Where's the coffee...?

"No reasonable and thoughtful individual will see Muslims as subhuman, or irrational, violent, or backward." -- Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, July of 2019

Was that a double-virtual-signalling spasm by Robert?  Or does he really believe it?  We'll apparently never know (unless Robert undergoes a remarkable change of strategy).

Let's analyze this more closely: Of course I would agree with the "subhuman" part; but Robert is using our obvious rejection of the notion of Muslims being "subhuman" in order to smuggle in a similar rejection of the other three, less obvious, descriptors.  "Irrational" for example: it's safe to say that anyone defending Allah, the Koran, and Mohammed is irrational.  How about "violent"? There may be many Muslims who are not strictly speaking violent and may not be all their lives; but that hardly exempts them from our condemnation, when they continue to enable, if not enthusiastically support (as well as mendaciously defend) an ideology that mandates violence in order to foment its fanatically psychotic, supremacist expansionism. 

Finally, we have "backward".  Well, there may be some Muslims who are educated and relatively literate; but again, so long as they affirm Allah, the Koran and Mohammed as good, they remain backward in terms of the progress of humanity -- not to mention that it is arguable to say that all too often those Muslims who are educated and relatively literate use their relative intelligence not for good, but for the evil of advancing Islam through more or less clever tactics of sophistry & deception.

Robert Spencer can still surprise...

... and not in a good sense. As followers of my blog (and of my erstwhile 10-year-long blog, The Hesperado, and before that, Jihad Watch Watch) know, over the years I've written scads of criticism of Robert Spencer's views of the problem of Islam (and of the problem of the problem -- the problem of the West's failures to grasp & grapple with the problem of Islam).  After all the gaffes and faux pas I've seen him do, and repeat, I thought I'd pretty much seen 'em all.

No so.  The other day, I almost did a spit-take of my coffee when I read these words from the éminence grise of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Robert Spencer:

”...a cult is generally centered around a charismatic leader who demands strict obedience, and there is no such in Islam...”

And wouldn't you know it, our old friend "The Big W" was right on the ball, and deposited this characteristically pithy comment that nailed it:

thebigW says 
Feb 19, 2019 at 10:37 pm 

” a cult is generally centered around a charismatic leader who demands strict obedience, and there is no such in Islam” 

Ahem, there sure as hell is such a thing in Islam, and his name is Muhammad. 

How to explain Robert's egregious lapse here? I'm still wondering.  Not only does Muhammad qualify as a cult leader, he's probably the Mother of All Cult Leaders throughout history.  Is Robert perhaps disqualifying him because he's been dead for centuries?  That would be a silly reason to disqualify him; for, unfortunately, Muhammad is still very much alive in the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims around the globe.

At any rate, probably the biggest objection (which Spencer didn't mention) to calling Islam a "cult" is that all the cults we've come to know over the decades have been relatively small, and usually fairly limited in geographical extent (with exceptions -- e.g., Scientology; though even Scientology can't hold a candle to the immensity, both in time and space, and in numbers, to Islam).  But that would be singularly simple-minded to conclude that Islam can't be a cult, just because it's too big.   Nor does being a cult exclude being a religion: A movement could be both (at least for people who are capable of patting their head and rubbing their stomach at the same time).  And this isn't to open that other kettle of fish, the "Islam isn't a religion" meme, about which I've written before.

Jihad Watchers still suckers for the mojo of the Better Cup of Mo

The Better Mo in this case being Zuhdi Jasser.

For example, a highly esteemed and intelligent veteran Jihad Watcher named "Wellington" described Zuhdi Jasser as "[a] sincere but confused Muslim..."  

And of course at the time, no other Jihad Watcher in that comments field corrected him; but in fact one relatively new (but quite active) Jihad Watcher praised him:

Ashley says 
Mar 14, 2019 at 10:29 pm 

 Bravo, Wellington.

Then on another thread, in another year, at Jihad Watch, we had another relatively new (but quite active) Jihad Watcher show her naivete not only about Jasser but also about two other Better Cops:

StellaSaidSo says
 Feb 23, 2018 at 4:28 am

... the ‘reformers’ are either deceiving themselves, or deliberately deceiving us. 

Notice how she starts out robustly; but then she has to effectively ruin it:

I think Raheel Raza is sincere, and Tarek Fateh, and maybe Zuhdi Jasser...

Don't you just love that "and maybe Zuhdi Jasser"...?  One deadly equivalent analogy would be a vetter at an airport responding to a high threat level for a possible terrorist plot basically giving the green light to a Muslim because he's wearing blue jeans and smiling, and so therefore "maybe" he's not part of the terror plot.

 – but sooner or later they must surely come to the conclusion that, if some of it is a crock, chances are that all of it is a crock. The journey towards apostasy takes hours in some cases, and years in others.

Here, Stella is making the mistake of speculating that because they could become apostates (based in part on her somewhat circular supposition that these "sincere" "reformists" are such because they have the potential to become apostates), that future-based speculation should retroactively inform our present judgement -- generously -- of these supposedly sincerely reformist Muslims.  I.e., she's setting up an implicit framework for erring on the side of generous trust of Muslims, rather than suspicion. Why is she doing that? I think because deep down inside, she feels anxiety about where her increasing knowledge of the horrors of Islam is leading her, and she needs to avoid becoming a "racist Islamophobe" -- and along come the Better Cop Muslims to save her from this awful propensity.

Then -- again from another Jihad Watch comments thread, in another year -- we have Wellington again engaging in a long, detailed argument (beginning with this comment) with another Jihad Watcher (one "rubiconcrest") about Zuhdi Jasser.  Wellington begins promisingly:

You may, rubiconcrest, respect Zuhdi Jasser for his courage but I do not respect him for putting forth a false narrative, as he has done sundry times, i.e., that Islam is something inherently good and can be reformed. 

Might as well respect a Marxist or Neo-Nazi for their courage in arguing for an “enlightened” and “reformed” version of their respective belief of choice. Would you do this? If not, why not? Because you think Islam is not as bad as Marxism or Nazism? Actually, it is worse when considering the time horizon in which it has been able to hide its malevolence.

But then, in the voluminous unpacking of this which Wellington articulates following this, he indulges in a maddening circumlocution around the most essential point: our inability to read Jasser's mind coupled with the devastating problem of taqiyya (not to mention the excruciatingly relevant facts that Jasser is intelligent, has been a Muslim all his life, and has thought hard about, and published books about, the problem of Islam in our time).  Wellington's missing the point is no surprise to me, given my previous run-ins with him.

Meanwhile, in my Jasser-hopping Googling, I was pleasantly surprised to find a couple of comments I lodged over 5 years ago under my nickname at the time, "voegelinian" (and of course none of the veteran Jihad Watchers gave me even the faintest whiff of a high five).

I first quoted "David Kopel":

David Kopel says
 Aug 24, 2014 at 11:24 pm

Nevertheless, when we don’t attach any guile to him, Jasser seems like quite an intelligent and reasonable person. He may a bit of a pollyanna on the subject of modernizing islam, but he’s not insincere. Why not give him a break? [my bold emphasis added]

Then I responded:

voegelinian says
 Aug 25, 2014 at 2:41 pm

You’re looking at Jasser from a micro perspective — as one individual. I’m looking at him from a macro perspective, in terms of the effects his punditry has — including softening up gullible Infidels to reinforce their already existing semi-conscious feeling that “most Muslims can’t be all evil, the only real problem is a certain percentage of them” — the meme which has been killing us, is killing us now, and portends horrific terror attacks in the future which the Muslims planning them will only be able to get away with if they can work stealthily within a society that generally trusts Muslims.

One Jihad Watcher, one "Brennan Kingsland" (a nonce-nick, of course), later in that same thread put the issue in a nicely pithy way:

Even if Dr. Jasser IS sincere, that’s not a risk any correct-thinking person would wish to take.

"Yo, terrorista-barista, give me a cup of hyphenated coffee -- you know, a Caffeinated-Decaf!"

We could call this absurd cup of coffee a Caf-Decaf.  Curiously comical if just an item in a cafe; but dismayingly counter-productive if a meme in the Counter-Jihad.

As far as I can tell, all the Luminaries in the Counter-Jihad retail this effectively impracticable cup o' Counter-Jihad Joe; nonetheless unobjectionably (if not usually commendably) tasty to its loyal clientele.

The caffeine of the metaphor is the robustly aromatic (and therefore disturbing) awareness of having woken up and smelled the Islamic coffee; the decaf is the various flavors and styles of watering down that bitterly strong java.  I can understand the broader Western Mainstream indulging this inconsistent if not self-contradictory nonsense; but when the Counter-Jihad regularly sells this swill over the counter, it's face-palm (if not forehead-desktop) time.

The latest example of this is from the hyphenated Christine Douglass-Williams, a regular contributor to that bastion of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Jihad Watch. Double-virtue-signalling phrases such as the following seem to flow from her pen as readily as cappuccino froth flows from an espresso steam wand:

At the root of the jihad against Christians globally (and also against minorities) is Islam’s supremacist doctrine. Not all Muslims choose to follow this doctrine, and many have also been victimized by it.

More pertinently (and therefore more dispiritingly), we see in another of her postings from the same day a glimpse into an exquisite irony; an irony she seems happily unaware of.  Relaying a report from Breitbart about what the latest mujaheed jihadin' on the London Bridge portends, she prefaces:

No one welcomes bad news, but denial can lead to even more bad news. A stark example is the reality of jihad terror. Ignoring its root cause will not make it go away. The article below highlights both good news and bad news associated with the London Bridge terror attack. It applauds human resilience and the readiness to sacrifice oneself for others. It states boldly that “people have had enough”...

The irony here is that Christine Douglass-Williams herself seems to be in denial of just how broad and deep is the danger of Islam.  Why I say this, aside from the first asymptotic twinge I quoted above, my readers will be able to piece together from the various essays I've written about her -- a brief allusion on this blog; and several longer more detailed essays on my heretofore Hesperado.

A note from our sponsors...

the great Don Pardo (PBUH)


Well, our sponsors is just little ol' me (and Flo and the gang).  Often my postings are stand-alone and delimited to one sub-topic of the broader, horrendous problem of Islam and the broader, infuriating problem of the West failing to grapple with that horrendous problem (and the smaller, though still vexing problem of the Counter-Jihad inadequately dealing with both aforementioned problems).

Sometimes, on the other hand, I happen to pen an essay that turns out to sound a lot of important themes, which I've often repeated many times in different ways over the years. Indeed, on my old blog, The Hesperado, I had a series with titles riffing off of the old Clint Eastwood movies with his pet orangutan, that (with rather a note of exasperation, as I recall) alluded to this:

Every Which Way But Anti-Muslim

Any Which Way You Can

Sorry If I Keep Repeating Myself

Anywho, one recent posting from this little ol' blog (going way back to February of this year) I think deserves re-posting, for its coverage of broader themes:

Saving the decaffeinated Muslim from our need to wake up and smell the coffee

"Barista-terrorista, give me a cup of caffeinated decaf!"

Some ten years ago, on my other erstwhile blog, The Hesperado, a fellow Civilian in the Counter-Jihad (such as it is) deposited a comment in my posting Spencer Does a Bostom on Chesler? in which he quoted Robert Spencer writing the following:

...it is undeniable that most Muslims are not fighting today's jihad, or aiding it in any way. It is not illegitimate to make a distinction between them and the jihadists, as long as one understands that such a distinction is not readily or easily identifiable or quantifiable in the Islamic world.

Unfortunately, that reader (one "Sagunto" from Amsterdam) provided no link but did say it was some time in 2008.  I tried Googling this quote, and parts of it, and could find no record of it on Jihad Watch (or anywhere else, other than my old blog); but it sounds like Robert Spencer.  It could well have been a comment he lodged on Jihad Watch (back years ago when he deigned to condescend to the hoi polloi of his unwashed readership), and I know of no easy way to search for those from among the archives at the Wayback Machine -- assuming that the screen captures there even captured that particular posting (they only have selected captures). I just spent a solid hour painstakingly going through the 2008 Jihad Watch archives at the Wayback Machine; to no avail.

At any rate, if we assume this is Spencer, it seems that for Spencer, the distinction between harmless Muslims and dangerous Muslims is sufficiently quantifiable for him to assert the "undeniable" existence of a majority of harmless Muslims.  And yet at other times -- for example, just recently, concerning a story where other Muslim Saudis colluded with the Muslim Saudi who killed Americans at the Florida Naval Air Station, when Spencer commented:

For years it has been a central element of the SPLC/CAIR rap sheet on me that I’m an “extremist” for pointing out there is no reliable way to distinguish allies from jihadis among the Muslims we’re working with. Yet here again, the point is proven.

-- Spencer has many times said that there is no adequate way for us to discern that difference!  In this regard, Spencer's consistently inconsistent, non-positional position over the years seems to be to waffle on the distinction between

1) our pragmatic knowledge of the difference between harmless Muslims and dangerous Muslims

and

2) our unavoidably complex and critically deficient situational knowledge of the difference between harmless Muslims and dangerous Muslims.

But then, Spencer only waffles on this distinction when he actually addresses it; most of the time, he just blithely disregards it while pursuing a massive project of public education that would lead any attentive observer who has an open casuistic mind, and who has sufficiently digested the mountain of data (and ocean of dots to connect) -- which Spencer presents relentlessly day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year on Jihad Watch -- to realize that on the macro scale (the only scale relevant to the existential safety of our West in the future), #2 trumps #1 such that, for practical purposes, we cannot pursue macro policies based on #1.

If the reader wishes to delve more deeply into Robert Spencer's consistently inconsistent, non-positional position (and why I say that the old quote "sounds like Robert Spencer"), there is much analysis in this regard in an essay I wrote a couple of years ago at The Hesperado -- Virtue Signalling at the Crossroads of the West.  Note: A good deal of the substance of the argument presented in that Hesperado essay is unfolded further by the various other essays of mine I link therein. As well, there was the old 2015 Hesperado essay I tooted my own horn about recently here, in which -- particularly the latter half -- I (with the help of some anonymous Jihad Watch reader of yesteryear) palpate this curious Spencerian tendency.

Cafe Merkel

Most in the Counter-Jihad probably don't apprehend the logic afoot in the following headline published on Jihad Watch:

Merkel: German government “will and must oppose extreme speech. Otherwise our society will no longer be free.”

One misunderstanding would be to construe Merkel as a brazen fascist. As tempting as it is for us to do that, let us be more forgiving, and analyze that headline from the standpoint of the PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism) that is (at least for now) far more prevalent and typical throughout the Western Mainstream than is brazen fascism.

What I see between the lines are the two fears characteristic of PC MC:

1) fear of Muslims

and

2) fear of being “racist”.

Now, of course those Westerners deformed by PC MC (alas, the clear majority throughout the West) don't realize they are afraid of Muslims, because their semi-conscious and/or subconscious is constantly working psychologically to suppress this fear. And the obvious cause of this suppression is #2 -- their fear of being “racist”.  It does no good to try to point out that “Islam is not a race” for we are not dealing here with a rational thought process; though there is some semblance of logic in play because there is a racial complexion to Islamic culture, mainly due to the historical fact that during its millennial career of imperialist expansion (7th century to the 17th), Islam colonized mostly Third World areas, along the southern zone from the Pacific to the Atlantic, whose demographics are mostly non-white, non-Western.

So when Merkel avers that, unless Germany opposes “extreme speech”, German society will no longer be free, what she really means (though she probably isn't fully aware herself of her own psycho-logic that moves her to this conclusion) is that if Germany doesn't keep a lid on its escalatingly restive (and growing) Muslim population, that population eventually will become so violent that the government will have no choice but to increasingly take on the form of a police state.

And need I add that this is, in different degrees and styles, the recipe and dynamic of every Western nation.  Because our fellow Westerners deformed by PC MC have a psychological problem that inhibits them from facing their first fear (fear of Muslims) rationally, they tend to relocate the burden of the problem back on themselves and us: In their minds, the question becomes, what can we do to avert the coming catastrophe of an inevitable “class of civilizations” -- not at our perimeter, but within our very West -- which they fear is coming down the pike? There is nothing they ask of Muslims, of course. No, the obligation is all on our shoulders, the “White Man's Burden” as it were.

So, since it's all our responsibility, what can we do?  Why, we can try more and more to walk on eggshells around the growing presence of Muslims in our midst and moderate our behavior with anxious deference to their preciously brittle hypersensitivity (which in actuality is, among Muslims, an anticipatory supremacism often more or less cloaked in various dissimulating layers of taqiyya, awaiting the day they can finally take the mask off and flex their supremacist muscles out in the open).

If we can do this, the Merkels of the West (who, alas, abound throughout the entire Western mainstream) are hoping the diversely bristling hornet's nest of Muslims will be placated, which will disinhibit Muslims from devolving into the open jihad of killing us en masse; the penultimate desideratum encoded in Islam.