Our "Reliance" on the Traveler (again)

I wrote about this before -- generally speaking here, and more specifically here and here. 

In that last "here" I zeroed in on Hugh Fitzgerald, lionized in the Counter-Jihad as a perfect analyst who can never make a mistake; but I've noticed an unsettling tendency he has to be what I used to call "asymptotic" -- a curious condition whereby the Counter-Jihadist seems in his rhetoric to come perilously close to a full-blown opposition to Islam, but then for various reasons at some point seems to encounter an invisible force field that causes him to recoil from going all the way.

These days, since Hugh returned to Jihad Watch, every time I read one of his essays, I encounter some annoying nougat plump in the middle of otherwise robustly anti-Islamic prose.

So, his recent Reliance upon the Traveler missive was delivered on my doorstep, and the very opening sentence offends:

Mohamad Tawhidi, the well-known “Imam of Peace” who smites the Islamist enemy hip and thigh, has compiled a useful list of Islamic groups engaged in terrorism. 

Mohamad Tawhidi is the latest flavor of Better Cop Muslim "reformer", whom Hugh evidently admires and relies upon (and thus trusts).  I've had occasion to mention him before, as with this old Hesperado posting (in which Robert Spencer also shows the wrong instinct.)  For this is a curious way to introduce the handy list Tawhidi came up with.  How about saying, "Mohamad Tawhidi, the self-styled “Imam of Peace” who puts on a show of opposing 'Islamists' , has compiled a list of Islamic groups engaged in terrorism which we can find useful, even if we suspect his motivations, so long as he reveres the biggest Islamist of them all, Mohammed.".

But no, Hugh can't bear to put it this way, apparently.

Part Deux?

I realize that in my previous posting about the Notre Dame fire I promised a "to be continued" but I don't know if I have any wind in my sails for that.  My friend (I'd like to call her that) Maureen Mullarkey wrote a grievingly incisive essay on it recently. And there have been many bits and pieces of information that indicate that an "electrical accident" is not -- pace the mainstream -- the most reasonable truth we should all settle on (particularly absent any investigation findings we can sink our teeth into).

Anyway, the jihad goes on, as (cough, cough) with Sri Lanka, at least 359 mass murdered and hundreds wounded in a series of coordinated paramilitary attacks by a commando unit of Muslims, most of the victims Christian, with a useful analysis by Ben Shapiro of what I have called "the problem of the problem".

Notre Dame hit a nerve in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream

Admittedly, I'm measuring the "Counter-Jihad Mainstream" by the comments fields at Jihad Watch; but I'd like to know a better, more representative pool from which to take its temperature.

So, we all know by now this week's big story: the great Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, in flames from the top, at the part most cherished in our history (pop and otherwise), the structure which climaxes in the belltower.

A crucial part of the story, for the facet I'm examining here today, is the fact that government authorities (from Macron down) and mainstream news sources have assured the public this is not an attack of any kind (let alone terrorist) and that it is most likely due to a construction accident (as the church has been under process of being worked on for weeks, perhaps months).

Important related facts are that just a day or so before the Notre Dame fire, the French government arrested three Muslim women for a plot some years earlier to car-bomb the same Notre Dame cathedral; and that France has been experiencing an escalating spate of vandalism of different degrees (none as horrific as the Notre Dame destruction) of churches all over the country (the vast majority without any published evidence the culprits have been Muslim).

Then we have the material fact of the response by the "Counter-Jihad Mainstream": Last night when I saw the story appear and remain at the top of the Jihad Watch list for a few hours (I've noticed as the time of day goes into evening, factoring in the 3-hour time difference from coast to coast, Jihad Watch doesn't add many (if any) new stories, and the successive addition of stories only starts again early the next morning), there were already over 180 comments.  It's rare on Jihad Watch for there to be over 100 comments on most stories (unlike many other website discussion forums, I've noticed); it's pretty much unprecedented for the top story to have garnered over 180 within an hour or two of its posting, as the single Notre Dame report did.  Whenever a posting garners over 100 comments, it has taken a day or two (at least) to create that snowball.  This time, as I said, there were over 180 within a couple of hours, and when I woke up this morning, while the story had been pushed down by about a dozen other stories (but still on the main page), it had increased by another 100, to 283.

So now that I've got the prefatory details out of the way, what is the tenor of the comments?  As far as we know still, this was not a Muslim terror attack, so what could all these Jihad Watchers be so concerned to be commenting about, with relation to the Notre Dame fire?  I think it's safe to say that this remarkably high number of comments in this context is a symptom of an amorphous, somewhat incoherent anxiety and frustration amongst the Readership of the Counter-Jihad, which I diagnosed in my 10-part series on my former blog (The Hesperado), "Taking the Temperature of the Counter-Jihad".

In the 10th installment, for example, I made the following obversations:

They [the Readership or Civilians of the Counter-Jihad, as opposed to the Leadership] need some direction, but their fellow Counter-Jihadists, and the unofficial leadership, aren't really providing any, other than a vague climate of inspiration that doesn't seem to be going anywhere as we sit back, feeling helpless on this Titanic course on which our West continues blithely to float adrift. 

...the Counter-Jihad basically straggles along flinging heaps of Too Much Information left and right like a Zamboni machine flings crushed ice, or before it like a bulldozer piles fresh hills of dirt amounting to veritable mountains of horrifying data, in hopes that the mere quantity of data, shoveled and dumped over time, will somehow have the qualitative effect of changing minds. 

 One does get the sense that the West is sort of floating in a state of Denial, in the eerie calm during an eye of a hurricane, hoping Muslims won't strike worse than 911, and apparently ill-prepared if they do so. And the Counter-Jihad, as canaries in the coalmine, sense this more acutely. And in their frustration & impotence at the dereliction of civic duty of their own West, they cannot help but feel there lurks & looms the foreboding of the eventuality that we won't really rouse ourselves from our pleasantly sleepwalking PC MC until after a series of horrific attacks on our soil, not just in America but also throughout various parts of the West. 

 We, the Counter-Jihad would like to avert such a protracted train wreck of a catastrophe, of course; but we remain too confused, it seems -- both in strategy and ideology -- to do much about it. 

To be continued...

Wow, it's been nearly ten days since I last posted. One of the reasons I created this blog was to have a place to post every day, without worrying about making elaborate posts (since that would become too much daily work).

On the other hand, I don't want to feel obligated to post on some kind of relentless schedule, either.

Anywho, today's post concerns one of the many submemes of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (and/or the tertiary "Problem of the Problem of the Problem") -- namely, the stubborn inability to arrive at the conclusion of what I have called rational prejudice.  And what is this conclusion, Pepe, you might ask...?  It is the conclusion that we cannot trust any Muslim, under any circumstance; and though there might well be localized circumstances for the time being where it doesn't matter whether or not we decide to trust a given Muslim, the principle should be borne in mind and cultivated for the macro level of protecting our society in the long-term from the stealth jihad.

Or as our old friend "The Big W" put it recently in a Jihad Watch comments field with his characteristically brutal succinctness:

Why is it so freaking hard to TRUST NO MUSLIM NO MATTER WHAT?

Big W's entire comment (of which the above was the punch line) was in response to one of the Jihad Watch comments veterans from way back, one "Wellington" (with whom I've had many a run-in over the years).  Wellington just couldn't control himself and had to lodge a comment in which he expressed his cautious trust of a major Muslim, the "senior member of the world’s biggest Muslim organisation" of Indonesia, named Yahya Cholil Staquf.  The reason Wellington felt moved to generously accord this particular Muslim with his grudging trust was because this particular Muslim, Yahya, said things like:

“The truth, we recognise, is that jihadist doctrine, goals and strategy can be traced to specific tenets of orthodox, authoritative Islam and its historic practice.”

And also this particular Muslim, Yahya, stated that the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims was wrong to link the word “Islamophobia” to racism...

 So, like a rube who's been unduly impressed by the slick soap oil of a smarmily seedy used car salesman, Wellington wrote about this particular Muslim, Yahya:

“This guy seems to be stating matters without any deception.”

The full response to this from Big W follows:

“This guy seems to be stating matters without any deception. ” Only problem is, Yahya ain’t explained how he can still be a Muslim without all that stuff (“orthodoxy” lol) that he’s supposedly saying is bad. And seems we should know by now that he CAN’T explain it. At least I know it fro criminy’s sake. Yahya don’t look like an idiot. What he’s got up his sleeve I’d bet is to fool people like Wellington. And looks like it worked. 

Patti Labelle up above [referring to a commenter named "lebel" who frequently pesters Jihad Watchers about their supposed paranoia about Muslims] is daring y’all to say what I just said, and y’all’s too chicken. Why is it so freaking hard to TRUST NO MUSLIM NO MATTER WHAT?

Now, if Wellington were to counter that he only said that this particular Muslim, Yahya, seems to be stating matters without any deception; the problem with that is that it would tend to demonstrate Wellington's unsophisticated grasp of the various levels and facets of the jihad, including of course taqiyya deception, and the phenomenon of what I have called the "Better Cop" Muslim (also see this Google page).  The "Better Cop" Muslim's whole schtick is to seem to be criticizing his own Islam and to be "feeling our pain" about the whole problem far more daringly than most Muslims; and the primary purpose of this schtick is not to fool the broader Western Mainstream (already readily fooled by the standard-issue garden-variety "Islam is a religion of peace! We are against terrorism! We love Coca-Cola!" Muslims of the "Good Cop" persuasion) -- but rather, precisely, to fool the still minuscule, but growing (albeit at a snail's pace) Counter-Jihad.

To fool them into what, one may ask?  To fool them -- or, rather, to lull them -- into reinforcing their already existing, semi-consciously anxious disinclination to cultivate a ruthlessly rational prejudice against all Muslims.  As long as that disinclination can be regularly massaged and reinforced, the stealth jihadists have a chance to forestall the development of sufficient distrust of Muslims, in the one area of the West where it has the greatest chance of developing (i.e., the "Counter-Jihad", such as it is), which would be perhaps the only way that the ultimate desideratum of Muslims following their Islam (viz., that the entire Earth submit to Allah and His Prophet either by converting to Islam or by submitting to the supreme rule of Muslims) would be frustrated, if not defeated.