Admittedly, I'm measuring the "Counter-Jihad Mainstream" by the comments fields at Jihad Watch; but I'd like to know a better, more representative pool from which to take its temperature.
So, we all know by now this week's big story: the great Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, in flames from the top, at the part most cherished in our history (pop and otherwise), the structure which climaxes in the belltower.
A crucial part of the story, for the facet I'm examining here today, is the fact that government authorities (from Macron down) and mainstream news sources have assured the public this is not an attack of any kind (let alone terrorist) and that it is most likely due to a construction accident (as the church has been under process of being worked on for weeks, perhaps months).
Important related facts are that just a day or so before the Notre Dame fire, the French government arrested three Muslim women for a plot some years earlier to car-bomb the same Notre Dame cathedral; and that France has been experiencing an escalating spate of vandalism of different degrees (none as horrific as the Notre Dame destruction) of churches all over the country (the vast majority without any published evidence the culprits have been Muslim).
Then we have the material fact of the response by the "Counter-Jihad Mainstream": Last night when I saw the story appear and remain at the top of the Jihad Watch list for a few hours (I've noticed as the time of day goes into evening, factoring in the 3-hour time difference from coast to coast, Jihad Watch doesn't add many (if any) new stories, and the successive addition of stories only starts again early the next morning), there were already over 180 comments. It's rare on Jihad Watch for there to be over 100 comments on most stories (unlike many other website discussion forums, I've noticed); it's pretty much unprecedented for the top story to have garnered over 180 within an hour or two of its posting, as the single Notre Dame report did. Whenever a posting garners over 100 comments, it has taken a day or two (at least) to create that snowball. This time, as I said, there were over 180 within a couple of hours, and when I woke up this morning, while the story had been pushed down by about a dozen other stories (but still on the main page), it had increased by another 100, to 283.
So now that I've got the prefatory details out of the way, what is the tenor of the comments? As far as we know still, this was not a Muslim terror attack, so what could all these Jihad Watchers be so concerned to be commenting about, with relation to the Notre Dame fire? I think it's safe to say that this remarkably high number of comments in this context is a symptom of an amorphous, somewhat incoherent anxiety and frustration amongst the Readership of the Counter-Jihad, which I diagnosed in my 10-part series on my former blog (The Hesperado), "Taking the Temperature of the Counter-Jihad".
In the 10th installment, for example, I made the following obversations:
They [the Readership or Civilians of the Counter-Jihad, as opposed to the Leadership] need some direction, but their fellow Counter-Jihadists, and the unofficial leadership, aren't really providing any, other than a vague climate of inspiration that doesn't seem to be going anywhere as we sit back, feeling helpless on this Titanic course on which our West continues blithely to float adrift.
...the Counter-Jihad basically straggles along flinging heaps of Too Much Information left and right like a Zamboni machine flings crushed ice, or before it like a bulldozer piles fresh hills of dirt amounting to veritable mountains of horrifying data, in hopes that the mere quantity of data, shoveled and dumped over time, will somehow have the qualitative effect of changing minds.
One does get the sense that the West is sort of floating in a state of Denial, in the eerie calm during an eye of a hurricane, hoping Muslims won't strike worse than 911, and apparently ill-prepared if they do so. And the Counter-Jihad, as canaries in the coalmine, sense this more acutely. And in their frustration & impotence at the dereliction of civic duty of their own West, they cannot help but feel there lurks & looms the foreboding of the eventuality that we won't really rouse ourselves from our pleasantly sleepwalking PC MC until after a series of horrific attacks on our soil, not just in America but also throughout various parts of the West.
We, the Counter-Jihad would like to avert such a protracted train wreck of a catastrophe, of course; but we remain too confused, it seems -- both in strategy and ideology -- to do much about it.
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment