Maajid Nawaz is a "Freedom Fighter" according to Robert Spencer

In my most recent posting, Damned if you do, demonized if you don't, I noted how Robert Spencer has not been doing his due diligence as a Counter-Jihad Luminary in addressing in depth & detail the "Better Cop" Muslims, such as Maajid Nawaz among others.

I also noted that more recently, he blurted out at least something about Nawaz, in the context of a recent hit list put out by the Southern Poverty Law Center in which they shine a harsh spotlight on 13 supposed Islamophobes (Nawaz among them, as well as Robert Spencer himself and his longtime ally, Pam Geller):

...as for working with moderate Muslims, for 13 years Jihad Watch has contained this invitation: “Any Muslim who renounces violent jihad and dhimmitude is welcome to join in our anti-jihadist efforts.” It is Nawaz (as well as other moderates) who has attacked me, in what appears to have been a cynical attempt to gain support for himself among Muslims; I never attacked him, and would have have been happy to work with him otherwise.

This is a typical Spencerism -- deficient in critical analysis of the problem of Nawaz, while petulant that Nawaz doesn't want to work with Spencer.

And as I wrote:

"Spencer just doesn't get it.  Nawaz didn't attack Spencer as a "a cynical attempt to gain support for himself among Muslims"; he did, and does similar things, as a cynical attempt to gain support for himself among Counter-Jihadists -- notably Sam Harris and his fan club -- who are more anxiously concerned about the PC MC Mainstream's disfavor even than Spencer is."

Now in a new post on Jihad Watch calling on readers to sign a petition against the Southern Poverty Law Center's hit list, Spencer even goes so far as to call that pseudo-Reformer snake, Maajid Nawaz, a "freedom fighter".

That's precisely the Counter-Jihad cred Nawaz craves -- and receives -- from dupes like Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray -- and now, Robert Spencer.

Damned if you do, demonized if you don't...

Like most people -- at least most people who bother to scan Jihad Watch regularly for current stories and analyses about the primary problem (the problem of Islam) and the secondary problem (the problem of the problem -- namely, the problem of the Western mainstream in denial about the primary problem); not to mention the tertiary problem (the problem of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, of which Jihad Watch is a bastion, dealing inadequately with the aforementioned two problems) -- my eyes tend to rivet onto those posts that have the highest number of comments, especially those that puncture the triple-digit zone.

This morning, on my third gulp of my triple decaf (triple moderate) jihadaccino, I almost overlooked one post there that when I last checked, had only 8 comments (and as of now, hours later, has a whopping, staggering 30).  However slight it apparently is to the regular Jihad Watchers, it turns out to be of great interest to those of us (some 5.3 of us) who have wondered for years why Robert Spencer doesn't speak out more about the growing phenomenon of the slyly cynical, affably glib "Reformist" Muslims infiltrating the sociopolitical pop culture of the West, whom I have collectively deemed "Better Cops".

For one analysis of this phenomenon, see my essay, Good Cop, Better Cop.  And if the reader wants that fleshed out in even more detail, he may consult several of my essays on this Google page.  The one time in many years that Spencer has adverted to one of those Better Cops, Zudhi Jasser, it was basically to excuse him:

" -- look, I don't really want to talk about Zuhdi Jasser because he's a good guy... and I don't doubt that Zuhdi Jasser's heart is in the right place..."

(See my essay on this, Ees not jure job...?)

One of the inadequacies of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream I alluded to above is, precisely, a naive and/or obtuse incomprehension of the phenomenon of the Better Cop.  This naivety or incomprehension reaches right up to Robert Spencer himself, as I've analyzed many times before (see for example my old essay, The Problem: Wahidism, not "Wahhabism").  And one of the slimier of the Better Cops is Maajid Nawaz, whose unctuously glossy hair product has apparently fooled the likes of otherwise intelligent luminaries of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream as Sam Harris, Douglas Murray, and (alas) Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  In vain, I have scoured the archives of Jihad Watch and Googled to find Robert Spencer's substantive views (or any views at all) on the likes of Nawaz.

Finally, in this article today, we at least get some glimmers of what Spencer thinks of Nawaz, and they are telling -- and, of course, unsurprising.

Spencer reports that the writer of an atheist blog, Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist,  expressed concern that Nawaz and Hirsi Ali were included in a list of Islamophobic Deplorables by the Leftist activist group, the Southern Poverty Law Center:

“If criticizing religious beliefs makes them extremists,” wrote Mehta, “then it won’t be long before other vocal atheists end up on that list too. And make no mistake, that’s what Nawaz and Hirsi Ali are doing. That’s all they’re doing. They’re not anti-Muslim; they work with moderate Muslims. They’re critical of the worst aspects of Islam.”

Spencer takes this opportunity to assure his readers and the world that he is not anti-Muslim:

Mehta protests that Nawaz and Hirsi Ali are “not anti-Muslim; they work with moderate Muslims. They’re critical of the worst aspects of Islam.” 

But no one would think that the other 13 were “anti-Muslim” if it hadn’t been for the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and their allied groups insisting that we were all these years, in their avidity to conflate opposition to jihad terror and Sharia oppression with hating a group of people — a tactic designed to discredit opposition to jihad terror and Sharia oppression. [bold emphasis added]

This isn't the first time Spencer has complained about Sam Harris.  There seems to be a hierarchy in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, where luminaries like Spencer are deemed to be a bit too untouchable for the more broadly mainstream likes of Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Douglas Murray, and others.  What makes the difference is that the broader Western Mainstream remains heavily PC MC, and if anyone wants to partake in it, or is deemed to be already in it -- like a Sam Harris -- then their Mainstream cred can be jeopardized if they are seen to hobnob too closely with the greasier Islamophobes below them on the Mainstream food chain.

At any rate, here's the part where Spencer alludes to Nawaz:

...as for working with moderate Muslims, for 13 years Jihad Watch has contained this invitation: “Any Muslim who renounces violent jihad and dhimmitude is welcome to join in our anti-jihadist efforts.” It is Nawaz (as well as other moderates) who has attacked me, in what appears to have been a cynical attempt to gain support for himself among Muslims; I never attacked him, and would have have been happy to work with him otherwise.

Spencer just doesn't get it.  Nawaz didn't attack Spencer as a "a cynical attempt to gain support for himself among Muslims"; he did, and does similar things, as a cynical attempt to gain support for himself among Counter-Jihadists -- notably Sam Harris and his fan club -- who are more anxiously concerned about the PC MC Mainstream's disfavor even than Spencer is.  And if Nawaz would merely turn his oily head around and connect eyes with Spencer, standing in the rain outside the pale of the scarlet ropes of the In Crowd, and nod to the PC MC bodyguards to go ahead and let Robert in, Robert would have have been happy to work with him otherwise.

Postscript:

Meanwhile, Spencer continues to protest that he is "not anti-Islam" and "not anti-Muslim", and where does it get him?  He still isn't invited to sit at the Mainstream Table in polite company with Sam Harris & Co.  This damned if you do, demonized if you don't situation works paradoxically in Spencer's favor, in that his growing audience sees this mainstream disrespect of their hero as a validation of his Counter-Jihad heroism (meanwhile, they ignore his protestations that he is "not anti-Islam" and "not anti-Muslim").

A further wrinkle to this paradox is pointed out by Spencer himself, alluding to how even though the likes of Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz remain standoffish to him, as though they don't want to be infected by his Islamophobic cooties (and thus ruin their standing foothold in the broader Mainstream), they are increasingly being accused of the same accusations (of "racism" or "bigotry" etc.) leveled at the greasier Islamophobes like Spencer.  But of course, the same paradoxical dynamic works for Harris and Nawaz -- with one hand they feed off these accusations and remain perilously secure, by their fingernails, on the firm ledge of the broader Mainstream and its approval; while with the other hand they use this growing PR problem to boost their Counter-Jihad cred (safely asymptotic as it is) among those who admire them for their "bravery" in discussing Islam frankly and "incorrectly".  It's a rather subtle and tricky balancing act to be playing -- and it gets subtler and trickier the more you anxiously court the PC MC Mainstream's favor.  With someone as sincerely starry-eyed as Harris, this paradox is just an accidental artifact of his asymptotic PC MC intersecting his bold, albeit over-cautious criticism of Islam; with his partner in bromance, Nawaz, however, we can reasonably assume this balancing act is a shrewdly calculated tactic, enabling his deeper infiltration of the Counter-Jihad.

Banking on De Nile... in this, our midwinter (Arab) Spring...

An old Jihad Watch story included this statement:

“Some Copts practice FGM as a matter of assimilation to the Muslim majority. This must stop.”

I think it’s more than “some”  And sure, it “must” stop; but will it...?

This highlights, with acutely grotesque focus, an important subsidiary problem of the Problem of Islam—the problem of Dhimmitude and its multifarious ways of enabling Islam and of inhibiting the fight of the free world against it.

As we veteran Counter-Jihadists know, from our memory of the days when Jihad Watch was split into a second branch, “Dhimmi Watch”, and from there along the meandering garden paths of our Unsentimental Education, leading to Bat Ye'or's useful coinage of the term, Dhimmitude is not merely a river in Egypt, but also a river that runs through the entire world, broader than a thousand Niles and a million Mississippis run together, providing lovely, spacious, distracting banks throughout the West on which the vast majority of free worlders may lounge about on picnic blankets enjoying the pointillistic play of sunlight on the water, the leaves, the flowers, our dotted parasols and our overweight mistresses, alternately in De Nile or rolling up the cuffs of our pantaloons or the hems of our dresses to wade, in-Seine... while our collective Lethe of Islamnesia courses on through the plains of a planet desperately yet pleasantly in denial, refusing to notice that the ground has shifted under our feet, with a bang after the nine-eleven rupture of the fin du siècle, into a 21st century that could eventually see the end of Islam.  Or the end of us.

But surely not the prolongation of this Fukuyamish daydream we persist in indulging, dizzying our distractions through a technopathic galaxy of Pascalian divertissements, our worldwide web where the spider is caught, while the ants are not.

The only question we canaries in the coalmine, we gadflies at the picnic, ask is whether we will connect all the pointillistic dots of our Brave Bourgeois World and wake up in time to save millions of people from being massacred, mangled and tortured by Muslims, so many army ants, or jihad ants, swarming our unwitting yellow-green sward, before we finally rouse ourselves to suspend our picnic vacation, furl our parasols, gather up our blankets, our nappes, our baskets of fruit & bottles of wine, and rid our precious, free greenery at last of this formidable formication by expelling it, and its millions of Mohammedan nits, back to the wastes whence they pullulated.

Before we do that, however, we must remove the rose-colored glasses and pinces-nez of our politically correct naivety that, by fostering a pleasant blur of multiculuralist pointillism, has screened out the myriad dots whose complex connections would have alarmed us long ago, had we done it, to bolt upright from our picnic blankets in a panic at the infestation that had grown incrementally over the decades at our feet and under our noses while we continued recklessly to play host to this teeming host in our midst.

St. Francis of Assissi, and Pope Francis of Hashashin...

This past week, the Mohammedan carnage in Nigeria continues apace:

"Nigeria: Muslims murder over 40 Christians, burn down their houses"

This carnage has been going on for years.

This week's story from the Morning Star News, on which Jihad Watch reported, adds more disturbing details:

The Rev. Thomas Akut of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) Good News Church in Godogodo said the assailants burned houses and shot Christians dead in the attack over the weekend.

The 41-year-old Pastor Akut and his family escaped harm, sleeping on the ground outside town until Sunday morning (Oct. 16), when they made their way to Kafanchan, he told Morning Star News by phone.

“We fled into the bushes, and some of us escaped to safer areas,” he said. “The attackers were in the hundreds and were well armed. Some of them wore army uniforms, while others wore police uniforms. Some of them exchanged gunfire with the few soldiers stationed at the post office in the town, while others burned down houses of Christians.”

Solomon Musa, an attorney and president of the Southern Kaduna People’s Union (SOKAPU), said at a press conference on Monday (Oct. 17) ...:

“The savagery and barbarity of the attack is beyond belief,” Musa said. “Yet, governments at the federal and state levels appear quiet and noncommittal. We have been abandoned, deserted and neglected.”

In addition to homes burned by the marauding Muslims, 16 church buildings were damaged in the terror attack:

The damaged buildings belonged to ... St. Simeon Anglican Church, Church of Christ in Nations (COCIN), Deeper Life Bible Church, Grace of God Church, Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Assemblies of God Church, ECWA I & II, ECWA Good News, ECWA Kibam, Lord’s Chosen Church, Methodist Church of Nigeria, Nasara Baptist Church, Christ Apostolic Church, and Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Oh, and one other church building was damaged by the terrorizing Muslims:  St. Francis Catholic Church.

Recently, Raymond Ibrahim, a fairly solid member of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, published an article comparing Pope Francis I with his namesake, the original St. Francis of Assissi: Pope Francis vs. Saint Francis on Islam.  He found that while the original St. Francis did have a naive expectation that debating Muslims in order to convert them to Christianity was a useful endeavor (as do, I suspect, Raymond Ibrahim himself, Robert Spencer, David Wood, Sam Shamoun, Nabeel Qureshi, Jonathan McLatchie, et al. -- all Christian Wilsonianists), nevertheless St. Francis was not naive about the overall danger of Mohammedans, and he actually supported military Crusades against them in order to help Christians who were being massacred and oppressed by Muslims in the Holy Land and environs.

Pastor Thomas Akut was able to say what his own Pope is too cowardly to say:

“This is a jihad,” he said. “It is an Islamic holy war against Christians in the southern part of Kaduna state.”

Has the Pope said anything about the carnage, about the genocide against Christians by Muslims in our time -- not only in Nigeria, but throughout Islam-infected Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia (think of Pakistan, where Christians are horribly persecuted by Muslims)?  No.  Instead, he lectures the West on its bigotry and Islamophobia; and as a symbolic gesture of this, he washes the feet of Muslims.

Shame on Pope Francis I, and on the Catholics who see no problem with him abandoning his flock to the Mohammedan wolves.

Further Reading:

Saint Leonella

Jihad Watch reports on St. Francis and Islam

A coffee break from the problems

I'm sick of Islam (the problem).

I'm sick of the West ignoring the problem of Islam (the problem of the problem).

I'm sick of the "Counter-Jihad" indulging fallacies about the first two problems (the problem of the problem of the problem...).