernization, through Wilsonianism, has been hobbled by a bizarre self-contradiction, whose strange pith may be expressed thusly:

We want to help the Muslim discover his "inner Westerner" and yet we are ashamed of our own West.

As I have articulated before, PC MC is not synonymous with "Leftism": PC MC is "Leftism Lite" -- it is Leftism sufficiently softened and sweetened to have become palatable to the majority of Centrists and Conservatives. PC MC would never have been able to succeed in becoming dominant and mainstream throughout the West -- as it has over the past half century -- had it not been able to win over the hearts and minds of the majority of non-Leftists throughout the West. The reason I raise this point at this juncture is to point out that Leftism is less incoherent than PC MC, and the more extreme the Leftism is, the more coherent it becomes -- to the degree that Leftism does not try to harmonize a pro-Western implication with an anti-Western assumption. In this regard, the Leftist achieves perfect coherence through reaching his apogee of extremism, in violent Revolution against the West in order to destroy it and replace it with Utopia. Needless to say, this would be a Pyrrhic coherence.

PC MC has inherited and continues to promote the Western complex of symbolisms regarding humanity, even while incoherently perpetuating its own anti-Western prejudices which it inherited from Leftism -- and in that spirit, in our time audaciously employing this Western complex of symbolisms for the purpose of enabling the most virulent enemy of the West today (not to mention its actual brazenly military enemy for the millennium spanning the 7th and 17th centuries): Islam.

And so, the Asymptotics, the Jihad Watchers...

Let us recall that the asymptotics of the anti-Islam movement are retaining degrees of PC MC in their minds and hearts. This includes the PC MC idea that because Muslims are human, many of them (or even most of them?) must be as relatively harmless and as amenable to secularism as are Jews and Christians, because humans are amenable to secularism, because secularism is the apogee of humanity, you see: Homo Occidentalis is the Natural State of Man. And since Muslims are humans, too (even if they themselves divide humanity into two virtual races -- Homo Islamicus and Homo Kuffaricus), then it stands to reason that most of them don't subscribe to that medieval nonsense which only a "tiny minority of extremists" among them do -- you know, just like the David Koreshes or Jerry Falwells among us, right?

Asymptotics, of course, don't go as far as the PC MCs do -- that is the whole point of the term asymptotic. But they do resemble PC MCs in kind, if not in degree. Let us not make the elementary logical mistake of confusing kind and degree.

At any rate, when the PC MC looks out at the sea of Muslims around the world (and pouring into our own Western world as we speak), he sees a mass of human potential -- with the potential to Westernize, if only they are encouraged by things we can do to help. Since coherence is not a concern for the PC MC, he will not see the contradiction between

1) his "respect" for the Islamic culture of Muslims

and

2) his expectation that most Muslims have an "inner Westerner" just waiting to get out, if only the right circumstances can be created for them.

And so, I have noticed that it seems as though most Jihad Watchers are asymptotic on this issue. In their minds, apparently, most Muslims are "ignorant" of their own Islam and/or most Muslims are really "relaxed" in a secularist (i.e., Western) state of mind which according to Wilsonianists is the Natural State of Man (including all Muslims). As for all the bad Muslims out there causing so much trouble around the world, the asymptotic Jihad Watchers have carried over the PC MC assumption that the bad Muslims get radicalized to go against their "inner Westerner" through being persuaded or strong-armed by a tiny elite of imams and other self-styled Muslim experts of Islam. So the answer to the problem, of course, is more Wilsonianism -- now in its new and improved form: Wildersianism!

Wildersianism may be a little tougher on Muslims than Wilsonianism is (restrictions on immigration, perhaps heightened surveillance on "radical" mosques and imams, and, of course, lots and lots of verbal critiques of Islam), but broadly speaking it perpetuates the same unfounded assumption that many (or most?) Muslims are really "just moms and pops like the rest of us". These asymptotic Jihad Watchers may try to distinguish themselves from PC MCs by insisting that they understand that it is Islam itself which is the problem -- but they retain a vestige of PC MC in their equally insistent distinction between Islam and Muslims, and in the hope (or wishful thinking) which this distinction provides them.

This becomes particularly odd given the daily diet of data these Jihad Watchers absorb on Jihad Watch documenting the dangerous fanaticism of Muslims all over the world, as well as frequent indications that "moderate" Muslims do not exist, or that at the very least, if they do, we cannot tell who they really are, given Islamic taqiyya.

Thus, even their unofficial leader, Robert Spencer, who helms Jihad Watch, routinely educates them in the impossibility of telling the difference between the dangerous Muslim and the harmless Muslim.

Here is one example of his pedagogy:

First, Spencer quotes from an article on a project in the UK calculated to decrease "radicalization" of Muslims:

The Preventing Violent Extremism scheme has supported efforts to strengthen the role of moderate imams and women in mosques.

Spencer then asks his incisively rhetorical question:

"How does one determine who they are?"

He again quotes from the article:

...the report says that prevention work should be "solely focused on people with the intent to act or who are being targeted by recruiters".

And asks again:

"How does one determine who they are?"

Excellent questions. Unlike Spencer, however, apparently many, if not most, Jihad Watch readers must have answers for these questions -- else their stubborn defense of the viability of Muslim humanity and the hope of its usefulness in sufficient numbers for us in the face of the dangers Muslims present to us make no sense.

Or perhaps they believe in a sort of vague Wildersian expectation that if we continue to try to smother amorphous blankets of secularism in the general direction of Muslims, they will soften up and their "inner Westerner" will flower. This would be the sense to restore coherence to this "I'm against Islam but not against Muslims" stance: For, according to these New Wilsonians called Wildersians, secularism is the Natural State of Man -- including all Muslims potentially -- and so there exists an "inner Westerner" in every Muslim just screaming to get out, and it needs our help! And, to boot, it is the only (or the best, or the most "humane") solution to the problem Muslims are causing the rest of the world.

Conclusion:

I would only caution these Jihad-Watching Wildersians that this is a very delicate operation: when trying to extract that "inner Westerner" from any given Muslim, be very careful, for the slightest wrong move could detonate the explosives therein.