The Logic of Conspiracy Theory

Diana West is a rare bird in our muddy waters of sociopolitical reality these days; she often writes and says things that ring of "conspiracy theory" (CT) yet fall short of the red flags -- which border on if not cross the line which separates reality from ludicrous and hyperventilating speculation -- that often reveal themselves in the rhetoric of typical "conspiracy theorists".  That's one of the main reasons why I keep reading her (aside from the fact that she's a very good writer and investigator in the sense of the "historian as detective").

Despite the title of my posting, I won't go into this intriguing phenomenon at any great length today, but will touch on one or two key points.

First, there seems to be a paradox in conspiracy ventilations -- a kind of vacillating equivocation between an implied characterization of the dastardly evil Conspirators as having seemingly limitless power and resources, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, implying there are, in fact, limitations on their power. (And another peculiar tendency of CT is the assumption that the motives of the Conspirators are as thoroughly sordid and diabolical as the Devil himself, apparently serenely uncomplicated by ambivalence or conflicted emotions).

So, concrete case in point, we have this description from Diana West, in a recent article --The Phony Paper Trail Through the Anti-Trump Conspiracy -- concerning what she calls the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, specifically about the Crowdstrike report on the DNC server supposedly being hacked by Russians (thus kicking off the whole saga against Trump & the Russians):

...the DNC did not permit the FBI to investigate, which, of course, doesn’t sound fishy at all. Further, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI blithely accepted the (redacted) findings that “Russia hacked the DNC” from Crowdstrike and then told the American people to do the same.

Now, if the Conspirators had limitless power, they wouldn't need a scenario where the DNC has to withhold evidence from the FBI, and then the FBI has to go along with this and thereby exhibit the strange behavior of the preeminent criminal investigation organization allowing some group to tell them what they can and cannot investigate.  No, they would just have the power to manufacture the evidence, go through the charade of having the DNC hand over the servers to the FBI, and have the FBI report the desired (false) conclusion.  Indeed, even what I described still has problem of paradox: for, if they actually had limitless power, they wouldn't need to go through any charade at all, since their totalitarian hold on society would already be in place, and Trump would never have won in the first place and continued to serve as President (unless, of course, he were a mere puppet under their thrall).  So, evidently, the fact that it went down the way it did, shows that if there are Conspirators, they don't have limitless power, but have to pursue their anti-Trump activities while maneuvering around various obstacles.

This is where it gets interesting, and raises numerous questions: If the Conspirators are limited in their power, exactly how are they limited?  This is not only a general abstract question, but also applicable to any given Conspiracy, such as the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.  One gets the sense that this particular Conspiracy reflects a cabal (Diana West uses that word in a recent posting) operating within a larger environment that is not Conspiratorial.  More questions: How do they operate? How do they manage to hide their Conspiratorial behaviors amongst their fellows with whom they have to work on a daily basis? To make this plausible -- especially given the gravity of the conspiracy (an effective and unprecedented coup against an elected, and then sitting, President) -- one would have to impute a remarkable and broadly distributed degree of naivete and/or useful idiocy. I'm not saying this couldn't, and didn't, happen; I'm only saying that in palpating the contours of this phenomenon of Trump Derangement Syndrome reaching into the heart of Washington in the specific form of this mainstream memeplex of "Russian collusion", one runs the risk of a kind of complex No True Scotsman fallacy, where simultaneously, all nefarious implications are imputed to the dastardly cabal, while all apparent, logically discernible, limitations to the cabal's power (e.g., my example above about the FBI and the DNC) are imputed to naivete and useful idiocy in the sociopolitical environment in which the Conspirators swim.

A closely related No True Scotsman fallacy: How are the Conspirators able to pull off anything big (like an assassination of JFK, or a "Russian collusion" meme that goes viral, or a 911 attack) at all, given that they are limited? Well, the No True Scotsman answer would be, whatever happened that we are calling a conspiracy just so happened to be what the Conspirators were able to get away with. But the question remains.

Depending on the conspiracy claimed, these questions reveal more or less plausible scenarios.  The most flagrant one with regard to the 911 Truther conspiracy (granted that there are variants on that theme) is, if the motive of the Conspirators was to make the American public think that Muslims were behind the attacks, why would they go to all the trouble of simulating airplane crashes into buildings (or, perhaps more credulity-straining, synchronize actual plane crashes into buildings with "controlled demolitions" of the buildings), when, as a dastardly cabal able to pull grandiose things off like this with their control of institutions and mass media, they could have just massacred 3,000 New Yorkers (or why not 10,000 or 50,000?) through a series of bombs on the ground and manufactured the culprits as Muslims? (And even more preposterous would be the clear implication that, because of the limitations of the Conspirators, they felt they had to concoct an even more elaborate & implausible coordination of terror attacks -- i.e., the one that actually transpired on September 11, 2001.)

I never said we're perfect...

I've written about Shazia Hobbs at least once before as a possible "Best Cop" -- and it doesn't necessarily matter if she is an actual "ex-Muslim", since unfortunately I have had sufficient experience with ex-Muslims who continue to defend Islam (go here then scroll down to "My 2009 interactions with ex-Muslims at the CEMB discussion forum"), even if only elliptically and sideways (while using rhetoric that sounds robustly anti-Islam until one examines it more closely).  Shazia has become known for telling her story in an autobiography, The Gori's Daughter, and in her activism to raise awareness of the Muslim rape gangs.  The term gori is a racist slang term used by Pakistanis to refer to white girls -- which Shazia, as the daughter of a Scottish woman and a Pakistani father, was (at least half white; enough for Muslim racists).  Significant for my brief excerpt below is Shazia's experience of not only living as a Muslim in a half-Pakistani family, but also spending her formative years in Pakistan with her parents and extended Muslim family and neighbors, before her parents moved back to the UK.

Her interviewer from which I culled this excerpt, Hashim Almadani, I had not heard of before.  He seems to be one of a growing multitude of Internet pundits who have an active Twitter life, have many YouTube videos, interview people, get interviewed by other people -- all while generally weighing in on sociopolitical issues of the day, often alluding to, if not revolving around, the problem of Islam. Even after perusing Almadani's blog, while I learn that he was born in Iraq and raised there, and finally left there in 2009 to emigrate to the UK, I can't tell whether he's a "secular" Muslim, or an ex-Muslim (the only truly, coherently secular way to be).

At any rate, they had an interesting exchange at one point in the interview, where we had a glimpse of how we really are, as Bill Maher refreshingly likes to say with pointed verve, "better than they are".

Shazia Hobbs interviewed by Hashim Almadani

Shazia Hobbs: One bad day in the UK was better than ten good days in Pakistan because [in the UK] if you have no money if you have no job you can still eat; if you have no job and you have no money and you're ill, you can still get treated, your children can get an education.  But if you live in Pakistan and you have no money. you don't eat --

Hashim Almadani: Yeah, you're dead!

Shazia Hobbs: Yeah. So here in the UK, it's different

The Counter-Jihad's blind spot for stealth jihad and taqiyya

Our old friend The Big W smoked out a common blind spot in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, expressed by one of the luminaries of the Readership, one "Wellington":

thebigW says 

Jun 14, 2019 at 10:30 pm 

Wellington says, “Ironically Muslims who are peaceful and good people are actually engaged in a distortion of Islam.” Not if they’re doin’ taqiyya. How dya know when they’re not doin’ taqiyya? Ya don’t. 

The Big W's typically trenchant point, put as usual with admirably blunt eloquence, leads us logically to wonder why it is that a robustly counter-jihad person like Wellington would bring up that elusive demographic, the Moderate Muslim (by another name), whose moderation is, on the macro level -- the only level that matters with regard to the survival of the West -- impossible to vet and verify.  This blind spot is also a mortal soft spot that tends to reinforce our dominant reflex and instinct, in America and throughout the West in general, to inhibit & suppress, rather than encourage, a rational prejudice against all Muslims -- the only thing that (one may reasonably suppose) will save the West in the long run, in the distant future. 

Stealth Decaf

Recently, I alluded to the deficiency in the Counter-Jihad (both its Leadership and its Readership) with regard to conceptualizing what, exactly, is the problem of Islam -- in, among other things, their impoverished appreciation for the stealth jihad.  Islam may be the only religion in history (and certainly the only religion on the planet today) whose members engage in a type of espionage. This includes perhaps most critically the tactic of the double (and/or even the triple) agent -- i.e., the false moderates and the cleverer "Better Cop" Muslims who make a show of going deeper in a seeming criticism of Islam -- in order to advance the goals (in essence, supremacist and expansionist) of their religion.

By chance, I bumped into an old essay of mine (published on my former blog, The Hesperado) from January of 2017, concerning a flaw in the otherwise excellent counter-jihad analysis of Philip B. Haney.  That old essay articulated well -- if I may toot my own horn -- the logic of stealth jihad, and the concomitant illogic of the Counter-Jihad when connecting the myriad dots involved.

Tbe "Better Cop" Muslim and the Counter-Jihad

I've written scads about this angle of the problem of Islam over the years.  This "Better Cop" phenomenon pertains specifically to the "problem of the problem of the problem" -- where the primary problem is, of course, Islam; the secondary problem is the mainstream West's inability to grapple with that primary problem; and the tertiary problem involves various defects in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream -- including a tendency to believe that when a "Reformist" Muslim smiles and sounds nice, he or she must actually be the mythical unicorn, the Moderate Muslim.

The "Better Cop" Muslims I define as those Muslims who have developed a taqiyya subtler and more sophisticated than the garden-variety "Good Cop" Muslims who, in order to fool the less savvy mainstream West, need only smile and repeat bromides like "Islam is a religion of peace!" and "I love America, I love Coca-Cola!"  The Better Cops, by contrast, make a show of seeming to cut deeper into a self-criticism of Islam, even as they are deftly palming the crucial cards of defending Islam with their other sleight-of-hand. In this way -- depending on how clever they are -- they can even fool many in the Counter-Jihad (their specific target anyway).

Two of these "Better Cop" Muslims I've noticed for a while now are Asra Nomani and Qanta Ahmed.

In a recent article on his blog, Andrew Bostom did a fine job taking apart these two Better Cops and their attempts to sell a sanitized Islam somehow supposed to be different from mainstream Islam.  However, it seems that Bostom was not entirely immune from their wiles (or at least the wiles of the "better" one).

When Janet Mefferd asked Andrew Bostom the 6 million dollar question about the motives of Qanta Ahmed and Asra Nomani -- "why the taqiyya?" -- Bostom executes a misstep:

I think they [Ahmed; Nomani] don’t tell the truth out of embarrassment. 

That twinge of a benefit of the doubt is, in that moment of microcosm, the essence of the reason why the West is likely doomed on the macrocosmic level to be eventually destroyed by Muslims in the future.

Indicative of Bostom's perspective is his different takes on these two Better Cop Muslimas:

...Qanta Ahmed, who is I think the more egregious of the two...

...Asra Nomani—who typically is a little better on these subjects...

The problem (of the problem of the problem) here,  is that Bostom apparently doesn't see the paradox -- that when Asra Nomani is "better" she is only so to the extent that she fools Bostom into thinking she's "better"; where "better" in his mind means she is less "egregious" (i.e., she's being less of a Mohammedan snake) than Qanta Ahmed.  I.e., if we use Bostom as our laboratory specimen metric, we can say that Asra Nomani is a better Better Cop -- in that she is able to fool even an Andrew Bostom into thinking she's not really doing any taqiyya at all (except maybe out of "embarrassment") -- than her Islamic sister, Qanta Ahmed.

How's the Readership doing?

The Readership of the Counter-Jihad, that is.

The Readership is how I distinguish the majority of those "in the Counter-Jihad" -- mostly relatively passive, ordinary Western folks who may have a Facebook account or Twitter page (and may be hooked up on LinkedUp), but most of whom don't even have a blog (unless it's one dedicated to their hobby of baseball cards or Dixieland jazz, etc.) and certainly don't write books about Islam, aren't featured in various websites of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (if they don't run one themselves), don't jet-set around doing speaking engagements at various institutions and colleges around the nation (or world), and don't participate in debates or panels eventually put up at YouTube.  All these latter activities being what distinguishes the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad from the Readership.  Back in 2017 on my older blog The Hesperado, I went into this phenomenon (what could be called the rudiments of a "sociology of the Counter-Jihad") in more detail in my 2-part essay, The Leadership and the Readership.

Related to this, also on The Hesperado (back in 2015), I "took the temperature" of the Counter-Jihad, and discussed that here on The Daily Decaf back in April of this year, in my essay, "Notre Dame hit a nerve in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream".

So how's the temperature of the Readership doing these days?  Glad you asked, Pepe.  I got a glimpse of it in a recent exchange amongst Civilians of the Readership in the comments field of a recent Jihad Watch article, concerning a story of many tons of explosives uncovered in a secret bomb factor in the UK, tied to Hezbollah.  The short answer for now is, not a whole lot has changed, although there seems to be more mention of the D word ("Deportation") -- along with, however, a context of incoherence among most of them.

One commenter, Savvy Kafir, posted one comment that in this regard is sound:

...the Islamization of the West CAN be stopped; but only by ridding the West of Muslims. We vastly outnumber them throughout the Western world, so clearly it CAN be done. We could (and must) deport every one of them. But it will require the political will of many millions of voters who have become aware of the threat posed by Islam, and properly horrified by it — and determined to prevent that nightmare from unfolding, no matter what it takes.

The only problem I have with this statement is to wonder what Savvy Kafir means by "the Islamization of the West".  Does he mean some kind of "Sharia creep" that will just keep slowly expanding by osmosis, with some violence here and there, but not much more than we've seen from Muslims to date?  I wouldn't have to wonder if he just put it more clearly, by saying something like, "...the eventual violent destruction of the West by Muslims in the distant future CAN be stopped; but only by ridding the West of Muslims."  I should add that this idea of "Sharia creep" -- which seems to be the main worry in the Counter-Jihad -- I find to be incoherent, and have analyzed this before in at least two essays:  The Logic of Stealth Jihad, and It's the Violence, Stupid.

Anyway, our old friend The Big W posted a hitting-the-nail-on-the-head comment (as usual). Quoting another commenter, "Rufolino", who wrote:

“The public will for “deportations” barely exists.”

Big W said:

It prolly won’t ever exist if people don’t start pushin’ it. You’d think folks in the Counter-Jihad if there was EVER a place on earth would be the NUCLEUS to grow this idea, but I guess you’d think wrong, eh?

Savvy Kafir, I note, responded to Big W.  I'll note the subtle deficiencies in his response in un-italicized square brackets:

thebigW — You’re exactly right. We in the counter-jihad community need to form the nucleus of a movement that demands the sort of dramatic changes & actions needed to rid the West of Islam. And the sooner we begin pushing that agenda, the better. 

[Yes, the Counter-Jihad (or better yet, the Anti-Islam Movement) needs to demand changes in the West's response to Islam. But before we do this, or in necessary tandem with this demand we make, we need to show the West why it needs to take the action of deportation of Muslims from the West. And that requires a complex, comprehensive education process of our fellow Westerners still pleasantly asleep to the danger of Islam. And that education process won't be able to proceed efficiently without some kind of an Anti-Islam Manual (or Anti-Islam app) that presents all the interlocking bullet points of our case, along with comprehensive yet summarized references to the “mountain of data and ocean of dots” that exists out there which substantiate our case.  An Anti-Islam manual or app must strike the right balance: It must be comprehensive and attentive to the complex subtleties of all the different levels and dimensions of the problem, in order to outwit the sophistry of the Islamopologists and their Useful Idiots, the Westerners deformed by political correctness -- who, unfortunately, remain the majority in the West.  However, at the same time, it must not get too bogged down in a morass of minutiae that will cause the reader's eyes to glaze over.]

... I’m not promoting murder or extermination (as one recently-banned commenter did) – just the common-sense strategy of expelling Muslims from the West before they succeed in turning free societies into Islamic ones. It was pure insanity to allow Muslims to immigrate to the West in the first place. That suicidal mistake MUST be corrected.

[There's that hint again of "Sharia creep" being the major problem rather than Muslims infiltrating and aggrandizing within the West for a long enough time such that at some point in the distant future (I roughly estimate 100 years from now) they will feel able to move on to Phase 2 of the Jihad: rampant, coordinated razzias throughout the West, reducing the West to a general breakdown in order and infrastructures.  Savvy Kafir apparently doesn't think this is going to happen, only that Muslims will somehow succeed in "turning our society into an Islamic one" by... how, exactly will they do that, absent the protracted, eventually escalating scenario of violence I described above? Savvy Kafir and the others in the Counter-Jihad who seem to think like him (and they seem to be the majority) never quite delineate the concrete steps of that process; and often they will add with a note of irritation in their tone, when pressed, that the West is already under Sharia now! This of course is silly hyperbole and doesn't do our primary mission of educating the West to the actual nature of the problem any good.]

* * * * *

I might have a part 2 on this, examining other comments on that Jihad Watch thread, none of which even come close to the (still deficient) level of awareness Savvy Kafir demonstrates.

Low Caffeine, Low Expectations

I know a guy -- I'd say he was a "member of the Counter-Jihad" (or better yet, "of the Anti-Islam Movement"), except that since there's no actually coherently organized "Counter-Jihad" (or "Anti-Islam Movement"), he can't really be a member of it -- whose screen name on the Paltalk chat venue is "SamHuntington" (named after the writer of The Clash of Civilizations) and whom I've known for years to be, generally speaking, quite tough on Islam.  At the same time, over the years I've also noticed now and then various disquieting signs of nougat (i.e., soft spots) here and there in his discourse about the problem of Islam, possibly significant enough to undercut his overall toughness. Or possibly not.  I'm still not sure where my friend Sam stands, given these soft spots.

Either way, these signs do indicate a more general problem in "the Counter-Jihad", where such signs, depending on the individual -- and depending on various consensuses involving decision-making for the group (such as it is) -- can and seemingly do indeed undercut a tough stance vis-à-vis the problem of Islam.  This -- need I add? -- is particularly disquieting, given that "the Counter-Jihad" is the only area of sociopolitical consciousness leading to action in the entire West where a tough stance has a chance of growing (and from there, helping to awaken the rest of the West).

At any rate, today's posting focuses on one type of soft spot, and that is the nougat of low expectations. In this case, the low expectations refers to Sam's ebullient praise of a mainstream documentary that is supposed to be spot on about the problem of Islam. The documentary is featured  on Netflix -- Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden -- and is based on a book (roughly the same title) by journalist Peter Bergen.

Since this series about which my friend Sam raved and swore it had no soft spots in its treatment of the central issue (Islamic jihad) is based centrally on Peter Bergen's book, and since Peter Bergen is featured in the series, I figured that, short of actually watching the whole series, finding out who this Peter Bergen fellow is would go a long way toward vetting the series and seeing if my friend Sam was being accurate.

Well, on Peter Bergen's webpage, we see a new(er) book he is advertising, titled, with conspicuously suspicious bravado, United States of Jihad (with clever typography showing the word "America" superimposed diagonally by "Jihad").  The brief descriptions and blurbs sound good -- robustly anti-Jihad, right? -- and no doubt my friend Sam would be impressed by them, until he puts two and two together and connects the dots.

For example, knowing what we in the Counter-Jihad know about our Western mainstream and how it routinely whitewashes Islam and in various ways punishes (including among other appalling things, ostracizing and character assassination) critics of Islam that in their politically correct estimation go too far -- i.e., don't limit their criticism/condemnation to the Tiny Minority of Extremists Who Are Twisting the Lovely Religion of Peace Followed by the Vast Majority of Muslims; Muslims Who, As We All Know (thanks to Imam Affleck), Just Wanna Have Sandwiches -- it makes no sense that they would praise a book on Jihad in America that violates the dominant politically correct paradigm.  And if my friend Sam thought about it, he would agree, I am sure, that if the West doesn't transition to a new frame of mind & culture whereby it actually supports -- rather than punishes -- a violation of this politically correct paradigm, it doesn't stand a chance to defend itself in the long term from the threat of Islam.

So how then on Allah's Green Earth could this Peter Bergen guy get so many effusive accolades of praise from the Western mainstream?  If his Islam criticism dared to be one inch outside the Politically Correct Reservation, it makes no sense and would be virtually impossible for him to garner such praise. This is not even to mention that Netflix, the venue for the series based on Bergen's other book, is solidly mainstream. So ask yourself: Do you think Netflix would ever in a million years dare to air (let alone showcase and promote) a series featuring and fully supporting Robert Spencer, Pam Geller, and Bill Warner?  I don't either.

Examples of the Western mainstream's praise of Bergen's book are on his webpage.  Here are a couple of screen shots:





The rest of the page, which my second screen shot cuts off, is a reproduction of a long New York Times review which praises Bergen's book, without a hint that Bergen might have committed the thought crimes of Islamophobia or bigotry or racism (charges routinely leveled at most of the Counter-Jihad analysts who remain outside the pale of the mainstream West, never reviewed or mentioned at all unless in passing to be demonized with such epithets).

Not only are all these praises coming from solidly mainstream Western sources (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, TIME magazine, Washington Post) and one Islamic media outlet pretending to be part of the Western mainstream (Al Jazeera America), but one of the two New York Times notices of praise comes from a guest review penned by none other than Janet Napolitano, who served as Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama (2009-2013).  There's no way in hell that she, or any of these other reviewers (and their politically correct editors and publishers granting them their imprimaturs) would possibly praise a book about Jihad in America that wasn't unacceptably soft -- by Counter-Jihad standards, that is.