Real coffee (but slightly decaf, please)

Or rather, more like: "Decaf (but slightly real coffee, please)".

In terms of the long-term threat of Islam and what the West needs to do to wake up to it, I speak of an analyst who shows refreshingly incorrect knowledge of mainstream Islam, yet who (as inevitably seems to happen), retracts his clear-eyed talons in order to hedge his bets on Muslims in general.

The analyst is someone I hadn't heard of before yesterday: Gabriel Said Reynolds, an academic scholar of Islamic theology and history.  The person who glowingly recommended him was a Christian chatter on Paltalk who has been showing signs for a while of a healthy antipathy to Islam; however, from years of experience of disappointment in this regard, I wasn't about to go along with this praise without doing a little investigation on my own.  The Christian chatter assumed that Gabriel Said Reynolds is a Muslim scholar, and that would be somewhat reasonable because of the "Said" in his name (and often we see these converts to Islam sporting names that are a grotesque hybrid of Arabic and European). As far as I was concerned, if Reynolds was a Muslim, then we ought not expect anything from him on the subject other than a tissue of lies (either baldfaced lies, or varying degrees of cleverer forms of taqiyya, all the way up to the styles & wiles of the "Better Cop" Muslims).

I soon learned from a little Googling that Prof. Reynolds is apparently a Catholic theologian with a home base at Notre Dame University and has published books on Islam at Yale University Press. I.e., he's a solidly mainstream academic. From years of bitter experience, I knew this augured ill for any chance that he'd buck the politically correct inhibition, so dominant throughout the mainstream, on any honest appraisal of Islam. This was doubly so when I breezed over a headline about how in 2017, he was "tapped by Vatican for Catholic-Muslim dialogue on religious extremism" (which would have been fine under the semi-Islamo-savvy Pope Benedict XVI, but bodes ill under his Papal replacement, the Marxist Islamophile, Pope Francis).

Well, I was largely (albeit guardedly) refreshed by an essay he published in First Things, a Catholic newsletter-cum-journal presided over by Richard John Neuhaus, a rather well-known Catholic priest and sociopolitical conservative (I remember seeing him a few times as a guest on the old Firing Line debates, always on the side of William F. Buckley).  Up until today, I hadn't bothered to familiarize myself with Neuhaus's stance on Islam, so I thought I'd look him up. A Google search yields a few promisingly substantive articles in this regard. So far, I've only read a 1998 essay, "Islamic Encounters" which indicates he is at least across the middle line toward Islamorealism.  Among other heartening facts, he notes in his essay that he was chastised by CAIR for his review of Bat Ye’or’s "important new book recently published in this country, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude".  So far so good (especially that he likes Bat Ye’or’s book); though he just had to follow that with a politically correct spasm:

To be fair, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) should not be taken to represent contemporary Islam. 

Neuhaus, needless to say, offers not a shred of justification for this sweepingly generous claim about "contemporary Islam".

I look forward to reading one or two further essays of his (particularly one revolving around Pope Benedict's notorious speech in 2006 which sparked violent riots and attacks among Muslims in various places around the world). But let us return to Prof. Gabriel Said Reynolds.

His essay in First Things, published in June of 2014 under the title, "I am a Christian, and I will remain a Christian": What We Can Learn from Meriam Ibrahim, is about the infamous case of a Sudanese woman whose father was Muslim but who grew up as a Christian and then married a Christian man and because of this, was sentenced by the Sudanese government to the crime of adultery (zina) -- because under Sharia law, a Christian marriage is not recognized -- and sentenced to death under the Islamic crime of apostasy (irtidad).  Professor Reynolds pulls no punches about Islam in his dispassionate description of the key points:

From the perspective of Islamic law, individuals ...who are born Muslims can never legally enter into another religious community. Their rejection of Islam, however, amounts to apostasy: a crime against God and the Prophet Muhammad which is punishable by death.

As Prof. Reynolds points out, this capital punishment for apostasy stems not directly from the Koran, but rather from the hadiths, one of which he quotes, straight from the camel's mouth (Mohammed):

“As for he who changes his [Islamic] religion, kill him.” 

And he goes on to add the pertinent, and ghastly, point:

These declarations shape the doctrine of the traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence: All four Sunni schools, and the standard Shi’ite school, agree that apostates are to be executed...

Followed by this even more ghastly fact, referring to her release from prison only after international non-Islamic pressure on Sudan forced them to let her out:

As her life would certainly be threatened by religious vigilantes (or by even by her own relatives) in Sudan, she and her husband and children immediately sought to leave the country.  

Ah, but then Prof. Reynolds (like Neuhaus) just had to have a Tourette's twitch of political correctness in the form of a parenthetical coda.  Let us repeat that previous sentence, and then restore his parenthetical remark he felt obliged to append:

All four Sunni schools, and the standard Shi’ite school, agree that apostates are to be executed (although more and more Muslims today disagree).

[bold emphasis added by me]

A number of things to say about this.  First, after we roll our eyes to the ceiling in our grief and then facepalm in jaded misery, we note the obvious, that this parenthetical remark is a politically correct virtue-signalling spasm so typical of most of those who are otherwise critical of Islam.

Second, we note that Prof. Reynolds (like Neuhaus) provides not a shred of evidence for this generous claim about "more and more Muslims today".

Third, and most interestingly, his claim raises important questions, some rhetorical, some perhaps not: If, as he claims, any Muslims disagree with their mainstream Islamic jurisprudence found in all 4 schools of Sunni law (and, as he points out, the standard Shi'ite school), on what grounds do they disagree?  On non-Islamic, Western grounds?  How does that square with their self-identity as a Muslim (= follower of Islam)? Or if they claim to ground it on Islam, how can that be, since all their mainstream schools rule otherwise? If by some implausible means, these Muslims have concocted or cobbled together some alternative Islam that purports to be grounded in some part of Islam, how can that be convincingly argued? And how on Earth could they convince Muslims who want to be mainstream Muslims (particularly when such challenges risk physical punishments, even death)? And why should we take them seriously, since their Private Idaho of their alternative Islam is -- because of its minuscule representation (not to mention its shaky foundations in Islam) -- demographically irrelevant to the broader problem of Islam? And, finally, why do so many Muslims who affect to be in disagreement with such glaringly monstrous aspects of their Islam -- why do they continue to defend Islam using various ploys of sophistry that avoid the kinds of questions I'm asking here, rather than offering up a frank and sincere response?

Of course, Prof. Reynolds' essay is utterly devoid of all these questions, even if their dire exigency inhabits the spaces between its lines, to be noticed by precious few readers in our time.

Two Kinds of People

The old adage that "there are two kinds of people" applies in many ways, concerning different issues. The two kinds I refer to here today concern first of all Westerners (and their assimilated partners in the non-West), divided into those who get the problem of Islam, and those who don't.

The latter are clearly still the majority throughout the West, though the situation isn't static: One can discern indications of a growth of the former -- a growing learning curve, but one beset by two problems:  1) an achingly glacial rate of expansion; and 2) a tendency to proceed in a framework that paradoxically inhibits, or hobbles, the progress of one's education about the horror of Islam.

But this reflects a further complication of what I have called "the problem of the problem" (where the primary problem is Islam, and the problem of it reflects Westerners grappling inadequately with that primary problem), which I've dealt with at length in many previous essays on this blog and on my former blog (The Hesperado) -- see particularly this essay -- additional wrinkles to the problem that will only clutter up what I want to examine here today, so I'll skip it.

There may be many factors differentiating these two types of people -- those who get the problem of Islam, and those who don't.  One factor often touted as relevant turns out to be based on faulty reasoning. For example, the simplistic distinction that those who don't get the problem of Islam are all "Leftists", while those who do get it are not "Leftists".  I once held this view, but over the years, I kept hitting my head against the data of countless Non-Leftists who were pretty much as myopic to the problem of Islam as any Leftist is, and eventually, on this particular subtopic, I went through that strange process called "changing my mind".

This brings me to a factor that sheds light on how these two types approach the problem differently. Their different approaches reflect two different epistemologies, what I'd like to call the Casuistic and the Axiomatic.  The ones who get the problem of Islam approach it casuistically; the ones who don't get it approach it axiomatically.

What is the casuistic approach? The word comes from the Latin for "case", and this approach proceeds on a case-by-case basis. This means that the casuistic approach is responsive to data -- not only to an existing pool of data, but also to new data.  Most problems -- particularly a complex sociopolitical problem like Islam -- do not have a static pool of data, but are dynamic, involving new data.  With this particular problem, one of the most important types of new data is, to put it bluntly, yet another Muslim (or, more often, Muslims in the plural) trying to kill us.  And this type of data is not only happening regularly and often, it is -- if you pay attention to it -- metastasizing (i.e., getting worse, both in quality and in quantity).

The casuistic approach isn't responsive to data merely in the sense of exclusively reacting to it; this approach also tries to make sense of the data and, if the data are regular, frequent, and metastasizing -- as the data concerning the problem of Islam in fact are -- the casuistic person will study more to make sense of this dynamic. As time goes along in his study, he will note different frameworks have been developed by different people providing some overall sense to this disturbing dynamic exhibited by the data.  And he will eventually realize that the different frameworks fall into one of two categories, reflecting our binary division between Casuist and Axiomatic.

Now, what is this Axiomatic approach? And how does it differ from the Casuistic approach?  The axiomatic approach brings an abstract principle, an axiom, to the table, before even assessing any data.  With this axiom in place, the axiomatic person then takes a look at the data; but if the data seems to indicate that his axiom isn't correct or needs to be adjusted, the axiomatic person won't budge.  He will try to figure out ways to explain why the data seems to be challenging the usefulness of his axiomatic framework -- ways which will leave his axiomatic framework intact (when, that is, such a kind of person does not just pretty much ignore the data, after giving lip service to its existence.)  So with these people who don't get the problem of Islam, it's not always a matter of them ignorant of the data or avoiding the data; oftentimes (especially in the social media realm of punditry and podcasting think tank "experts") it's a matter of form-fitting the data into their pre-fab axiomatic paradigms.

So, what got me to thinking about this was a headline today from Jihad Watch:

Muslim convicted of plotting jihad massacres at UN, FBI offices and NYC landmarks deported to Sudan

With the (even) more disturbing details in the story:

A Sudanese national convicted in 1996 with nine others as part a large-scale terrorism plot against the U.S.... the conspiracy headed by the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman to target the United Nations, FBI offices and other New York City landmarks.

The funny thing about this ("funny" in a grimly black humor sense) is that for all of the years I've been reading about Islam since 911, I never knew about this major terror plot to mass-murder Americans in New York City in the 90s. One more datum to add to the mountain of data out there indicating the horrific proportions of this problem.  And I thought about all the Westerners (still a majority, sadly) whose view on the problem of Islam wouldn't change at all -- even after they learn about this story.  They would either just forget it 15 minutes after they read about it in the New York Times; or, if pressed, they would find a way to make its grotesquely alarming appendages fit into their box without disturbing the rigid presuppositions of their axiom that:

"the only problem is a Tiny Minority of Extremists, and meanwhile mainstream Islam is just a religion like any other, and the Vast Majority of Muslims Just Wanna Have a Sandwich".

Signs of intelligent life on Planet Jihad Watch

Recently on Jihad Watch, Andrew Bostom (about whose asymptotic tics I've written before) published a salutary article with a refreshingly rare criticism of the Kurds -- "Don't Romanticize the Kurds". When I first saw the article, I thought, this is great, but didn't expect the comments to rise above a measly 9 or 10.  Well, when I checked back just a few hours later, it had reached nearly 150 (it has since peaked at 193 and will probably not rise further now that it has sunk into the oblivion of the archived "Next Pages").

In his article, Bostom adumbrates all the reasons why the Kurds are unremarkably extremist (i.e., normatively Islamic, since the vast majority of them are Sunni Muslims).

So what triggered this high number of comments?  Before I read through them, I assumed it was the various members of the Readership of the Counter-Jihad (as opposed to the Leadership) wringing their hands about the Kurds and wrangling with each other over their double-virtue-signalling angst.

And I was pretty much correct.

One long-time commenter named "Ernie", for example, posts this uninformed remark:

I’ve heard that the Kurds are a people , and that there are Kurds that are Muslim , other Kurds are Christian ,and that there are even Jewish Kurds . There are no good reasons for the betrayal of the Kurds ; and white-washing the betrayal of the Kurds by smearing them or referring to things that happened in the past is simply another injustice done to them .

Ernie just assumes that there must exist an innumerable number of non-Muslim Kurds; but, as our old friend "the Big W" points out later on in that comments thread:

All I needed to know about the Kurds is that “the Kurds, the vast majority of whom are orthodox Sunni muslims” 

http://home.hum.uva.nl/oz/leezenberg/PoliIslamKurds.pdf 

 to know that everything Andrew Bostom tells us here ain’t surprising at all.

No doubt Ernie would just double down if he faced the facts that the vast majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, because that's how incoherent emotions roll. And Ernie effectively did that later on in the comments thread:

Well , The Kurds have done it according to some people here , and that deserves the dead-penalty apparently…. I really think about leaving here , and not coming back to this blog . It has gone too far. Let me be clear : I hate Islam , and everything it stands for . But the whitewashing here for genocide directed at ANY people , and in this case The Kurds is disgusting . And as final justification : they are Muslims…………sorry , I can’t and I will not accept this . It is evil .

 And:

Abandoning the Kurds in northern Syria and leaving them to the “mercy” of Erdogan is defacto ethnic cleansing/genocide of the Kurds in that region , Gravenimage . You’ll see .

Another commenter -- one "Chand" -- chimes in on Ernie's side, posting comments like these:

Islam may be problematic, or bad, or very bad, or terrible or even evil but for most JW readers this translates into a hatred for ALL Muslims, just for being born into Islam. ALL Muslims are blamed for the Jihad problem and are falsely accused of being facilitators of jihad or sharia, whatever that means.

First of all, Chand is the one "translating" (i.e., assuming) what JW readers supposedly think -- that they move from opposing Islam to nursing a "hatred for ALL Muslims".  As I have pointed out, it's not about "hate", it's about rationally protecting our societies from Islam (which, rationally, entails that we be appropriately wary of Muslims who actualize the Islam that threatens us -- and also, of course, rationally entails the fact that we cannot adequately discern which Muslims are not doing taqiyya from those who are). Chand, apparently, is willing to throw all these rational concerns out the window in order to anxiously avoid "hating" Muslims. Once again, signs that the Counter-Jihad is infected with the PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Cuturalism) that saturates the broader Western mainstream (about which those in the Counter-Jihad are always bitching).

Then, after quoting Bostom --

“Messo said the PYD/YPG and Daesh are both terror groups, differing only in aims, and sometimes even working together. “For example, the BBC showed that the PYD/YPG signed an agreement with Daesh. And, according to our own sources, the PYD/YPG took former Daesh members with them,” he added.”

-- Chand remarks:

This quote by Bostom is the most ridiculous of all. Equating a secular/Marxist group which have women brigades and clearly have equal rights for women, women’s emancipation, scientific education, countering religious doctrine and backwardness, etc. as their political agenda with a barbaric gang of fascist criminals trying to establish their own vision of 7th century Arabic Islam is totally dumb.

Then Wellington -- a long-time veteran of Jihad Watch comments about whose asymptotic twitches I've discussed many times -- just had to weigh in with his considerable ballast:

Not every Muslim is a mortal threat and anyone saying so is, at best, guilty of extreme exaggeration (though so-called moderate Muslims do give cover to the most “devout” to be found among Mo’s followers). But what is a threat is Islam—and a threat as no other major religion remotely is.

After all these years of reading Jihad Watch (I believe, by his own lights, since its inception in 2003), Wellington still doesn't get the relatively simple principle -- namely, that:

We must, if we want our West to survive past 100 years from now, treat all Muslims with equal suspicion because as Robert Spencer has noted many times, we cannot adequately tell the difference between "devout" Muslims and Muslims doing taqiyya.

So, if Wellington had actually digested what he's been learning all these years, he would know that asserting that "[n]ot every Muslim is a mortal threat" is an utterly needless and irrelevant reminder of a too fine distinction -- or even worse, actually reinforces our incoherent need to soften our stance with regard to the aforementioned principle.

Another long-time regular at Jihad Watch comments is one "eduardo_odraude" (indeed, I believe he is the person who helms the fine website Quoting Islam), who weighed in with more anxious concern about hating Muslims:

This site does not promote anti-Muslim hatred. It does lead sane people to an intense dislike of what the core texts of Islam teach.

lebel is purveying falsehoods in claiming Robert Spencer promotes anti-Muslim hatred. Spencer has stated countless times that many Muslims are ignorant of their own texts and innocent of the violent totalitarian teachings of Muhammad. lebel knows but wants to hide that Robert Spencer says in virtually every talk Spencer gives that it is wrong to paint Muslims with a broad brush.

This "lebel" character eduardo alludes to is the wild card in this Jihad Watch comments thread (as he has been in other threads over the many months if not years). He goes in to taunt and chide Jihad Watchers for, in one way or another, "hating all Muslims". The lebel wild card would be an excellent opportunity for Jihad Watchers to school him on the primary point:

We do not "hate" Muslims per se, primarily because "hate" is a silly distraction from our concern to defend our society from Muslims actualizing their Islam.

So this primary point is the real issue, which lebel is either cleverly, or obtusely, deflecting: namely, is Islam a threat to our Western society, and how much of a threat is it? The crucial related question is, which Muslims can we trust, if any, and on what grounds should we trust them?  The lebels of the West (if indeed he is even a Westerner), the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalists (PC MCs) who dominate Western culture, anxiously wish to maintain an abstract principle that axiomatically defends a putative majority of Muslims.  This axiomatic abstraction is threatened by the casuistic approach that confronts the sheer mountain of data (and ocean of dots suggesting connection) and concludes that the problem extends so deeply and broadly that we would be reckless if we drew artificial delimitations around it for the sake of insulating a putative majority of Muslims from our concern. Meanwhile, PC MCs often engage in a sophistry that pretends to grapple with these data & dots, thus manipulating them to give their axiomatic abstraction an aura of a reasonable grounding in facts. It is dismaying to see most of those in the Counter-Jihad basically doing the same thing.

At a certain juncture in this sea of 193 comments, we see the Three Mouseketeers of the Rabbit Pack -- Wellington, gravenimage, and the Energizer Bunny himself, Angemon -- weigh in against this lebel character (his comment they are responding to immediately precedes Wellington's), whose main complaint about Jihad Watchers is, as I take it, the crux of the matter:

...taqiyya... enables you to dismiss any of the behavior [of seemingly Moderate Muslims] ...as some kind of deception. 

Instead of a head-on rebuttal of this point by steadfastly defending the exigent cogency of a generalized suspicion of all Muslims, the Three Amigos above go into tortured rhetoric effectively trying to sidestep that crux of the matter -- evidently because, in their asymptotic double-virtue-signalling, they are uncomfortable avowing it.

P.S.: I remember a few days ago seeing a comment by some commenter whose name I'm not familiar with, one "Cortez", that was a bracingly refreshing splash of water on the nonsense of the Counter-Jihad Softies.  Now there's no sign of Cortez in that thread.  Here's proof that his comment was scrubbed (evidently (who else?) by Spencer and/or his tech genius, Marc), two screen shots showing there was in fact a Cortez comment on that thread, 5 days ago: