Tourism & Terrorism

Back in late summer here, I posted an essay on an interesting aspect of the larger issue of the Jihad. The essay was titled Do-Gooders Without Borders. Unfortunately, it dealt only in passing with this phenomenon.

Part of the problem is that, to do this phenomenon justice, an analysis would have to spend a lot of time researching and marshaling data to back it up. Over the years, I've seen indications and dots-worth-connecting about it, but more often than not, I had other fish to fry and neglected to do my due diligence in bookmarking them.

At any rate, I was recently reminded of this phenomenon by the latest, grisly example of Do-Gooders Without Borders (or, in this case perhaps, Multiculturalist Airheads Without Borders), the two Scandinavian women who were hiking in Morocco and were attacked and murdered by at least three Muslims explicitly in the name of Islam according to the murderers, one of them decapitated (it's shocking that both of the non-Muslim girls weren't decapitated).(This update indicates four Muslims were arrested for the murders, and nine others also arrested for possible complicity.) (Yet another update, indicating up to 20 Muslims were involved; meanwhile authorities are apparently trying valiantly to maintain that this wolf pack was actually some sort of random collection of "lone wolves".)

I noticed one Jihad Watch reader (one "kenek") posted the most relevant data on this:

Calling them naive is a little kinder than I would be.
 
“Both were students of “outdoor activities and cultural guidance” at the University of Southeastern Norway. ”
 
These were obviously islamic supporters and good little dhimmis. As liberals they likely shamed anyone who tried to explain the true nature of islam to them and felt very self-righteous about it afterwards. If safety were an issue they would never have gone alone and they certainly never would have gone to any islamic country!
Was it karma? Some of their pets turned on them. The only uncommon part about this case is that we heard about it at all. The only reason it continues to be in the media is because the terrorist cell might kill other moslems.

As my above-linked previous essay discussed, these young women murdered by Muslims in Morocco, due to their politically correct multiculturalist biases probably sought and trusted Muslim locals, translators and guides who were likely part of the group who waylaid them and destroyed their bodies and souls. More research needs to be done about this phenomenon -- of Muslim locals colluding with various mujahideen and terrorists with reference to any terrorist incident that happens when Western tourists recklessly gallivant anywhere in the Muslim world -- to lay the groundwork of a good argument in this respect; but apparently the Counter-Jihad has other priorities (like selling Robert Spencer's latest book).

"Are you saying that all cups of coffee are bad...?"

One thing I'd like to do more on this new blog is use it, once in a while, to feature a good old essay from my now deceased blog, The Hesperado.

I've been a-spelunkin' the archives of that old battle-scarred battleship and have run into many good ones. For now, I'll note this one, with a teaser of a quote from it.  The "character" to whom I refer in the first sentence, James Baron, was just some reader commenting on Jihad Watch nearly two years ago (haven't seen hide nor hair of him since) who... well, let the quote spell out the rest:

What I found interesting was that this character, James Baron, was trying to oppose the Jihad Watchers and their supposed bigotry by standing his ground on the old "tarring all Muslims with the same brush" argument.  Unfortunately, the Counter-Jihad Softies who seem to make up the vast majority of Jihad Watchers have no way to confront this argument head-on -- because, in effect, they seem to agree with their opponent on that point.  Where they run afoul of coherence is where their increasingly learned opposition to Islam logically leads to an open-ended condemnation of all Muslims.  But, being deathly afraid of "going there", they stand their ground at various places short of that.  Hence their incoherence.

Don't forget to "read the whole thing", the essay titled Mainstreams confusion, dated February 7, 2017.

"Waiter, there's a zebibah in my coffee...!"

The zebibah is the dark nodular blemish smack dab in the middle of the foreheads of particularly devout Muslims, their degree of devoutness measured by how many times they bang their foreheads on the floor during their 5 times of daily prayer.  Being a small, dark, round nodule, it resembles perhaps a dead fly -- and apparently the word zebibah (or zabiba) literally means "raisin". It's not that much of a stretch to notice the resemblance of a dead fly on the table and a black raisin, is it? Which in turn has made me wonder if the Hebrew word for "fly" -- zebub -- is not related to the Arabic word for "raisin". Again, it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to say that early Arabs, perhaps influenced by Hebrew and/or Aramaic, appropriated the word for "fly" in order, playfully or poetically, to refer to raisins.  The Hebrew word is most famously used in the name of the evil God of the Canaanites, Baalzebub -- later translated by Jerome in his Vulgate as dominus muscarum ("Lord of the Flies"); and subsequently becoming in the history of Western Judaeo-Christian/Graeco-Roman mythologoumena one of the many names of Satan.

What does this have to do with the Counter-Jihad? Well, only a Westerner severely compromised by political correctness (i.e., damned purt near everybody in the West) would deny that devoutness in Islam is directly related to the violent jihad against the West (along with its crucial corollary, the stealth jihad). So, a recent Jihad Watch article notes that at least one mainstream news source reported that the recent Muslim mujaheed, who killed 3 people at a Christmas festival in Strasbourg (and wounded many others, and of course, it is excruciatingly reasonable to suppose, dearly desired to kill many more), had a zebibah on his forehead.

As the savvy Jihad Watch reader who goes by the name "thebigW" noted in a comment on that article at Jihad Watch, the supposedly Moderate Muslim leader of Egypt, Al-Sisi, himself sports a dead fly on his forehead too (though considerably milder than the norm, as though perhaps his assistant applies pancake makeup to it):


I've written before (on my former blog, The Hesperado) about Al-Sisi as he reflects on the "problem of the problem of the problem" -- which we may explicate thusly: problem3 of the problem2 of the problem1, where problem1 is the problem of Islam; problem2 is the problem of the Western Mainstream's failure to deal adequately with the problem of Islam; and problem3 is the failure of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM) to deal adequately with the first two problems.

Speaking of which, problem3 manifests itself in (among other things) twitches of schizophrenia -- such as these two stories on that bastion of the CJM, Jihad Watch, coming within days of each other:

1. A Jihad Watch headline, quoting Al-Sisi:  Egypt’s el-Sisi: “If you go to a country that welcomes you, you must respect its laws, traditions and culture” -- followed by Spencer's editorial remark:

A remarkably clear-sighted and honest statement. Be sure to read it all. If a European leader spoke this way, he would be excoriated as a racist, bigoted “Islamophobe.”

 (And augmenting this needless spasm of admiration for a Muslim leader, we have Spencer not too long ago penning this:

Sisi’s regime isn’t perfect. Muslims are still brutalizing Christians in Egypt, and the government has done little to protect this despised and defenseless minority. At the same time, Sisi is a bulwark against political Islam in the Middle East. With Turkey rapidly re-Islamizing and the Islamic State still in the picture, that is important. So after the Obama administration’s unwavering support of the Muslim Brotherhood, this is most welcome. [bold emphasis added by yours truly] )

 2. Then we have stories like this, for which one could find dozens of similar stories over the years since Al-Sisi (or El-Sissi) wrested power from the supposedly more extremist Morsi:

Egypt: Christian gets three years prison for insulting Islam.

Until the Counter-Jihad grows a healthy rational prejudice against all Muslims, I will see little reason for optimism for the West's long-term future as Islam continues to undergo an exponential global revival in this 21st century.

"I'll have a triple counter-jihadaccino -- and make it decaf."

Recently, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch dished up a steaming pile of memes jam-packed with subtly specious assumptions.  It revolves around Trump's nominee for America's ambassador to the U.N., Heather Nauert, and her high crime of having a paper trail indicating she knows about (and learns from) Jihad Watch.

 Allow me to reproduce it here, with comments interspersed in square brackets.  (Bolded parts were added by moi.)

I had to laugh. “Nauert’s relationship with Spencer dates back to 2009, when she hosted him and fellow anti-Muslim activists Frank Gaffney, Tarek Fatah and Nonie Darwish to discuss an hour-long segment on ‘stealth jihad.'”

[There's Tarek Fatah, one of the cleverer of the Better Cops -- functioning here precisely as a Better Cop, standing (or sitting) shoulder to shoulder with his Counter-Jihad Colleagues, sharing with them the brunt of the Mainstream attacks (and sharing with them being listed in a Jihad Watch article conveying subliminally the impression that he too is a Counter-Jihad Colleague with the best of them)]

... I don’t remember this hour-long show about stealth jihad at all. But the Huffington Post and Hamas-linked CAIR, their memories are elephantine, and they would have you believe that this is practically the only show Heather Nauert ever hosted, and one of the few noteworthy things about her.

Otherwise, this hit piece by Rowaida Abedelaziz is chock-full of the usual Leftist propaganda...

[Here, Spencer commits the gaffe of implying that a Muslim (Rowaida Abedelaziz) is a Leftist, and/or is acting as a Leftist by slinging Leftist propaganda.  Certainly, a Muslim can exploit Leftist memes to advance the Jihad; but the way Spencer frames this, he's opposing the Huffington Post Leftists along with the Muslim reporter. Other statements he has made in the past indicate a fusion, or confusion, of Leftists and Muslims in his view.]

[Then Spencer details some of the Muslim reporter's "Leftist propaganda" among which is that --]

...Fatah and I are “anti-Muslim activists,” which must mean that foes of the Nazis were “anti-German.”

[Here we have two gaffes for the price of one: 1) including Fatah in with himself as (it is telegraphed) valiant Counter-Jihadsts suffering the attack of "Leftist propaganda"; and 2) still retailing that tired old "Nazi" analogy which years ago, in the summer of 2006, was searingly questioned by Jihad Watch readers (back when they had the balls to dare to question their Fearless Leader).  As for #1, even if Spencer might protest (cagily) that it is not he -- but rather the Muslim reporter -- who is including Fatah with him, that doesn't let him off the hook for the failure to provide a quick sentence or two appropriately distancing this Better Cop Muslim from his side. The impression left by the absence of such a clarification, thus, remains]

Nigel Farage quits UKIP because its leader “seems obsessed with Islam, not just Islamic extremism, but Islam” 

So ran a recent Jihad Watch headline, followed by brief editorial remarks written by Robert Spencer.

Nigel Farage, it should be reminded, is a “conservative” politician of the UK and one who inspired great hope among anti-liberals for his Brexit stance -- only underscoring (yet again) how the problem of the problem is not merely a “Leftist” phenomenon (as Spencer incessantly implies).

What I found ironic was Spencer's sternly firm stance here, built upon an apparent case of temporary amnesia of his own deftly waffling non-position on this very same issue. Here's what Spencer wrote:

...how does Farage propose to separate “Islamic extremism” from “Islam”? ... It’s astonishing that Farage could be so short-sighted.

Let's refresh Spencer's memory here. He has, for example, used the term political Islam (as has his colleague, Christine Douglass-Williams, featured frequently on Jihad Watch) as though that means anything pertinent in this regard and is not rather performing the same function as other similar locutions -- like the “Islamic extremism” of Farage he is poking fun at.

Oops!

You call this a cup of coffee we're supposed to wake up and smell...?

A recent Jihad Watch headline telegraphs Robert Spencer taking issue with someone publishing at his friend & colleague David Horowitz's flagship site, Frontpage.com:

Brian Kilmeade: Barbary pirates who fought US in Jefferson era had “bastardized the Qur’an” 

Brian's essay is a rather sophomoric rant with little grounding. Aside from the howler of a Counter-Jihad solecism pointed out by Robert, when Brian gets to the money quote -- what the Muslim ambassador told Thomas Jefferson in answer to Jefferson asking him why Muslims were attacking Western ships, stealing their cargo and killing and/or enslaving their crews -- Brian reproduces a quote wildly divergent from even the inaccurate versions I found when, back in the Spring of Ought Nine, I took the time and trouble (unremunerated, naturally) to track down the actual quote in a credible source. (And of course, nary a peep from Robert about this; and I'd even bet money his new vaunted best-seller on the history of Islam still gets the quote wrong, as have all other popularizers out there, it seems.)

See my results:

I Struck Gold! Second Addendum to Primary Sources 101

Even more details, in another essay written at about the same time:

Primary Sources 101 and the Blogospheric anti-Islam Movement

Sweet sugar or sweet coffee?

In the vaguely disorganized Counter-Jihad Movement, we see civilians among the Readership occasionally standing up to asseverate that the (unfortunately) common locution "radical Islam" is wildly unhelpful if not actually counter-productive, since it strongly implies that ordinary non-"radical" Islam is hunky dory (if not also peachy keen).

Being a student of the English language, I know that sometimes an adjective distinguishes a noun, and sometimes it just highlights its already essential nature. I don't know the technical grammatical term for these two types of adjectives, but we can illustrate it with the following:

When we say "sweet sugar" we are not distinguishing a sweet sugar from a non-sweet sugar, since we know that all sugar is sweet. We are just embellishing, sort of poetically -- adding a bit of frosting (pun intended) -- when we put it that way.

When, however, we say "sweet coffee" we are indeed distinguishing a particular cup (or pot) of coffee from other coffees that are not sweet(ened).

So "radical Islam" is a redundancy, like saying "sweet sugar". Of course most who employ this term (in both Mainstreams) don't mean it as a redundancy at all, but as a qualifier, distinguishing it from a broader Islam that (it is obviously understood) is not "radical".

Perhaps the more apposite analogy of a redundancy for Islam would be "poisonous arsenic".

Capisce?

Mirror-image Mainstreams

The two Mainstreams I have in mind are the broader Western Mainstream, dedicated to defending Islam and the vast majority of Muslims (other than a Tiny Minority of Extremists who are trying to "hijack" Islam); and the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, still behind the curve on the Problem (of Islam) and the Problem of the Problem -- namely, the secondary problem of the aforementioned Western Mainstream in denial about the main problem (of Islam).

I couldn't have found a more exquisite representation of the interlocking, mobius-strip resemblance between these two Mainstreams -- not even had Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) himself (or his pen-&-ink-wielding Cousin Itt Doppelganger) penned it -- than the one I hit upon in Jihad Watch, penned (naturally) by the Dean & Don of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Robert Spencer.

Editorializing on a story about Muslim jihadists killing what appears to be other Muslims in Mozambique, Robert says:

The fact that Islamic jihadists kill Muslims has led many Western analysts to conclude that the jihadists are not actually Muslim, since the Qur’an forbids Muslims to kill other Muslims (4:92). But heresy, apostasy, and blasphemy carry death sentences in Islamic law, and so Muslims of differing sects have frequently killed each other... [bold emphasis mine]

Robert is correct -- this is what the broader Western Mainstream does. What he and his followers seem oblivious to, however, is their own mirror image of this specious reasoning:

The fact that Islamic jihadists kill Muslims has led many in the Counter-Jihad to conclude that the Muslim victims of the jihadists are not jihadists also.

Another asymptotic twitch...?

Hugh Fitzgerald, a veteran Counter-Jihadist who used to be “Vice-President” of Jihad Watch and contributed many prolix perorations there in the old days, then mysteriously disappeared -- then has returned and remains there -- is the reason (if memory serves me) I developed the term “asymptotic” in the first place. 

One can consult the links contained within the link above for more detailed descriptions of what I mean by this, but in a nutshell it means “getting closer and closer to a thoroughly anti-Islam position but never quite arriving there”.  The asymptotic analyst, then, is better than the run-of-the-mill analyst still laboring under the broader Mainstream framework of a Tiny Minority of Extremists Who Are Hijacking Islam, and is better even than many others in the Counter-Jihad; yet for some reason can't quite translate the logic of the dot-connection into the holistic position I have succinctly defined as “the problem is Islam and all Muslims enable Islam”.

Anywho, in a recent multi-part series about Gerard Batten of the UKIP, Hugh points out more than once that Batten has been criticized by Nigel Farage for being too preoccupied with the problem of Islam -- clearly implying that, on this point, Farage is in the wrong and Batten in the right.

Then Hugh has to manifest this asymptotic twitch:

...his interviewer, one Gillian Joseph, expressed her distaste and disbelief. She first described his appearance at what she called an “anti-Islam rally.”

Batten promptly corrects her: “It was not an anti-Islam rally, but a rally for justice for women and girls.”

 Clearly, Hugh approves of Batten “promptly correcting” her impression that this rally was anti-Islam -- for, Heaven forbid it should be anti-Islam!

We're nearing the end of 2018, and a leading member of the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, plus a leading politician with one foot proudly in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, both still recoil like shrinking violets from affirming clearly and boldly their opposition to Islam. No wonder I've grown pessimistic over the last couple of years.

The Brown leading the Brown

A recent headline on Jihad Watch:

UK: Meghan Markle supported community kitchen in mosque linked to 19 jihadis 

Megan Markle being the Duchess of Sussex, recent wife of Prince Harry, one of the sons of the Queen of England.

Markle made a splash partly because she's the first Brown Person (though with decidedly white, coffee-with-cream appeal) to marry into the Royal Family.  Her virtue-signalling here -- using a mosque as a soup kitchen to help feed the poor -- indicates that she's not the one doing the leading, but that Muslims (the #1 Brown People of the world) are leading her by the nose (emblematic of how they are leading the entire West by the nose).

Further Reading:

The Muslim: The New Black and the New Jew 

The Race Factor: Reality, and political reality

Color Blindness

Another "Better Cop" -- or a new "Best Cop"...?

There can't, of course, be more than one "Best Cop" Muslim, since "best" as a superlative denotes a unique Muslim -- by definition, only one -- putatively the best of all the Taqiyya Artists.  I've bumped into a couple of such Muslims over the years, and at least once I analyzed the issue; but I still can't decide yet which one of them would take the crown.

At any rate, here's the latest candidate in the running:  Imam Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi -- who, as Philip Haney (publishing a piece on Jihad Watch) informs us, is “an Iranian-born Shia scholar who openly campaigns against Islamic extremism" and is known in Australia as the ‘Imam of Peace’.”

What Haney should have said is, “pretends to openly campaign against Islamic extremism” in order to fool stupid Westerners into thinking he is actually a “moderate” or “reformist” Muslim.

What reformist stunt did this Sheikh Tawhidi do to merit his candidacy for “Best Cop”?  He filmed himself (or obviously had someone film him) walking into the prayer room at the Melbourne airport (the second busiest airport in Australia, Haney also informs us) and pointing out that among the other harmless books there (e.g., a Bible), lay a most sinister volume titled “Fiqh Us-Sunnah” (“the Law and the Way”).  The seemingly dapper Sheikh then starts thumbing through the volume and pointing out sections in it to the camera:

“...page 19 -- Jihad; page 59 -- taking hostages at war; page 48 -- Jizya, making the Infidel pay money, Islamic taxes; 228 -- martyrdom...”

The Sheikh tells his audience that such books could “radicalize” Muslims, and he says he has done his part to alert us, now it's up to us to do something about this -- presumably to interdict the availability of such books to the public.

What Philip Haney meticulously demonstrates  in his article is that this book's extremist content -- which the Sheikh pretended to be alarmed at -- is perfectly normative in mainstream Islam.  So this Better Cop Muslim, Imam Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi, performed the deft feat of a Two-Fer:

1) he massaged the meme of the specious distinction between Extremism vs.Mainstream Islam (his own Islam)

2) by doing so through this stunt (pretending to exercise his civic duty here), he massaged the impression that he's a Muslim with a conscience who is concerned about radical Wahhabist Salafist Islamist extremism.

#1 by itself would qualify him as a by-the-numbers garden-variety Good Cop Muslim (defined as such by being able to fool the Western Mainstream already predisposed to believe that most Muslims are relatively good people who just wanna have a sandwich).  #2 is good enough to earn him a Better Cop Muslim badge, to the extent that there are people in the Counter-Jihad stupid enough to believe that any Muslim who makes reformist claims is not double-talking taqiyya -- the stupidity here being their apparently inability to see that #2 is dependent upon #1 (which by itself would make anyone in the Counter-Jihad fall off their chairs laughing).

The measure of whether a Muslim propagandist is a Good Cop, a Better Cop, or the Best Cop depends on the audience he fools. If he only manages to fool the broader Western Mainstream, he's just a Good Cop.  If he manages to fool some in the Counter-Jihad, he begins to surpass the Good Cop and becomes a Better Cop. Another way to put this (the more cynical, but I think realistic way) is that a Muslim is only "Better" when a certain number of people in the Counter-Jihad are guillible enough to believe he's sincere. Sure, he has to have more talent than a Good Cop -- he has to be able to juggle more balls and pull rabbits out of his hat with more smoke & mirrors -- but ultimately his whole magic trick depends on pockets of weakness and gullibility in his target audience.  A "Best Cop" then would be a Muslim who has succeeded in fooling a remarkably high number of people in the Counter-Jihad -- he wouldn't necessarily have to fool all of us.  Time will have to tell to determine if this Sheikh Tawhidi qualifies, but from the comments attached to Philip Haney's article, I don't see anything remarkable per se, even if he does qualify certainly as a Better Cop.

While it was nice to see Philip Haney publish on Jihad Watch, as he is one of the rare Counter-Jihadists who seems to have hardly any “asymptotic” tendencies, as I have called them; and his piece was an excellent analysis of the central problem manifested by this Sheikh's stunt -- namely, that the "extremist literature" the Sheikh was doing his civic duty in flagging is actually literature that is part of the normative mainstream Islam the Sheikh himself supports -- Haney himself evinced an asymptotic twitch when he wrote:

“... Imam Tawhidi should certainly be commended for his refreshing courage and honesty (i.e., If You See Something, Say Something), but it also casts a spotlight on an ominous, unavoidable dilemma for [1] Muslim leaders like him, as well as for [2] the global Islamic community...”

And when a commenter (“thebigW”) called him on this --

He should even more certainly be commended for fooling Philip Haney. Is there a category in the Oscars for “Best Taqiyya”? Someone submit the Imam’s video to the Academy.

--  Haney responded to that commenter thusly:

It’s not that I’m fooled; just the opposite. That’s why I referred to See Something, Say Something (it’s an inside joke, which you’ll see better if you look up my book, See Something, Say Nothing. However, if Muslim leaders actually acknowledged that mainstream Islamic teaching is a threat to National Security, that would be an improvement, right? 

thebigW then responded:

Only a few of them might like this Imam Tawhidi, but most will continue to lie, and so our general confusion will continue while we slowly boil to death like the proverbial frog in the fairy tale (and the few of them who do will do it like Imam Tawhidi, in such a way as to continue the confusion, not clear it up).

That Haney says he's not fooled is a good sign; however, in terms of his rhetorical presentation, he is to some degree contributing to the “confusion” astutely alluded to by thebigW.

P.S.: This isn't the first time I've spotted asymptotic cracks in Philip Haney.

Counter-Jihadists in Cars Getting Coffee

What would an actual Counter-Jihadists in Cars Getting Coffee production look like?  Let us imagine, say, David Wood, assuming the starring role of Jerry Seinfeld; and, of course, the show having the same slick high-end production value, with its glossy cinematography and expert editing. So in episode 1, we see David Wood getting into his 1989 Ford Taurus and while driving on the Santa Monica freeway calling Robert Spencer, they trade chit-chat on the phone for a minute --

"Hey, Bob! Are you primed to get some coffee today?"

"I'm ready, Dave, whenever you are!"

"Let's do this!"

David proceeds to the "undisclosed location" where Spencer's home is, pixelated out when David arrives there, "because jihadists and Leftists want to kill me" Spencer says with a cheeky grin to the camera before slipping into the passenger side of David's ride.

"Nice naugahyde!" says Robert, feeling the armrest.

"Check out the Mohammed bobblehead on the dash!" says David.

"Cool!"

They then head off to the Muslim-owned Urth Caffé to gab about the problem of "political Islam" and Leftists.  "I'll have a decaf mint mochaccino" David tells the moderately unhijabbed waitress, while Robert decides he needs a boost today, and orders a "radicalized extremist Salafist Wahabbist Islamist triple jihadaccino".

* * * * *

I was reminded of this today when I was sipping my second cup of coffee on an expansive Sunday afternoon, punishing myself by browsing through the day's Jihad Watch headlines, and came upon this one:

UK: Police took part in Ramadan fast to “show unity” and “gain better understanding” of Muslims

What piqued my interest was Robert Spencer's commentary -- as usual, missing a key element in the phenomenon of the problem of the problem (the primary problem being Islam, the secondary problem of it being the West's continuing inability to grapple adequately with the primary problem):

The reason why British police do things like this is because of jihad terrorism. If there were no jihad terrorism, there would be no police “outreach” to Muslim communities. 

Yes, Robert is correct about this, but he's leaving out a crucial corollary factor: the ostensibly non-problematic behavior of the majority of Muslims who, for all intents and purposes, seem to just wanna have a sandwich.  When we restore this crucial corollary factor, and notice its chemical reaction, so to speak, with the equally important factor Robert pointed out, we see what drives the anxious need of the Western Mainstream to continue to placate Muslims and to whitewash their Islam: the fear that if we focus too directly on Islamic terrorism and respond too appropriately to it, we will end up "tarring all Muslims with the same brush".

Which brings us to a second crucial corollary factor: The mainstream Western phobia about "being racist".  One doubts that all this anxiety about "tarring all Muslims with the same brush" would be a factor at all, were Islam a white power organization.

When we analyze these anxieties and fears more closely, we see it is further warped by incoherency, insofar as the fear of becoming comprehensively bigoted against all Muslims is compounded by a fear of Muslims -- namely, there seems to be an underlying, semi-conscious fear that if we provoke Muslims too much (where "too much" is set at an irrationally low threshold of alarming hypersensitivity of Muslims to being "offended"), they will spiral violently out of control in ways far worse than we have seen in the West to date.

These two fears, paradoxical if not tending to be mutually contradictory, sort of feed on each other, but in a twisted way of psychological suppression, where Fear 2 (of Muslims spiraling out of control) paradoxically serves to increase the force of Fear 1 (of ourselves becoming "racist" against Muslims). Or I suppose it is a matter of Fear 1 being dominant and trying to suppress Fear 2, and the inability on the part of the Westerner to successfully suppress Fear 2 generates the psychological tension and anxiety.

"...Fear 1 being dominant and trying to suppress Fear 2, and the inability on the part of the Westerner to successfully suppress Fear 2 generates the psychological tension and anxiety."

And of course, the psychological tension and anxiety generates the need to assuage the tension and anxiety, and that expresses itself primarily by an ongoing project to drastically minimize the nature & dimensions of Fear 2.  This wouldn't be that bad, if Muslims weren't really that much of a systemic, metastasizing danger.  But since they are, they create this odd dynamic in the Western mainstream, of Fear and Denial.

Yes, by Jove, I think I've got it.  This is the fundamental PC MC mechanism in the PC MC espresso machine that daily churns out coffee so whitewashed, it's not, for the majority of un- (or dis-)informed customers, necessary to wake up and smell.

Look who's back...

 

Back on my old blog (The Hesperado), I described many times what I called "the Rabbit Pack" as "that self-appointed high-school-clique-cum-lynch-mob of hall monitors who patrol Jihad Watch comments."  I so eponymized them after that particular critter because over time it had struck me that one of their gang leaders, "Angemon", resembled the Energizer Bunny (and Bugs Bunny) in his indefatigably sophomoronic sophistry he deployed in order to pester me for my comments literally hundreds of times in various commentis fields on Jihad Watch.

It wasn't so much the mere pestering that bothered me; it was what became increasingly evident -- that he was obsessed with pestering me in the name of a soft, nougaty approach on the problem of Islam, apparently offended by my tougher stance.

And several other long-time veteran commenters not only seemed to have no problem with his hundreds of quibblingly niggling attacks on me -- they generally provided him a supportive atmosphere (meanwhile avoiding my frequent pleas to help me out, goshdarn it!). Hence "the Rabbit Pack".

I participated in Jihad Watch comments for years and years, then finally left in weary disgust some time in 2016 or so (maybe a little later, can't remember; it's all a blur).

After I left Jihad Watch comments, I continued to read through them pretty much every day (not all of them, but those attached to interesting articles and/or those which had a high number of comments). Doing so, I noticed that the busy beaver of an Energizer Bunny, Angemon, all but faded from view. I surmised that what had kept him inspired all those years prior was his obsessive mission to zoom in and pester me; and once I left, he had no reason to live (i.e., to deposit his rabbit turds in comments fields on Jihad Watch).  In the last 2 years, I think I saw Angemon once.

Well, what do you know, the other day as I dipped into the comments field of a recent Jihad Watch article, whom did I see? 

And greeting his return were two illustrative members of his Rabbit Pack, one "Wellington" and one "gravenimage" (see my links above for more on these characters).

"Glad to see you back, Angemon. Very glad, since your rapier intellect is, to say the least, quite helpful in combating what Islam intends for us all."

"Agreed, Wellington.
I’m glad to see Angemon back posting, as well, and missed him when he was gone."

UPDATE: Well, in the past couple of months since I saw the reappearance of that once indefatigable Bugs Bunny, I've seen neither hide nor fur of that hare...  There is an Allah!

Coffee you thought was good...

The Bad Habits cafe, in Daylesford

The CJM (Counter-Jihad Mainstream) has a bad habit of praising various individuals for their anti-Islam cred, even though some of those individuals say things that go against some of the core principles (one would think) of the still incohate A.I.M. (Anti-Islam Movement).

As one example of this, over the years I've noticed various writers at Jihad Watch praising a 20th century scholar of Islam, Ignaz Goldziher, in terms of him being free of the politically correct nonsense we, in the Counter-Jihad, note with annoyance & weariness abounds all too much throughout our Western mainstream.  Thus, for example, we have one member of the CJM Leadership, Ibn Warraq, a decade ago list Goldziher as a "real Orientalist" among others of whom he approves.  Or a few years earlier, in 2004, we see the CJM luminary, Bat Ye'or, write this:

"...the great Orientalists of the 19th century, particularly Ignaz Goldziher, whose work has since become anathema to the Muslim intelligentsia."

And of course, of Ignaz Goldziher's eminent qualifications as a counter-jihadist pioneer, we have copious references by that other member of the CJM Leadership, Hugh Fitzgerald -- here, here, here and here.

The only problem with all this reflexive praise of Goldziher I got a sudden inadventitious glimpse of quite by accident, as this past week I was browsing around in Google Books and bumped into this rude piece of furniture, an otherwise finely turned Ignaz Goldziher coffee table, circa 1971, castigating none other than fellow Islam scholar Bernard Lewis:

No other propagandist alive is more responsible for sustaining this delusional opposition between "Islam and the West" than Bernard Lewis. He even forgets the books he himself has already written on the subject and writes new ones... essentially the same ideas, almost verbatim similarities... in practically everything that he writes -- "the West" got it right, "Islam" and Muslims did not, there were some accidentally intelligent Muslim reformists who did, but the ignoramus masses and fanatics did not, and thus we are in the mess that we are. This is Bernard Lewis in a nutshell.

The irony here is that the CJM when they mention Bernard Lewis often criticize his tendency to be too soft on Islam (example, Hugh Fitzgerald in his ironic "tribute" to him); and yet Goldziher -- whom they uncritically praise -- himself childes Lewis for being too harsh on Islam!

P.S.: This reminds me of another great scholar of yesteryear whose specialty was Islam, the Dutch scholar Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), and Hugh Fitzgerald's penchant for unalloyed -- and apparently uncritical -- praise of his work as well.  In an essay on The Hesperado some five years ago, I recounted my disagreement with Hugh over this (actually mixing it up with him in Jihad Watch comments back in 2006).  In retrospect, my concluding remarks were way too soft on Hugh, in the interest, I suppose, of being civil and charitable.

Mo Joe about Moe, Flo

Just below and the other day, I linked readers to an old & dusty Hesperado essay on the "Better Cop" Muslims.  In the meantime, I found another good one, with a searingly apt title, if I don't say so myself:

What does it take to seduce a Counter-Jihadist?

Yo, Flo, your better cuppa Moe-Jo made me lose my Mojo...

Over the years in many essays on my former blog The Hesperado, I developed the term "Better Cop Muslim" to distinguish a new type of taqiyya artist, a smoother & slicker salesman whose sophistry I realized is targeting not the Western mainstream -- already fooled by the garden-variety "Good Cop Muslims" -- but rather precisely the slowly growing (at an achingly half-frozen snail's pace) Counter-Jihad.

One of those essays, The Role of the Better Moes, I think is particularly worth reading.

Midway through that long analytical essay, I ask the pivotal question:

Why is there such a fertile soil of receptivity in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream to the new-and-improved sales pitch of these Better Moes?

And I attempt an answer.

The Counter-Jihad's fairy-tale version of Maajid Nawaz

My title is a direct satirical jab at the title of a recent essay on Jihad Watch by one of Robert Spencer's contributing writers there, a Brit named Joshua Winston -- namely, "Maajid Nawaz’s fairy-tale version of Islam".

This fairy tale version of that transparent snake, Maajid Nawaz, becomes evident within Winston's first paragraph:

He doesn’t believe in the sharia punishment for apostasy or blasphemy. These are all fundamental aspects of Islam. He’s a Muslim who is following a fairy-tale version of Islam, an Islam that doesn’t exist anywhere else but in his mind.

What Winston meant to say -- but apparently hasn't the brains to say -- is:

He SAYS he doesn’t believe in the sharia punishment for apostasy or blasphemy. These are all fundamental aspects of Islam. He’s a Muslim who is PRETENDING TO follow a fairy-tale version of Islam, an Islam that doesn’t exist anywhere else but in his CLEVERLY LYING JIHAD-OF-THE-TONGUE.

Clever enough, indeed, to fool intelligent supporters of the Counter-Jihad like Joshua Winston. (Hence, my coinage of the term "Better Cop Muslim" to describe these wilier, oilier Muslims like Nawaz.)

Winston even gives us an example, a glimpse, in his very next sentence, into why we should suspect Nawaz:

And yet while he denounces Islam, he also lies about its teachings and defends it.

And Winston's example of this Nawazian habit follows:

There’s a hadith in which saintly Muhammad had rubbish dropped on his door every morning by a neighbouring Jew. Then, good Samaritan that he is, Muhammad went to check on the Jew when he awakened one morning to find no rubbish had been dumped at his door. He wanted to make sure the Jew wasn’t dead or ill. This is the picture Maajid Nawaz painted of Muhammad on one of his radio shows. Meanwhile, Nawaz is neglecting to tell listeners that Muhammad was fond of having his critics killed and tortured, and very fond of killing Jews, even young Jewish boys with so much as one pubic hair.

At this juncture, Winston has only two options:  Either conclude that Nawaz has cleverly constructed his reformist persona for the sake of Stealth Jihad; or conclude that he's "confused" and suffering from cognitive dissonance, caught in a psychocultural dilemma between his Islam and his desire to assimilate into the modern West (a desire which the asymptotic Jihad Watchers seem to assume exists among innumerable -- perhaps most -- Muslims).

Naturally, Winston opts for Door #2 (sort of), gestured to by the lovely hand model as Don Pardo intones the complementary gift he'll receive, the reward of his ethical narcissism:

So what is he? Muslim or non-Muslim or alleged reformist Muslim for pay? If Muhammad is the perfect exemplar and role model for all mankind, who is Maajid that he gets to criticize and denounce his prophet’s teachings and example? ... Or is Maajid saying that he is better or more knowledgeable than Muhammad? If Maajid is all for liberalism and democracy, why is he a Muslim?... Maajid comes across, to my mind, as an atheist more than a religious person.

Note too that phrase "alleged reformist Muslim for pay" -- which assumes that the only reason Nawaz would pretend to be a reformist is not out of fanatical devotion to Islam (thus doing stealth jihad), but out of the all-too-human weakness of greed.

Je suis Jésuite!

My enthusiastic identification with Jesuits in my title is not in reference to the Islam defender Pope Frank above (himself a Jesuit), sucking not coffee, not even decaf, but Leftist yerba mate. It was (and remains) in response to Father Manuel Carreira, a Spanish Jesuit and also an astrophysicist, whose salutary words Jihad Watch bannered in a piece on him a couple of years ago:

“Islam is the worst plague that humanity has seen in the past 2000 years”

As I wrote in Jihad Watch comments back in 2016 (under the moniker “Fessitude”, near the end of my time there, as my weary disgust was mounting to a crescendo):

From this report, I can only say that Father Manuel Carreira’s Counter-Jihad bonafides is impeccable.

(It’s so refreshing (and so bloody rare) to read a Counter-Jihad individual’s thoughts on the problem of Islam without finding a few annoying nettles of prevarication or spongy, nougaty fungus buried deep within its outward show of bravado.)

The French historian Étienne Gilson has pointed out that the famous French philosopher Réne Descartes was trained by Jesuits, and even the one thing for which he is most famous (the epistemological conclusion, Cogito ergo sum) was, according to Gilson, probably modeled after typical Jesuit exercises of thought experiments to train in logic. With Jesuit Father Carreira (unlike with his Pope), this training in logic has served him well to come to a rational conclusion about Islam -- and we can now update the Cartesian formula:

“I think, therefore I am anti-Islam!”

PC MC TV

I note it's been over a month since I posted anything last. It's part of my plan to become famous, you see -- stop posting, and don't tell anyone what (or where) your blog is...

All seriousness aside (as Steve Allen used to say), a recent Jihad Watch story reminded me of an old annoyance of mine -- namely, the prevalence of softballing / whitewashing the problem of Islam on cable series, television shows, Netflix shows, and various movies over the years.  On my erstwhile blog, The Hesperado, I penned many an essay on this phenomenon, including this one (same title as my essay here) which offers an overview of the discussion, a few reviews of movies/shows and links to other essays of mine on it. As the reader will note should they peruse those, I became annoyed, exasperated, and finally weary of this prevalence in our popular culture with regard to the problem of Islamic terrorism.

Although I haven't written about this in at least a couple of years, it continued to be an issue for me -- usually in the form of turning me off from a show or movie I wanted to watch (example, the 5th season of House of Cards -- before Kevin Spacey's fall from grace), whose first episode made me roll my eyes -- "Oh for Crissakes, here we go again!"  Basically, the first episode was about a crisis in President Underwood's power -- he, played by Kevin Spacey, being deep down a cynical sociopath who only cares about his power and not about right and wrong.  In the first episode, an Islamic terror group has taken an American family hostage and threatens to broadcast their beheading on TV, and President Underwood cynically uses this as a way to leverage his power, using language that sounds like the same language we Islamo-realists use.

So anyway, along comes a new show called The Bodyguard.  I didn't know what it was about other than being a taut, tense thriller about intelligence agents, and as I started into the first episode, I noted how well it was acted, directed and written.  I thought, great, another good show to watch.  The lead character, an undercover agent, is on a train with his young child, when he suspects a terrorist is aboard.  At a dramatic juncture, he's convinced a suicide-bomber is holed up in the train restroom.  When he breaks in the door, the viewer is presented vividly with a Middle Eastern woman in a hijab and a suicide vest on.  Sounds pretty good, for an Islamophobe like me, right?  Finally, a realistic show about the problem, eh? Not so fast.  The woman was acting (and written and directed) to be clearly out of her wits in fear herself.  I.e., either she had been extorted and pressured to do this horrible thing ("We have your children and we'll kill them if you don't do this") or she had terrible second doubts about doing it at all (i.e., a conscience).  Both of these are not plausible in terms of realism. Much more correct -- but, of course, politically incorrect -- would be to show the degree & depth of fanaticism which we know by now is common among not only suicide bombers but mujahideen in general.

Anywho, the Jihad Watch article I referred to above was about how a Muslim stand-up comedian, Hasan Minhaj, cracked jokes in his routine about how "Islamophobic" this new series is.  I.e., even a show which telegraphs its politically correct anxiety about the issue isn't good enough for Jihadists-of-the-Mic like Minhaj.

"Barista-terrorista, there's so many things wrong with my coffee...!"

Quoting Macaroni (as I like to call Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron, the politically correct multiculturalist President of France) --

“We will not accept any form of terrorism or incitement of terrorism on our national territory.” --

Robert Spencer then adds his brief introductory editorial remarks to the story he is relaying on his blog, Jihad Watch:

Sure. And given the policies of the Macron government regarding mass Muslim migration, and the stigmatization, demonization and persecution of everyone who dares to oppose the Muslim migrant influx, before too long jihad terrorism won’t be necessary anyway, any more than it is in Saudi Arabia.

This observation of Spencer's is wrong on so many levels, I won't have time to unpack them all here.  Perhaps the main flaw is his clear implication that Muslims will be able to achieve their Islamic goal of successfully thorough Islamization of France (and, by logical implication, any Western country more or less as stupid as France in this regard, and that's still most of them) without massive, widespread, and intense violence tantamount to frank warfare (though probably resembling paramilitary guerrilla warfare through to its bitter and chaotic end).

The second flaw -- tightly related to the above flaw: underestimating the resistance of French society (and, by logical implication, any Western country) to Islamization. I'm not talking about conscious resistance; of course we don't see that (except in fitful, incoherent coughs and sputters). I'm talking an organic resistance after it dawns on them what Islam really means, when Muslims have at last taken the mask off.  That day hasn't arrived yet, because most Muslims are doing various flavors of stealth jihad deceit and false assimilation -- and because most Frenchmen (and most Westerners) continue to indulge the notion that "most Muslims are not extremists" based on a woefully inadequate appreciation of the subversive danger of Islam.

The third flaw -- closely related to the second flaw: underestimating the oil-&-water distance between full-blooded Sharia (i.e., actual Sharia) on a sociopolitically successful level, and French society. The reason why Frenchmen (and Westerners in general) are so relatively sanguine about Islamization is that they tend to believe the Muslim taqiyya apologists who try to sell them the notion that Sharia is "diverse" and need not include the brutally fanatical, Draconian laws that for example ISIS (or Saudi Arabia) practices.

The 4th flaw -- the "hidden flaw" -- the implication that only "Leftist elites" (and/or "Globalists") are making possible this future, non-violent success of Islamization of the West.  One theme I articulated at length innumerable times on my old blog, The Hesperado, over the years is that this is a curiously benighted view that overlooks how broad and deep is Western denial, in a variety of ways and degrees affecting the majority of Westerners including Ordinary People -- and therefore, one must reasonably conclude, not (entirely, or even largely) a sinister conspiracy, but a complex cultural historical process whereby the West's healthy virtues (including curiosity and respect for the Other, along with self-criticism of ourselves) have morphed monstrously into excessive versions of themselves. Thus enabling, in our time, the infiltration into the West of this Mother of all Others, Islam -- the only Other with a blueprint for, and cultivation of, the desideratum to destroy our societies in the name of their vision of the truth.

Hey Flo, can I get another cup of coffee...?

An incoherent cup of coffee

 

Max Abrahms, “one of the world’s leading experts on terrorism,” claims jihadis are “ignorant about Islam”

So ran a recent headline on Jihad Watch.  Of course, Robert Spencer won't ever add that the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (of whose Leadership he is an éminence grise) claims or implies -- in one way or another -- that various Better Cop Muslims (i.e., "reformist" Muslims) are also, strangely, ignorant of their own Islam.

Or worse yet and more incoherently, that the Islam that defines their being Muslim is somehow -- and that "somehow" is the nodus of this incoherence -- not the same monstrously dangerous and evil Islam the Counter-Jihad otherwise rails against 24/7.