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 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:
