Spencer & Geller: What Happens in Vegas...

Spencer & Geller (no, not another magic act like "Penn & Teller") may have rubbed anti-Islamic people (you know, those strange Neanderthals who keep insisting, of course out of bigotry, racism and hatred, that Islam's monstrously anti-liberal belief system should be condemned) the wrong way a few times before -- not the least of which by alienating various erstwhile colleagues over the years -- but what they have done this week seems to take the cake.

The Blogosphere is a relatively vast, diverse and amorphous space of ideas and discussion on all manner of subjects. One fairly small part of that sphere is the "anti-Jihad" movement (why its participants don't call it the anti-Islam movement remains a mystery). Within that small wing of the Blogosphere, Robert Spencer over the years through his website Jihad Watch has become a major player -- not merely by being a blogger, but also by writing books and by jet-setting all over the world attending various debates, seminars, speeches, lectures and public events revolving around the "anti-Jihad" movement. Of course, the "anti-Jihad" movement is not limited to the Internet, but has involved many different events of sociopolitical activism, and the UK and Europe probably has demonstrated more activity in this regard so far than the Americas or Australia.

In the past two or three years, Spencer has become joined at the hip with Geller, who used to be a relatively bit player in the "anti-Jihad" movement, but has, thanks to her association with Spencer, grown in influence. And no doubt Spencer has benefited from his partnership with Geller, as she seems to have a flair for social networking (and possibly actual influential connections).

At any rate, this week Pam Geller published an apodictic denunciation (based entirely on rumor) of the EDL (the English Defense League) as having "Nazi" associations. The EDL is one of only two political groups in the UK that is actually anti-Islam (the other being the leper colony no one, including most in the "anti-Jihad" movement, wants to touch with a ten-foot pole: namely, the BNP).

Meanwhile, most European, English and American activists and groups who are concerned about the danger of Islam have been supporters of the EDL, and this recent and sudden condemnation from Spencer & Geller has come as a dismaying turn (though not entirely surprising, given Spencer's previous abandonment of the Flemish anti-Islam party, Vlaams Belang, for fear of catching their "fascist" cooties).

In light of this, several key figures of the trans-Atlantic "anti-Jihad" movement have signed and published an open letter to Geller (and, by implication -- one hopes -- to Spencer) urging her to reconsider and to apologize for defaming a group that has been courageously and meritoriously fighting on the front lines against the encroachment of Islam in one major outpost of the West -- the UK.

Will Spencer & Geller step up to the plate and do the right thing, and retract their unsubstantiated smear of the EDL, and apologize for that? Or will they try to pull a rabbit out of a hat?

If you're a betting man, the Vegas odds are on the latter.

UPDATE:

If this description by Lawrence Auster -- of how Geller (and by Siamese extension Spencer) is trying to squirm out of the corner she has painted herself in -- is reliable (and often he is quite astutely reliable), it looks like I or any of my readers would have made a killing on the Vegas odds noted above.

One solution to the "Black problem"

Lawrence Auster's blog is one of the few places to report, and discuss, the "Black problem".

Of course, before we proceed, we have to define what this problem is.

The problem is that blacks are statistically more violent and more racist than whites are.

In my estimation, however, any rational definition has to avoid both polar extremes -- of a simplistic condemnation (however implicit and gingerly may be its insinuation) of all blacks, on the one hand; and of an undue minimization of its disturbing dimensions, on the other hand.

In terms of the former, readers (and apparent fans) of Auster bruit about the solutions of re-instituting slavery; or short of that, of re-instituting the de facto segregation of the century roughly spanning the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Meanwhile, Auster himself persists in affecting an agnosticism about any concrete proposals even while he regularly adverts to the problem (highly ironic and inconsistent of him, considering how he (rightly) frequently has taken Robert Spencer and others in the AIM (the Anti-Islam Movement) to task for only talking about the problem of Islam, without actually offering any proposals for what to do about that problem).

The latter of Auster's readers' solution -- re-instituting segregation -- has some slender merits; a major one being that blacks seemed to have had a relatively more orderly and productive existence during the century between 1865 and 1965 than they have had since that time and, pace certain suspect descriptions by tendentious PC historians, seemed to have enjoyed quite a bit of freedom and opportunity (particularly in Northern enclaves, such as New York). That era, however, organically developed; it was not artificially instituted. And it required a cultural paradigm to be held by the dominant white society. It would be preposterous to think it could be renewed and instituted by force of law (and even more preposterous to think it could re-grow voluntarily).

Similarly, needless to say, slavery is out of the question.

Mass deportation (shades of Marcus Garvey) suffers from an arguable fact about the problem of blacks that distinguishes them from Muslims: As bad as sporadic black-on-white violence is, and however much it may seem to be escalating, it is still persuasive that the vast majority of blacks are sufficiently peaceable (even if among that vast majority of non-violent blacks there is a sizeable minority of socially counter-productive individuals in terms of addictions, dereliction of family cohesion; poor work habits; etc. -- but then, one could say approximately the same about whites). It's simply wrong to deport en masse a people whose vast majority are peaceable. And among blacks we do not have the problem of being unable to distinguish the dangerous ones from the harmless ones to anywhere near the same degree, quantitatively or qualitatively, as we do with Muslims.

So what do we do then?

I propose the simplest, most elegantly rational solution: simply enforce the law in a color-blind fashion, as our PC dictates allegedly claim to support. Such a policy, of course, would -- if consistently applied -- result in the effect and appearance of unduly focusing on blacks, only because they are the ones predominantly indulging in brutal racist attacks, wildings, flash mobs and riots (not to mention some other categories of crime).

All we have to do as a society is continue to insist that we are simply enforcing the law without respect to color, and only with respect to the evidence of who the perpetrators are. This in turn may well entail additional preventative measures (such as, for example, stopping and searching blacks whose behaviors fit various profiles for potential violence) -- all of which can be reasonably defended as emanating from a rational policy of profiling in order to prevent. But it wouldn't have to go beyond that to begin segregating and/or quarantining whole subpopulations of blacks.

Indeed, in certain respects, our law enforcement already does this to some extent. The problem is only that they have been increasingly hampered over the past few decades by PC bureaucratic rules regulating their conduct and too often inhibiting them from properly doing their job in a rational way that responds to the data (which is, in this regard, that blacks are statistically more violent). And this in turn is exacerbated by a mainstream media that tends to whitewash (pun intended) the problem by avoiding the racial complexion of various crimes if they tend to be too dominated by black perpetrators.

Conclusion:

I didn't say my proposal would be easy to institute: it would require a relatively major re-orientation of our dominant and mainstream PC mentality. But it certainly wouldn't require the herculeanly unrealistic transformation which the other aforementioned solutions would entail. And it has the advantage of maintaining an ostensibly non-racist rationale. We are simply enforcing laws against criminal behavior, we would say; and the burden of explaining why such a neutral and rationally color-blind policy of law enforcement nets more blacks, over time as the paradigm shifts, would become shifted onto the shoulders of the black community and their PC enablers.

Crucially, then, this paradigm shift would center on shifting the explanation from an axiomatic white racism alleged to be systemic (for which there is no overt evidence) still supposedly justifying black criminality, to the recognition of a significant sociological dysfunction in the black community and in black culture that needs to be owned by blacks, and addressed by them.

And, unlike Muslims, I think black people show that they have the capacity for such hopeful reform.

In the meantime, we would enforce the law consistently and rationally, no matter how "racist" the results appear, and thus do a better job of protecting our citizens.

He Said, Ed Said

On Edward Said, I have found that many in the AIM (the Anti-Islam Movement "such as it is", as Diana West once wryly put it) exaggerate him by making him into some sort of Godfather of Academic PC MC; whereas, as chapters 2 and 3 of Martin Kramer's book, Ivory Towers of Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, tend to show, Said only cleverly capitalized on a trend in Western Academe already long underway.  One quote in particular from that book (p. 37), by historian Clive Dewey, is apt here:

“When Edward Said’s Orientalism first appeared in 1978, historian after historian must have put it down without finishing it—without imagining, for a moment, the influence it would exert. It was, technically, so bad; in every respect, in its use of sources, in its deductions, it lacked rigour and balance.The outcome was a caricature of Western knowledge of the Orient, driven by an overtly political agenda. Yet it clearly touched a deep vein of vulgar prejudice running through American academe.”

I.e., before this non-Westerner (Ed Said) came along to try to expose and skewer Western "Orientalism", the majority of Western Academics, excessively and reflexively self-critical of their own West through their axiomatic PC MC, had already paved the ground for his shoddy hypothesis to gain further traction.

As I wrote in response to Robert Spencer once, who typically assumed that Said was responsible for the dominance of anti-"Orientalism" in Academe (not to mention throughout pseudo-intellectual pop culture -- cf. Master's graduates who move up in their careers to write for Salon magazine, or sideways for the new and improved The New Yorker):

I disagree that it was "with Said" that this perspective became dominant -- if by "with Said" you mean he was not simply exploiting an already existing perspective that flourished completely without his help before he came along to exploit it (he only really got going in the late 1970s -- the main font of his influence began in 1978 with his book Orientalism, while prior to that he was only dabbling in articles about various Islamic and Palestinian issues, beginning in 1970 (see for example this).

The mere fact that a pseudo-scholar like Said can have the influence he has had in Academe (and in pseudo-intellectual salon society) points to a phenomenon larger than him -- an already existing predisposition and predilection to swallow what he cooked up.

Thus, the anti-Islam blogger Fjordman (perhaps more mildly than Spencer) recently uses the locution that "he [Said] and his disciples have been allowed to spread demonization and falsehoods against European and Western scholars for so many years relatively unchallenged."

The problem is not so much that Said has "been allowed" to do this (a curious and gross understatement of the phenomenon under analysis) -- but rather that Said was, and continues to be, positively encouraged by a massively nutritious context in an environment, Western Academe, already predisposed, long before he came along, to nourish his academic activities and give an enormous boost to his pet theory, packaged in the sexy meme of "Orientalism" glibly assumed ("resemanticized" is Kramer's term) to be a pejorative.

Quote of the Day

A “multicultural” society needs not sensitivity training but insensitivity training -- that’s to say, thicker skins.

-- Mark Steyn

Dante's dual ultimate

“... man is, so to say, a middle term between corruptible and incorruptible things… and since every middle-term participates in the nature of the extremes which it unites, man must participate in these two natures. And since every nature is ordered toward some ultimate goal, it follows that man’s ultimate goal is two-fold… he is the only being who is ordered towards two ultimate goals [solus inter omnia in duo ultima ordinetur]… Ineffable Providence has therefore set man to attain two goals… the first is happiness in this life… the second is the happiness of eternal life…”

Dante, De monarchia, III, xv, 3-8 (trans. D. Nicholl, quoted in Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos, 1981.)

Commentary:

A dual ultimate, or two ultimates, is a paradox; for, one thing cannot have two ultimates; and yet, according to Dante, following Aristotle's logic as unfolded further by Christian theology, human being does.

This paradoxical state of human nature -- of a dual ultimacy oriented toward two distinct goals seemingly at variance with each other -- is the tension of existence, as elaborated by the 20th century philosopher Eric Voegelin (who only unpacked what was already present in the perennial classical traditions of Western theology, philosophy and mythology).

The two goals -- happiness in this life, and happiness in the next life -- are often seen in stark contradiction among many believers in the eschatological religions of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam. And there is definitely a tension between the two, not to be smoothed over by some sugarcoated New Agey acceptance of death, accompanied by an existential dulling of the senses both of tragedy, and of hope (or, worse yet, its pale modern cousin, "optimism") in the face of tragedy.  Or, in modern Christian terms, a one-way ticket to salvation as a consequence of undergoing the correct rituals and assenting to the correct dogmas.

Obviously, what disturbs happiness in this life are the Hesiodian ills -- disease, pain, injustice, loss and death. And, though a rich and/or a lucky man may be able to pull off a long life free of most, or all, of these ills, sooner or later the end of his happiness will catch up with him, if not also one or more of his loved ones before he dies (and if he has a conscience and compassion, he will be disturbed by the suffering of others who, unfortunately, continue suffering despite successive waves over the centuries of religions supposed to be solving that problem).

Meanwhile, what complicates happiness in the next life is, of course, the ineluctable uncertainty enshrouding it, circumvented happily only through denial of the doubts that inevitably cast shadows on faith, hope and love -- even as these latter divine sisters may be said, and felt, to be in some ineffable sense victorious.

This tension, on the other hand, should not become inflamed by a fanaticism strengthened by a Gnostic certitude that would transform it into a "struggle" (jihad) setting up a hostile alchemical reaction between the two ultimates, embodied and personified in Us vs. Them, the True Believers vs. the Enemy, obsessively elevating the one while denigrating the other, as Islamic tradition -- "We love death, you love life" -- cultivates in deadly spades.

Nor should some Pie in the Sky Jesus solve the Mystery and flatten our experience of "this rich pageant" (i.e., life) into some cheap transition from the stage made of cardboard cutouts, whose straight and narrow ramp headed straight to Heaven, like some bargain-basement Halloween house, is haunted on either side by externalized temptations to be avoided by horse-blinders, if not demonized when their cultural dominance besets from all sides -- all for the sake of some simplistic answer that insults our intelligence and the God who creates our mind not to take the easy way out, but to think and to reason and to wonder and to imagine.

The first ultimate -- happiness in this life -- does not flow smoothly as an easy ride into the second ultimate -- happiness after death. Nor are these two ultimates inimical to each other, as though happiness in this life were an evil seduction preventing us from gaining our eternal fulfillment -- or as though the latter were some puerile concoction by religious hypocrites or fools eager to hoodwink the rest of humanity into their religious game.

The truth is mysteriously somewhere between and beyond these two: difficult to conceive, oftimes difficult to bear; but really, the only way it could possibly be -- if, that is, the mind attends to, and takes seriously, the heart's deepest longing.

As we wend that way of our longing, in this wild wood of life we share with Dante, we come upon a fork. Somehow, the forked path leads to the same destination; but is this the forked tongue leading us astray or is this the heartbreak we all must face at the rift between the two lives...? Portending the higher love our weakness intuited all along? As the manifold tongues of flame in Dante's Paradiso at last unite in the love of all creatures and their Creator: what faith, hope and love intend, all the while in this life they may flicker and suffer and wither and die, apart from their occasional and fortuitous, even serendipitous, bonfires now and then, here and there, of communal, brotherly warmth.

Or, as that Russian proverb goes:

“The longest way out, is the shortest way home.”

Particle Physics in the Anti-Islam Movement

The asymptotic tendency within the A.I.M. (the Anti-Islam Movement) expresses itself in formulations by which the holistic position is diluted or minimized, often in the slightest ways that may be barely noticeable without the use of a high-powered microscope.

The asymptotic person is incapable of simply condemning Islam and all Muslims. He must inject various words (or even one word will suffice; or at times a mere "-ism" tacked onto the end of Islam) in order to qualify the holistic position that may seem, apparently, too radical and extreme for his ethically sensitive taste.

Thus, our latest exhibit:

I ... believe ... that no believing Muslims should be in the United States, period.

Sounds like a tough and no-nonsense statement, eh? Can anyone spot the sub-atomic particle in that quote by which the holistic position becomes watered down, and by which the supposedly no-nonsense toughness being expressed becomes incoherent?

Yep -- it's the adjective "believing" in the phrase "believing Muslims".

Why does Lawrence Auster (the author of that quote) feel the necessity (which I have elsewhere called the "asymptotic twitch") to inject that word there? If I knew that he was using that phrase synecdochally to refer to all Muslims, I'd be less concerned; but I doubt he is.

Does Auster believe, in any event, that come the day we begin taking rational measures to protect our societies from Muslims, we will be able to tell the difference between a believing Muslim and a non-believing Muslim?

On what basis can we possibly make that distinction for our practical purposes of protecting our societies? On the basis of superficial indicators -- such as Western clothing, perhaps; or seemingly Western habits, like music appreciation, having a wife who does not wear a veil, having your kids playing baseball in Little League in some all-American town (as the Muslim-American software engineer "Mike" Hawash, before he felt the call of Jihad and went off to kill Americans in Afghanistan, had)...?

Or does Auster know about some top secret device the Pentagon is developing, by which we will be able to read minds and know what any given Muslim really "believes"...?

Auster in an email to me once objected to my holistic formulation as being too "totalistic" for his sensitive taste and ethics.

Apparently, I must repeat myself every few months on this: My holistic position is not an ontological position; it is a pragmatic position. I.e., I am not saying "All Muslims are in fact dangerous". What I am saying is that:

"Because we cannot tell the difference between the Muslims who are dangerous from the ones who probably are not dangerous, we must pragmatically treat them all as dangerous, and base our policy accordingly."

Contrary to the anxious wishes of our various asymptotic analysts in the A.I.M., the escalating, metastasizing behavior of Muslims over the following decades will force the issue: Eventually, the West will have no choice but to treat all Muslims with reasonable prejudice as deadly.

Not all dangers warrant a reasonable prejudice that expands the problem into a sweeping totalism. Various factors and features of the problem of Islam, however, when put together, do.

The longer the West waits to come to this rational realization, the costlier, the messier, and the bloodier (on both sides) will be the eventual result. Meanwhile, our asymptotic analysts in the A.I.M. -- by helping in various ways to put the brakes on the holistic meme -- may be serving to enable the Western retardation, which as yet shows few signs of coming up to speed to deal adequately with the problem.