Paradigm Inertia

Geert Wilders is great in so many ways.  All Counter-Jihadists, however, seem to have an Achilles heel of one sort or another.  Geert's is his failure to move, or shift, his Counter-Jihad paradigm from Islam, to Muslims.

From a an interview a few months ago with Geert Wilders:

4:46 Not all Muslims are rapists or terrorists.

4:50 But with migration from those countries we bring that culture into our own.

4:54 Which is not so keen on freedom and security.

4:59 Your analysis is: that’s caused by Islam. Islam is a pernicious ideology, as you call it.

5:06 That is an analysis not shared by everybody.

5:11 For most people say: no, those are extremists;

5:14 it isn’t Islam. You’re right when you say that,

5:18 at least, that many people think that. It’s not true.

5:21 In those ten years I wrote a book, published in America,

5:25 “Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me”.

5:29 The war Islam declared on us.

5:35 The war we see broadcasted daily by your station into our living rooms.

5:38 By and large, Muslims aren’t the problem. Islam, in my opinion, is.

5:43 Islam has a violent character.

5:47 Do you read the Koran?

5:50 Do you read the sira? The life of Mohammed? The example for one and a half billion Muslims today.

5:55 Look at countries with a dominant Islamic culture,

6:02 or at least where it is very important You see a constant of unfreedom,

6:06 of women, gays, journalists getting into trouble,

6:12 a lack of democracy, outrageous violence, shariah law.

6:17 We’re importing that into Europe. I can’t imagine,

6:21 that’s my assignment for the next ten years: to change exactly that.

6:26 To repair The Netherlands To expel Islam from our daily life.

6:32 That must happen anyway, if we want to live in 10, 20 or 30 years as a free country.

* * * * *

Now, I have often complained about the mean-spirited nitpicking of the long-time regular reader of Jihad Watch, "Angemon" -- which, of course, his various friends in his Rabbit Pack (other long-time Jihad Watch readers and commenters gravenimage, Champ, Mirren, Jay Boo, Wellington, dumbledoresarmy, Western Canadian, PRCS, et al.) have countenanced for years (if not, at times, commended outright).  An example of a mean-spirited objection would be the following:

"Angemon" would first quote from my report above (quoting Wilders whom I am criticizing here) --

"4:46 Not all Muslims are rapists or terrorists."

Then he would disingenuously ask something like, "So you think all Muslims are rapists or terrorists?" -- without taking the time to consider why I would critique Wilders on this, and without using a tiny bit of imagination to consider what I might have meant by this -- instead reaching for the worst possible conjecture about my motives possible, and then proceeding to go to town with his straw man.  That's what a mean-spirited objection does; and it's what an enemy in the war of ideas does (i.e., for example, a Leftist who is against the Counter-Jihad).

Now, the opposite of the mean-spirited attack is the critical engagement in good faith.  This begins by generously assuming good motives, yet still probing because something bothers the critic.  So, for example, quoting that remark and then simply asking, "I assume you don't mean that all Muslims are rapists or terrorists; so what is precisely your objection to Wilders here?"  This is the way civilized colleagues of a movement deal with each other -- unlike "Angemon" and the other friend of the Rabbit Pack, "joe blow" (aka "Philip Jihadski") who routinely (going back years now) begins his abusive responses to me in Jihad Watch comments by calling me a "Donkey" or "Jackass", and who has been banned from Jihad Watch not for unfairly ideological reasons, as I have been, but for brutally threatening violence against other commenters and posting personal information about them.  This is the kind of friend gravenimage, Mirren, Champ, Wellington, dumbledoresarmy, Western Canadian, Jay Boo, PRCS, et al., cultivate, apparently.

So anyway, the reason I find that statement of Wilders faulty is two-fold:

1) it implies an assumption that the only thing wrong with a Muslim is if he is a rapist or a terrorist -- as though there aren't many other ways they endanger our society.  With that remark, Wilders almost sounds like he suddenly had a lobotomy that removed all his memory of what the stealth jihad entails.

2) it implies that we can know with certainty sufficient for our security needs on a macro scale (and what other scale is there when considering millions of individuals who are members of a fanatically psychotic ideology like Islam which has been conveying escalating unpredictable terrorism in the name of conquest and in tandem with this has been known to cultivate taqiyya deception?) which Muslims will be dangerous and which Muslims will not be dangerous.

Beyond that, the implied assumption Wilders is telegraphing in this interview is that "Islam" can somehow be a danger to our society, and we therefore need to expel this danger, but that this is not related really to Muslims "by and large":

5:38 By and large, Muslims aren’t the problem. Islam, in my opinion, is.

This is a surreal formulation that curiously detaches the main reason why Islam is the problem -- the Muslims who put it into daily practice -- and retains only the inert ideology and its inert Koran and other texts as the danger.  As though a holy book can walk into a theater or a shopping mall and start shooting people.  (And, of course, also keeping in mind my other objections above.)

This inertia that seems to be obstructing a paradigm shift goes well beyond Wilders; the entire Counter-Jihad Mainstream seems to suffer from an inability to move beyond Islam to Muslims -- which means, from Islam alone to Muslims who enable Islam.

There are two reasons why the Counter-Jihad needs to make this paradigm shift:

1) What I already said above:  Muslims put Islam into practice, and with the problem of stealth jihad, we reasonably conclude it is all Muslims who, in a variety of ways, present the danger of Islam on a macro level.

2) The Western Mainstream which, thanks not only to the "Elites" but also to probably the majority of Ordinary People, dominates the sociopolitical culture all around the Counter-Jihad, persists in its stubborn myopia to the problem of Islam because their focus is really not on Islam, but on Muslims:  They generously assume, on the basis of principles such as "presumed innocent before guilty" and "give the benefit of the doubt" -- further augmented by our perennial Western anxiety over our White Guilt which anxiously moves them to want to avoid "tarring all Muslims with a broad brush" -- that the vast majority of Muslims are "decent moms and pops like the rest of us".  And they do this all in order to avoid the worst sin of all for the white Westerner -- "racism" and "bigotry" (in sneer quotes, to distinguish the PC MC deformation of those terms, as opposed to the terms when considered rationally without PC MC, which indeed are to be eschewed by all good men and women).

This generous assumption is the powerful basis, in the hearts & minds of the Western Mainstream, for the anxious fear that a growing alarm at the hatred and violence perpetrated by innumerable Muslims will eventually trigger in us a movement from targeting only a Tiny Minority of Extremists to targeting all Muslims, thus sweeping up millions of innocent Brown People into a comprehensively racist dragnet that will inexorably leads us down the slippery slope of rounding up all Muslims, putting them into concentration camps, then genociding them.  With this horrendous fear in their minds, naturally the PC MC mainstream would do anything to prevent that, including first and foremost shutting down any conversation about it that would dare to imply that anything more than a Tiny Minority of Extremists is the problem -- and other related High Thought Crimes.

On this point, the PC MC mainstream is ahead of the curve -- Muslims are the topic, not merely Islam in abstraction from Muslims -- though they draw the disastrously wrong conclusion, based upon the faulty premise that assumes that the vast majority of Muslims are innocent and need to be respected and embraced, that there is no systemic problem of Muslims, metastasizing in our time in a nexus of violent jihad and stealth jihad.  The PC MC mainstream resists admitting there is a problem of Islam because they reasonably realize that you can't have a problem of Islam without assuming that Muslims who follow Islam are also a problem -- and from there, that the problem of Muslims following Islam is an open-ended problem that would threaten the safely narrow Tiny Minority of Extremists meme.

For some reason, the Counter-Jihad Mainstream seems to have enormous inertia about this elementary bit of logic. Actually, I think I know the reason: they share with the broader Western Mainstream the same White Guilt, which is the main substance of PC MC.  The Counter-Jihad Mainstream thus is afraid to go down the road of facing the general problem of Muslims, not merely because they don't want to arouse the anger of the PC MC mainstream and thus think it's a strategic mistake, but also because they themselves share the same anxiety to avoid "tarring all Muslims with the same brush".

As long as the Counter-Jihad Mainstream indulges this paradigm inertia, it will be trying to lever a change in the myopic West with precisely the wrong mechanics, forever rolling the boulder up the Sisyphean hill as it insists that Islam is the problem and that "Islam is not a race", only to have it tumble back down when the broader West refuses to listen to a "racist Islamophobia".  This maddeningly unproductive exchange between the Counter-Jihad and its broader West has been going on for 15 years, with little to show.  Indeed, the broader West seems to have dug in to its See-No-Islam position even more stubbornly now than ever before.

Isn't it time for a paradigm shift?