Wednesday, December 13, 2017
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 It's as if all his former years of warning us about the stealth jihad have been replaced by a warning only of jihadists (or, sometimes for an Arabic twang, Spencer writes "jihadis" without the Western t).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.
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