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.
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