"Money can't buy me Jihad..."

It's been years since Hugh Fitzgerald has trotted out his "Esdrujula Elves".  Years ago, Hugh articulated a supposed explanation for why Westerners would either defend Islam, or even jump ship altogether by converting to Islam -- and for each reason, he came up with a handy label, each word following the obscure syntactical rule known as esdrújulo, which means a word with 3 or more syllables is to be accented on the penultimate syllable.

Thus, if the reader thinks or, or better yet speaks out, words such as Timidity, Cupidity, or Stupidity, he will see that the accent falls on the second to last syllable.  Anyway, Hugh just used that device to make his framework more mnemonic and alliterative. The important thing, of course, is the meaning of those words.

Over the years, I have written a few essays on the problem with Hugh's Esdrújulo Explanation, and the reader can consult those for deeper analysis.  But the flaw in the ointment here is not really all that complicated.  Hugh purports to be explaining why it is that Westerners either defend Islam or even convert to it by adverting to motivations like "he did it for the money" (Cupidity), or "he does it out of fear" (Timidity -- either the fear of violating political correctness or the more subconscious fear of Muslims exploding); or "he does it because he's ignorant of Islam and generally dumb" (Stupidity). 

As my essays linked above argue in detail, these are not really explanations; they function more as superficial characteristics that end up begging the question, when you think about them for more than a few seconds.  The main reason for this deficiency is two-fold:

1) the abysmal culture of ethics of Islam

2) the relative superiority of the culture of Western ethics.

Thus, unless the Westerner in question is a criminal sociopath slash (pun intended) psychopath, he or she would never defend Islam much less convert to it for money or sex -- knowingly -- unless he or she hates the West and wants to see Islam replace it.

With Stupidity and Timidity, there's a little more leeway; but the former quickly becomes complicated by innumerable Westerners one could cite who are reasonably (if not, at times, remarkably) intelligent, yet still defend Islam (or even convert to it), while the latter -- when it concerns the rational fear of Muslims -- is just a matter of the sometimes reasonable response of someone scared for their life. While we can say it would be laudable for the timid Westerner to go boldly forward regardless of the threat of death and/or torture, it would be imprudent to castigate the person for being afraid.

In Hugh's latest esdrújulo spasm, he quite clearly, even bluntly, conjectures that what motivated two recent Western converts to Islam -- two relatively intelligent men who had been part of sorta kinda anti-Islam movements in the Netherlands -- was likely sex and or money (both I suppose would fall under "Cupidity").  That can't be the real reason; since it is reasonable to suppose that when a Westerner knows how evil, dangerous and anti-Western Islam is, then he or she would not join it for sex or money (or any other reason). The real reason why these Westerners did so was because they hate their own West and have been profoundly detached from their own West as a consequence -- psychically and spiritually. Along comes Islam, which also hates the West, and has a rich, complex, diverse culture of its own complete with an absolute explanation of life and a social network of comraderie -- the perfect vehicle for the self-hating Westerner (whether extreme Left or extreme Right) to realize his full potential for self-hatred, by turning his Western Self into a hated Other, from the vantage point of having submitted to being adopted by the Mother of All Others, Islam.