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.

A Counter-Jihad phone app?

A few doors down, I lodged a posting yet again recommending that those concerned about Islam in the West do something about creating an Anti-Islam Manual (A.I.M.) in the form of an app available on all devices (phone and computer most prominently, of course).

The main purpose of this A.I.M. app would be as a handy resource to use when engaging with all those Westerners around us in the West (sadly, still a vast majority, it seems) who have a pleasantly uninformed -- and/or an annoyingly misinformed -- understanding of the problem of Islam.

Among the multitude (if not plethora) of subcategories about which an A.I.M. would provide compelling data would be, as I wrote in that other posting a few days ago, the subcategory of "Muslims faking hate crimes against them".

I gave one example in that posting:

Finland: Muslim migrant politician admits he fabricated story about man who told him “go back to Somalia”

Since I posted that, several others have come to my attention, fairly easy to find (but not as ready and easy as it would be if already available in an app grouped together as a subcategory, to be accessed immediately at the push of a button or swipe of a finger):

Muslim arrested for throwing eggs at a Jewish woman and at a Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn

Germany: Muslim migrant soldier invents story of Germans kicking him and saying “Only Germans should wear uniform”

Minnesota: Man accused of assaulting Muslim says he has video proof attack never happened

Wisconsin: Muslima who claims discrimination because of her hijab exposed as a fraud

And, just now, days after I posted this, I noticed this headline, also clearly part of this subcategory of the problem:

UK: Man who used sledgehammer to smash windows of mosques turns out to be Shia targeting Sunnis

Over the years, there have been quite a few attacks on mosques in the West.  As Robert Spencer aptly  notes:

How many of these attacks on mosques were presented by the political and media elites as instances of “Islamophobia”?

Key for the function of this A.I.M. app would be to provide links to mainstream sources to back up any fact and/or interpretation presented, in order to try to circumvent the eye-rolling sneers that would be aroused upon seeing that a source was "Jihad Watch" or "FOX News" or "Breitbart News", etc. As the reader will plainly see (if they actually click on those links above), for the purposes of this posting today, I didn't go to that extra trouble, for this isn't the context to do so; here, I am merely performing a meta-analysis of this issue.  As a relevant aside, in my efforts to communicate this, that or the other appallingly alarming fact about Islam, time and time again I've run into people who sneer at my linking as a source for that fact "Jihad Watch" or "FOX News" or "Breitbart News", etc.   After I got fed up with this I would show them the (usually) mainstream news source used by Jihad Watch, etc., for the report. This doesn't mollify everyone in the audience; many of them (if not most) remain impervious to the data that should at least begin the process of changing their mind about Islam. 

Niggling questions about the MRI

Not the magnetic resonance imaging used in medical diagnoses; but rather, my half-tongue-in-cheek phrase, "Muslim Relocation Initiative".

Among the niggling questions that inevitably seem to pop up -- often from people located more or less "in the Counter-Jihad" -- include:

"Where are you going to deport them?"

"How will you know if they are Muslim unless they identify themselves as such?" (I kid you not, this is a question asked of me -- and not just once, but repeatedly, by "Angemon" the Energizer Bunny of Jihad Watch comments; for example see this posting from last September.)

"What about all the Muslims you won't be able to deport because you can't find them?" (this being a silly variant of the above silly question)

"What about Muslims who are born here (in the West)? Where are you going to deport them?"

Let's take these one by one.  My following retorts aren't mean to be exhaustive in terms of refuting these stupid questions, but will just try to hit the main points:

"Where are you going to deport them?"

This question is not only stupid, it's odd.  It implies that there is no physical location to deport them to.  In fact, there are millions and millions of square miles of land comprised by the 56 majority Muslim nations that exist in the world. So if the questioner isn't implying that, what exactly is he asking? It seems that what they are really doing with their question is making a statement in the form of a rhetorical question -- and that statement is: You can't deport them, it's wrong.  I.e., the "where" is not really their concern, because anywhere would be wrong.

"How will you know if they are Muslim unless they identify themselves as such?" 

This question is so stupid, I don't even know how to begin. Let me have another sip of coffee (and Jack)...  First of all, we know that Western individuals and organizations that establish demographic statistics actually, and regularly, produce statistical conclusions (of course, tentative) about the numbers of Muslims in various places -- in the West total; in each Western country; in each Muslim country; in the Muslim world total.  So the first answer that comes to mind to wave away this annoying fly of a stupid question is: By the same method these mainstream demographic surveys use. DUH!

"What about all the Muslims you won't be able to deport because you can't find them?" 

Of course, as I intimated above, the previous question probably really means what the questioner is getting it with this last question. And what they are really getting at (but are being cagey in not just spitting out) is the statement (put in the cagey form of a rhetorical question): You won't be able to deport all Muslims because some of them will slip out of your dragnet.  To which my response is: Yeah, so what? A lot of big complex projects (perhaps all of them) suffer from imperfection and thus fail to deliver absolute perfection. Does that mean we should refrain from embarking upon these projects?  If we refrained from doing things because we knew they wouldn't be perfect, we wouldn't get anything important done.  To even have to spell this out is a painful exercise, since it's so elementary, it should already be assumed and conceded.

"What about Muslims who are born here (in the West)? Where are you going to deport them?"

Now this question, finally, actually poses a substantive difficulty.  Taking the second part of the question, we can say that the questioner implies that where a person is born constitutes the "where" of his birthright; and this is an important, foundational concept in Western civilization, not to be lightly discarded.  The response is based on an informed recognition of Islam, wherein the Muslim has a higher allegiance to the Umma, which in Islam is a trans-national entity -- not an actual physical entity we can point to, but a work-in-progress; or we should say a jihad-in progress.  While we can't specifically point to a delimited entity on the map and say, "there's the Umma", we can say that the aforementioned 56 Muslim-majority nations on earth are approximately the historical and politico-diplomatic recognitions of that "jihad-in-progress" to date.  And this "jihad-in-progress" has been (and remains), for Muslims following their Islam, a goal to conquer the earth and replace its godless polities with the only rightful polity, a Caliphate based in Sharia. In this context, the political allegiance of any given Muslim born anywhere in the West is reasonably supposed to be not only founded elsewhere than in the (Western) polity of his birth, but in the Umma -- but also inimical in terms of an ongoing, protracted subversion to undermine the West, materially connected to the jihad of which one tentacle is terrorism. This by itself may not be quite enough to warrant deportation; it is arguable that a further, deeper appreciation for the concrete extent of this jihad would inform such a warrant.

This is not unprecedented. Recently in Jihad Watch there was reported the story of a Muslim from Alabama who went off to join the jihad in ISIS. A key sentence in the report:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that an American-born woman who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State (ISIS) group and now wants to return to her family in Alabama is not a U.S. citizen.

As our old friend "The Big W" put it with his characteristically blunt (and refreshing) succinctness:

thebigW says
Nov 15, 2019 at 11:08 pm 

 Yep. And I don’t see why any damn Muslim should be recognized a citizen of any Western nation, even if they’re born here like this Muslima. IF we don’t expand this judge’s decision to apply to ALL Muslims in the West, the West won’t last. 

So I guess the West won’t last past another hundred years give or take a few beheadings.

I haven't yet checked to see what the response has been to Big W's comment; no doubt most of the surrounding Jihad Watch commenters will just ignore it, while a select few (such as the above-mentioned "Angemon") will attack it. Allah forbid that they should agree.

What exactly is the problem of Islam...?

For most of those who believe there is a problem of Islam, they seem to have a dim apprehension that violence is a part of that problem.  But how is Islamic violence a problem?  There are two ways it would be a problem:

1) Currently and in an ongoing manner, Islamic terrorists are killing people in order to try to destroy the West (in order to make Sharia supreme)

2) The current and ongoing terror attacks are not meant to destroy the West now, but rather to initiate a long "jihad of attrition" -- combining sporadic yet growing terrorism with increasing penetration of millions of Muslims into the West -- that will slowly, over a long period of time, transform the West to a state where Muslims will finally take off their masks because they will be able to destroy it violently (in order to make Sharia supreme).

The first one, #1, has a "soft perspective" and a "grim perspective".  The soft perspective of #1 is that, sure, there are some nasty "Islamist extremists" doing terrorism here and there, but a) they don't represent more than a tiny minority of world Muslims; so that b), their goal of destroying the West is highly unlikely to happen, and we will be able to manage the problem in the long-term by continuing what we're doing now. I.e., the problem is not systemic, nor is it metastasizing.

The grim perspective of #1 doesn't make the rosy assumptions of the soft perspective; but rather errs on the side of... grimness, to (tentatively) conclude that the problem is, in fact, systemic and metastasizing -- and thus involves many more Muslims than merely a "tiny minority" who are assumed (by the soft perspective) to be going against the Islamic norm of the "vast majority" of Muslims.

I'd say most in the Counter-Jihad subscribe to the grim perspective of #1 but haven't really given much thought to the prospect of #2, which doesn't have a "soft" side; it's just plain grim.  So basically they think that there are a whole lot of Muslim extremists out there -- many more than the comfortable deniers exemplified by the soft perspective of #1 -- but they haven't thought about what the Islamic end game must be, and what strategies Muslims would be pursuing for the long-term.  This majority in the Counter-Jihad, thus, seems to have an incoherent jumble of negative emotions & thoughts about the problem of Islam: sometimes they sound like they think Muslims can take over peacefully, just by "Sharia Creep" and steady demographic aggrandizement in the West. And even while they indulge this assumption, the Counter-Jihad majority continues to call attention to and decry terrorism -- yet never apparently connecting the two logically.  One wonders what exactly they are worried about when it comes to Islam.

If that isn't bad enough, when I have told them I think the full, grim effects of the problem (from the perspective of #2) probably won't unfold for another 100 years (give or take a few hundred beheadings), the typical response I get is of Chicken Little panic: "WHAT!!?? WE WON'T LAST THAT LONG!!! THE SKY IS FALLING NOW!!!!!!!"  But again, they seem unable to articulate precisely what this "sky falling" in the very near future entails, vis-a-vis Muslims and us.

Let's take a closer look at #2 (my position):

2) The current and ongoing terror attacks are not meant to destroy the West now, but rather to initiate a long "jihad of attrition" -- combining sporadic yet growing terrorism with increasing penetration of millions of Muslims into the West -- that will slowly, over a long period of time, transform the West to a state where Muslims will finally take off their masks because they will be able to destroy it violently (in order to make Sharia supreme).

If that is the case, Muslims aren't pursuing this modus operandi of more or less biding their time (in conjunction with terror attacks below a certain threshold now and again) for no good reason, but only because they are forced to.  And the obvious reason why they are forced to is because of the superiority of their enemy (mainly, the West).  They realize the West can't be brought down merely with a concatenation of terror attacks -- because of the West's comparative military superiority. Furthermore, unless they are blithering idiots (and it's tempting for those "in the Counter-Jihad" movement to denigrate Muslims as stupid, but that's a reckless temptation that underestimates the fanatical intelligence cultivated in Islam), Muslims also realize that, if they tried to "bet everything on one hand" and pull out all the stops by initiating a generalized mayhem of jihad wherever they are in the West, the West would at that point finally wake up to the danger and be able to definitively disable them, likely permanently.

As I noted above, from my sense of taking stock of "the Counter-Jihad" over the past decade plus (example, my "Taking the Temperature of the Counter-Jihad" series), its analysts (whether in the Leadership or part of the Civilian Readership) don't seem to have a view coherent enough position even to delineate where they fall along this division; let alone whether they proffer a third alternative.  One thing is clear, they hardly ever show signs of appreciating #2.  They thus have, as best we can piece together (since they never actually have a conversation about the nuts and bolts of this issue in these terms), a confused sense of #1 that splits off into variants; but none of them clearly making sense in terms of clarifying precisely how Islam is dangerous to us -- which, of course, is intimately connected to how dangerous one considers Islam to be.

Note (Friday, November 22):  

A day after I published the above essay, I realized that my #2 point hadn't fully articulated its gist.  The original version was this:

2) The current and ongoing terror attacks are not meant to destroy the West now, but rather to initiate a long "jihad of attrition" -- combining sporadic yet growing terrorism with increasing penetration of millions of Muslims into the West -- that will slowly, over a long period of time, transform the West to a state where Muslims will be able to destroy it (in order to make Sharia supreme).

But what I realized was missing were two crucial factors of that future process: (i) when Muslims will "finally take off their masks because they will be able to destroy" the West; and (ii) that this future destruction will be "violently" (obviously meaning more violently than theretofore -- with no more need [or at least much less need] of taqiyya and its various modes of dissembling peacefulness).

The reader can see I already made the changes to the two instances in which I quoted #2.

Further Reading:

An apropos posting I wrote a couple of years ago on The Hesperado, my former blog:

The Psychology of the Counter-Jihad Softy

Indeed, I noted just now that in the comments section of that posting, my comment to a reader touched on the very issues my posting here today deals with.  I wrote back on January 20, 2017:

We also need to understand what "enemies" in this context means, in terms of their willingness and concrete ability to not only pop up at random with violence against us, but also infiltrate in myriad subtle ways so as to enable far more horrific attacks on us in the future -- after decades of economically and infrastructurally and psychologically destabilizing attacks (and fear of attacks) have had their effects, at some future date (I estimate approximately 100 years, give or take) reducing us (the entire West) just enough to be brought down by bigger, more concerted attacks into general breakdown.

Thus, even if a Counter-Jihadist Softy may understand generally what you say about all Muslims being potentially/actually our enemies, their soft perspective will minimize the "enemy" part to merely a static stance of actual/potential enmity in a vague way, not the metastasizing enmity it actually is -- motivated, inspired, and guided by the blueprint of fanatical hatred and infiltration encoded in Islamic texts, tradition, history, and culture.

Imagine an A.I.M phone app for the A.I.M.

The first A.I.M of my title today stands for "Anti-Islam Manual". The second one, "Anti-Islam Movement".

Neither exists; but it's long past time they should (if it ain't in fact too late).

About this I've written many a time on my old blog, The Hesperado -- particularly this one, which zeroes in on the point:

The aim of the A.I.M. should be an A.I.M.

I was reminded again of this need by a recent Jihad Watch headline:

Finland: Leftist Muslim migrant politician admits he fabricated story about man who told him “go back to Somalia”

Aside from the unfortunate absurdity of Robert Spencer's "Leftist Muslim" (as if a Muslim can be a Leftist any more than he or she can be anything Western), the story concerns one of the multitudes of sub-categories of the Problem of Islam (and the secondary Problem of the West Inadequately Dealing with the aforementioned Problem of Islam).

What subcategory? Well, I'm glad you asked, Pepe.  This particular subcategory is "another Muslim fakes a hate crime".

The main theater of the problem of Islam is currently the war of ideas; and the main "warriors" in this war of ideas are ordinary civilians (and their book-selling Leadership) more or less coagulating into a "Counter-Jihad".  And as warriors of ideas, we civilians who care are effectively "deputized" -- and being deputized involves more than a plastic badge and a squirt gun: It involves arming yourself with information.

In our age of digital information, "the Counter-Jihad" has no excuse for not developing an A.I.M. (Anti-Islam Manual -- see my essays linked up top for details).

What such an A.I.M. would contain, amongst the multitudes of sub-categories, would be every story about a Muslim faking a hate crime.  Oh Mammy, there have been many of these over the years. My favorite was from back in 2014 in California, the Muslim man who claimed his murdered wife was murdered by Islamophobic haters; the only problem was that the Muslim husband who murdered his own wife in an "honor killing" had faked the note he claimed to have found in his home which read, "Go back to your country, terrorist".

So, with an A.I.M. app, alls ya needs ta do is just punch in key words onto your phone (or speak into it) "faked hate crimes against Muslims", and voilà! There you have all the data you need to fend off some snarky Westerner who thinks that particular subcategory is not a problem. Armed with this data, the civilian deputy for the Counter-Jihad can then make a case for the speciousness of the "hate crime" stats inflated by Islam apologists.

Tooting my own horn

This old posting of mine from May of 2015 is, if I don't say so myself, a wealth of a superbly detailed argument for a tougher stance on Islam, and against the bluff-calling incoherence of a Robert Spencer:

Noah Webster (Peace Be Upon Him), and these “defining days”

If all caffeine became lethally toxic, would you only avoid "extremist" ("pious") espressos...?

Am I right, or am I right...?

So let's examine a recent Robert Spencer editorial remark, expounding on a recent threat by Turkey's Interior Minister to send captured ISIS combatants back to "their" countries (i.e., to the Western country where they had sojourned prior to leaving to join ISIS):

The captured Islamic State jihadis don’t believe that European states are their countries at all. They consider themselves to be citizens of the worldwide Islamic umma. When back in Europe, many of them are likely to continue their jihad there.

Leave it to our old friend "The Big W" to zero in on the problem with Spencer's observation:

Ain’t this likely true of ALL Muslims? What’s the risk of NOT assuming this, and WHY fer Crissakes wouldja not assume it…..???

This is Big W's characteristically blunt way of wondering why Spencer is implying that this problem of returning ISIS Muslims is somehow different from the problem that any and all Muslims, anywhere in the West, pose.

It's a good question, and the Counter-Jihad Mainstream not only has no answer, they routinely flinch from facing the question, and if someone raises it too persistently, they tend to attack that person (as they have moi for years on various forums, including Jihad Watch comments).

P.S.: 

Big W only got two responses. One guy ("CogitoErgoSum") didn't seem to object to Big W, but his pointless defense of Robert Spencer in that context indicates he didn't get Big W's point. The other, from our old Rabbit Pack member, "gravenimage", ostensibly agreed with Big W, but with one glaring flaw:

gravenimage says 
Nov 4, 2019 at 5:19 pm 

True, thebigW. No pious Muslim considers any Infidel nations to be their countries. They are just places to use as bases from which to wage Jihad. 

Can the reader spot the flaw? A gold star for anyone spotting "pious".  Why would gravenimage delimit the problem from plain old "Muslim" to a "pious Muslim"?  Evidently because she's too timid to abandon all qualifiers insulating her from the dreaded A word.  It's doubly ironic when Big W himself not only pointedly referred to "all" Muslims, but emphasized it in ALL CAPS.  So gravenimage is peculiarly dense, or is adjusting the problem on purpose, in her role as hall monitor/crossing guard for the Counter-Jihad.  The only problem with this delimitation of the problem to "pious Muslims" is that, on the macro level, we can't  tell the difference sufficiently between "pious" Muslims and "non-pious" Muslims.

P.P.S: 

About a year ago, Spencer articulated the same thing, concerning a story about an ISIS fighter who wanted to "return" to Australia, but the Australian government stripped his citizenship and deported him:

All free nations should do this as a matter of course, but the suicidal British and others have instead welcomed them back.

They joined an entity that has repeatedly declared that it is at war with their home countries. That should have been taken as a renunciation of citizenship.

Again, what's the difference between this ISIS jihadist and any old Muslim?  I note that even back then, Big W lodged essentially the same retort:

What’s the difference between ISIS and Islam? Yeah they are different, Islam can fool people (or make us fool ourselves) into thinking it’s not a condition for deporting.

And of course, no other Jihad Watchers said it (and none commented substantively, other than one regular, "Mark Swan", whose response implicitly contained essentially the same delimitation gravenimage provided:

Mark Swan says
Dec 30, 2018 at 10:11 am

“Islamic State is opposed to Australia, their interests, values, democratic beliefs, rights and liberties” Islamic State is just “go by the book” Islam.

And, characteristically, Big W's rejoinder is right on the money, and fills in the blank Mark Swan either obtusely, or purposefully, left missing:

thebigW says
Dec 31, 2018 at 1:46 pm

Yeah and if you see any Muslims who don’t seem to be “go by the book” it’s only because they’re pretending to be different from ISIS.

Post-Post-Postscript:

Notice how in another, related context, Spencer suddenly pulls his punches:

“The court heard Kocoglu had renounced Islamic State, had no prior offences and had not re-offended in the past five years and was not a threat to the Australian community.”
A great deal is riding on Kocoglu’s being honest about this. Australian citizens can only hope that he is.

Notice Spencer is not using the robust language he used in the case of ISIS-joining Muslims returning to a Western nation and the prospect of their deportation and/or stripped citizenship, as we examined above in the main body of today's posting, and in the P.S. and the P..P.S.

Yet another example of the Problem of the Problem of the Problem

Over on the Sam Harris discussion forum (where Sam Harris himself never participates), I weighed in on the Problem, not of Islam, and not of the West inadequately dealing with Islam -- but of the Counter-Jihad (such as it is) inadequately dealing with the aforementioned two problems.

As the reader will note if he goes over there to read my comment, I've been to that forum before, a few years ago (see this Google page which shows some of my past history there, with many of the dates being 2015).

The particular person over there I addressed in my new comment (one "icehorse") doesn't really answer my question (a typical experience Ive had over the years), though he addresses me sort of sideways. If anything of significance happens, I'll report it here.

UPDATE (11/7/19):

Nothing much to report -- other than that the two who deigned to respond to me (icehorse and Traces Elk) are just wasting my time.

Real coffee (but slightly decaf, please)

Or rather, more like: "Decaf (but slightly real coffee, please)".

In terms of the long-term threat of Islam and what the West needs to do to wake up to it, I speak of an analyst who shows refreshingly incorrect knowledge of mainstream Islam, yet who (as inevitably seems to happen), retracts his clear-eyed talons in order to hedge his bets on Muslims in general.

The analyst is someone I hadn't heard of before yesterday: Gabriel Said Reynolds, an academic scholar of Islamic theology and history.  The person who glowingly recommended him was a Christian chatter on Paltalk who has been showing signs for a while of a healthy antipathy to Islam; however, from years of experience of disappointment in this regard, I wasn't about to go along with this praise without doing a little investigation on my own.  The Christian chatter assumed that Gabriel Said Reynolds is a Muslim scholar, and that would be somewhat reasonable because of the "Said" in his name (and often we see these converts to Islam sporting names that are a grotesque hybrid of Arabic and European). As far as I was concerned, if Reynolds was a Muslim, then we ought not expect anything from him on the subject other than a tissue of lies (either baldfaced lies, or varying degrees of cleverer forms of taqiyya, all the way up to the styles & wiles of the "Better Cop" Muslims).

I soon learned from a little Googling that Prof. Reynolds is apparently a Catholic theologian with a home base at Notre Dame University and has published books on Islam at Yale University Press. I.e., he's a solidly mainstream academic. From years of bitter experience, I knew this augured ill for any chance that he'd buck the politically correct inhibition, so dominant throughout the mainstream, on any honest appraisal of Islam. This was doubly so when I breezed over a headline about how in 2017, he was "tapped by Vatican for Catholic-Muslim dialogue on religious extremism" (which would have been fine under the semi-Islamo-savvy Pope Benedict XVI, but bodes ill under his Papal replacement, the Marxist Islamophile, Pope Francis).

Well, I was largely (albeit guardedly) refreshed by an essay he published in First Things, a Catholic newsletter-cum-journal presided over by Richard John Neuhaus, a rather well-known Catholic priest and sociopolitical conservative (I remember seeing him a few times as a guest on the old Firing Line debates, always on the side of William F. Buckley).  Up until today, I hadn't bothered to familiarize myself with Neuhaus's stance on Islam, so I thought I'd look him up. A Google search yields a few promisingly substantive articles in this regard. So far, I've only read a 1998 essay, "Islamic Encounters" which indicates he is at least across the middle line toward Islamorealism.  Among other heartening facts, he notes in his essay that he was chastised by CAIR for his review of Bat Ye’or’s "important new book recently published in this country, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude".  So far so good (especially that he likes Bat Ye’or’s book); though he just had to follow that with a politically correct spasm:

To be fair, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) should not be taken to represent contemporary Islam. 

Neuhaus, needless to say, offers not a shred of justification for this sweepingly generous claim about "contemporary Islam".

I look forward to reading one or two further essays of his (particularly one revolving around Pope Benedict's notorious speech in 2006 which sparked violent riots and attacks among Muslims in various places around the world). But let us return to Prof. Gabriel Said Reynolds.

His essay in First Things, published in June of 2014 under the title, "I am a Christian, and I will remain a Christian": What We Can Learn from Meriam Ibrahim, is about the infamous case of a Sudanese woman whose father was Muslim but who grew up as a Christian and then married a Christian man and because of this, was sentenced by the Sudanese government to the crime of adultery (zina) -- because under Sharia law, a Christian marriage is not recognized -- and sentenced to death under the Islamic crime of apostasy (irtidad).  Professor Reynolds pulls no punches about Islam in his dispassionate description of the key points:

From the perspective of Islamic law, individuals ...who are born Muslims can never legally enter into another religious community. Their rejection of Islam, however, amounts to apostasy: a crime against God and the Prophet Muhammad which is punishable by death.

As Prof. Reynolds points out, this capital punishment for apostasy stems not directly from the Koran, but rather from the hadiths, one of which he quotes, straight from the camel's mouth (Mohammed):

“As for he who changes his [Islamic] religion, kill him.” 

And he goes on to add the pertinent, and ghastly, point:

These declarations shape the doctrine of the traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence: All four Sunni schools, and the standard Shi’ite school, agree that apostates are to be executed...

Followed by this even more ghastly fact, referring to her release from prison only after international non-Islamic pressure on Sudan forced them to let her out:

As her life would certainly be threatened by religious vigilantes (or by even by her own relatives) in Sudan, she and her husband and children immediately sought to leave the country.  

Ah, but then Prof. Reynolds (like Neuhaus) just had to have a Tourette's twitch of political correctness in the form of a parenthetical coda.  Let us repeat that previous sentence, and then restore his parenthetical remark he felt obliged to append:

All four Sunni schools, and the standard Shi’ite school, agree that apostates are to be executed (although more and more Muslims today disagree).

[bold emphasis added by me]

A number of things to say about this.  First, after we roll our eyes to the ceiling in our grief and then facepalm in jaded misery, we note the obvious, that this parenthetical remark is a politically correct virtue-signalling spasm so typical of most of those who are otherwise critical of Islam.

Second, we note that Prof. Reynolds (like Neuhaus) provides not a shred of evidence for this generous claim about "more and more Muslims today".

Third, and most interestingly, his claim raises important questions, some rhetorical, some perhaps not: If, as he claims, any Muslims disagree with their mainstream Islamic jurisprudence found in all 4 schools of Sunni law (and, as he points out, the standard Shi'ite school), on what grounds do they disagree?  On non-Islamic, Western grounds?  How does that square with their self-identity as a Muslim (= follower of Islam)? Or if they claim to ground it on Islam, how can that be, since all their mainstream schools rule otherwise? If by some implausible means, these Muslims have concocted or cobbled together some alternative Islam that purports to be grounded in some part of Islam, how can that be convincingly argued? And how on Earth could they convince Muslims who want to be mainstream Muslims (particularly when such challenges risk physical punishments, even death)? And why should we take them seriously, since their Private Idaho of their alternative Islam is -- because of its minuscule representation (not to mention its shaky foundations in Islam) -- demographically irrelevant to the broader problem of Islam? And, finally, why do so many Muslims who affect to be in disagreement with such glaringly monstrous aspects of their Islam -- why do they continue to defend Islam using various ploys of sophistry that avoid the kinds of questions I'm asking here, rather than offering up a frank and sincere response?

Of course, Prof. Reynolds' essay is utterly devoid of all these questions, even if their dire exigency inhabits the spaces between its lines, to be noticed by precious few readers in our time.

Two Kinds of People

The old adage that "there are two kinds of people" applies in many ways, concerning different issues. The two kinds I refer to here today concern first of all Westerners (and their assimilated partners in the non-West), divided into those who get the problem of Islam, and those who don't.

The latter are clearly still the majority throughout the West, though the situation isn't static: One can discern indications of a growth of the former -- a growing learning curve, but one beset by two problems:  1) an achingly glacial rate of expansion; and 2) a tendency to proceed in a framework that paradoxically inhibits, or hobbles, the progress of one's education about the horror of Islam.

But this reflects a further complication of what I have called "the problem of the problem" (where the primary problem is Islam, and the problem of it reflects Westerners grappling inadequately with that primary problem), which I've dealt with at length in many previous essays on this blog and on my former blog (The Hesperado) -- see particularly this essay -- additional wrinkles to the problem that will only clutter up what I want to examine here today, so I'll skip it.

There may be many factors differentiating these two types of people -- those who get the problem of Islam, and those who don't.  One factor often touted as relevant turns out to be based on faulty reasoning. For example, the simplistic distinction that those who don't get the problem of Islam are all "Leftists", while those who do get it are not "Leftists".  I once held this view, but over the years, I kept hitting my head against the data of countless Non-Leftists who were pretty much as myopic to the problem of Islam as any Leftist is, and eventually, on this particular subtopic, I went through that strange process called "changing my mind".

This brings me to a factor that sheds light on how these two types approach the problem differently. Their different approaches reflect two different epistemologies, what I'd like to call the Casuistic and the Axiomatic.  The ones who get the problem of Islam approach it casuistically; the ones who don't get it approach it axiomatically.

What is the casuistic approach? The word comes from the Latin for "case", and this approach proceeds on a case-by-case basis. This means that the casuistic approach is responsive to data -- not only to an existing pool of data, but also to new data.  Most problems -- particularly a complex sociopolitical problem like Islam -- do not have a static pool of data, but are dynamic, involving new data.  With this particular problem, one of the most important types of new data is, to put it bluntly, yet another Muslim (or, more often, Muslims in the plural) trying to kill us.  And this type of data is not only happening regularly and often, it is -- if you pay attention to it -- metastasizing (i.e., getting worse, both in quality and in quantity).

The casuistic approach isn't responsive to data merely in the sense of exclusively reacting to it; this approach also tries to make sense of the data and, if the data are regular, frequent, and metastasizing -- as the data concerning the problem of Islam in fact are -- the casuistic person will study more to make sense of this dynamic. As time goes along in his study, he will note different frameworks have been developed by different people providing some overall sense to this disturbing dynamic exhibited by the data.  And he will eventually realize that the different frameworks fall into one of two categories, reflecting our binary division between Casuist and Axiomatic.

Now, what is this Axiomatic approach? And how does it differ from the Casuistic approach?  The axiomatic approach brings an abstract principle, an axiom, to the table, before even assessing any data.  With this axiom in place, the axiomatic person then takes a look at the data; but if the data seems to indicate that his axiom isn't correct or needs to be adjusted, the axiomatic person won't budge.  He will try to figure out ways to explain why the data seems to be challenging the usefulness of his axiomatic framework -- ways which will leave his axiomatic framework intact (when, that is, such a kind of person does not just pretty much ignore the data, after giving lip service to its existence.)  So with these people who don't get the problem of Islam, it's not always a matter of them ignorant of the data or avoiding the data; oftentimes (especially in the social media realm of punditry and podcasting think tank "experts") it's a matter of form-fitting the data into their pre-fab axiomatic paradigms.

So, what got me to thinking about this was a headline today from Jihad Watch:

Muslim convicted of plotting jihad massacres at UN, FBI offices and NYC landmarks deported to Sudan

With the (even) more disturbing details in the story:

A Sudanese national convicted in 1996 with nine others as part a large-scale terrorism plot against the U.S.... the conspiracy headed by the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman to target the United Nations, FBI offices and other New York City landmarks.

The funny thing about this ("funny" in a grimly black humor sense) is that for all of the years I've been reading about Islam since 911, I never knew about this major terror plot to mass-murder Americans in New York City in the 90s. One more datum to add to the mountain of data out there indicating the horrific proportions of this problem.  And I thought about all the Westerners (still a majority, sadly) whose view on the problem of Islam wouldn't change at all -- even after they learn about this story.  They would either just forget it 15 minutes after they read about it in the New York Times; or, if pressed, they would find a way to make its grotesquely alarming appendages fit into their box without disturbing the rigid presuppositions of their axiom that:

"the only problem is a Tiny Minority of Extremists, and meanwhile mainstream Islam is just a religion like any other, and the Vast Majority of Muslims Just Wanna Have a Sandwich".

Signs of intelligent life on Planet Jihad Watch

Recently on Jihad Watch, Andrew Bostom (about whose asymptotic tics I've written before) published a salutary article with a refreshingly rare criticism of the Kurds -- "Don't Romanticize the Kurds". When I first saw the article, I thought, this is great, but didn't expect the comments to rise above a measly 9 or 10.  Well, when I checked back just a few hours later, it had reached nearly 150 (it has since peaked at 193 and will probably not rise further now that it has sunk into the oblivion of the archived "Next Pages").

In his article, Bostom adumbrates all the reasons why the Kurds are unremarkably extremist (i.e., normatively Islamic, since the vast majority of them are Sunni Muslims).

So what triggered this high number of comments?  Before I read through them, I assumed it was the various members of the Readership of the Counter-Jihad (as opposed to the Leadership) wringing their hands about the Kurds and wrangling with each other over their double-virtue-signalling angst.

And I was pretty much correct.

One long-time commenter named "Ernie", for example, posts this uninformed remark:

I’ve heard that the Kurds are a people , and that there are Kurds that are Muslim , other Kurds are Christian ,and that there are even Jewish Kurds . There are no good reasons for the betrayal of the Kurds ; and white-washing the betrayal of the Kurds by smearing them or referring to things that happened in the past is simply another injustice done to them .

Ernie just assumes that there must exist an innumerable number of non-Muslim Kurds; but, as our old friend "the Big W" points out later on in that comments thread:

All I needed to know about the Kurds is that “the Kurds, the vast majority of whom are orthodox Sunni muslims” 

http://home.hum.uva.nl/oz/leezenberg/PoliIslamKurds.pdf 

 to know that everything Andrew Bostom tells us here ain’t surprising at all.

No doubt Ernie would just double down if he faced the facts that the vast majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, because that's how incoherent emotions roll. And Ernie effectively did that later on in the comments thread:

Well , The Kurds have done it according to some people here , and that deserves the dead-penalty apparently…. I really think about leaving here , and not coming back to this blog . It has gone too far. Let me be clear : I hate Islam , and everything it stands for . But the whitewashing here for genocide directed at ANY people , and in this case The Kurds is disgusting . And as final justification : they are Muslims…………sorry , I can’t and I will not accept this . It is evil .

 And:

Abandoning the Kurds in northern Syria and leaving them to the “mercy” of Erdogan is defacto ethnic cleansing/genocide of the Kurds in that region , Gravenimage . You’ll see .

Another commenter -- one "Chand" -- chimes in on Ernie's side, posting comments like these:

Islam may be problematic, or bad, or very bad, or terrible or even evil but for most JW readers this translates into a hatred for ALL Muslims, just for being born into Islam. ALL Muslims are blamed for the Jihad problem and are falsely accused of being facilitators of jihad or sharia, whatever that means.

First of all, Chand is the one "translating" (i.e., assuming) what JW readers supposedly think -- that they move from opposing Islam to nursing a "hatred for ALL Muslims".  As I have pointed out, it's not about "hate", it's about rationally protecting our societies from Islam (which, rationally, entails that we be appropriately wary of Muslims who actualize the Islam that threatens us -- and also, of course, rationally entails the fact that we cannot adequately discern which Muslims are not doing taqiyya from those who are). Chand, apparently, is willing to throw all these rational concerns out the window in order to anxiously avoid "hating" Muslims. Once again, signs that the Counter-Jihad is infected with the PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Cuturalism) that saturates the broader Western mainstream (about which those in the Counter-Jihad are always bitching).

Then, after quoting Bostom --

“Messo said the PYD/YPG and Daesh are both terror groups, differing only in aims, and sometimes even working together. “For example, the BBC showed that the PYD/YPG signed an agreement with Daesh. And, according to our own sources, the PYD/YPG took former Daesh members with them,” he added.”

-- Chand remarks:

This quote by Bostom is the most ridiculous of all. Equating a secular/Marxist group which have women brigades and clearly have equal rights for women, women’s emancipation, scientific education, countering religious doctrine and backwardness, etc. as their political agenda with a barbaric gang of fascist criminals trying to establish their own vision of 7th century Arabic Islam is totally dumb.

Then Wellington -- a long-time veteran of Jihad Watch comments about whose asymptotic twitches I've discussed many times -- just had to weigh in with his considerable ballast:

Not every Muslim is a mortal threat and anyone saying so is, at best, guilty of extreme exaggeration (though so-called moderate Muslims do give cover to the most “devout” to be found among Mo’s followers). But what is a threat is Islam—and a threat as no other major religion remotely is.

After all these years of reading Jihad Watch (I believe, by his own lights, since its inception in 2003), Wellington still doesn't get the relatively simple principle -- namely, that:

We must, if we want our West to survive past 100 years from now, treat all Muslims with equal suspicion because as Robert Spencer has noted many times, we cannot adequately tell the difference between "devout" Muslims and Muslims doing taqiyya.

So, if Wellington had actually digested what he's been learning all these years, he would know that asserting that "[n]ot every Muslim is a mortal threat" is an utterly needless and irrelevant reminder of a too fine distinction -- or even worse, actually reinforces our incoherent need to soften our stance with regard to the aforementioned principle.

Another long-time regular at Jihad Watch comments is one "eduardo_odraude" (indeed, I believe he is the person who helms the fine website Quoting Islam), who weighed in with more anxious concern about hating Muslims:

This site does not promote anti-Muslim hatred. It does lead sane people to an intense dislike of what the core texts of Islam teach.

lebel is purveying falsehoods in claiming Robert Spencer promotes anti-Muslim hatred. Spencer has stated countless times that many Muslims are ignorant of their own texts and innocent of the violent totalitarian teachings of Muhammad. lebel knows but wants to hide that Robert Spencer says in virtually every talk Spencer gives that it is wrong to paint Muslims with a broad brush.

This "lebel" character eduardo alludes to is the wild card in this Jihad Watch comments thread (as he has been in other threads over the many months if not years). He goes in to taunt and chide Jihad Watchers for, in one way or another, "hating all Muslims". The lebel wild card would be an excellent opportunity for Jihad Watchers to school him on the primary point:

We do not "hate" Muslims per se, primarily because "hate" is a silly distraction from our concern to defend our society from Muslims actualizing their Islam.

So this primary point is the real issue, which lebel is either cleverly, or obtusely, deflecting: namely, is Islam a threat to our Western society, and how much of a threat is it? The crucial related question is, which Muslims can we trust, if any, and on what grounds should we trust them?  The lebels of the West (if indeed he is even a Westerner), the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalists (PC MCs) who dominate Western culture, anxiously wish to maintain an abstract principle that axiomatically defends a putative majority of Muslims.  This axiomatic abstraction is threatened by the casuistic approach that confronts the sheer mountain of data (and ocean of dots suggesting connection) and concludes that the problem extends so deeply and broadly that we would be reckless if we drew artificial delimitations around it for the sake of insulating a putative majority of Muslims from our concern. Meanwhile, PC MCs often engage in a sophistry that pretends to grapple with these data & dots, thus manipulating them to give their axiomatic abstraction an aura of a reasonable grounding in facts. It is dismaying to see most of those in the Counter-Jihad basically doing the same thing.

At a certain juncture in this sea of 193 comments, we see the Three Mouseketeers of the Rabbit Pack -- Wellington, gravenimage, and the Energizer Bunny himself, Angemon -- weigh in against this lebel character (his comment they are responding to immediately precedes Wellington's), whose main complaint about Jihad Watchers is, as I take it, the crux of the matter:

...taqiyya... enables you to dismiss any of the behavior [of seemingly Moderate Muslims] ...as some kind of deception. 

Instead of a head-on rebuttal of this point by steadfastly defending the exigent cogency of a generalized suspicion of all Muslims, the Three Amigos above go into tortured rhetoric effectively trying to sidestep that crux of the matter -- evidently because, in their asymptotic double-virtue-signalling, they are uncomfortable avowing it.

P.S.: I remember a few days ago seeing a comment by some commenter whose name I'm not familiar with, one "Cortez", that was a bracingly refreshing splash of water on the nonsense of the Counter-Jihad Softies.  Now there's no sign of Cortez in that thread.  Here's proof that his comment was scrubbed (evidently (who else?) by Spencer and/or his tech genius, Marc), two screen shots showing there was in fact a Cortez comment on that thread, 5 days ago: