"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.