A little conversation about the whole damned mess...

A Jihad Watch commenter once asked me:

How would JW folks be able to accomplish what they are trying to do better by taking on board what you are saying?

Well (I said), I see that as a two-part or two-fold question. The still inchoate anti-Islam movement remains embryonic and not entirely coherent because there seems to be no concerted platform: I.e., what exactly are JW folks (reflecting all who are “in” the still-inchoate anti-Islam movement) trying to do?

So your question also includes that internal question. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to have a vaguely amorphous anti-Islam antipathy more or less galvanizing a growing embryo of a movement than not to have that; but surely more definition is needed.

Unfortunately, I often see, when some JW folks are prodded with probing questions about the problem of Muslims, discomfitting signs of a soft, squishy, nougaty center corrupted by asymptotic caramel, such that what I thought were no-nonsense stalwart Counter-Jihadists turn out to be barely distinguishable from George “Muslims-are-decent-moms-and-pops-like-the-rest-of-us” Bush’s war on terror.

Secondly, your question points to an important dimension of our overall movement: namely, that we are in, as Frank Gaffney aptly puts it, “the battle space of the war of ideas”. As such, this important dimension is about E-C-P: Education, Communication, Persuasion. And this war is not a civil war so much as a war that should remain civil — a struggle to persuade the majority of our fellow Westerners who persist in their myopia which, sociopolitically and psychologically, is a giant mass of tissue combining pleasantly passive laziness with starry-eyed politically correct sincerity. As such, it will take years, if not decades, to wake them up to the problem of Muslims. To recognize my previous point is to recognize that our internal dilemma is not as neatly polarized as most JW folks are irresponsibly implying all day long.

And this penchant for most JW folks to indulge in this polarization (between “Us Ordinary folks who get it” and “Them Damned Leftists over there”) is highly ironic, given how soft and naively gullible so many of these JW folks are about Muslims. If they could only adjust these two parameters to try to reverse them into their mirror image (tougher on all Muslims, more understanding of “liberals”), the movement’s “battle space” would become much more efficient, in tactics and substance. I think part of what’s going on here is “TPS” — the “Tea Party Syndrome”: These JW folks I am describing are really fixated on the “real problem” — Liberalism, with the problem of Islam only a peripheral sub-problem currently occupying their attention.

Postscript:

It is our grim luck that Muslims will help this overall situation, by being unable to control themselves in the coming decades as they continue to spiral and metastasize in murder and mayhem, seemingly haphazard, but more likely than not part of an overall goal of Jihad conquest over "Rome" (i.e., the West), facilitated by the Useful Idiocy (paradoxically a "morosophy") of that same West.

Will the "Counter-Jihad" get its shit together in time over the coming decades to avert the catastrophe by waking up (a sufficient number of) its fellow Westerners?  I used to be a "pessimist for now, but ultimately an optimist" on this question. Now, alack, I tilt decidedly worseward. And I can thank the "Counter-Jihad" in large part for my gloominess.