"I'll have an unrealistic cup of coffee, please..."

A leitmotif Robert Spencer indulges in:

Editorializing on this headline -- "New York City jihad bomber is now recruiting for jihad in prison" -- Spencer remarks:

Nothing is done with jihadis in prison to try to change their jihadi mindset. To attempt any such thing would have been “Islamophobic.”

Au contraire, my counter-jihad frère: In fact, nothing should be done with jihadis in prison or elsewhere in the West -- except deport them from the West.  Or does Spencer honestly believe that jihadis can be deprogrammed? 

Good Coffee, Bad Coffee

"BC" wrote of UK Muslim columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who, Jihad Watch reported today, says Christmas is “Islamophobic”:

She used to write a lot of sense about Muslims in UK and she got a lot of abuse as well but then she seemed to lose it. 

So while Yasmin was writing "a lot of sense about Muslims", our stalwart Jihad Watch reader "BC" had, apparently, no problems with her and even found her viewpoint salutary -- until she "seemed to lose it".  How about we never trust any Muslim in the first place?  Too tall an order, I guess, for many (if not most?) in the Counter-Jihad...

"Bus your own table, please..."

As I've been saying for years (but nobody seemed to listen), Muslims have been elevated to the top of the Aggrieved Ethnic Minority/Leftist Cause Célèbre Food Chain -- such that when any other ethnic minority or cause célèbre (e.g., gays, women) comes into conflict with Muslims, the former are thrown under the bus to protect the latter (the Mother of All Others, Muslims).

Yet another confirmation of this when recently Jihad Watch posted stories about how one of Robert Spencer's main collaborators & colleagues -- one Christine Williams-Douglass -- a black female writer from Canada (would that be "African-Canadian"...?) was thrown under the bus by the Canadian government to placate Muslims:

"Christine Douglass-Williams fired from Canadian Race Relations Foundation for writing for Jihad Watch"

"Canada: Hamas-linked Muslim group crows, government mum on firing of Christine Douglass-Williams from race board"

P.S.: It's ironic, given that Douglass-Williams is markedly soft on Muslims, exemplifying yet another phenomenon I've been calling attention to over the years (and nobody has seemed to be listening): the "damned if you do/damned if you don't" dynamic.

Good Coffee, Bad Coffee, Better Coffee... hmmm, hard decision there...

But what's the better coffee going to cost me...?

A recent headline on Jihad Watch:

UK: Muslims threaten to kill Muslim boxer for putting up a Christmas tree 

From the story:

“Amir Khan and wife Faryal Makhdoom receive death threats for putting up a Christmas tree,”

The Muslims who threatened Amir and his wife Faryal are, of course, the Bad Coffee/Cops/Muslims.  The interesting question is whether Amir and Faryal are Good Cops, or Better Cops.  That depends entirely on whom they fool -- the broader Western Mainstream, so easy to fool? Or the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, less easy (but, alas, not at all impossible) to fool?  Whichever demographic Amir and Faryal's behavior fools, the fooling consists primarily in the effect their valiant action to put up a Christmas tree (made even more heroic by receiving death threats) will have: tending to reinforce  our decent Western disinclination to cultivate a rational prejudice against all Muslims.

And as long as that rational prejudice is, in myriad ways, many of them quite subtle -- but all involving Muslims who just wanna have a sandwich and coffee -- inhibited, Muslims will continue to have a good chance to realize their dream of destroying "Rome" (i.e., us).

Coffee for thought...

Jihad Watch headline:

Oklahoma: Muslim who beheaded coworker gets death penalty 

Robert Spencer opines:

This is just what Alton Nolen wanted (which is not to say that it should not be done). He “justified his actions based on his reading of the Quran.” The Qur’an promises Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).

Better than the death penalty would have been to deport him as soon as he converted to Islam (along with all the other Muslims in the West).  But no, the Counter-Jihad Mainstream refuses to push the Meme of Total Deportation. 

"I'll have a schizoccino, please -- oh, and also a cake I can have and eat too..."

Of the thousands of examples of the schizophrenia of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism throughout the West over the years which one could serve up, I saw yet another this morning, pregnant in this headline at Jihad Watch:

Canadian Senate passes bill to remove mention of “barbaric cultural practices” from law banning FGM... 

The frothy schizophrenia with which this headline is brimming must be palpated.  The Canadian Senate, anxious to protect Muslims, 1) prohibits the use of the phrase “barbaric cultural practices” from a practice that, because it is self-evidently horrible (female genital mutilation), it otherwise anxiously hastens to remind its citizens has nothing to do with mainstream Islam and with the vast majority of Muslims who are decent moms and pops like the rest of us; but 2) in this very prohibition's motive to protect Muslims, it is clearly telegraphing a direct connection between Muslims and the banned practice of FGM.

"I'll have a single Decapuccino, please..."

A Jihad Watch headline from a while back:

Italy: Muslim migrant slits non-Muslim’s throat... 

Did the Muslim merely "slit" the Italian's throat, or did he actually behead him (or try to behead him, as with the assassinations of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam and Lee Rigby in London)?

That would be a good assignment for the Counter-Jihad: Make a tally of all the times the mainstream media have reported a beheading as a far more anodyne "slit his throat" or "cut his throat" or just "kill" in a generic sense.

Such euphemisms would be the Kuffar form of Kitman -- telling part of the truth, but not all of it.  It's true that when a Muslim beheads someone, he is cutting and slitting (and slicing and dicing).  But that's not all he's doing; and the gruesome act and its horrifying result are qualitatively significant and distinct from what it involves (viz., cutting and slitting).

What lovely topics Islam brings to mind on a pleasant wintry morning as we sip our coffee...

Drinking the previous coffee

Drinking the previous coffee, fighting the previous war.

"35,000 jihadists now present in the UK, almost two full World War II divisions" so Robert Spencer informs his readers on Jihad Watch.  What about the other two million, 700 thousand plus Muslims in the UK (total population of Muslims in the UK, at least 2,786,635)?

How do we know they are all not "jihadists"?  Is Spencer relying on the UK government to be able to discern which Muslims are jihadists and which are not?  And what is a "jihadist" anyway?  A practitioner of Jihad, one would assume.  And what is Jihad?  Spencer seems to think, or certainly is massively communicating to his audience, that a jihadist is a front-line soldier -- with the implication that any Muslim who is not on the front lines (driving a vehicle over innocent people in the street, stabbing people, exploding in public places, etc. -- but not including "crime") is therefore not waging jihad.  It's as if all his former years of warning us about the stealth jihad have been replaced by a warning only of jihadists (or, sometimes for an Arabic twang, Spencer writes "jihadis" without the Western t).  And aren't there a multitude of forms of jihad, many not involving any overt violence at all?  And aren't they all needed, in order to enable far worse violence in our future?

Without that 1) broader, more complex and deceptive tissue of non-"jihadi" Muslims practicing their various forms of stealth jihad; and without 2) our Western naivete and phobia of Islamophobia -- #2 massively reinforced by #1 -- all the divisions in the world composed of the Minority of Extremists would be unable to do much more than pose a minor security risk for the indefinite future.

"I'll have a Radicalized Espresso, please..."

In a notice about two Muslims in Texas who joined ISIS, Robert Spencer writes:

Arman and Omar Ali, Muslim brothers from Texas who became devout in their observance of Islam and then joined the Islamic State (ISIS).

First of all, Spencer can't know whether or not they "became devout" without having a mind-reading machine.  Or does he assume, after the jihadi-fact, that they must be devout?  Our whole quandary with regard to Islam is that we need to determine before Muslims explode that they are "devout".  Or better yet, just use rational prejudice to assume they are already, by the mere fact that they self-identify as Muslims.  He's inferring that from the fact that they joined ISIS.  This implies a cluster of things: that Islam leads to (or better yet, is) dangerous fanaticism, since increased devoutness to it leads to joining ISIS; and that increased devoutness is, apparently, functioning as Spencer's back door to the Radicalization Meme.

The Radicalization Meme, in turn, implies that Muslims who are not "radicalized" are not of concern, or should be of less concern, than the "jihadis".  This in turn implies that not all Muslims are "jihadis" (perhaps even most are not) -- which in turn implies that "jihad" is only violent.  What happened to the Stealth Jihad which in the old days Spencer used to mention every other time he mentioned "jihad"?

Our first inference -- that Islam leads to (or better yet, is) dangerous fanaticism -- would set up a paradox for Spencer's perpetually elliptical rhetoric about the problem of Islam -- since not only would he have to disavow his statement that he is "not anti-Islam", it would also imply that all Muslims are already "radical" (with their apparent diversity explained through our knowledge of taqiyya and of the diversity of flavors of jihad).

The Civilians of the Counter-Jihad will likely never get any straight talk from Spencer on these important questions, since the Civilians don't seem to care to ask them of him.

"Sikh, and ye shall find..."

In the wake of the latest New York City attack by Muslims, Jihad Watch reports that a Sikh who happens to be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas (and Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, whatever the heck that is) tweeted an anxious appeal to protect "brown people".

"Historically," the Sikh professor says, "attacks like these have been followed by violence against innocent brown Americans."

Then Robert Spencer writes:

Here is still more in the Left’s endless quest to portray everything as a racial issue. 

No, not everything.  It's mostly Islam that Leftists racialize (and that surely is our chief concern).  And it's not merely Leftists who indulge in this racialization of Islam -- innumerable non-Leftists throughout the West also wring their hands about the possible "bigotry" and "racism" involved in condemning Islam and the Muslims who promote it (and how many Muslims don't promote it...?)

And since when is a Sikh a "Leftist"?  The term "Leftist" applies only to Westerners, as it is a sociopolitical, cultural deformation organically grown in the West.  A non-Westerner may put it on like an overcoat and sport it around town, but that doesn't make him a "Leftist".   

A much more appropriate, and historico-culturally accurate term for this Sikh professor would be dhimmi, since we know that Sikhism developed in a context of relentless, horrific attacks and oppression by Muslims on non-Muslim Indians in the Asian subcontinent over centuries of unspeakable brutality.  Anyone who derives from this ancestral holocaust and still defends his people's enemy is clearly crippled, psychologically and culturally, by the Stockholm Syndrome of dhimmitude.  But no; Spencer ignores all this and leaps straight for the Leftist jugular.  This is yet another example of Robert Spencer seeing only Left.  I hope he doesn't do that when he's being tested with the eye chart at his next optometrist's appointment...

"That coffee chain sells toxic coffee that has already killed thousands of people -- but I'm going to write an essay about how the music they play in their shops is atrociously cheesy 90s pop..."

Hugh Fitzgerald, the Poet Laureate of the Counter-Jihad (or at least he used to be, until for some inexplicable reason after he returned from a long mysterious hiatus from Jihad Watch, he changed his literary style), recently penned a long essay about how, pace the mainstream Western media, Jerusalem's significance to one of "the three Abrahamic faiths" -- Islam, natch -- is much less historically substantial than its significance to Judaism and Christianity.

The problem with Hugh's essay is that it's arguing about the wrong thing (or as I put it years ago, "It's the Violence, Stupid").  If Muslims weren't killing people -- escalating in their murderous violence as part of a perennial, expansionist supremacist blueprint to ruin all civilizations in order to make their fanatical, flawed, evil and toxic regime supreme -- then this issue about whether Jerusalem has equal or less significance to Islam than to the other Two Faiths would be academic.

In fact, if Muslims were behaving like the members of any other religion on the planet instead of killing people, torturing people, oppressing people, plotting horrific terror attacks all over the place, rioting at the drop of a hat over cartoons, treating women like shit, enslaving people, raping people, violating the chastity of countless underage girls and boys, and then adding insult to injury by lying to us about all of the aforementioned -- most in the West would extend the favor to Muslims of saying, "Hey you guys, sure, we get it -- you have a tradition that makes you think Jerusalem is a vital holy city in your faith: Go for it! We support you!  We'll make room for you!"

"Garçon, where is my croissant, s'il vous plaît...?"

I watch (and read, and analyze) Jihad Watch pretty much on a daily basis.  I suppose this has happened before in its 14-odd-year career, but I've never noticed it before. A report that was up a couple of days ago has vanished into thin air.

It was a report on a female British activist Jayda Fransen who, along with members of her party Britain First (dubbed "far right" if not "fascist" no doubt, by the Orwellian media) has done things like walk through Muslim neighborhoods in various locations in England (e.g., Luton, a town north of London) carrying crosses -- and for this (along with giving public speeches in which she expresses her appropriate outrage at what Muslims are doing in England), she has been arrested and faces prison and/or stiff fines for "hate speech".  She recently became world-famous for being the source of the tweet which Trump retweeted and for which, of course, the entire Cosmos lambasted him.

So there was a notice about this on Jihad Watch a couple of days ago; and now it's vanished.  Naturally, Spencer is too busy jet-setting around promoting his book to bother to write a note (or have one of his underlings like "marc" his tech wizard write a note), briefly explaining why to his loyal readers who support him by buying his stuff and making him the counter-jihad celebrity he has become.

"Waiter, there's a fly in my coffee..."

A recent Jihad Watch report relayed this headline:

Pakistan: Video shows civilians aiding jihadis screaming “Allahu akbar” while murdering 13 at college

Robert Spencer editorialized:

“We can’t say for sure whether or not it was an inside job. But yes, there are some people in the footage seen guiding the terrorists.” Certainly there is no shortage of jihad sympathizers among Pakistani civilians. And why is that? Because they realize the Islamic justifications for what the jihadis do. 

The fly in my frappaccino was the phrase I bolded:  “they realized.”  Somehow, I don't think the fanaticism of a Pakistani Muslim rabble, inculcated over a lifetime of a sociocultural process of intricate inculcation steeped in the complex madness of Islam, involves any form of “realization.” One reasonably smells here in Spencer's phrase the telltale hint of the flawed “radicalization” meme (along with the implicit, corollary meme, “Muslims must be like us deep down, until outside forces adventitiously radicalize them”).   

"I'm not anti-coffee; I only oppose frappuccinos..."

Editorializing on a recent report of a Muslim out of New Jersey (probably yet another in a long line of black converts to Islam) who goes by the colorful name of “Mr. Supreme A. Allah” -- and who was charged with “murder, felony murder, robbery, carjacking, unlawful possession of a handgun, possession of a handgun for an unlawful purpose, and conspiracy to commit murder” -- Robert Spencer, less squirrelly than usual in this regard, just came out and blurted:

This story has nothing to do with jihad, as far as I know...

If this could not be clearer than the sky on a cloudlessly blue, sublime summer morning that Spencer understands jihad in a very limited way, I don't know what else to say.  (See my previous posting -- "I'll have an asymptoticcino, please..." -- on Spencer's myopia to that subtype of jihad we could (and should) call the jihad of criminality.)

"I'll have a counter-jihad croissant with plenty of soft nougat inside to go with my triple decaf counter-jihadaccino, please..."

Editorializing on one of his own recent Jihad Watch headlines --

Michigan: Court rules that Muslim woman in danger of honor killing in Jordan will not be sent back 

-- Robert Spencer writes:

"The ruling is good."

Here we have our American government actually deporting a Muslim from the U.S. (her student visa, which should never be issued to Muslims anyway, expired), and we have Spencer wanting this Muslim to stay.  Apparently, Spencer believes that when a Muslim is victimized by other Muslims, that victimized Muslim must be harmless and should remain in the West.

The point is not merely, nor even mainly, that this particular Muslim (Olga Jad Kamar) poses an imminent threat to Westerners; but that our Spencerian need to exude humnitarian concern for Muslim Victims (of other Muslims) only tends to reinforce, in the long run, our unwillingness to grow a rational prejudice against all Muslims, thereby helping to make sure Muslims will continue to be accepted by us as part of our broader Western sociopolitical tapestry -- which eventually, perhaps by the end of this 21st century -- will allow Muslims in the West to pull off the kind of terror attacks which will make 911 look like firecrackers at a 4th of July picnic.  Attacks of such numerous incidence, broad dispersal, and mass-destruction capability as to portend widespread disabling if not destruction of our social, economic and material infrastructures while, of course, mass-murdering perhaps millions of our men, women and children. But apparently, Spencer doesn't see the threat of Islam as being that dire.  Confessions of an Islamophobe! Can I get a ROMPRLMAO (Rolling On My Prayer Rug, Laughing My Ass Off)...?

"I'll have a cup of non-anti-caffeine decaf, please..."

In a Jihad Watch posting today, we got a glimpse of Robert Spencer's inner incoherence (which he keeps disguised from his followers -- though with a few wardrobe malfunctions they are too obtuse, or too slavish, to detect -- nowadays, at least, unlike several years ago when he actually engaged his civilian readership).  In a notice about a Muslim activist, San Diego State University professor Khaleel Mohammed, Spencer editorialized:

Professor Khaleel Mohammed of San Diego State University appeared in the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West,” but then had the realization that he was aiding “Islamophobia” and repented publicly of his participation. Whether his coreligionists threatened him or he decided on his own to join the jihad, I do not know. 

It's difficult to bold only for emphasis, so numerous and clustered are the counter-jihad solecisms in that brief passage.

The first problem here that glares at us (at least those of us who are actually anti-Islam (which, when “actually,” means also anti-Muslim -- neither of which, by his own admission, Spencer is) is where he imputes a “realization” on the part of Prof. Khaleel Mohammed.  It is not reasonable -- nor judicious in light of the Counter-Jihad's main task to wake up the West to the danger of the global revival of Islam -- to indulge in speculation about any “realizations” a Muslim may or may not have; and most certainly not in the crucial context in which Spencer is indulging here: giving this particular Muslim the benefit of the doubt as to whether (“I do not know”) he might have, in the past, been working with us against “the jihad,” but “then” at some point in time changed his mind to “join the jihad.”

Spencer is also, of course, clearly implying here that not all Muslims have “joined the jihad” -- indeed, that many, if not most, have not.  How else are we to parse his recent statement that: “not all Muslims, or even a majority, are terrorists”...?  Would Spencer, if he were confronted with a question on this (and why hasn't anyone confronted him with questions like this? or why hasn't he volunteered to clarify himself?), try to say that “well, certainly many Muslims who are not engaged in terrorism are engaged in various forms of jihad”...?  But the screaming question then is, how many? and then, how do we tell the difference between the ones who are and the one's who don't seem to be because they're pretending not to, through taqiyya -- hence the “stealth jihad” he used to talk about a lot (but interestingly, doesn't anymore).?  Questions like this pretty much ruin any attempt to erect some useful category of Harmless Muslims We Can Trust.  Then Spencer might say (again, it would be nice if he would clarify this for the rest of us) that we can discern the difference through vetting.  But how reliable is vetting? And are we prepared to play Muslim Roulette with our children's lives on whether crafty Muslims can pass our vetting examinations? Etc.

P.S.: Indeed, Spencer's curious statement about Khaleel Mohammed which we quoted up top indicates that, before this particular Muslim insulted Spencer recently, he was apparently willing to take him at face value as an ally, because he participated in the famous Counter-Jihad documentary, Obsession: Radical Islam's War With the West -- and that, thus, this is another in a long line of Better Cops who fool the Counter-Jihad Mainstream.

"I'll have an incoherently hypocritical cup of coffee, please..."

Our old friend "Angemon" -- whom I dubbed the "Energizer Bunny" for his literally hundreds of attacks on me in various Jihad Watch comments threads over the years (thus spawning my term "Rabbit Pack" to denote all the Jihad Watch regulars -- gravenimage, Phillip Jihadski, Wellington, Western Canadian, Mirren, dumbledoresarmy, PRCS, et al.(qaeda) -- who never came to my defense (unless you count one or two limp-wristed and bizarrely mild responses to Angemon), and even a few times, when they weren't pretending not to notice, taking the opportunity to join in Angemon's attacks on me) -- is back after a long hiatus (haven't seen his name pop up on Jihad Watch comments in months, it seems).

In a Jihad Watch thread about a French academic who envisions a solution to the metastasizing problem of Islam in a partition of France into a Muslim France and a non-Muslim France, after one newbie commenter wrung his hands about "unimaginable measures in democracy (remigration, forced evictions of the most radical)", Angemon has the rich temerity to reprove him.  After all the months, if not years, Angemon attacked me for advocating deportation of all Muslims from the West, he now affects to be oh-so tough against someone who opposes the Robert Spencer Lite approach.

And speaking of the "Rabbit Pack" member, gravenimage, she writes on the thread in question:

So Professor Christian de Moliner is horrified by the prospect of deporting Jihadists, but is fine with ceding part of civilized France to these barbarians, and seeing them flogging those who criticize Islam and stoning rape victims to death? *Ugh*.

That's rich; seeing how she did nothing to defend me from Angemon's countless attacks on me over the years for (among other judicious things) pointing out the need to deport all Muslims (and the incoherence of trying to granularize deportation short of all Muslims).

But that's typical for the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (of which Angemon is a particularly oily toady).

"I'll have an asymptoticcino, please..."

No, my title does not refer to a new, overpriced offering at Starbuck's, but rather to a term I developed many years ago to describe a subcultural phenomenon for which, as far as I know, no word had been designated -- the phenomenon, namely, of those "in the Counter-Jihad" who still retain, to one annoying (if not imperiling) degree or another, reflexes and instincts of politically correct multi-culturalism.

Today's single shot comes from Le Café Spencer along with a mazurka of tough nougat:

Editorializing on a recent news story --

“On Sunday night, a man identified as Mahad Abdiaziz Abdirahman, 20, of Minneapolis stabbed two men at the Mall of America after they tried to stop him from stealing clothes inside the dressing room at Macy’s.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch wrote:

I didn’t post about this incident here at Jihad Watch because, contrary to false claims, this is not “Muslims Committing Crimes Watch,” it is Jihad Watch, and there was no indication that this stabber was on a jihad. 

A very interesting parenthetical remark there (though pretty much unsurprising, to someone who has been paying attention over the years to Spencer's seemingly incoherent ambiguity about the problem of Islam). Another bit of evidence (to add to the mountain of coffeebeans) indicating Spencer conceives of -- or, perhaps worse, routinely articulates for the public -- the problem of Islam as a problem only of a Minority (Tiny? Small? As Large as a Pipes Dream? A Wee Bit Larger But Still Not the Majority? "Not all Muslims, or even a majority"...?   We'll never know for certain, apparently) of "Jihadists", not of all Muslims embodying in a wondrous diversity Islam's inherent expansionism.

"I'll have a bagel with my coffee..."

In the long run-up to Robert Spencer's upcoming speech at Stanford University, various PC MCs and Muslims have become hysterical about what this portends -- apparently imagining him to be some kind of racist, Islamophobic monster.  In Spencer's many short pieces on these irrational reactions, he has slung the epithet "Leftist" around at his various detractors liberally (pun intended) and well nigh universally. 

With one exception -- when a Jewish student condemned him for potentially fomenting an anti-Semitism against Muslims as, in effect, the "New Jews", I noticed a curious absence of the L word in his article in reference to this particular Jewish attacker.  He mentions "Leftist" all over the place in his commentary on the report, but only tangentially, never flat-out calling this Jewish writer, Courtney Cooperman a "Leftist" nor directly insinuating she is one.

"I'll have a cup of interesting, yet overly simplistic coffee..."

Raymond Ibrahim, part of the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (if only by virtue of the fact that he posts articles now and then on Jihad Watch, and has for years and is not just some pseudonymous slob in various comments threads attached to various counter-jihad blogs, but is well-known, at least in Counter-Jihad circles), published an interesting essay on Jihad Watch recently.  Its thesis is that Martin Luther's Reformation triggered a concatenation of a process that has paved the way for the currently widespread & dominant Western tendency to bend over and spread its butt-cheeks for Muslims.

In short,

-- Ibrahim writes, also relying upon historian Franco Cardini --

“The Reformation produced one logical if unexpected result: a definite boost to the positive evaluation of Islam, and therefore to the birth and development of an often conventional and mannered pro-Islamic stance.” This “mannered” and “pro-Islamic stance” continues to haunt the West to this day. After all, it’s not for nothing that naïve and favorable views of Islam — to say nothing of passive responses to Muslim aggression and a paralytic, all-consuming fear of being seen as “crusading” against Islam — are especially ingrained in and compromise the security of historically Protestant nations, including the U.K., Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, and the U.S.

While Ibrahimi's thesis is interesting (and I've noted how Martin Luther and Jean Calvin both made intemperate remarks about how the Pope is a worse evil than the "Turks" (the Muslims of the day)), the Counter-Jihad synthesis it would create would be overly simplistic.  For one thing, his list of "historically Protestant nations" who are soft on Islam leaves out Catholic Spain and Rome, no less soft (not to mention that the Papacy and much of its official culture is and has been for decades egregiously soft on Islam, with the previous Pope, Benedict XVI, the exception rather than the rule).  More importantly perhaps, it leaves out other contributing factors, including the collective PTSD (Post-Terrorist Stress Disorder) which the West suffered from for over 1,000 years (from the 7th clear up to the 17th century and beyond) of relentless attacks, tortures, massacres, and enslavements by Muslims; a PTSD that did not vanish when the West became spectacularly dominant globally beginning in the the late 17th century (after it won its last major battle, 1683 at the Siege of Vienna, defending itself against Muslim onslaughts).  As time went on and the West's amazing progress and expansion unfolded exponentially from the 18th to the 19th centuries, the PTSD only became submerged into a collective cultural unconscious, mingling with increasing fascination, sometimes morbid, sometimes forgetful & fanciful, of things Oriental.

As the West embarked upon its tumultuous yet still breathtakingly progressive 20th century, bringing the entire world with it, a collective amnesia about Islam became entrenched and this, coupled with the seeming backwardness of the Muslim world by the turn of the 20th century and into the first couple of decades, made it seem even to learned scholars and observers of Islam like Snouck Hurgronje that Islam's star (& crescent moon) was likely on the wane and its days of historical grandeur were gone, and it would be inevitable that most Muslims would change and therefore shed their "medieval" mores (a habit of mind condescendingly underestimating the atavistic fanaticism of Mohammedans that tends to persist into our 21st century in the broader Western Mainstream if not at times also in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream).

Also missing from Ibrahim's interesting yet overly simplistic brew are healthy factors from the West's Judaeo-Christian/Graeco-Roman heritage -- chief among which were an interest in other cultures, a self-criticism about our own culture, and a transcending of tribalism towards universalism -- which paradoxically provided a framework for their distortion in the later development of PC MC; a distortion whose major (though not the first) manifestation, symptom and further spur was the European Enlightenment of the 18th century -- itself with likely precursors in the cultural upheaval of the Reformation, though taking a more circuitous and complex route of development than Ibrahim seems capable of appreciating.

So we can add Ibrahim's factor to the hill of coffee beans as one more important facet -- but not the only one -- explaining why the West is now, in the 21st century, proceeding full-steam ahead toward civilizational suicide.

"I'll have one espresso, please..."

Concerning a picture of Muslim activist Linda Sarsour raising her index finger, various CJM Civilians over at Jihad Watch speculate on how this has been for years now a pledge of allegiance to  an ISIS.

Then one of the Civilians -- Jihad Watch veteran commenter (and member of the "Rabbit Pack", one "PRCS") -- noted that Muslims were doing this before ISIS existed (as demonstrated by a photo montage he linked of Chechen Muslim jihadists doing the one-finger salute (supposedly) in the 1990s.

Indeed, the significance of a finger as a recognition of Allah's tawheed apparently goes back to Sahih Hadiths

Of course, it didn't occur to these various CJM Civilians that the extra-ISIS usage of the Finger of Tawheed is perfect kitman cover for Muslims pretending to distance themselves from the ultimate motives and tactics of ISIS.  As a form of taqiyya (deceit for the advancement of Islam), kitman specifically means "telling some of the truth but not all of the truth".

Thus Muslims like Linda Sarsour can proudly display their index finger, and then if someone insinuates they are telegraphing their support of ISIS, she can shoot back that they are being "Islamophobic" and/or "racist".  Such Muslims can simultaneously enjoy a public display of support for Islamic terror and a public disavowal of same (hence, stealth jihad) -- plus for good measure, another chance to point the finger at the supposedly rising tide of anti-Muslim "bigotry" over which the majority of Westerners continue to wring their hands.

"A triple espresso for the triple agent..."

On the "The Heroic Tamer El-Noury" -- a Muslim who has worked for the FBI for years as a double agent, helping them to foil Al Qaeda plots and nab key terrorists -- Hugh Fitzgerald, our reliably quintessential asymptote, writes:

But his heroism does not mean we need to accept El-Noury’s benign view of Islam. Hero he certainly is, but that has not made him a reliable guide when it comes to what Islam inculcates.

And, a little later in his report, when discussing how El-Noury otherwise -- when he's not valiantly hunting down the Tiny Minority of Extremists, doggedly insists that Islam is Peace and that Most Muslims Just Wanna Have a Sandwich -- Hugh adds:

But a different, and a better view, is that when El-Noury  misleads himself, and us, about Islam, we should not let his impressive work as an undercover agent cause us to silently accept his view of Islam.

Then Hugh concludes:

Our duty is to correct his misrepresentation of the faith. 

No, Hugh. Our duty is to stop trusting any Muslims.  Period.  When an intelligent veteran of the Counter-Jihad like Hugh Fitzgerald lets himself get fooled by an El-Noury, we can see why the deeper Stealth Jihad, using not double, but triple agents (the "Moderate Muslims" of the broader Western Mainstream, the "Secular Muslims" of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Leadership, and the "decent Muslims" of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Civilians), will likely succeed in destroying Western Civilization.

"I'll have a Kurdish coffee -- hold the whey..."

As I've noted before, the Counter-Jihad Maintream tends to romanticize certain classes of Muslims -- such as the Persian People, the Arab-Sprung Egyptian Democrats, and the valiantly Westernized Kurds.

This week, the latter crotchet was indulged by none other than the Poet Laureate of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Hugh Fitzgerald -- and he wasn't content to indulge his Kurdophilia once, but in three separate essays in the span of one week.

Not only was Hugh writing in glowing terms about a people who are overwhelmingly devout Sunni Muslims -- if that isn't odd enough for an eminent writer of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Leadership -- he proceeded in these essays to expatiate upon a global policy using outlier Muslim groups (such as the Kurds, the Baluchis, the Azeris and others) as pawns -- heroic, valiant, praiseworthy pawns, to be sure -- in a Realpolitik strategy that sounds like Henry Kissinger and Daniel Pipes combined.

Sure, it's a Realpolitik that is grounded in a relatively healthy hostility to main Islamic actors on the world stage -- Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey -- but it hasn't accounted for the wild card: the millions of Muslims who have flooded the West, an incursion likely continue for decades to come, to the tune of many more millions of Muslims inside the West.  I might be supportive of Hugh's grand plan to use outlier Muslim groups with traditional grievances against the more powerful Muslims around them; but only after we have deported the millions of Muslims from the West.  For, what Hugh's grand plan is counting on is an escalation of the perennial internecine violence among Muslims -- which is fine and dandy as long this internecine violence doesn't spill over into the West, which it surely will as long as there are Muslims here and as long as the West continues its hostility to Islamocriticism (which it surely will as long as the Counter-Jihad continues to cultivate a diffidence -- if not an outright disdain for -- a rational prejudice against all Muslims).

Self-Serve Counter-Jihad

A rather startlingly substantive example of how Civilians of the Counter-Jihad (Mainstream) report more (alarmingly) useful information than does the Leadership.

Robert Spencer represents the éminence grise of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream. A better example of this unofficial position he enjoys than the name-dropping list of Counter-Jihad Mainstream celebrities (Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Gavin McInnes, Mark Steyn, Steve Bannon, Mkichelle Malkin -- of course Baron Bodissey, Debbie Schlussel, Diana West, and Frank Gaffney won't be submitting any, any time soon... and why have we not seen Andrew Bostom's name?), writing encomiums for his new book, would be hard to find.  On his flagship website, Jihad Watch, he reported a story recently:

Former Vogue model spent years in Muslim billionaire’s harem as his “pleasure wife”

Spencer then goes on very briefly to explain how in Shia Islam, functional prostitution is permitted under a category of holy “temporary marriage” and that “[s]ome Sunnis practice this also” (I've read it is not any less widespread among Sunni Muslims, so I'm not sure why Spencer is being so tepid here).

So that's it. The sum of the story -- as presented by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Leadership -- is of a fat old Saudi Muslim billionaire seducing a naive, young, beautiful American girl to join his harem, and appended to that, how mainstream Islamic doctrine permits sex slaves slash prostitution.

Leave it to one of the many Civilians who left 79 comments to supply the deeper, more alarming purport of this story (the remaining commenters merely -- typically, for Jihad Watch comments -- indulged superficial emotion).  They may be read in these four comments by a "Jack Diamond":

Comment #1

Comment #2

Comment #3

Comment #4
 
But how many readers are going to even read the comments closely, much less plow through to find a diamond in the rough...?

"I'll have a triple jihadaccino -- but make it secular, please..."

In a recent notice on Jihad Watch in which Robert Spencer is touting his book and congratulating himself for owning the term "Islamophobe" in the context of juggling three things -- ridiculing that propaganda term; affecting to be one of the bestest, bravest, toughest Counter-Jihadists in the West; and virtue-signalling by distancing himself from the obviously white supremacist Richard Spencer -- he writes:

I want a society in which women, Jews, Christians, gays, secular liberals, and secular Muslims can live freely and without fear of being brutalized, victimized, or denied basic rights. 

For those who don't know that Spencer for years has been subtly & deftly tap-dancing around his stance on the issue -- and that years ago, he got into lengthy arguments with Civilians in Jihad Watch comments (when Jihad Watch readers actually had the cojones to dare to disagree with their Fearless Leader) because they were dismayed by how Spencer, at the time, insisted that he is "not anti-Islam" and "not anti-Muslim" -- his casual listing of "secular Muslims" as though that were a viable demographic out there will not surprise (see my two essays on this -- ...damned if you do... and ...damned if you don't...).

I wonder how many Jihad Watch readers this time around caught Spencer's Mohammedan Slip...?  Let's take a look, shall we...?

Well, I just reviewed the 39 comments.  Good Lord, it's worse than I thought.  36 of those 39 completely ignore Robert Spencer's "secular Muslims" -- while the remaining three actually praise him for it.

And, of course, of the Jihad Watch regulars there -- including "gravenimage" who makes it a regular volunteer duty of hers to point out where commenters are right or wrong about many different points in the comments fields of probably most of the Jihad Watch articles over the years -- not one of them takes these brown-nosers (let alone, heaven forbid, the Grand Poobah himself) to task.

"Coffee black -- with cream..."

Jihad Watch the other day reported an undercover operation, so to speak, conducted by a mainstream UK TV station, whereby they sent a white Englishwoman out into a Muslim neighborhood to learn what it's like to be a Muslim.  In order to facilitate the cover, they tinted her skin brown and added a prosthetic to make her nose look bigger (and of course added a hijab head covering).

I note that only two of the Jihad Watch comments even advert to this aspect of the story, which not only was headlined in the Jihad Watch report, but is also arguably the #1 reason why the PC MC-dominated West continues to placate Muslims, rather than condemn them for their Islam.

While those two Civilians in the Counter-Jihad at least noticed this most important factor, they seemed unduly surprised by it, as though it's not massively dominant throughout the West.

Similarly, a long-time Jihad Watch regular, "Angemon" (whom I dub the "Energizer Bunny" of the Counter-Jihad and member of the "Rabbit Pack" of Jihad Watch regulars) many moons ago seemed strangely incognizant of this factor, and added that to his long list of reasons to pester me in Jihad Watch comments incessantly for months if not years.

Thus, a typical complain I lodged there (under the nickname "voegelinian") two years ago:

“As for l’Andele, a few friends and I created it in 2014 after we saw that many of our fellow countrymen had to answer for their freedom of speech in the courts, on fallacious charges, often as a result of complaints from so-called “anti-racist” associations that are largely subsidized and politicized.”

This is like the 500 fucking thousandth example over the years of how the PC MC mainstream racializes the problem of Islam — and still Angemon doesn’t get it, and pesters me for calling attention to it. And then his friends here have the gall to chide me, instead of him for his egregious lacuna with regard to this massive, and important aspect of the Problem of the Problem (the problem, that is, of Western myopia to the problem of Islam, and resistance if not hostility to those who are calling attention to that problem)..

And I added:

And here’s the 499,000th example I came across recently — in the words of Sam Harris during his recent conversation with Muslim“Reformer” Maajid Nawaz at the Kennedy Forum at Harvard University. The context of Sam Harris’s words at this point was his complaint about the problem of what he calls “pseudo-liberalism” (by which he means what others casually call “liberalism” or “political correctness” – or what I mean by “PC MC”) — and how, as he rightly notes, we can criticize Christianity all day long, but –
“…the moment you try to shine a light on the problem of… Islamism…the full armamentarium of political correctness and… cries of racism just hits you full in the face…”
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI9QwEKqrso
But I guess on this point, Angemon knows better than Sam Harris, eh?

The reader can go to that thread (beginning here) to see how Angemon responded, in multiple, lengthy hit-pieces against me; and how another of the Rabbit Pack, "gravenimage", did nothing to assist me.

That wasn't the only time Angemon showed a strange incomprehension for the problem of the mainstream racialization of Islam.  As I wrote in another Jihad Watch thread a few months later that year:

[quoting the article at that time] “several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”

And Angemon asks me where I get my notion that the PC MC mainstream West racializes the issue of the problem of Islam. Um, duh, from countless stories like this reported at Jihad Watch over the years.

Again, the reader can go to that thread to see how Angemon spun his maddening sophistry in response.

Finally (for now), perhaps the most direct example of Angemon's odd inability to grasp this point occurred a month later that same year:

Quoting me —

“2) Muslims are perceived to be a Brown People”

— Angemon typed:

“Maybe by you. Not by regular people.”

I don’t know what Angemon means by “regular people”. If he means the majority of Westerners, the he is woefully ignorant of the mass sociopolitical, cultural, psychological phenomenon of PC MC, which precisely racializes the problem of Islam the way I described.

Again -- if the reader has the stomach to tolerate it -- read the thread to see how Angemon uses sophistry to .... to do what, exactly?  And again, none of the other Jihad Watch regulars ever bothered to give me a helping hand, or to explain to Angemon how he was full of shit.

P.S.: I haven't seen Angemon in Jihad Watch comments for many months now; perhaps, since I've been gone from Jihad Watch comments since late 2015, he lost interest in what was evidently more important to him than the problem of Islam and the problem of the West persisting in its myopia to the problem of Islam -- namely, the problem that seemed to have consumed most of his energy: the problem of Hesperado.

"I'll have a cup of regular coffee -- and hold the caffeine."

In a recent Jihad Watch notice about a Muslim in Boston, Daoud Wright, found guilty of a plot to behead Pam Geller, Robert Spencer writes:

Why did Daoud Wright want to behead Pamela Geller? For the Sharia crime of drawing Muhammad. And in response, instead of standing for the freedom of speech, Western political analysts, including “conservatives” such as Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham, condemned Pamela Geller for “provoking” Muslims. Those people have no idea what’s at stake, or how seriously the freedom of speech is being challenged today.

Conspicuously absent from that paragraph is the name of Donald Trump -- surely as important, if not an even more significant "conservative" to stand on the wrong side of the Garland attack (not only because Trump went on to become President of the United States, but also because he has been one of the few of an already minuscule number of conservatives to show signs -- albeit ambiguously deviating lately -- of being on the right side of the problem of Islam).

Spencer's omission is even odder, considering how back in January he made no bones about Trump's error:

I am no fan of Trump. After he denounced our free-speech event in Garland, Texas, last May, which was attacked by Islamic jihadists, it is not at all clear that Donald Trump understands the jihad imperative or the war against free speech, or is at all equipped to counter them. When violent jihadis commit murder to prevent people from drawing Muhammad, to desist voluntarily from drawing Muhammad is to reward violent intimidation, and encourage more. When Trump said, “They can’t do something else? They have to be in the middle of Texas doing something on Muhammad and insulting everybody?,” he was revealing that he did not grasp that essential point, and was willing to acquiesce to Sharia restrictions on the freedom of speech.

"I'll have a triple espresso -- oh, and use fundamental coffee, please, thanks..."

Today on Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer proudly features himself arm in arm with Steve Bannon, one of those conservatives with a no-nonsense swagger that triggers in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (both Leadership and Civilians) a free pass to use retrograde rhetoric on the problem of Islam.

Bannon, reports Spencer,

...said in 2016 that I was “one of the top two or three experts in the world on this great war…against fundamental Islam.”

To which we, outside the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, ask:

As opposed to non-fundamental Islam...?

You won't find that question in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream.  Which is why I have dim hopes that the Counter-Jihad in general (passively pushed and pulled by the tide of its Mainstream, whose influence remains unquestioned by a hapless Civilian body) will be able to do its primary job -- to wake up its surrounding Western Mainstream before Muslims succeed in destroying our civilization.

And if we few outliers in the Counter-Jihad have to explain to its Mainstream why the rhetoric of qualifiers and dysphemisms is crucially important to avoid when discussing the problem of Islam (and of all Muslims), that just goes to show how infirm & illiterate its Mainstream is.

Lapsus contra-jihadensis

Jihad Watch headline:

"Virginia man gets two years prison for lying to FBI about friend’s ties to the Islamic State"

Robert Spencer then writes:

Michael Queen appears to be a convert to Islam, as he says: “I’m never going to throw a Muslim underneath the bus to try to do the right thing,”

That is not a reasonable supposition, since there are millions of non-Muslim Westerners who are sufficiently deformed by PC MC so as to lead them to the reflex spasm of virtue-signalling which this Michael Queen fellow exhibits.

And not all of them are "Leftists" as Spencer has many times implied.   Indeed, that's the problem with PC MC: the Leftist worldview wouldn't enjoy the sociopolitical traction it commands were it not for the non-Leftist majority in the West being deformed by PC MC.

Allow me to vent...

As I sip my Venti...

My vent is not new, but harks back to 2014, when after (to toot my own horn) I supplied an interesting post chock-full of interesting facts and insights, one of the "Rabbit Pack" (one "dumbledoresarmy" from Australia) had to chime in to chide me.  Good times, good times...

(Note: my nickname at that time was "voegelinian".)

voegelinian says November 20, 2014 at 2:19 pm

Queen Rania [of Jordan] could well become the Muslim Princess Di — with her looks, charisma and her international human rights activities over the years (look over her Wikipedia bio, detailing a long list of ostensibly impressive deeds (deftly interwoven with the subtly and distractingly colorful chatoyance of Muslim concerns (e.g., “Queen Rania stated that she is not opposed to women choosing to wear the Islamic veil hijab by their own volition as long as it is not compulsory….”), accolades and honors) — if she had a good Jewish publicist and agent perhaps (I hear Ari Gold is available and taking on new clients). At first glance, I assumed she must be the princess-daughter of Queen Noor, another blonde babe (who looked like actress Lindsay Wagner); but now I learn that, of course, the new ruler of Jordan since King Hussein died of cancer in 1999 must be a male heir, and thus Queen Rania is an unrelated female (though, on second thought, given the Islamic penchant for inbreeding, I suppose it’s not unlikely that these Beverly Dunebillies could be marrying a second cousin or two).

One can surmise that, like father like son, the King of Jordan, Abdullah II ibn al-Hussein (who took over in 1999 when his father died), likes white looking blonde babes. His father not only married a blonde American beauty, Elizabeth “Lisa” Najeeb Halaby (born 1951 in Wash. D.C.), who went on to become the aforementioned Queen Noor in consort with her hubby habibi King Hussein, he had also married Muna al-Hussein — an Englishwoman formerly known as Antoinette Avril Gardiner (and the mother of his son the present King of Jordan, husband of Queen Rania). And while Queen Noor was a blonde American babe, she too was the progeny of Idiot White Western Females marrying Muslim men — specifically, she was the daughter of Najeeb Halaby, a Syrian born in Dallas, Texas in 1915 (!!!) whose Syrian Christian father (so Wikipedia tells us) emigrated to Texas in 1891 — and Doris Carlquist (Swedish descent — i.e., no doubt a blonde babe; divorced her in 1977). Her father Najeeb wasn’t just any old Syrian habeeb — he grew up to be an aviator, airline executive, and government official. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Truman administration, before being appointed by John F. Kennedy to head the Federal Aviation Administration; then following that he had a successful private-sector career, serving as CEO of Pan American World Airways from 1969 to 1972 (and more distinguished and lucrative stuff after that, including advising Saudi business ventures, etc.).

Aside from the gossip-magazine detail of this typically Arabic male penchant for the blonde babe that we see in the royal history (and, of course, of the disturbing penchant some white Western females evidently seem to have for the swarthy Arab male, blithely airheadedly, recklessly — yea traitorously — unaware (at best!) of the ghastly problems of their Islamic culture), there remains the Six Million Dollar Question: How did it come about that a Syrian Christian immigrant to the U.S. spawned a Muslim queen of Jordan (who, as Jihad Watch archives attest, has promoted Islamic evil in her own way — i.e., she has merely been a good mainstream Muslim)? A clue to the answer may be had in the Wikipedia bio of her father, Najeeb Halaby: Halaby’s paternal grandfather was Elias Halaby, provincial treasurer or magistrate in Ottoman Syria, who also came to the U.S. in 1891.

I.e., Najeeb’s grandfather was a Dhimmi.

dumbledoresarmy says November 20, 2014 at 7:41 pm

Mate. You seem to be assuming that any identifying-as-non-Muslim person from a Muslim country – even if they plainly identify as a Christian – IS a Muslim and must be treated as such. Dhimmi or dhimmified, yes, some of them are; but a dhimmi is still NOT A MUSLIM. A dhimmi is someone whose forebears, for generations, endured HELL – centuries of grinding oppression and abuse – rather than take that final soul-destroying step into the Void and say the Shahada. A western non-Muslim woman who marries a Syrian Christian or a Lebanese Christian will get married in a *church* not a mosque and her kids will be baptised in a *church*. They will go to Sunday School, if the family is practising, *not* a madrasa. That ain’t Islam and you can’t tell me that it is. And dhimmitude is a problem, yes, but I don’t see it as an incurable diseas or unbreakable curse. It *can* be shaken off. It can be rejected; as Fr Gabriel Naddaf is showing us right now, in Israel. If someone’s faith is in the Biblical God rather than in the monster allah, then that someone can – if other non-dhimmi Christians know what they are doing – be DE-dhimmified. (That, presumably, alas, didn’t happen in the case of Elias Halaby; which is tragic). Of course, since *you* don’t believe that the Biblical God, the YHWH of the TaNaKh, is anything other than some sort of comforting illusion or delusion and not capable of or interested in doing *anything* in the here-and-now with actual people’s lives, you assume that exorcism and spiritual deliverance don’t happen and can’t happen. The likes of Mark Durie, who have much more experience in these matters than you do, know that it *can*. I assume you would prefer that every last Christian in the middle east be ignored and abandoned to be sadistically mass murdered down to the last man, woman and infant by Muslims, than that they be given refuge in the Western or wider non-Muslim world? You view these threatened-with-genocide people as nothing but “plague dogs”?? Read Mark Durie’s The Third Choice – and the other book “Liberty to the Captives” – and learn something.

voegelinian says November 20, 2014 at 11:45 pm

Two words: Stockholm Syndrome.

voegelinian says November 21, 2014 at 2:16 pm

God this dumbledoresarmy pisses me off. How dare she elaborate obtusely on the premise of an utter lack of comprehension for the problem of dhimmitude, after all these years she’s spent digesting Jihad Watch.

"We only serve coffee beans here..."

A Jihad Watch Civilian poses the following reasonable thought process concerning the seemingly baffling nature of the Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock:

It's clear from multiple studies that people become less violent as they pass a certain age, and violent urges tend to either diminish or just are not acted out when people get into middle age and beyond. There are personality traits linked to criminal behaviour, this is established, and the force of these “negative” traits weaken with age. Most violent offenders are relatively young…and more are male. Testosterone is thought to be one component as well, and it decreases with age. I can cite multiple references to support these conclusions; they aren’t merely my conclusions, but the consensus.

Now, these are general truths, and apply to most people. I realize this might not apply to Stephen Paddock as a person. He might have some kind of dysfunction. He might have testosterone increasing with age due to glandular problems. Highly unlikely! But possible. That in itself would manifest in other aggressive behaviours though Any kind of chemical change, be it substance abuse or malfunction bodily systems, would manifest in signs and behaviours. No one noticed anything odd about him. Still. He might be a total outlier. I might be wrong.

However, just examining the facts we do know I have to observe that for a man in his sixties to do something on this scale, especially with no former indications, something is very, very odd. It just does not fit. Very strange indeed. It flies in the face of all predictable data.

I would say that something happened to change the course of his life. Something unforeseen, and fairly recent...

If the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM) had better lines of communication amongst their Leadership (i.e., in this case, if Robert Spencer hadn't burned his bridges with Debbie Schlussel years ago), they could compare data and do their principal job in the CJM of informing the growing nucleus of people who are not being well informed by the mainstream on this most exigent issue.  In a recent posting, Schlussel reported the following:

Neighbors say Paddock and his girlfriend were “gone” for six months, last year. Where did they go? With whom did they meet? You can’t rule out that maybe they met with jihadists or learned about the precepts of Islam during that trip. I’ll bet you the FBI has no idea where Paddock and his consort were for those six months, just as they still don’t know where the San Bernardino terorists, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were for 20 to 30 minutes between their terrorist attacks and their trip to the 72 virgins in December 2015.

Whatever happened to the Lady of the Double AA?

On Jihad Watch today, Hugh Fitzgerald resurrects that old bugbear of Jihad Watch, Mustafa Akyol (who, being a Good Cop Muslim, is easy to attack -- unlike a Maajid Nawaz or a Zuhdi Jasser -- by Counter-Jihad Mainstreamers like Hugh).

I fondly recall voluminous Jihad Watch comments threads where a "friend" of Robert Spencer elaborated at great length defending Mustafa Akyol along with his patron, the sinister Fethullah Gulen.  That friend called herself "Morgaan Sinclair" (and, of course, claimed it is her real name).  She proceeded to devolve in subsequent comments fields so outrageously, she was apparently banned -- as was I, for understandably lashing back at her after too many of her flagrant defenses of Muslims (including among other things, her vilification of Serbians defending themselves against Islamic jihad) in tissues of maddening logic.

Here's one example of many of Morgaan Sinclair's shenanigans.  Scroll down, and pop some popcorn to go along with your coffee.  (Note: my handle back then was "remote control".)

So Hugh in the article linked above in my first paragraph is shining a harshly skeptical light on Mustafa Akyol's claims to be a Muslim "Reformer".  Why is Mustafa Akyol any more suspect than any of the others in the long list of supposed Great Brown Hopes (i.e., Muslim Reformers) paraded before Jihad Watch readers recently by Robert Spencer's colleague, Christine Williams?

More importantly, why is this kind of question not asked on Jihad Watch by the Leadership and by the Civilians?  Why is it only left to me on some obscure nook and/or cranny of the Internet to raise it?

"I'll have a Triple Moderate Jihadaccino please..."

“We see what is happening in Sweden, in Britain, and in France. We are experiencing now the fear that you have experienced for decades.”

And Robert Spencer opines:

The same fear, emanating from the same cause. Israel is on the front lines of the global jihad. Anyone who understands the nature, magnitude, and goal of that jihad will stand with Israel.

Does Spencer, or anyone in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream understand the nature, magnitude, and goal of the Jihad?  Just because someone says they understand it, doesn't mean they do.  Then we have the problem that Spencer has never sat down to actually describe what he thinks defines those three facets of the primary problem of Islam.  His sycophantic followers just trust him implicitly (and besides, they too seem to indulge impoverished, unimaginative conceptions of those three facets).

Just one point for now, since I want to keep these coffee shots short and bittersweet:  The Islamic terrorism we have seen to date throughout the West, and that continues to bubble as in an ongoing cauldron with the heat being slowly turned higher and higher, is not itself calculated to topple or/and unravel our civilization, if by those effects we imagine a concurrent, present, short-term intention.  They are calculated to produce a protracted effect that will slowly alter the course and nature of our Western societies -- not so that we succumb to "Sharia creep" (as so many in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream suppose), but rather, so that we continue to do nothing as Muslims infiltrate ever more deeply into the fabric of our societies.  The ultimate goal being to foster the ability at some distant point in the future (100 years or more, pace the Chicken Littles of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream) for Muslims to be able to finally destroy our Western civilization with rampant bouts of violence including a concatenation of WMD attacks in scores, if not hundreds of cities, that will make 911 seem like a picnic. 

False Dilemma much...?

In the comments field of a recent Jihad Watch article, one "Westman" (a veteran commenter as I recall, and if not an active member of the Rabbit Pack, at least a figuratively dues-paying member and -- no surprise -- an asymptotic) wrote the following:

I can agree, without reservation, that Islam is the “mother lode of bad ideas” yet that is not sufficent reason to declare that EVERY Muslim is a danger to Western civilization.

Notice how Westman is taking the crux of the whole issue by the horns -- the problem of Islam vs. the problem of Muslims.  Let's read on:

On what basis do you equate Islam, the ideology, and all Muslims, as individual persons, to be one and the same? Are Christians all one and the same? Could we excuse ourselves if we told Christians they are all like Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, or the Westboro Baptist church?

Oh dear, how did an Equivalencist get into the Counter-Jihad Mainstream?  Easy, since there isn't really an Anti-Islam Movement of any coherence. And so Westman botches that crux, and nobody in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream sets him straight.

I have no problems with Muslims who reject Sharia and teachings that conflict with freedom; just as we recognize that Protestants who reject Catholicism are still Christians. 

I too have no problems with Muslims who reject Sharia and  teachings that conflict with freedom; except for the minor inconvenience of taqiyya.

Frankly, if we judge all Muslims to be adherents of Shariah there are no solutions left to maintain Western civilization but war and genocide.

Woah, Nelly.  Since when are those the only two choices?  Time and time again, I see Counter-Jihad Mainstreamers (whether of the Leadership, or Civilians like Westman) set up this false dilemma, as if the D Word -- closely related to the A Word -- didn't exist, or Must Not Be Spoken.

Read what the non-veteran commenter, "Maxine", says (responding to Westman's preposterous hope in the Great Awakening of Muslims), which prompted Westman's anxious need to defend Muslims.

Naturally, none of the Jihad Watch regulars or veterans paid attention to this most crucial disagreement between Westman and Maxine (and heaven forbid they should actually step in to stand with Maxine's sound instincts).

"A decaf with caffeine, please..."

What maple leaf is Red other than a dying maple leaf? (-- a Jihad Watch reader)

Perusing the comments field of another Jihad Watch article this morning with this headline -- Canada: Man jailed for “no more Muslims” graffiti --  as I sip my triple-moderate jihadaccino served up by a barrista terrorista at a local Starbucks, I wondered whether any of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream civilians commenting there (including the veterans of the Rabbit Pack) would remember their fixation on how the problem is Islam, not Muslims.

Naturally, none did.  It was almost as though they had never staunchly defended that flawed, incoherent trope for years, often attacking me (when I used to swim along with the rest of the school of fish in Jihad Watch comments threads) for unpacking the ill logic of it in favor of the more coherent (but less Politically Comfortable) anti-Muslim position.

One of their incoherencies being their implied assumption that the West can "ban Islam" (or, even more preposterously, simply make Islam a social pariah in the West) while leaving the millions of Muslims already here (and the millions more likely to arrive while the Western Mainstream is stubbornly resisting the slightest hints of anything remotely critical of Islam) intact and in possession of all their legal rights we accord them.