With friends like these...

It's exceedingly rare for "the Counter-Jihad" to be self-critical -- this being, in fact, one main feature of why I say there is a "problem of the problem of the problem" (where problem 1 is Islam, problem 2 is the mainstream West's inability to deal rationally with problem 1, and problem 3 is the Counter-Jihad's inadequacy with relation to problems 1 and 2).

How would this tertiary problem be ameliorated?  By, among other things, the ability to spot nougaty softness in the rhetoric of fellow members of the Counter-Jihad (whether of the Readership or the Leadership); calling attention to such softness (and NOT attacking such "whistleblowers" for their modest contribution to quality control); and presenting critical analyses of such softness to demonstrate why it's bad for the general mission of waking up our fellow Westerners to the long-term threat from Islam.

Recently on Jihad Watch, Spencer published a report by Andrew Bostom that was a welcome exception to this deficiency in the Counter-Jihad -- a report that called the sainted Ayaan Hirsi Ali into question.  As usual (but not always), Bostom's analysis is cogent and useful.  Essentially, his report involves a panel discussion held at the prestigiously "conservative" Hoover Institution at Stanford hosting Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her husband Niall Ferguson, and H.R. McMaster. And what Bostom zeroes in on is how this prestigious panel treated a woman in the audience who during Q&A expressed her genuine heartfelt concerns about the danger of Islam and the frustration of trying to bring this into the light in our Western culture, dominated as it is by a politically correct deference to Islam (and hostility to criticism of Islam).  And how did this prestigious panel treat this woman?  As Andrew Bostom characterizes it:

The woman's “poignant, and accurate observations about Islam are dismissed with a toxic brew of derisive laughter, and crude apologetics.” 

Most in the Counter-Jihad know who Ayaan is and what constitutes her Counter-Jihad Street Cred.  Fewer know the other two.  Niall Ferguson, Wikipedia tells us, is

...a Scottish historian and works as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Previously, he was a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and also taught at Harvard University and New York University. 

What Wikipedia only informs its reader obliquely is that Niall is a "conservative" who signals his distaste for politically correct multi-culturalism. For example:

He is known for his contrarian views, like his defense of the British Empire.

Not to mention that he has been pro-Brexit, and has been, for a mainstreamer, leaning towards a criticism of Islam and the mass immigration into the West.

And if one Googles him, one finds today one of his tweets:

Terrific satire by ⁦@offpiste9⁩ : “Anglo-Saxons deserve reparations for the Norman Conquest”

And of course, the fact that Niall would have married a markedly black African woman like Ayaan in the first place -- especially back in 2011, when she seemed to have been more anti-Islam than she is now (we'll get to that in a minute) -- indicates he certainly isn't a Leftist (even if he does exhibit various signs & symptoms of the PC MC virus -- notwithstanding that he would likely protest that he isn't PC at all!).

As for the other person on that Hoover Institution panel, H.R. McMaster, Wikipedia says that he:

...is a retired United States Army general. In 2017, he became the 26th National Security Advisor, serving under President Donald Trump. He is also known for his roles in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom.  

While there isn't much of a Jihad Watch paper trail on Niall, there is a sufficiently damning one on H.R.  For example:

McMaster tells NSC staff that label “radical Islamic terrorism” not helpful because terrorists are “un-Islamic”

And:

“But I think it’s important that, whatever we call it, we recognize that [Muslim extremists] are not religious people.”

One can find the links to those -- and much more that is disquieting about this bloated war general thoroughly besotted with politically correct multi-culturalism -- at this Google page of related Jihad Watch articles.

Now, back to Ayaan. I used to be like most of the Readership (and Leadership) of the Counter-Jihad in praising her to the skies, and I recall one very long and heated Jihad Watch comments thread many years ago in which some upstart was maligning her, and I and many other Jihad Watchers pitched in for a pitched battle against this upstart in defense of Ayaan -- though granted, the upstart's critiques of Ayaan didn't really have much to do with the problem of Islam, per se (and indeed, that upstart tended to be rather soft on Islam in various subtle ways).  However, over the last couple of years I've noticed disquieting signs of asymptotic slippage.  Two years ago, for example, Andrew Harrod wrote a (somewhat) critical review of Ayaan's book, The Challenge of Dawa, in which he (more or less wittingly) highlights the crux of her problem: her facile (and historically illiterate and/or revisionist) distinction between Islam and that recent artificial construct, "Islamism". That review incidentally has some revealing details about her career, whatever that is exactly, involving networking with Muslim reformers (i.e., Better Cops) like Asra Nomani and Zuhdi Jasser (and as we know, Maajid Nawaz; and no doubt others).  Furthermore, Harrod notes that Ayaan

...differentiates between “Mecca Muslims, who prefer the religion originally promoted by Muhammad in Mecca” and “Medina Muslims, who embrace the militant political ideology adopted by Muhammad in Medina”...

And if that isn't bad enough, she

...questionably asserts that “Mecca Muslims” are the “clear majority throughout the Muslim world.”  They “are loyal to the core religious creed and worship devoutly but are not inclined to practice violence or even intolerance toward non-Muslims.”  

Finally, Ayaan cooks up a third category of Muslims: “Muslim reformers” or “modifying Muslims”.

So the Ayaanite framework here is:

1) Muslims who just wanna have a sandwich: the “clear majority”

2) "Islamists" who are endangering the world with jihad: a minority

3) "Reformist" Muslims who are trying to reform Islam: a minority.

Does Ayaan specify how small (or how large) of a minority these Muslims behind Door #2 and Door #3 are?  Not that she could specify anyway, since not only are any attempts at statistics in this regard difficult to pin down, such efforts also are disastrously undermined by the problem of taqiyya and stealth jihad (a problem Ayaan seems unconcerned with).

Secondly, if Sandwich Muslims are a "clear majority" and of the minority left over, half (?) are "Reformist", then why is there such a dire problem?   Surely this overwhelming number of decent Muslims should have been able to neutralize their few bad apples long ago, no...?

For my analytical misgivings about Andrew Harrod (and Ayaan and others), see this old Hesperado essay, Signs of Intelligent Life on Planet Jihad Watch? Le Part Deux.   There, I note three problems with Ayaan:

1) her friendship with -- and thus her lack of appropriate condemnation of -- the pseudo-"Reformer" snake-oil taqiyya artist, Maajid Nawaz, which is one likely reason why she has seemed to adopt the spurious distinction between "Islam" and "Islamism";

2) her curiously misplaced concern about Vlaams Belang and Geert Wilders being as bad as "Islamists"; and finally,

3) her grandiose dream of Islamic Reform to solve the metastasizing global problem of Islam which Muslims are causing.

Note: My second misgiving about Ayaan in the list above began some eleven years ago (concerning Vlaams Belang), way back in the mists of 2008 -- likely long before Ayaan became friendly with Maajid Nawaz; so we may surmise that if indeed Maajid "turned" her (as he turned Sam Harris), he did so by exploiting pre-existing tendencies.

And so now in the summer of 2019, we find Ayaan on a distinguished panel with H.R. McMaster -- who is on record asseverating that Islamic terrorists are "not Islamic" and that Islamic terrorists are "not religious people" -- dismissively laughing at a person who is deeply concerned about the threat of Islam and the West's hostility to such concern.  And the participation of Ayaan's husband, Niall Ferguson, is all the more ironic, given that in 2005, he praised one of the seminal works sounding the alarm of the invasion of Islam into the modern West, Bat Ye'or's book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Here was his encomium, printed on the back cover of the book:

“No writer has done more than Bat Ye”or to draw attention to the menacing character of Islamic extremism. Future historians will one day regard her coinage of the term “˜Eurabia” as prophetic. Those who wish to live in a free society must be eternally vigilant: Bat Ye”or’s vigilance is unrivalled.”

Why are Niall and his wife Ayaan now teaming up with Neanderthals like H.R. McMaster and deriding that same concern about Islam?

P.S.:  And of course, what was the response of the Readership as reflected by Jihad Watch comments?  Less than 50 comments, consisting mostly of mild concern, incomprehension of the broader problem (of the problem of the problem), and yawns.