The two Mainstreams still talking past each other...

Today, Robert Spencer quoted a Muslim cleric:

“Allah has ordered Muslims to take up weapons and has ordered the use of weapons against unbelievers” 

Then Robert opined, showing he just doesn't get the Problem of the Problem:

In the West, we’re constantly told that only greasy Islamophobes believe that Allah has issued any such order. Has Khabeebur Rehman Qazi been listening to greasy Islamophobes? How is it that he came to misunderstand his peaceful religion so drastically?

The “Problem of the Problem” I refer to is the problem not of Islam, but of the Western Mainstream’s inability to grapple with the problem of Islam. A good deal of that inability is the Western Mainstream’s habits of demonizing critics of Islam.   

So what Robert doesn’t get here is that the Western Mainstream has more arrows of red herrings up their sleeve (to mix metaphors) than merely the one Robert cited.  For example, the Western Mainstream would likely retort that this particular Muslim cleric only represented the Tiny Minority of Extremists who don't reflect the Islam of the vast majority of Muslims Who Just Wanna Have a Sandwich.  And the reason why the Western Mainstream tends to deploy this particular red herring arrow from its quiver is due to its concern that the vast majority of Muslims not be “tarred with one brush”. 

Then, in that context, the Western Mainstream will pull out another red herring and rhetorically ask the critics of Islam why they insist on reducing Islam to the twisted version of these Tiny Minority of Extremists.  When the critics of Islam respond that they are not twisting Islam, but actually showing how mainstream Islam accurately reflects what these so-called “Extremists” are preaching, the Western Mainstream will double down on their concern for the majority of Muslims, that they not be tarred with the one brush of extremism.  Of course, the Western Mainstream isn't coherent on this point, because it can't really disprove the fact that mainstream Islam accurately reflects the Islam of the so-called Extremists (al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, ISIS, etc.). Nevertheless, what they are implicitly falling back on is the apparent, and massive, fact that most Muslims aren't ostensibly doing or saying anything bad, and seem to be a diverse collective of largely unobjectionable peoples.  For the Counter-Jihad Mainstream to engage the Western Mainstream at this level would mean to join a conversation that faces the Problem of Muslims (which of course presupposes that any “Problem of Islam” is only a problem to the extent that Muslims put it into practice).

And what does the Counter-Jihad Mainstream have to respond to this concern?  In my experience over the years, I have seen them either avoid the question, or actually agree that they are “not against Muslims, only the ideology Islam” (i.e., that there is no Problem of Muslims per se).  As long as the Counter-Jihad Mainstream avoids engaging the Problem of Muslims head on, it will be contributing to the lack of contact with the broader Western Mainstream; and as long as that contact is put off, our war of ideas on this most exigent issue will never gain traction.

Further Reading:

Essays on the two Mainstreams

Let's see Hugh and Big W arm-wrestle!

I noticed our old friend Big W weigh in on a recent Hugh Fitzgerald post on Jihad Watch where Hugh, characteristically, implies there are some Muslims we can trust and use as allies.

Hugh in his article is critiquing a Muslima who is pushing the line of the hijab being a positive thing. That's all well and good; but then Hugh has to indulge this odd habit of his to invoke "Reliance upon the Traveler" (see for example this old essay of mine in this regard) and quote a slew of Muslims who seem to be critical of the hijab.

Leave it to Big W to refocus us back on track:

thebigW says 
Mar 24, 2019 at 4:34 pm 

the Muzzlimas who don’t wear the veil are wearing a better disguise that fools the counter-jihad into thinking they ain’t doing taqiyya. 

And leave it to the hall monitor of the Rabbit Pack, one "gravenimage" to "help" with a comment that shows she still doesn't get it:

gravenimage says 
Mar 24, 2019 at 5:27 pm 

They are a mixed bag–certainly, some Muslimahs who eschew the Hijab are still stealth Jihadists. 

Um, no gravenimage, not "some".  All.

ISIS now "WASWAS"...?

Occasionally in the past year as ISIS has seemed to have gone through its death throes, the Counter-Jihad Mainstream pronounces various pieces of its obituary.

For example, last week, Jihad Watch posted an article with this headline:

The Islamic State’s caliphate has officially ended as its last stronghold is liberated 

The broader Western Mainstream, of course, follows suit, and more or less agrees (as it does, despite a lot of superficial animosity between it and the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, about many aspects of the Problem of Islam).

My take on this is different, as I've written before here (see my 4-part series on it).  I theorize that the primary objective of the ISIS Muslims was not to conquer the West by establishing a Caliphate (since the Caliphate's raison d'être is to conquer the Earth for Allah) -- not because they didn't want to do that, but because they realized they could not do that, given the spectacular superiority of their enemy, the West, relative to their current abilities. Their primary objective was to unleash unprecedented geopolitical destabilization which would in turn trigger a mass exodus of Muslims from the Muslim world into the West.

As I described what I've called the "Jihad of the Feet" in an older essay of mine (The Multifarious Strategy of Jihad):

... at first [in the 1950s and 60s] it was a slow trickle, then in the 80s and 90s it began to pick up; then after 911, the West didn't do the normal thing and shut off the water, but rather paradoxically & perversely turned the spigot way over to allow a gush of immigration, and kept it going for years as though it were running a nice big, long bubble bath. Then, after the logical devolution of the Arab Spring into the metastasizing train wreck of ISIS, it's like the West took a sledgehammer to the water pipes, or backed up a van to knock over the fire hydrant, or actively pitched in to topple levees to help this Mohammedan Katrina devastate our societies. 

It would be a case of shortsightedness, stuck in the conventional box, to insist on seeing ISIS as merely a gang that, with respect to ultimate goal of conquest, was trying to do it through the front door.  Rather, it is reasonable to surmise, they sought to effect sufficient geopolitical trauma through a widespread "strategy of  sidération" (a useful French word difficult to translate with just one English word; which may be rendered as "a state of shock, disarray and paralysis").

Meanwhile, the Counter-Jihad Mainstream has been reporting stories that afford a glimpse of the effects I'm talking about -- for example, this week:

Hungary: Muslim “refugee” discovered to have beheaded 20 people for the Islamic State 

-- with Robert Spencer's apposite explication:

He was ordered expelled from Hungary after being caught with forged documents on December 30, but he was detained on Friday, so clearly he didn’t leave after he was expelled. Also he seems to have moved freely around Europe for quite some time. His story is evidence that European authorities are overwhelmed and cannot deal adequately with the Muslim migrant crisis they have inflicted upon themselves.

But of course, it's not just a matter of triggering mass immigration into the West in order for individual Muslims to perpetrate terror attacks now or in the near future; but also, and more importantly, to lay the demographic seeds for a much longer-term goal of jihad in the distant future (I estimate approximately 100 years from now, give or take a generation or two).

Now if only Spencer and his acolytes can put together and connect these various dots he has been reporting...

Lessons of the New Zealand mosque attack

Reams have been written and broadcast about this, both in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream and throughout the broader Western Mainstream. Rather than spending time repeating stuff, I'd rather point out two important points characteristically glossed over (if not blithely ignored) by both Mainstreams.

The first point to notice is that the broader Western Mainstream operates in their anxious whitewashing of Islam with an implicit logical principle (in the logic of their mass neurosis):

The New Zealand attack is horrible and heinous; therefore there is no systemic danger from the global revival of Islam.

The first part is true; but that logical nexus to the second clause is the problem.

The second point concerns the other Mainstream, the Counter-Jihad Mainstream.  One gets a palpable sense that they are still scratching their heads in exasperated bafflement (when they're not conspiracy theorist Real-Problemers) at how the broader Western Mainstream magnifies this one attack while mostly minimizing the hundreds (if not thousands) of attacks by Muslims over the years in Europe, the UK, Russia, Australia, USA, Canada (not to mention the Middle East, Africa, central Asia, and SE Asia).  The main reason for this irrational disparity, I have argued many times, is that the broader Western Mainstream's main concern is to protect the majority of Muslims from being "tarred with a broad brush" -- the broad brush of "they're all terrorists".  The response of  the Counter-Jihad Mainstream to this is to deny they are doing that.  But the force of their message, backed up with mountains of data and oceans of dots to be connected, is that indeed we cannot so easily draw a hard line between the Jihadists over here, and the Ordinary Sandwich Muslims over there. Why the Counter-Jihad Mainstream is so shy about pointing this out is due, I think, to their asymptotic fear of violating PC MC on that account.

The Better Mo is only "better" relative to those he fools

And to repeat myself for the umpeenth time, the main people the Better Mo is trying to fool are NOT the clueless mainstream Westerners hip-deep in De Nile, but rather the Counter-Jihad.

So this recent comments thread at Jihad Watch had various Counter-Jihad veterans (who are oh-so tough against "extremist" Muslims) failing to condemn one of the slyest, oilest of Better Mos, Maajid Nawaz.

Well, except for one, someone named "martin" (surprise, surprise, not a regular commenter there):

martin says
Mar 2, 2019 at 3:06 pm

Nawaz is just another deceitfull muslim snake.

Amen, martin.  And wouldn't you know it, our old friend "the Big W" was there to put a succinct bow to it:

thebigW says 
Mar 4, 2019 at 12:30 pm 

Yep, what martin said. What’s weird is that 100% of y’all here in the counter-jihad don’t just say what martin said. 

Then, in another thread, we had the great "Wellington" (we've encountered him before) of the Jihad Watch Readership weigh in with his considerable ballast on Zuhdi Jasser -- not, of course, to condemn him, but rather to prevaricate with squishy nougat:

Wellington says

Mar 4, 2019 at 7:21 pm

Well, CRUSADER, while I think Zuhdi Jasser is a decent human being, I also think he is a very confused human being...

And sure, enough, there was Big W, saying what needs to be said:

thebigW says 

Mar 5, 2019 at 12:56 am 

the only confusion when it comes to Zuhdi Jasser is with the people who think he ain’t doing taqiyya 

God bless  you, Big W!  Flo, get my friend here a cuppa joe -- BETTER Joe for those who've woken up to Islam -- and a plate of your finest glazed donuts!!!

Under the bus without a plan

The "under the bus" phenomenon -- throwing blacks, or women, or gays, etc., under the bus in favor of Muslims -- I've been noticing for years now (see The new totem pole as well as The Multi-Culturalist Caste System).  It's been only recently that I've seen a recognition in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream of this important factor.

One older essay of mine from September of 2013 laid out the general framework that situates this problem -- a general framework that, alas, reflects the infirm state of "the Counter-Jihad" in terms of its ability to prevail in the most important phase of this war we are in (waged against us by Muslims): the War of Ideas to try to wake up our fellow Westerners to that Longest War, that has lasted for over 1,400 years, only put on hold temporarily when Muslims were unable.

That old essay -- titled The Counter-Jihad: Still A.I.M.less -- speaks to the need for us to have a digital "Anti-Islam Manual" (A.I.M.).  It was a dire need in 2013, unaddressed by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Leadership (and all but unnoticed by the Readership) -- and it remains not even a low priority, but no priority at all.

Indeed, I was calling for such a Manual as far back as 2008 ("Fitna is good propaganda, but we still need an Anti-Islam Manual") and continued to pen appeals over the years (as these two from 2011 --"The aim of the A.I.M. should be an A.I.M." and "Why we need an Anti-Islam Manual").  Nobody was listening to me then, and still, to this day, nobody seems to care as we slouch toward 2020 with no adequate hindsight in sight.

Getting back to our title today, I noted in that old essay how our opposition -- the Islamopologists (whether Muslim or PC MC) -- is at an advantage for various reasons, including that they seem to have a guiding "memo" which they all seem to have been reading; whereas the Counter-Jihad continues to flounder in ill organization, inadequate verification of claims, and TMI (too much information that only serves to cause the "glazed over eyes" syndrome in our audience).

Thus I wrote:

The Islamopologists already have an extant template -- the PC MC template -- and this template, furthermore has been dominant and mainstream for at least 50 years throughout the West.  Its main mechanisms of Reverse Racism (and the flip side of that well-worn coin Excessive Self-Criticism of the West) turn out to fit Muslims perfectly like a glove; and so we must acquit, all day long (until some day, we must submit).  Hand over fist it's hand in glove, insofar as Muslims are treated by the PC MC mainstream as an Ethnic People (or better yet, a wonderful "tapestry" or "mosaic" or "rainbow" of Ethnic Peoples) -- indeed, Muslims have become designated the #1 Ethnic People in the world where, if we must make a choice between them and other Ethnic Peoples, we must throw the latter under the bus.

So, better late than never (perhaps), Robert Spencer -- in a recent story about a young black novelist who had to withdraw his latest novel because of a Twitterstorm of rage directed at him, all due to the fact that he dared to have a Muslim villain in his plot -- has lately been showing signs of noticing what I've been harping on for over a decade:

Novelist pulls book before publication after Twitter mob outrage over its featuring a Muslim villain

Because in the Left’s fantasy world, Muslims are not and can never be villains; they are always and in every case victims of hateful, “Islamophobic” Western Christians. Step out of line, even if you’re a trendy, black, gay “sensitivity reader,” and the mob will get you. Even the New York Times is shocked in this case, and laments of Kosoko Jackson’s withdrawn book that “it should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first.”