Another Better Cup of decaf spotted at the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Cafe ...

Over the years at my former blog, The Hesperado, I pointed out new "Better Cop" Muslims I kept seeing pop up. Since this type of Muslim is mainly targeting the Counter-Jihad to fool with his (or her) taqiyya and mostly ignores the broader Western Mainstream (already fooled by the relatively more transparent "Good Cop" Muslim who continues to insist with a straight face that "Islam is peace" and is "opposed to terrorism of all kinds"), one sees Better Cop Muslims pop up largely in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, most of whose Leadership and Readership seems to swallow their sweeter taqiyya without any significant signs of suspicion.

This sub-topic of mine I never pursued exhaustively; I don't doubt there are dozens more of these Better Cop Muslims busy as beavers out there who have escaped my notice. At any rate, one of them I noted in an essay back in February of 2017, a personably young and attrractive Muslima named Uzay Bulut, was so good at crafting her appearance of hard criticism of Islam, it was difficult to tell if she was a Better Cop or an actual Reformist on our side.  Of course, my whole point in this exercise has been to establish the principle of rational prejudice, whereby we cease worrying about trying to prove or disprove their allegiance to the free world and simply condemn them for self-identifying as Muslim (thus ignoring their insistence that they can somehow be both an ally of ours and a Muslim at the same time).

Well, wouldn't you know it, in this panel at the OSCE, where numerous Counter-Jihad warriors-of-ideas have been speaking recently in panels on a whole constellation of issues radiating out from the primary problem of Islam, guess who's sitting three chairs down from Katie Hopkins?  Our old friend, Uzay Bulut.

"Barista-terrorista, why is this coffee giving me Tourette's-like spasms of political correctness...?"

Not too long ago, Robert Spencer was interviewed by a barbershop quartet of Italian wise guys subbing for Joe Piscopo -- the ambiance, needless to say, was no-nonsense neo-con with a whiff of street-wise Rudy Giuliani conservatism in the studio.  The panel was Frank Morano, Anthony Pope, John Tabacco, and Al Gattullo (what a name -- "John Tabacco"!).

Just 5 minutes or so into it, after trading pleasantries and after Spencer began sketching out the basics of the the alarmingly horribly nature of Islam through the ages into our time now, including passages in the Koran commanding open-ended warfare against unbelievers, one of the three Italian guys just had to have an anxious spasm of double-virtue signalling:

Just to be fair, isn't it true that there are more than a smattering of violent suggestions in the Bible?

And Spencer responded:

Yeah, sure, absolutely. There have been 30,000 jihad attacks around the world since 911.

The Italian goombah went on:

And you say, in the Koran this chapter says kill, this chapter says behead, this chapter... but the truth is, like Frank was saying before, 99% of the people out there are not so zealous --

With which Spencer rejoined:

Yeah, sure.

Italian gumbazzo:

-- that they're following the Koran down to those three citations.

Spencer:

Yes, exactly.

Joey Pants winds his anxious spasm of politically correct multiculturalism to a finish:

Most people who follow Islam, and Muslims, they don't take it to that zealous end.

Spencer's response -- instead of schooling this needless, senseless and recklessly irresponsible spasm -- had to throw a bone to it:

This is the thing about it. There have been 30,000 jihad attacks around the world since 911. All of them by people who point to the Koran to justify what they're doing. How many attacks have there been by people who point to the Bible and say "I'm killing people because the Bible has Joshua going in and clearing out a city"? Absolutely zero. So you've got in the first place a big difference in interpretation, that the Koran teaches these things as open-ended commands of warfare against unbelievers, and the Bible doesn't. And obviously this is how Muslims are taking it. And yes, there are many Muslims who are not doing this,

Better Cup (of Mo Jo...)

The Better Cup of Mo Jo is a deceptively caffeinated cup of decaf -- it actually tastes like the real coffee you're supposed to wake up and smell!

It harks back to my meme, the "Better Cop" Muslims -- who are better at fooling the West into thinking they're really moderate and "reformist".  So good are these Better Cop Muslims, they fool even the Counter-Jihad. In fact, that's their main purpose, and they will risk falling out of favor with the broader Western Mainstream just so they can appear daringly "reformist".

Well, we have a new Better Cop on the horizon: Dr. Majid Rafizadeh who, so Robert Spencer informs us,

...is a board member of Harvard International Review and president of the International American Council on the Middle East; he is also the author of the extraordinary book A God Who Hates Women: A woman’s journey through oppression and another, Peaceful Reformation in Iran’s Islam: A life story of struggle and poverty, which is just as shocking and important.  

The Jihad Watch story about Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a reproduction of a recent essay he wrote, published at the Gatestone Institute, a sorta kinda counter-jihadish organization. In his essay, Rafizadah complains about how he has been subtly pressured by Westerners, including Academe, to be less critical of Islam than he is.

As Spencer put it:

In this Gatestone Institute article, he substantiates what we have documented for years at Jihad Watch: that criticism of Islam is a career-killer in the West (“racist!” “bigot!” “Islamophobe!”) and that if critics of jihad terror and Sharia oppression distance their criticism from Islam itself, they have a much better chance of advancement in the political, media, and academic spheres.

To which I would add, Better Cops trying to infiltrate the Counter-Jihad also -- paradoxically -- have a much better chance of advancement in the Counter-Jihad when they distance their criticism from Islam itself  -- i.e., when they studiously evade the 6-million-dollar questions: How in hell can they continue to be Muslim if they are so reform-minded and oh so secular? And why in hell do they still revere the monstrously anti-liberal Koran, Allah, and Mohammed?  Most in the Counter-Jihad -- including Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, David Horowitz, etc. etc. -- will respectfully avoid asking these supposedly "reformist" Muslims challenging questions like this. Meanwhile, their activity -- particularly under the blessing of the Counter-Jihad -- reinforces our anxiously gullible tendency -- even in the Counter-Jihad -- to suppress our rational prejudice against all Muslims.

"Barista-terrorista, there's an annoying raisin in my scone..."

Today's annoying raisin comes again from our old friend, the otherwise eminent warrior-of-ideas "in the Counter-Jihad", Frank Gaffney,

In this interview with Philip Haney -- a long-time counter-terrorism analyst at Homeland who quit Homeland (and was pressured out) because of his dismay at their "see-no-Islam" policy -- they discuss many interesting things, among them Haney's former career as an entomologist, and his application of that scientific knowledge, particularly about the behavior of ants, to Muslim terror networking.

Haney:  ...attention to detail, that’s another key component of counter-terrorism. That’s what we call connecting the dots. Well, it has direct application in science as well. You connect dots, you make observations, you write things down on your famous clipboard, and pretty soon a picture emerges. Then you do statistical analysis on it. Develop your premise and prove that it was true. Well, the other component is, being a specialist in ants, I simply began to follow the trail and I would find the nest. And in counter-terrorism, you do the same thing."

Gaffney:  So Phil, you migrated within the government from Department of Agriculture to the Department of Homeland Security at its founding in the case of the latter. I know that you wound up developing, in the course of that time, a considerable degree of familiarity with the patterns of behaviour of jihadists and the kind of trail that they would follow. Talk a little bit about the sort of patterns or what impels the behaviour of those Islamic supremacists, this doctrine they call shariah.

Haney: ...Some people have heard about ants, how they leave scent trails. And other insects do it, too, so they can follow each other around and not get lost. Well, that’s essentially what shariah is. That is the universe that Muslims live inside, it forms the boundaries of the world that they live in. And their attempt to implement shariah on a global basis, from their perspective, is an attempt to establish order in this chaotic, violent world that we live in. That’s why they always say that Islam is a religion of peace. Because for them, shariah equals peace. But the caveat to that statement that Islam is a religion of peace is just not right now.

And here's Gaffney's gaffe, his anxious need to interject double-virtue signalling:

Gaffney:  ...And Phil, let me just ask you, this scent trail, as you put it, this attempt to impose order, you mentioned that this is the environment in which Muslims live. I think it’s important to say right up front that that’s not necessarily so for all Muslims, is it?

Haney to his credit (as the reader will see who reads the interview from that point on) doesn't take the bait and pretty much ignores Gaffney's anxious spasm to defend Muslims; though it would have been nice if he had admonished Gaffney all the same.

The old "Nazi" analogy

German Nazis enjoying morning coffee in Paris shortly after Hitler had conquered France.

A longtime veteran commenter on Jihad Watch, one "gravenimage", still policing comments fields for counter-jihadically incorrect speech (the problem is not so much her policing, as her selective conscience in this regard) zeroed in on a comment by one "eddie" (never seen him before in all my years of reading Jihad Watch comments), who made the preposterous statement:

The serial liar Trump is far more evil than Muslim men who are kind and thoughtful.

To this, gravenimage responded:

In other words, ‘Trump is far more evil than Nazis who are kind and thoughtful’.

Quickly (17 minutes later), eddie shot back:

gravenimage: In my opinion, comparing individual Muslims with Nazis is reprehensible. You need to get out and mix a bit. I’ve bedded a few Muslim women in my time, but I’m not sure I’d like to make love to a woman who’s a Nazi. By the way, not all Nazis ran death camps. Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi Party, and he was a very brave man who helped save thousands of Jews, 

As is typical of gravenimage, I've noticed, she didn't fully tackle eddie's point head-on, which was (probably unwittingly) palpating the problem of "all Muslims":

Muslims adhere to a vicious creed. Nazis adhere to a vicious creed.
There is, really, little difference–save that Islam has been around longer, so that more adherents have been born into this vicious creed. That is, really, the only serious contrast between them. Certainly, both ideologies are appallingly brutal and totalitarian.

Perhaps gravenimage should learn from the feet of the Master, Robert Spencer, about what motivates eddie's thought in this regard.  At this old essay of mine, she could read especially from the point where I wrote:

"As for Spencer's Nazi Germany analogy -- ..."

-- as I quote Spencer, arguing against readers of his blog who disagreed (back when Jihad Watch commenters dared to disagree with him), showing Spencer stubbornly defending points like:

Islam is more multifaceted than Nazism, and involves many beliefs, some good, some bad. You are comparing a huge 1400-year-old tradition over many nations with 12 years of Germany. If you met a Nazi in 1938, you would know what he thinks. But the fact is that when you meet a Muslim today you can have no certainty about what he thinks or knows.

Statements which show that Spencer has defended basically the point of view of eddie, not of gravenimage (nor of the other Jihad Watch regulars who piled on eddie along with her).

But she probably won't.  And when I brought this same point up in Jihad Watch comments (years ago, when I was still active there) and showed the proof I show in that old essay, gravenimage's friends attacked me for daring to criticize their Master, while she strangely was doing no comments policing that day...

"Terrorista-barista, there's an annoying raisin in my scone again..."

 

The annoying raisin to which I refer is the dysphemism "radical", inserted so often in sentences alluding to the problem of Islam -- as in "radical Islam"; as though Islam straight no chaser, ordinary, mainstream Islam, isn't already a horrible, dangerous, anti-liberal ideology enshrining, motivating and calling for monstrous human rights violations.  (And, unfortunately, "radical" isn't the only dysphemism in this regard.)

For today's annoying raisin, we revisit our old friend Eric Metaxas, in his interview with Robert Spencer:

Eric Metaxas: [growing up as a Greek] I was taught to hate and fear "the Turks" -- not the Muslims, but the Turks because of what they had done to our people,,, I heard many horrible stories growing up. It's kind of like the Jews hearing stories about what the Nazis did: these are true stories. It doesn't mean that you have to be ethnocentric or that you have to hate a whole group of people -- because as a Christian, I don't believe we're supposed to do that -- but we are called to be "wise as serpents"; we are called to understand things. And so, because I was Greek I was sort of taught to hate "the Turks" and you realize wait a minute, it's not the Turks, it's the people who did this, and the people who did this to our Greek Orthodox forbears, they weren't "Turks" -- they were radical Muslims who happened at the time to be Turkish; but it wasn't their ethnicity as Turks, it was their religion as radical Muslims."

Robert Spencer: Yes, that's quite right, Eric, and it's very important.

Waiting for Spencer to correct Eric's dysphemism "radical"... no such luck. Later, Metaxas raises that metonymic phenomenon of the historical habit of calling them "Turks" instead of referring to the more pertinent aspect, their Islam -- and notice now that he's not directly referring to the problem of their Islam, he evidently feels no need to add that annoying raisin:

Eric Metaxas: ...part of the reason of this confusion with "Turks" and Muslims is because in history, a lot of times Muslims were just called "the Turk" or "Turks" -- there was this very confusing thing, and so when I grew up, the Greeks always talked about, "for 400 years, we were under the Ottoman Empire" and "the Turks, and the Turks, and the Turks" -- and what they really mean, of course, are the Muslims; they don't mean "the Turks", they mean the Muslims. "The Turk" was a term, often, for "Muslim".

"Some of my best friends are Muslims..."

Eric Metaxas (I've written about him before), in his 2-part interview with Robert Spencer about his new book, didn't exactly repeat that old cliché, but he might as well have.  Right at the top of his Part 2 of his interview with Spencer, he asks Spencer the good question, why, 17 years after 911, are Americans still so clueless about the problem of Islam? (He could have expanded this to ask why the majority of Westerners in general seem to be clueless about the problem of Islam.)

 In his answer, Spencer avoids the cultural problem of what I have called Politically Correct Multiculturalism (PC MC), but that's beside the point I'm raising here.  At the end of his brief answer, Spencer concludes with the frustrating fact that still in our time throughout the West:

"Those who think that there is a problem of terrorism within Islam are [branded as] racists and bigots and Islamophobes."

To which Eric quipped:

"Like you and me."

Spencer laughed, then Eric had that anxious spasm we've seen or heard so often over the years, even among those who are more or less "in the counter-jihad" (Eric seems to have one foot in, one foot out) which I have called "double-virtue-signalling":

"It's so fascinating because -- look, I have had friends that are Muslims who are nothing like this..."

Prompting the question, "nothing like what, exactly...?" And the deadly follow-up question: "How do you know they are 'nothing like this', eh Eric...?"

Spencer, naturally, let it slide.

Cup of Whitewash

Today's cup of whitewash is from a leading voice in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Frank Gaffney.  Interviewing Andrew Bostom, they are discussing John Brennan's murky past, including rumors that he converted to Islam while stationed in Saudi Arabia, and at one point -- in the context of discussing this possibility about Brennan -- Frank just can't help double-virtue-signalling:

"It's not to say that being a Muslim, if he were, is incompatible with having a security clearance; it's just to say that his conduct may bespeak -- and as you say, some of his writings and some of his statements suggests [sic] a willingness himself to place considerations of Sharia adherence above the policy interests of the United States."

Hey, Flo: You call this a cup of coffee...!!!???

"I'd like a strong cup of decaf that will keep me awake..."

Double-talk from Robert Spencer:

“One of the chief elements of the rap sheet on me from the Southern Poverty Law Center and its allied Islamic supremacist groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations is that I have said that there is no reliable way to distinguish jihadis from peaceful Muslims.”

When, that is, you juxtapose that with my immediately preceding post down below, where Spencer is distancing himself from any connection between (the problem of) Islam and Muslims. (And in at least one link in that posting of mine, the reader will find numerous articles detailing this paradox indulged by Spencer over the years.)

Connect the Dots 101

Robert Spencer continues doggedly to resist and even oppose the connection between Islam and Muslims; a connection which the PC MC Mainstream makes all the time (for cogent reasons, I have argued; though of course based upon a specious axiom).

Thus, in the context of discussing Nigel Farage's recent spasm of politically correct multi-culturalism, Spencer complains:

Farage makes the familiar conflation of Islam and Muslims, arguing that if one finds any problem with Islamic texts and teachings, one is condemning all Muslims. There is no reason why that should be so, and if he would foreclose upon any discussion of the motivating ideology behind jihad terror and Sharia oppression, how can he confront them?

Flipping off Filip

For background on Robert Spencer and Belgian anti-Islam activist Filip Dewinter, go to this article of mine posted on The Hesperado in 2010, and scroll down especially to #3 in my list.

From a recent posting on Jihad Watch, it looks like Spencer -- after years of purt near utterly ignoring Filip -- is still keeping him at 6-foot-pole's length to avert catching his allegedly "fascist" cooties. And, consummate master of double-talk as he can be, he makes it sound like he's not still distancing himself from Filip.

Filip Dewinter needs to get a better Jewish agent; either the Counter-Jihad Leadership to a man agrees with Spencer on ostracizing him, or Filip is abysmally inept at marketing himself. (I tend to think it's more the former than the latter.)

Do-Gooders Without Borders

Debbie Schlussel many moons ago, referring to various Westerners (some Americans among them) who ended up suffering the horrific ordeal of being beheaded by ISIS and other Muslim terrorists (e.g., perhaps the first to come on our Western radar, Daniel Pearl), wrote:  

"...few people can really handle it, as they’d rather be infantilized and told that every American In Name Only put out of his/her misery by ISIS is really a hero fighting the good fight against Islamic terrorists (when in almost all the cases, the newly beheaded are really America-haters and Muslim apologists who were lucky enough to be born here)."

Schlussel is correct; and it's a curious phenomenon, until you think about it more. Part of what's going on, I think, is that there exist a large number of these starry-eyed cosmopolitan Do-Gooders-Without-Borders (and Without Brains) who have realized that even more glamorously humanitarian than the Third World Classic of yesteryear (various Indian tribes of central and South America oppressed by cruel right-wing (never left-wing, of course) dictators; various generic black African people suffering from their perennially Biblical afflictions of drought, famine, pestilence and wars) -- are the Suffering Victims of the Muslim World. Not the non-Muslims whom the Muslims are oppressing and massacring, of course, but the Muslims themselves who, when they keep getting embroiled in their Bloody Borders (not to mention internecine fitna), need the help of all the bleeding hearts who can pitch in to try to do their part to alleviate the suffering of those Poor Muslim Victims.

I think it's reasonable to suppose that these Do-Gooders love to plunge into the thick of Muslim hot spots to assuage their White Guilt and appease their ethical narcissism, spend a lot of time "getting to know the locals" and finding so many friendly, hospitable Muslims, learning their culture more deeply, and doing their small part to find ways to help them out of the morass of the mess which the evil West has inflicted upon them. In so doing, sometimes spending months, years, sometimes moving from country to country, hot spot to hot spot, they fall in with various Muslim helpers, guides, translators, habibis who "know someone who can help", etc. -- and by naively and gullibly trusting these seemingly nice Muslims, they set themselves up to be ensnared by less visible networks of various Muslim gangs, tribes and jihadist groups, ambushed and kidnapped for ransom and eventual execution.

"T-U-L-S-I -- Straight Ahead...!"

Tulsi Gabbard is a Congressional Representative for Hawaii.  She's 37, so she's just barely eligible to run for President (minimum age requirement, 35). I'd vote for her in a heartbeat, notwithstanding that she tends to indulge the dysphemism of attaching the adjective "radical" to the problem of Islamic terrorism. But compared with other American politicians, she's miles ahead of them.  She's also female, telegenic, and "ethnic" (half East Indian -- she swore in as Representative on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita).

One couldn't find better reasons for supporting Tulsi than this Leftist attack on her at the amusingly titled "Jacobin" website.  Even though she's a Democrat who supported Bernie!

For example, the writers at Jacobin say:

So what is the cause of terrorism, according to Gabbard? Islam, of course.

Can I get an ROMPRLMAO (Rolling On My Prayer Rug Laughing My Ass Off)...?

Before the Great Inhibition...

Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville in Caen, France 

We can add Alexis de Tocqueville to the list of luminaries from yesteryear (before the Great Inhibition of our era) who in 1838 served up this cup of coffee stronger and more robust about Islam than the insipid whitewash we get these days (jar tip from Andrew Bostom):

“Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. … The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels … [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran … The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.”

Re-entering through the side door

I've decided to slink back into "the Counter-Jihad" (such as it is), since I can't help myself. Hopefully, my renewed activity will be less time-consuming and less beleaguering to my psyche.

Rather than use my wheezing aircraft-carrier (the H.M.S. Hesperado) as my re-launching pad, I figured this little ol' café here will do just fine, after a slight makeover of its name.  I like the sound of The Daily Decaf; and also it refers to the daily attempts -- whether concerted, conscious, or semi-conscious and incoherent -- by our Western Mainstream and by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream -- to whitewash the horrible, toxic coffee of Islam we need to wake up to and smell.

For more about my "re-entry" listen to my Intro piece linked up top somewhere, over by the non-dairy creamer, I think.

"At the Jihad Watch Café, we serve incoherent coffee..."

 
...it is “fundamentally wrong” to use the phrase “Islamist terrorism,” because it is actually “Islamic terrorism,” no steps removed from Islam as such.

So intones Robert Spencer, the éminence grise of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, at that bastion of same, Jihad Watch.  One of his customers (moi, who has purchased one of his books and found it, frankly, a rather lackluster cut-and-paste job) asks from on low:

How is the “fundamentally wrong” phrase “Islamist terrorism” any worse than the “radical Islam” of Jihad Watch contributor Raymond Ibrahim?

And the question becomes (as William F. Buckley used to say), why can't the Counter-Jihad get its rhetoric together?  If one were to do a survey of the last few years since “Islamist” and “Islamism” became fashionable in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (e.g., Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of many Counter-Jihad Mainstreamers who have lauded Robert Spencer's new book), one would find those dysphemisms sprinkled throughout like coconut flakes at a Starbuck's.

One would think, then, that in an essay titled -- Why We Don't Need Words Like 'Islamist' -- in which author Robert Spencer is critiquing Raymond Ibrahim's positively titled -- Why We Need Words Like 'Islamist' -- Spencer wouldn't commit any gaffes.  Unfortunately, I tripped over one glaring one, twice: his use with an utterly sincere straight face, of the dysphemism “political Islam” as though it were any better than “Islamism”.  As Robert Spencer's other self (the more robustly anti-Islam Mr. Hyde, as opposed to his “I am not 'anti-Islam' ” Dr. Jekyl) might say to himself (on a rare good day when he's not feeling the need to double-virtue-signal):

...it is “fundamentally wrong” to use the phrase “political Islam,” because actually all of Islam, from top to bottom, the whole kit and fucking kaboodle, is “political”.

He even has the gall to specify with an example, of what kind of Muslim would not be an adherent of this curious fantasy concept:

...many analysts use the term “Islamist” to mean an adherent of the tenets of political Islam. And certainly, as Raymond points out in his piece here, some term is needed for such people: for example, a follower of Mubarak in Egypt would likely be a Muslim but not an “Islamist”: i.e., not a proponent of Sharia rule.

Is that as clear as the mud on the banks of De Nile...?

"Barista-terrorista, my latté has so much milk, it's white, not brown..."

A member of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Readership (i.e., an anti-Islam commenter on Jihad Watch) named "tim gallagher" complains:

Islam is ferociously repressive and far right wing ( well, 7th century barbarism really) in every regard and it’s staggering the way the left wingers side with it. It defies any logic.

Well, tim wouldn't find this so "staggering" and logic-defying if he paused to consider (or if he read outside the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Reservation once in a while -- oh, say, at The Hesperado blog).  The short answer to tim's aggravating bafflement is that Leftists perceive Muslims as Brown People, and this in turn triggers the psycho-cultural mechanism analyzed by blogger Lawrence Auster (and further clarified by moi) as "Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations".

Why did the decaf suddenly turn into regular...? Part 2.

Actually, my title should be: "Why did the decaf suddenly turn into a quintuple espresso...?"

As I analyzed in Part 1, Hugh Fitzgerald's guesses are inadequate to explain why an anti-Islam politician in Germany, Arthur Wagner, converted recently to Islam.  Hugh is presented with a German political activist who 4 years ago left the more Left-leaning CDU party to join the more Islam-savvy AfD party which opposes Islamization of Germany -- and yet who has lately converted to Islam.  Hugh guesses Wagner must have converted to Islam either for sex or for money; or both.  (Hugh's first guess he tosses off as unlikely, that Wagner was actually convinced of the beauty of Islam.)

The problem with the sex and/or money explanation is not that it's impossible; sure, that's always possible, but it would perforce require either 1) ignorance of Islam, or 2) evil.

#2: If a Westerner is not ignorant of Islam, but knows Islam (and hence knows it's evil), then if he joins Islam for sex or money, he's also being evil.

#1: The ignorance explanation becomes strange, given that Wagner was in an anti-Islamization party for 4 years, and actively joined it in the first place.

Once we palpate #1 further, we begin to open up an avenue of a subtler, more intelligent speculation.  Are there degrees of ignorance of Islam?  There do seem to be.  I've written probably hundreds of essays (out of a total of 1,400 plus) analyzing this welter of a problem.  The more interesting end of the spectrum, to me, is the person who actually knows about Islam, or who is learning more and more about the horror, the full catastrophe of Islam, but can't quite fully follow the logic to where their growing familiarity with the data of Islam leads them.

Why can't they follow the logic of the data? Because they are afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of the thread that leads from condemning Islam to condemning Muslims. Why is that something to be afraid of? Because it would mean they would succumb to "racism".

This thought process I am unraveling is the thought process of PCMC; and it is present even in the Counter-Jihad.  A fear of enacting the paradigm shift from a problem of Islam to a problem of Muslims.  It seems to me this thought process is quite prevalent and motivates all forms of Denial in this regard.  Interestingly, this dynamic becomes more pronounced the more, not the less, one knows about Islam.  The PC MC majority in the West knows less about Islam than the person who has chosen to be "in the Counter-Jihad", but they know enough -- from the pressure of the news -- to realize, if only subliminally, that it's a horrible problem. But two factors allow them to remain in a state of relatively stable, comfortable Denial (at least consciously): 1) their habit -- reinforced by the peer pressure of their surrounding culture, suffused as it is with PC MC, of not taking the time to investigate past the PC MC mainstream whitewashing of Islam to uncover the seamier underside of Islam; and 2) their dominant PC MC sensibilities which, among other things, keeps their internal Censor strong out of a deep, peculiarly Western phobia about being "racist".

The Westerner who has embarked upon the long, complex journey of being "in the Counter-Jihad", however, doesn't suffer from these two factors, at least not in such a marked way. But #2 does still exert its unconscious force on him; and because it does, it comes into psychological conflict with his growing awareness (through his self-education) of the horrors of Islam and the obvious logical connection this has to Muslims.  The result is an incoherent attempt to have his cake (of being anti-Islam) while eating it too ("I'm not against Muslims" or some even more elliptical version of this).

Now, I am not trying to say that Arthur Wagner was "in the Counter-Jihad" per se; there is no delimited definition of that state (to a great extent because the movement itself remains incoherent). Some are halfway in / halfway out (e.g., Sam Harris).  The psychological dynamic is the same, variantly, depending on the degree of PC MC in the heart and mind of the person involved.

So my guess as to why Arthur Wagner converted to Islam may not be as colorfully specific as two of Hugh's guesses (women and/or money), but I argue it's more reasonable. In a word -- 4 words, to be more precise -- Arthur Wagner converted to Islam because of PC MC: Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism.  But wait, my readers may counter, Wagner four years ago had joined the anti-Islamization party opposed to the disastrous Angela Merkel policy of Muslim immigration; how could he be affected by PC MC...?  If my readers, or anyone "in the Counter-Jihad" has to ask that question, he hasn't fully grasped the Problem of the Problem.  This secondary problem (persistent Western myopia to the primary problem, Islam) reflects a complex paradox of fear and admiration of Islam, centrally motivated by the twin Dogma of PC MC:

Respect for the Other / Self-Criticism of the West Bordering on Self-Hatred. 

The second thing to know is that this PC MC neurosis that cripples any critical understanding of the primary Problem of Islam is not merely the province of "Leftists" over there: it is, in various degrees, in all Westerners, including those who are "in the Counter-Jihad".  And as we know from Psychology 101, if you don't realize you have a neurosis, you'll be less able to overcome it.  Those who are "in the Counter-Jihad" are particularly vulnerable to this kind of Denial, mainly because their self-identity is so dependant upon a bravado about being oh so tough on Islam.  Arthur Wagner, a political activist in the German anti-Islamization party AfD qualifies as being vulnerable in this way, even if he may not be, strictly speaking, "in the Counter-Jihad".  His previous allegiance to the party of Merkel, before he joined the AfD, likely continued to be present deep in his heart & mind; as PC MC is present in the heart & mind of nearly everyone "in the Counter-Jihad".  We can reasonably assume that Wagner's PC MC was a stronger psychological force than his new career as an "anti-Islamization" activist. So, rather than spend years developing incoherent ways of pretending to be anti-Islam while avoiding a condemnation of Muslims (as most in the Counter-Jihad seem to like to do), he found psychological release by going all the way, one way: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Why did the decaf suddenly turn into regular...? Part 1

On Jihad Watch, that bastion of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the curious case of a German politician, Arthur Wagner, who for the last 4 years has been a member of the supposedly tougher, more conservative and anti-Muslim Immigration party, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland or "Alternative for Germany") -- a party that is routinely labeled "far right" probably mainly because of its stance against "Islamization" -- has himself converted to Islam.

Hugh's essay is an exercise in educated speculation on why Arthur Wagner, a member of an essentially anti-Islam political party (or more likely "anti-Islamist" or "anti-political Islam" party) would himself convert to Islam.  The reason Hugh has to speculate is because Wagner has refused to answer questions about his conversion, maintaining it is none of the public's business.

Hugh's speculative diagnosis is more revealing of Hugh, and of the schizophrenia about Islam indulged by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (tough on the outside, nougaty soft on the inside) to which Hugh can be said (based on hundreds of essays he has written, which I've analyzed over the years) to belong.  Here's how Hugh handles this curious conversion to Islam by a formerly anti-Islam guy:

"It seems to me that there are three possible reasons why Arthur Wagner decided to convert to Islam."

So begins Hugh, and I cringe and brace myself for the subtly asymptotic locutions to come.

The first is the most obvious: that having been dead set against more Muslim immigrants, he decided to have a look into the faith whose adherents, according to his own party, “have no place in Germany,” and was struck by the sheer wonderfulness of Islam. After all, the refugees he’d been assisting were mostly Muslims, and inclined to sing the praises of their faith. To do what Wagner did out of genuine belief is not impossible — strange things happen every day. 

No Hugh, that's not an explanation for Why; it's just a rephrasing of the What, without providing any insight leading from that What to the Why.  Let's see what his other two, supposedly more substantial guesses are:

But there are two other conceivable explanations for Arthur Wagner’s behavior. The first may be called the “cherchez-la-femme” (look for the woman) theme. Among the refugees Wagner had been helping, there might well have been a Muslimah who caught his fancy. And if she responded, well, since he’s not exactly Gregory Peck, he might have been thrilled. As a female refugee, she would of course see a solution to all her problems if she could land this particular fish, and he, in turn, would be delighted to have such a mate. Of course, given that in Islam, men are superior to women, it would be unthinkable for a Muslim wife to submit to a non-Muslim husband. Before getting married, the non-Muslim husband-to-be must, therefore, convert to Islam. Which Arthur Wagner may have been perfectly willing to do. There is still another conceivable variant. Muslims in Brandenburg, knowing of Arthur Wagner’s work with Muslim refugees, and of his desire for a mate, might have persuaded a Muslim woman, refugee or not, to respond to him, all in the path of Allah of course, and then to demand that he convert so that they might marry. What a coup for Islam that would be — and has now turned out, in fact, to be. You can just imagine how often Muslims will be bringing up the case of Arthur Wagner, as proof of Islam’s greatness, for it can “overcome even the worst sort of islamophobia.” 

Okay, that speculative guess at least has some meat to it.  However, it still begs the question a bit; unless Hugh is trying to say that the mere motivation of an older guy feeling unattractive and needing female companionship suffices, completely, to explain why he would convert to Islam -- which is what his rather verbose paragraph certainly seems to imply.  This would be a variant on Hugh's "Esdrujula Elves", trying to explain the West's seduction to Islam (whether all the way, to conversion, or short of that, to its mainstream tendency toward fawning adulation) by recourse to vaguely human foibles, such as greed, stupidity, or timidity (not sure what "-idity" would apply here, as another facile label for Hugh to slap onto the midlife crisis of a horny guy as the sole motivation for his conversion to Islam; but the specious principle would be the same).  It goes without saying, then, that this second guess is pretty flimsy (for those who can't see why Hugh's thesis is specious, my link just given may help them).
 
Let's see if Hugh's third guess gets any warmer:

The third possible explanation is of the filthy-lucre sort.

Oh God; he's still stuck on the Esdrujula Explanation -- this time having recourse to Greed. Will he stay stuck on that level or expand it to something more substantive? Let us see:

He might have thought of it himself, or someone may have suggested to him that, by turning Turk, there was money to be made. Think of all the speaking engagements now available to Arthur Wagner, throughout the deepest-pocketed Muslim lands — in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar — or even audiences of Muslims in Germany. His subject would be the one that every devout Muslim wants to hear: “Why I Became A Muslim.” That triumphalist topic ought to be worth 50-100,000 dollars per speech, given that he was a high-ranking official in the AfD, the most unlikely, and therefore the most valuable, kind of convert. And after all, Wagner would have done nothing wrong. He became a Muslim, and now he’s speaking about it. Why shouldn’t he? How dare anyone question his motives? Is he any worse than so many of our past presidents, secretaries of state, national security advisors, big shots of every sort, who once out of office head out to the Gulf (Persian, Arabian, take your pick) to pocket most generous honoraria? Arthur Wagner has a story, he wants to tell it, and there are people, his fellow Muslims, who want to hear it. Eventually we’ll find out what led Arthur Wagner to the One True Faith. If there’s a woman involved, he’s not going to keep her waiting. If it’s money he is after, just keep track of his speaking schedule. And if, mirabile dictu, he actually went from warning about Islam to becoming a Muslim, because he has indeed become a True Believer, then not just in Houston, but in Germany, Europe, the entire Western world, mein damen und herren, we have ein großes Problem.

As I guessed, Hugh's third guess remains stuck on the level of his Esdrujula Elf, Cupidity.  Completely unexplored by Hugh's speculative discursus on this most curious phenomenon -- of a formerly anti-Islam person converting to Islam -- are more positive reasons having to do with ideology.  Such as, for example, the virtues of the dominant worldview of the West in our time, Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism -- virtues such as Respect for the Other and its other side of the same coin, Excessive Self-Criticism about our own Western civilization.  And many other related phenomena which I have analyzed at length over the years.  Instead, Hugh serves up a simple-minded analysis, at this late stage of the game.  It's 2018, for Crissakes. You'd think the Counter-Jihad would have evolved by now beyond its flawed template.  The dismaying reality seems to be that it has fossilized into a Counter-Jihad Mainstream.

Part 2 to come, for my guess, which probes more deeply this issue than Hugh does.

For now, I hazard a guess explaining Hugh's curious analytical deficiency: It's probably because, as a member of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream and its asymptotic tendencies, Hugh can't see how he himself shares with Arthur Wagner an underlying PC MC that disposed the latter to convert to Islam.  Hugh's myopia to the PC MC inside himself thus blinds him to its presence in, and key influence on, not only the Arthur Grants of the West who "go native" by conversion to Islam, but the much more numerous Westerners (the majority, in fact) who stop short of that by fawning all over Islam like it's the best thing since sliced falafel.

"Get your Mo Joes here... Iced Muslim with milk, Mohammedan Venti, Grande, Trenti, Blonde Roast Revert, Decaf Moderate, Triple Decaf Reformer (the "Tarek Fatah"), Shia Latté, Sunni Black, Extremist Espresso..."

One of the staunchly anti-Islam Civilians from the Readership commenting in that flagship of the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Jihad Watch, boldly writes:

roger woodhouse says

Jan 22, 2018 at 6:03 am

....There is no ‘radical Islam’There is just Islam.Muslims can decide which parts of the quran they want to practice.The more ‘educated’ amongst them choose to ignore their book. ‘Education ‘being the factor.Islam depends on the ignorance of its followers to survive.Without Jihad Islam will die.

How does roger know this?  He doesn't of course, unless he has a Mohammedan Mind-Reading App™ -- and even if he had one, that App, if it can't read hundreds of millions of Mohammedan minds, would be worthless to our sprawling, massive, complex security needs, with millions upon millions of Muslims pouring into the West and roiling and percolating throughout all institutions of our Body Geopolitic.  Not to mention that time and time again, we have found terrorists and terrorist supporters to be college educated and middle class or above in wealth.

At any rate, his "educated Muslims" is yet another flavor of harmless Muslim to add to the list which the Counter-Jihad has generated over the years in its asymptotic anxiety trying to forestall the inevitable rational prejudice against all Muslims which the weight of the mountain of data about the problem of Islam leads us: 

Lax Muslims,  
Non-Observant Muslims,
Muslims Who Don’t Know Their Own Islam,  
Muslims Who Don't Take Islam Seriously, 
Muslims Who Are Too Afraid To Come Out of the Secularist Closet,  
the MINOs ("Muslims In Name Only")
Muslims Who Lack Conviction to Carry Islam Out, 
the Not Fully Compliant Muslims,
Reluctant Muslims,
Muslims Who Truly Don't Care About Islam,
Non-Muslim Muslims,

Etc. etc. et al. (qaeda)...

As with the panoply of different coffees at a typical café, many of these flavors don't seem to be that different from some of the others. At the end of the day, all of them have a basic function: to forestall our inevitable wake-up call to smell the Mohammedan coffee.

Decaf pretending to be caffeinated...

The Counter-Jihad Mainstream reporter, Christine Douglass-Williams (CDW) editorialized on a recent Jihad Watch notice:

Last January, one of Charlie Hebdo’s most outspoken journalists quit her job because “it has gone soft on Islamist extremism. Zineb El Rhazoui accused the weekly of bowing to Islamist extremists and no longer daring to draw the Prophet Mohammed.” Then she was threatened by Islamic State supporters who called for her murder by “lone wolves.”

The supreme irony here once again on display -- what I call the Nawazian Voldemort Effect after Maajid Nawaz's clever (and quite successful) attempt at it:

Namely, the subtle usage of the dysphemism "Islamist" (buttressed by "extremism" as though mainstream, ordinary Islam isn't already by nature extremist) is already telegraphing, and reinforcing, a soft position on the problem of Islam -- even as it is couched in a seemingly robust stance against the problem of Islam.  Essentially, trying to pass off a cup of decaf as a robustly caffeinated espresso.

How many people in the Counter-Jihad are fooled by this?  How many of the Readership agree with their Leadership to soften their stance on the problem of Islam this way?  How many care either way?

P.S.: This is not to say that the Moroccan apostate upon whom CDW relies, Zineb El Rhazoui, would herself frame the issue this way.  It's difficult for me to tell, as I only have, as yet, a cursory familiarity with her writings and interviews and analyses by others on her. For example, Zineb has said: "I am against Islam and Islam is against me" ("Je suis contre l'islam et l'islam est contre moi.") -- no "Islamism" there.  On the other hand, she sometimes slips in the Ism, and sometimes seems to take care to distinguish Islam from Muslims: As the French feminist 'Elisseievna' reports: "She explains that "to realize that Islamism is a fascism allows us to stigmatize the ideology but not the individuals of the Islamic culture." (Elle explique que « prendre conscience que l’islamisme est un fascisme permettra de stigmatiser l’idéologie et non les individus issus de la culture islamique »).  Then there's the further complication that, apparently, in French, as in English of an older time (perhaps the early 20th century at the latest, but certainly earlier), the "-ism" ending is not necessarily a decaffeination of Islam at all, not a truncation to dilute the Islamophobic caffeine as it has become for the likes of Sam Harris (under the tutelage of his partner-in-bromance, Maajid Nawaz), but merely a denotation of it, largely redundant.  However, do the millions of Americans and modern English-speaking people of the world who read Jihad Watch know this -- that when CDW quotes Zinab's "Islamist extremism" approvingly, this may not mean it in the veritably soft way intended by CDW and her colleague Robert Spencer?

"Barista-terrorista, I'm allergic to raisins, and there are clearly at least 4 raisins in this cinnamon scone......"

I was pleased to see a post by Cinnamon Stillwell featured on Jihad Watch this morning -- she's a writer who (notwithstanding her occasional asymptotic raisins) deserves a wider audience (and years ago I put her on my blogroll over at The Hesperado).

Her piece on Jihad Watch involved a Good Cop Muslim (defined as such because he would easily fool the broader Western Mainstream, but not the Counter-Jihad Mainstream), an academic named Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, senior lecturer in history at King’s College London, invited to deliver his taqiyya to a select Harvard audience.  As Cinnamon Stillwell reports it and mostly ably analyzes it, his lecture at Harvard was an exercise in Equivalencism and Tu Quoque -- more specially, the claim that "Islamophobia" is equivalent to anti-Semitism, and that both are in effect racism.

The raisins in the otherwise scrumptious & nutritious cinnamon scone Stillwell served up may be spotted in this sentence of hers:

Never once did Zia-Ebrahimi address the reality of such practices within Islam, nor the fact that Islamists advocate Islamic supremacism and are implacably hostile to Europe – seen as Christendom. In his eagerness to whitewash all things Islamist, Zia-Ebrahimi ignored the multiple terrorist attacks throughout Europe and the often-contorted Western reaction to Islamist aggression.

That's three raisins.  And, after I carefully extracted them out of my cinnamon scone with my fork, I almost bit into one more after I thought I was in the clear:

That Harvard would host an Islamist apologist masquerading as a champion of virtue exposes the intellectual weakness, duplicity, and true intents of scholars who charge their opponents with “Islamophobia.”

If the "Counter-Jihad" doesn't stop using these dysphemisms that have the effect of reinforcing our reflexes to exonerate Islam itself by locating the problem in some other entity ("Islamism", "radical Islam",  "political Islam", etc.), we will be failing in our ultimate duty to wake up our West to the problem of all Muslims in diverse ways enabling their Islamic imperative to conquer the world.

"I'll have an Intifadaccino, please..."

"How to successfully stop illegal immigration: Follow Israel’s model" -- reads a recent headline on Jihad Watch (Robert Spencer's flagship blog) penned by the egregiously soft-on-Muslims writer Christine Williams-Douglass (CWD), collaborator & colleague of Robert Spencer.

To which I would retort: Yes, we should follow Israel's model, so that we may have our own innocent citizens -- including men, women and children -- routinely mass-murdered and occasionally tortured by Muslims! Israel's model of allowing Muslims to enter and reside inside Israel has not been working -- unless one defines "working" as an allowance of the aforementioned mass-murders and tortures.

Not to mention a story that came out in June reported by the Times of Israel that Israel's intelligence service, Shin Bet, announced in a statement that as of June 2018, for the preceding 5 months since January, they had foiled some 250 terror plots (not by Buddhists or Wiccans or Hindus or Jews or Christians or Atheists or Polytheists).  So how's that policy of allowing Muslims to reside in Israel working?

The Counter-Jihad Mainstream has many foibles, which I've recounted in the past; among them being this silly notion that Russia, China, Japan, and Israel are perfect bulwarks against Islam who suitably clamp down on Muslims: "Them Ruskies wouldn't let Muslims get away with what the rest of the West does!" Etc. All one has to do to counter such specious nonsense is survey the litany of Mohammedan terror attacks on especially Russia and Israel over the decades (Japan has only escaped this because of a dearth of Muslims, due almost wholly to factors unrelated to any anti-Islam vigilance on the part of its people and government; ditto for China, although they have had a spate of Muslim attacks in recent years).

And let us not leave without making sure we don't let CWD get away with her careful notation of "illegal" immigration -- leaving us wide open to a flood of a protracted legal invasion of Muslims.

UPDATE:

Within hours of the rosy post on Jihad Watch I discussed above, by Robert Spencer's colleague & collaborator Christine Williams-Douglass, hailing Israel as a model of success against the jihad, what does Jihad Watch post, but this headline:

Judea and Samaria: Muslims murder Israeli rabbi and father of six in drive-by shooting

And this headline:

Israel: Two teenage Muslimas charged with joining the Islamic State, plotting New Year’s jihad massacre

-- just the latest carnage in years, decades of carnage by Muslims within Israel and without Israel.  The Israeli leadership (and how much of its sophisticated, Leftish civilian population?) evidently agrees (at best) with the Counter-Jihad Mainstream that Muslims inside Israel are magically delicious and harmless, even though they keep killing Jews and/or plotting to kill more Jews and/or believing fervently in the righteousness of killing more Jews.

"I'll have a Better Joe, to go with my Better Moe (since I lost my Mojo)..."

Jamie Glazov, a notoriously soft counter-jihadist (softer even than Robert Spencer's more recent collaborator & colleague, Christine Williams-Douglass), so soft you wouldn't want to dunk him in your coffee you've woken up to and smelled, in a recent posting on Spencer's Jihad Watch pulled the envelope of his nougat egregiously (which is saying a lot) when he called attention to the sins of Linda Sarsour, a Good Cop Muslim -- an easy mark, for the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM) -- who, in a recent tweet, attacked ex-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a most sordid manner:

"Brigitte Gabriel-- [sic: sloppy -- if not incorrect -- use of an em-dash by Linda] Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She's asking for an a$$ whippin'. I wish I could take their vaginas away - [sic: now just a single dash substituting for an em-dash which, in any case, would be incorrectly used here] they don't deserve to be women."

Where Glazov lurches off the rails (but remains comfortably on the CJM Reservation) is where he ensconces this in a framework uncritically allying himself with Better Cop Muslims -- in this case, two of them. First he appeals to the latest Moderate Medicine Muslim selling Islamic reform from the back of his wagon, Imam Tawhidi, when he begins his post with this shot out across the bow:

Fake feminist and Jihad-promoter Linda Sarsour has blocked Muslim reformer Imam Tawhidi on Twitter because he asked her to apologize for her grotesque and vicious tweet about the courageous truth-teller about Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 

Note that utterly uncritical favor Glazov handed Imam Tawhidi on a silver platter, granting him without a hint of sneer quotes the title of "Muslim reformer".  Directly related to this, Glazov is publicly relying upon one Muslim (Tawhidi) to condemn another Muslim (Sarsour) -- which only reinforces our unfortunate disinclination we Westerners, being relatively decent and civilized as we are, have to cultivate a rational prejudice against all Muslims (a prejudice that nevertheless must be cultivated if we want our civilization to survive this 21st century from Mohammedan devastation).

Close on the heels of this faux pas, Glazov continues his Reliance Upon the Traveler by relying upon another Better Cop Muslim (for a Muslim becomes a Better Cop by being relied upon by the Counter-Jihad), Shireen Quudosi, an up-and-coming Better Moe joining the ranks of the others (Maajid Nawaz, Zudhi Jasser, Asra Nomani, Tarek Fatah, Irshad Manji, etc., etc., et al. (qaeda)...). Indeed, Qudosi is the source Glazov uses for the notorious Sarsour tweet against Hirsi Ali, and he further quotes her salty riposte to Sarsour.  Does the Counter-Jihad really need to use two catfighting Muslimas when we can just condemn Sarsour ourselves?

Anyway, Qudosi has a glaring problem she hasn't successfully squirmed out of -- probably because she can't: namely, her admiration, as a Muslim, for the horribly foul and psychopathic Prophet Muhammad.  As long as any Muslim is a Muslim they are burdened by this malignant mole disfiguring their Moderate countenance (easily seen, by those with critical eyes to see (unlike Glazov, Williams-Douglass, Robert Spencer, and the rest of the CJM) through their Better Mask).  And as such, they are not only useless to us, they become positive handicaps for us, since they reinforce our aforementioned disinclination -- to cultivate the rational prejudice against all Muslims that will be the only way to save our civilization from Mohammedan ruin before (or after) this 21st century is over.

The Counter-Jihad Cafe: "Wake Up and Smell the Decaf"

Yet another random stabbing by a Muslim, this time in Ireland, as reported at Jihad Watch.  And, naturally, authorities of the broader Western Mainstream say there is "no link to terrorism".

As Robert Spencer editorializes on this, he unwittingly puts his foot in his mouth:

Quoting the mainstream Irish news source, RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) -- “Gardaí have said they have found no established link to indicate the attacks, in which the Japanese national was fatally stabbed and two other people were wounded, were terror-related.”

-- Spencer writes:

They mean that they haven’t found that he was in contact with someone in Iraq or Syria, or has any ties that they can discover to jihadis anywhere. But that doesn’t mean this has nothing to do with jihad, and this false assumption stems from the further false assumption that jihad terror has nothing to do with Islam, and those who engage in it are only members of jihad terror groups, who themselves also have nothing to do with Islam. The Muslims who are misled into joining these groups are, this mistaken view goes, quite different from ordinary Muslims, who are peaceful and tolerant and have nothing to do with terrorism. 

What's ironic here is that Spencer does essentially the same thing he is accusing the broader Western Mainstream of doing; he only does it to a lesser degree, and dressed up with affectations of no-nonsense "counter-jihad" articulations (even while he has insisted that he is "not 'anti-Islam' " and that only "elements of Islam" are problematic).

P.S.: As this companion blog (to my main blog, The Hesperado) is meant to be as pithy as an espresso shot, I often don't riddle my posts with added evidence and links; though just for you, my rare reader, I slide a saucer your way with this plump scone of relevant data about Spencer fresh out of the oven -- on the house.

"I'll have a double Schizaccino, please..."

A Jihad Watch headline (culled from a BBC report):

New York City to spend $50,000,000 on “security infrastructure,” including 1,500 steel street barriers 

What we have here, essentially, is the broader Western Mainstream unwittingly telegraphing their schizophrenia about the problem of Islam:  On the one hand, they are deathly afraid of Muslims -- i.e., a perfectly rational fear of Muslims is operative in their minds on some deep level where their normative Orwellian denial hasn't (yet) extirpated it.  On the other hand, this Orwellian denial has taken over their public conscience because of a second fear: the fear of their own white Western "racism" -- which, if not checked, curbed, denied and (if necessary) self-flagellatingly shamed (but more often projected outward on various fellow Western, usually "right wing", scapegoats), will result in "another Holocaust" against the New Jews, the Muslims (better than the old Jews, because Brown).

Is this second fear as rational as the first?  Only on one level, not on both levels as their schizophrenia indiscriminately mashes together.  On the level of a fear that the problem of the danger of Islam is systemic and metastasizing throughout the Muslim demographic in alarming ways such that we cannot ultimately discern the difference between a harmless Muslim and a dangerous Muslim (and/or between a harmless Muslim and a Muslim who is not deep down beneath his outward smiles & wiles of a false moderation in solidarity with the jihad against us and thus lends his support to it in one way or another), it is a perfectly rational fear.  And the broader Western mainstream knows it -- but only deep down inside, beneath their consciousness, smothered by their waking denial.  On the other level, that the only way the West could handle this problem is to round up all Muslims and "genocide" them, it is not rational, since there are other ways to protect our society from Muslims -- including rounding them up and deporting them back to their Dar-al-Islam.

If that isn't bad enough, the only area within the West where education has been cultivated about the catastrophe Islam represents -- "the Counter-Jihad" -- indulges its own form of schizophrenia: On the one hand, they industriously churn out information about the ghastly, alarming nature of the problem of Islam; but with their other hand they are busy denying that this has anything to do with Muslims generally speaking (only with some whittled down, amorphously delimited subcategory of "jihadis"). 

This Counter-Jihad schizophrenia is a kind of mirror image of the broader Western Mainstream schizophrenia.