Thursday, March 21, 2019
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.
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