Confusing Categories

Omar is a far Leftist and a devout, Sharia-adherent Muslim; neither group is distinguished for mavericks or original thinkers. In fact, both are marked by an ideological lockstep that brooks no dissent, disagreement, or fair consideration of opposing ideas. That makes Omar’s future drearily predictable.

So opined Robert Spencer, on a recent Jihad Watch posting on the new Muslim Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar.

Why would Spencer think that a Muslim can also be a "Leftist" (much less a "far" one)?   I've seen him write locutions that come to the edge of making this conflation, but never as baldly explicit as this one. The principle in the Anti-Islam Movement (consequent upon our digestion over the years of the indigestible horrors of Islamic texts, history, culture, and news) should include, among many other principles, the understanding that whenever we see a Muslim occupying any non-Islamic ideological, cultural or psychological space, we reasonably conclude that the Muslim in question is using that foreign garb as both a disguise and as a weapon; but not really inhabiting it.

So when we see a Muslim occupying the space of Leftism, showing signs & symptoms of "being a Leftist", we reasonably conclude that Muslim isn't really a Leftist; he or she is just using Leftism to advance Islam.  Similarly for the most virulent strain of Leftism, Communism.  In this regard, the last time I noticed such a conflation problem, it was on the Lawrence Auster blog, among commenters Auster approved and esteemed (the only commenters he would allow to publish on his blog). But that time, it was even worse than Spencer's gaffe -- that commenter (and Auster seemed to readily lap it up) actually argued that the "Communist Muslims" we see among the mujahideen in, for example, Iraq, are really, deep down inside, Communists; and only using their Islam as a "green coat of paint".  That commenter got it precisely ass-backwards.  (See my Hesperado essay -- Counter-Jihad 3.0: Old updates available for download... -- from 3 years ago for further details.)

Ideologies and/or worldviews such as Leftism, Communism, conservatism, atheism, politically correct multi-culturalism, and nationalism are Western products; and as such, a Muslim cannot inhabit any of them -- though he or she can don it like a garment in order to weaponize it for the jihad, whether stealth or sword. (In this regard, that same Hesperado essay I linked above at the end of the previous paragraph, also analyzes another Counter-Jihad luminary, Hugh Fitzgerald, seeming to make a similar error not only of conflation, but of bass-ackwards reverse engineering, with regard to the so-called "Nationalist Muslims" like Saddam Hussein.)

This isn't merely a matter of Muslims themselves inhabiting a macro-cultural domain outside the West (pace its parasitical pretentions to an "Abrahamic" identity); it's also as importantly (if not more importantly) a problem of the Islam which they inhabit being inimical -- in explicit, complex, fanatically robust, and profoundly comprehensive ways -- to our civilization.

As an aside, I've seen -- and written many times about -- Spencer's rhetoric veering regularly too far into an implication that Leftism is the main or only (the lines get blurred with his heated rhetoric) reason for the problem of the problem (the problem of the West tending to whitewash -- if not positively support -- Islam, rather than roundly condemn Islam as it should).  This may be related to the conflation problem I identify here today (though I haven't figured out how exactly); yet it is a distinct problem.