the D word ain't "Decaf"

As I quoted on my former blog (The Hesperado) back in 2012, Robert Spencer in a posting on Jihad Watch in 2010 glided smoothly over a conjunction that not only should not be made, but is one which implicitly (if not often explicitly) is made almost thematically by the broader Western Mainstream:

...neither Ayaan Hirsi Ali nor anyone else is talking about rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such. It is a peculiar leap of logic to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations. [bolded portion my emphasis]

Notice how Spencer is equating deporting Muslims "wholesale" (how many is "wholesale", anyway?) with rounding them up and genociding them.  And in the same breath, of course, he is decrying and distancing himself from both.  That's the purpose of conjoining the two, so that you can be appalled by deportation as much as you are naturally by genocide.  Did any of his readers wonder whether such a conjunction should be dashed off with such a glibly breezy alacrity?  Perish the thought!  They had other incoherent fish to fry that day (as usual).

Except for moi, of course. The reader can zero in on my comment a decade ago on that comments thread (under the nickname "Hesperado" in fact), where I wrote a very long and detailed response:

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Spencer writes:

...neither Ayaan Hirsi Ali nor anyone else is talking about rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such. It is a peculiar leap of logic to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations.

The logic of PC MC in this regard is not really peculiar, nor is it a leap.

The fact is, when we explicitly or implicitly condemn Islam, we are by logical extension condemning all Muslims. We may hem and haw and try to assure those who connect this particular dot that we are not doing this, but the dot-connection is a reasonable inference -- for a Muslim is precisely a person who supports, and derives inspiration and existential identity from, Islam. And if we condemn the latter, how are we not condemning the former?

Whenever this issue becomes forced into explicit response, the Anti-Islam analysts usually try to do an end-run around it, by hypothesizing that many (or most?) Muslims "don't really know their Islam", or are "lax Muslims who don't really practice it", or indeed may be "reformists" of one stripe or another. These hypotheses (with no solid grounding in fact) serve two functions:

1) they attempt to placate the PC MCs, who control the sociopolitical discussion about Islam in the West, and convince them that we are not "against all Muslims"

and

2) they reflect a sincerely liberal (or Christian, or often, both) attitude that is anxiously disinclined to condemn a whole People.

Sometimes, a given Anti-Islam analyst's use of those hypotheses may reflect #1 and not #2; sometimes vice versa; or sometimes an incoherent mixture of the two. But it must be asked: Is it not rather illogical (if not comically preposterous) to suppose that there exist viably massive numbers of Muslims out there who do not support Islam?

So we see that within the Anti-Islam Movement itself, there is lurking the same logic that leads the PC MCs "to say that because one group was falsely accused of supremacist designs and was persecuted as a result, therefore any other group accused of supremacist designs must be falsely accused, with the accusers nursing genocidal aspirations." What differentiates us from the PC MCs is that the latter hold tenaciously to an abstract axiom that forever forbids us from condemning Muslims, no matter how massive is the mountain of data that damns them and their Islam. On our side, however, we have Anti-Islam analysts who with similar tenacity resist the logical consequence of that mountain of data which we are able to notice and digest. That logical consequence is the condemnation of all Muslims. The problem is not the condemnation, but what we do about it. We will not "round them up" nor "genocide" them. But we will have to do something, to protect our societies from them.

And let us not forget that the PC MCs are exceedingly hypersensitive about this issue. Any negative criticism of Islam or by extension of Muslims is deemed to be perilously close to the slippery slope that leads to "rounding up Muslims and gassing them to death, or deporting them wholesale, or any such." This too is logical: PC MCs know that if there is a potential eventuality that is horrible, the best way to prevent it is to stop it at its source -- and the source of this horrible potential they envision, "another Holocaust" this time against poor Muslims, is precisely the thought crimes of saying too many negative things about Islam and by extension about the Muslims who support Islam (and how many Muslims don't support Islam?)

The specific reasons for this logic are many, but the two most important are:

1) we are implicitly condemning not merely a "group", but an entire People who hail from over 50 countries around the world, who have a rich culture that goes back 1,400 years, and whose culture is massively deemed to be a "world religion"

2) this entire People we are implicitly condemning are perceived to be an ethnic people (or a wonderfully diverse rainbow of ethnic peoples), and thus immediately and irrevocably the hot buttons of Reverse Racism are pushed -- for in the PC MC climate, which is dominant and mainstream throughout the West, one cannot say anything negative about designated ethnic peoples (or if you do say anything negative, please say it in exceedingly gingerly terms, say it fleetingly, do not press the issue, and desist politely -- and we may still allow you to have your career).

[END QUOTE]

Actually, while no Jihad Watcher that day directly engaged Spencer's conjunction, I did get 2 or 3 to engage my engagement, and readers may well find my wrestling with these asymptotics instructive -- particularly "Kilian Klaiber", "Ipso Facto" and "Demsci".  The full transcript (including all 60 comments that day) I have copy-pasted into my companion blog, Resource for The Hesperado.