Yes, my title is quite a mouthful. If it were a muffin you ordered with your triple decaf counter-jihadaccino, it would be either scrumptiously over-complicated, or impenetrably mysterious.
Well, good thing it's not a muffin!
Anywho, for years I've noticed that Hugh Fitzgerald has what I call "asymptotic" tendencies. I use that term loosely & metaphorically, essentially to mean, "getting closer and closer, but never quite arriving". And what Hugh is getting closer and closer to (but never arriving at) is the Full Monte of woke-itude about Islam -- namely, that mainstream Islam is the problem and that all Muslims in one way or another enable that problem, which means that we cannot trust any Muslim.
For a while, back in the day, I noticed Hugh's asymptotic tendency tended to hover in place, so to speak -- neither progressing nor regressing. But lately, going back perhaps the last couple of years, I have noticed telltale hints (how's that for a clever oxymoron?) of regression. All of this I documented and analyzed in detail over the years from many different angles, both on this relatively new blog and on my old crusty & trusty Hesperado blog (which I wrote from 2006 to 2017, logging in well over 1,000 essays). If the reader would kindly lift his or her little finger and do an Advanced Google search for "hugh fitzgerald asymptotic" (or simply "hugh fitzgerald") -- and under the slot for "site or domain" specify the url of either The Daily Decaf or The Hesperado -- he or she will find a veritable treasure trove of critical essays pertinent to today's point.
And what I mean by the titular adverb, zbigniew-brzezinskishly (modifying the adjective asymptotic), is a kind of staid, stodgy State Department perspective blinkered by an anachronistic Cold War framework of geopolitics. This perspective may be illustrated by an extended quote from a recent piece by Hugh, in the various ways he indulges in a speculative psychologization of "Arab" leaders:
“...after seven decades, the Arab states are becoming increasingly fatigued with the whole “Palestinian cause,” weary of the Palestinian demands, and no longer interested in sacrificing their national interests for the Palestinians and their tiresome, prevaricating, grasping, and demanding leader, Mahmoud Abbas.
Those initial responses of mild approval gave way, at a meeting of the Arab League in Cairo on February 1, to a unanimous rejection of the Trump Plan, and then, a few days later, to its rejection again, this time by the O.I.C. (the Organization of the Islamic Conference). Those Arab states that had originally supported the plan as a “praiseworthy effort” did not want to stand out from the other Arabs at a meeting of the full 22-member League; they preferred to keep their heads down, and vote with the rest of the group, for fear of being tarred as “collaborators and sellouts to Netanyahu and Trump.” In such circumstances, they didn’t want to take a risk of antagonizing the Arab street, whipped up by the Palestinian propagandists against the regimes of those who did not denounce the plan. And Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco – all of which had originally lent their cautious support to the plan – had to worry not just about other Arab states attacking their position, but especially about Iran, with its vast propaganda apparatus, ready to pounce on those Arab states it could depict as in Trump’s – and Netanyahu’s — pocket. Given such potential threats, it was prudent of those countries to reverse their initial responses...”
First off, how does Hugh know what's in the mind of these "Arab" leaders of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco? He doesn't show a shred of evidence for any "fatigue" he's imputing to them, nor a lick of proof for his claim that they have grown "weary of the Palestinian demands". Nor -- as Hugh's psychologizing begins to wax uncontrollably in his next paragraph -- that these "Arab states":
did not want to stand out from the other Arabs at a meeting of the full 22-member League;
they preferred to keep their heads down, and vote with the rest of the group,
for fear of being tarred as “collaborators and sellouts to Netanyahu and Trump.”
they didn’t want to take a risk of antagonizing the Arab street, whipped up by the Palestinian propagandists against the regimes of those who did not denounce the plan.
and lastly that they
had to worry not just about other Arab states attacking their position...
Not only is the psychologizing troubling, that Hugh is putting his own mind's logic into the heads of these Mohammedans -- a bad habit of modern Westerners in general concerning Islam and by extension the Orient, by which they project our Western mindset & mores onto Muslims, as if the true measure of human being is to be the Homo Occidentalis. But Hugh goes further: He's clearly and strongly implying that these various "Arab states" don't really care that much about the Israeli-"Palestinian" issue anymore; because, apparently they have other more earthly, generic, un-Islamic concerns, such as their "national interests" which they are supposedly "no longer interested in sacrificing for the Palestinians".
As our old friend "The Big W" put it in the comments section of Hugh's piece with his characteristically and loveably hamfisted precision:
This is just Hugh guessin’ what’s in those Arab heads (and seems like, puttin’ himself there) makin’ them out to be way more reasonable than they are which is fanatically psychotic against the Jews ETERNALLY.
Also annoying are Hugh's repeated locution of "the Arabs" this and "the Arabs" that, reminding us nostalgically of the Cold War era when Islam was -- by Western Experts and Strategists and Analysts and Think Tanks -- even more neglected as a geopolitical factor than it is now (if that's conceivable); even by a mind as perspicaciously prescient as Whittaker Chambers, as I analyzed in a 2015 essay on The Hesperado. Back in 2017 on The Hesperado in a posting I published analyzing Hugh's asymptotic nougat, "The Wrong Instincts", I made an aptly snide remark about this tendency of his, when, after quoting him praising a couple of Muslims --
"...and importantly... several Arabs, including the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who had witnessed the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, and the Algerian journalist Mohamed Sifaoui, who has risked his life both in Algeria and in France denouncing Islamist threats."
I wrote:
...why is Hugh calling these two Muslims "Arabs"? Did he have a flashback to when he was going to college during the Nasser era?
Here on The Daily Decaf, back in 2017, I had occasion to describe Hugh, when he weighed in on what to do about the Kurds, as cultivating a "Realpolitik strategy that sounds like Henry Kissinger and Daniel Pipes combined."
If I may turn the psychoanalytical tables -- or couch -- on Hugh, I may conjecture that over the recent years, he has succumbed to the pressure inherent in the asymptotic position, which I analyzed back in 2017 on The Hesperado, in a posting titled "Cognitive Dissonance" -- the pressure being an increasing tension between the force of the data the person has opened his mind to, since he has become self-aware of his relative freedom from the PC MC paradigm, and the lingering residues of PC MC still in his heart & mind inhibiting him from going "all the way" to a condemnation & suspicion of all Muslims. And Hugh's particular style of recoiling from the progress of his learning curve has been to cultivate a kind of Let's Be Intelligently Reasonable About This and Integrate a Worldly Wisdom About History and Culture and the Middle East; sort of William Dalrymple meets Tom Friedman.
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