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:

The CJM vs. the AIM

Many times over the years -- both on my old blog, The Hesperado, and this newer (no longer brand spanking) blog -- I've had occasion to mention my coinage, the "Counter-Jihad Mainstream" (CJM). In one of the first essays I link here, I put it this way:

I realized that I need a term to denote a Counter-Jihad whose leadership consistently promotes a soft approach to the problem of Muslims while promoting a hard line against Islam, and whose civilian members follow along more or less like sheep (sometimes turning to wolves to attack those who dare to criticize the methodology or analysis of one of their Exalted Leaders). 

(I go on to note in that particular essay that even the hard line against Islam pursued by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM) is often compromised by the implicit logic of various locutions of rhetoric.)

I don't intend to go through a long explanation of the whole phenomenon today, just to note the most recent sign & symptom of it I noticed from the pen of Robert Spencer, the éminence grise of the Counter-Jihad, on that flagship of the CJM, Jihad Watch.  This morning, before I had my second sip of my first cup of coffee, I saw this headline on there:

WaPo: US “taking custody of two British men accused of involvement in Islamic State killings of American hostages”

After an acerbically cheeky introduction -- “British men.” Bowler hats, no doubt. Jolly good, but they may miss being able to tuck into a plate of bangers and mash. Are they gutted at this development, or chuffed at getting out of Syria? -- Robert then gets into the heart of the serious matter at hand:

...these men may have grown up in Britain, but living in a garage doesn’t make you an automobile. As Islamic State jihadis, they joined an entity that declared itself superior to and above all national allegiances, and deserving the allegiance of all Muslims worldwide, superseding and overriding their national identity.

This is quintessential CJM rhetoric.  Let's massage Robert's rhetoric with the more robust principles of the AIM (i.e., the Anti-Islam Movement that, unfortunately, does not yet exist) to bring their differences into relief:

CJM: ...these men may have grown up in Britain, but living in a garage doesn’t make you an automobile. 

AIM: ...nor does being born in a garage make you an automobile (even if your parents had also been born in that garage).

CJM:  As Islamic State jihadis, they joined an entity that declared itself superior to and above all national allegiances, and deserving the allegiance of all Muslims worldwide, superseding and overriding their national identity.

AIM:  As Muslims and as continuing to remain Muslims, they (i.e., any Muslims whatsoever) belong to and support an entity (Islam) that declares itself superior to and above all national allegiances, and deserving the allegiance of all Muslims worldwide, superseding and overriding their national identity -- an entity, moreover, with a game plan to destroy us eventually, both physically (by killing as many of us as it takes combined with terrorizing the rest of us and thus dislocating our collective psyche), and culturally, through a strategy combining terrorism and stealth deceit."

Why won't we ever see Robert Spencer (or his followers) ever put it this way?

"How do you know that's real coffee?"

In a recent Jihad Watch notice about a couple of Muslims who were taken off a plane in Texas and then as a response have used the incident as a vehicle for two subtypes of Jihad -- the jihad of lawfare and the jihad of the publicity stunt -- we notice that our old friend "the Big W" crosses paths with our old nemesis "Angemon".

This isn't the first time Angemon has poked his infernal Bugs Bunny nose into the Counter-Jihad to ask a stupid rhetorical question of the Big W; I have recounted a previous time here on this blog in my posting The D word (ain't Decaf).

This time, after the Big W typed a thought you'd think any Counter-Jihadist worth his salt would find supremely unobjectionable (and would, in fact, give their thumbs up to) --

thebigW says
Sep 24, 2019 at 1:07 pm

a lotta terrorists didn’t have no beard, no towel on their heads, looked completely Westernized. so goin’ by their external appearance ain’t good enough. The fact they’re Muslim should be all we need to know to be EXTRA suspicious of them–an’ don’t get distracted if they tell you they “love America and Coca Cola and apple pie” 

-- Angemon just had to butt his rabbit butt in and deposit this rabbit turd:

Angemon says 
Sep 24, 2019 at 2:22 pm

“a lotta terrorists didn’t have no beard, no towel on their heads, looked completely Westernized. so goin’ by their external appearance ain’t good enough. The fact they’re Muslim should be all we need to know ” 

How would one know they’re muslims unless they admitted [SIC]? 

Angemon evidently meant "unless they admitted it" and left out the "it".  I.e., this genius is asking how can our law enforcement & intelligence personnel know if a Muslim is a Muslim unless that Muslim "admits it"!  The Big W had a scathingly apt retort:

thebigW says 
Sep 24, 2019 at 9:34 pm 

How would one know they’re muslims unless they admitted? So are ya sayin’ that all the census figures we have on population of Muslims in countries and total global are ALL based on each an’ ever one of them Muzzies “admitting” they were Muslim??? HA HA HA HA HA HA 

Now, when I first read this exchange several days ago, I hadn't seen if there were any further responses -- say, some more Einsteinian brilliance from Angemon, or (Jennah forbid) some other Jihad Watch regular stepping in supportively on the Big W's side.  Let's see what ensued, shall we...?

Well, I just looked, and Holy Toledo! Angemon doubles down on his weird fixation with a confused morass of odd logic all apparently marshaled in order to oppose the Big W's main point, which was, to remind our readers:

The fact they’re Muslim should be all we need to know to be EXTRA suspicious of them–an’ don’t get distracted if they tell you they “love America and Coca Cola and apple pie”  

Here's Angemon's response in full (brace yourselves, readers). What Angemon does here is essentially complicate the Big W's point with a tedious mess of sophistry:

Angemon says 
Sep 25, 2019 at 4:25 pm 

“So are ya sayin’ that all the census figures we have on population of Muslims in countries and total global are ALL based on each an’ ever one of them Muzzies “admitting” they were Muslim??? HA HA HA HA HA HA” 

Nice strawman, you braying jackass. My question still stands, despite your leftard/islamic fashion of trying to sneer it away. “The fact they’re Muslim should be all we need to know”. Very well – how would one know they’re muslims unless they admitted? According to you, “a lotta terrorists didn’t have no beard, no towel on their heads, looked completely Westernized. so goin’ by their external appearance ain’t good enough“. How are you going to tell who is a muslim and who isn’t unless they come out and admit it? Isn’t it beneficial to them to deny their religion in addition to looking Westernized? Why wouldn’t they deny their religion if they’re terrorists trying to cause as death and destruction as possible? 

P.S.: – to entertain your non-sequitur nonsense about muslims and census, and overlooking your ignorance of how census work, go ask around for the exact number of muslims, both in the US and worldwide. As Hugh Fitzgerald recently noted on another story, “While he has everything else wrong, I hope Imran Khan has his figures right. It is comforting to think that there are not 1.8 or 1.6 or 1.4 but, rather, 1.25 billion Muslims“. Muslims and organizations like CAIR inflate those numbers so good luck trying to identify the 8-million advertised by CAIR – you’d have to turn millions of non-muslims into muslims to reach that number. 

Now, my question again: how would one know they’re muslims unless they admitted? How do you propose to tell who is a muslim and who isn’t if you’re, for example, walking down a street in New York? You can’t answer it because you dug yourself so deep there’s no amount of ladders in the world to get you out. “A lot of muslim terrorists look completely Westernized so looks can’t be relied on. Wait, what do you mean, how are we going to tell if they’re muslims to begin with? What do you mean, terrorists who look Westernized to blend in aren’t going around announcing their religion?”. Foot, meet mouth. 

Perhaps some other day I'll pick Angemon's sloppy mess of sophistry apart piece by piece. For now, it would be apposite to just note two blindingly glaring things: 1) that what Angemon is evidently assuming is that the Big W's advice (viz., that [t]he fact they’re Muslim should be all we need to know to be EXTRA suspicious of them) is predicated on a perfect knowledge of the identity of all Muslims who exist (talk about a straw man!) -- rather than, obviously, only on those we do know exist (a knowledge which can always be fine-tuned and augmented with more and more intelligence); and 2) that Angemon is apparently assuming that the only way to attain that perfect ("exact") knowledge of all Muslims is if they "admit" it -- which, of course, is not the only way we determine who is Muslim; and Muslims could lie about that (what they "admit" or don't "admit") anyway, even if Angemon's point wasn't a red herring, as per my #1 above.

"Barista-Terrorista, make mine Caffeinated Decaf -- I need to get some sleep while I wake up to smell the coffee..."

Andrew Bostom, about whom I've written on this little ol' donut shop of a blog, as well as more copiously on my erstwhile flagship, The Hesperado, is an excellent resource for the Anti-Islam Movement (once it coheres into an actual entity, that is, hopefully some time before Muslims destroy the West), and that makes his asymptotic tics all the more remarkable (and depressing).

It's an interesting parallel, between the asymptotic Counter-Jihadist and the "Better Cop" Muslims who seem to be moderate and reform-minded.

A recent posting by Andrew on his blog describes Asra Nomani -- one of the better Better Cop Muslims (insofar as she gets closer to affecting genuine sincerity in her seeming moderation and has none of the disingenuously oily mannerisms of a Maajid Nawaz) -- as a "secular Muslim". Andrew may as well have introduced her as a "square circle" or a "married bachelorette".  The interesting parallel I alluded to may be expressed this way:

The asymptotic Counter-Jihadist manifests the following paradox: He appears to know enough about Islam to know about the stealth jihad -- which means he should be on guard and not be fooled by taqiyya (and, of course, he should know that the whole point of deceit is to try to be good at it, which would logically include any seeming displays of sincere moderation); and yet inevitably, every asymptotic Counter-Jihadist shows that they are, in fact, fooled by certain Muslims who are better than other Muslims at deceit (hence, "Better Cops").

The Better Cop, in turn, through her professed "secular" moderation, appears to be advocating a perspective and program that contradicts what we in the Counter-Jihad know about mainstream Islam. We know (or should know, by now) that all this nice-sounding moderation coming out of her mouth doesn't jibe with Islam, and in fact contradicts most of it in all the essential points. So why and how is she still self-identifying as a "Muslim"?

Indeed, my definition of a "Better Cop" Muslim is that they are identifiable as such not so much by what they say and do, than by the fact that they have fooled at least one important Counter-Jihadist.  Thus we have Frank Gaffney treating Zuhdi Jasser with undeservedly profound respect; Sam Harris partnering up with Maajid Nawaz; Andrew Bostom considering Asra Nomani to be genuinely "secular"; and so forth.

The parallel may be more sharply (and briefly put): The more that a Counter-Jihadist knows about Islam, the less he should trust any Muslim -- indeed, logically he should graduate to the epiphany that, on the macro level, no Muslim is trustworthy.  This would apply double (or trebly) to the Muslim who affects to be moderate or "secular", since there is no Islam that would not contradict such a moderate or secular stance.  The more moderate or "secular" a Muslim is, the more he or she is embodying that contradiction with his or her own Islam.  The problem is worse, not better, with the more palatable Muslims.  Counter-Jihadists like Andrew Bostom (and Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald) should know better; so why do they keep blurting out faux pas like calling Asra Nomani a "secular" Muslim?  What would be the reaction of Andrew Bostom, or Robert Spencer, or Sam Harris, or Hugh Fitzgerald, to an intelligent German Nazi who continues to self-identify as a Nazi, and who claims that they love Jews, claims that "true Nazism" loves Jews, and claims that Hitler was actually a Jew lover but has been "misunderstood" by "extremist Nazis"? We know what their reaction would be: This Nazi is either crazy or lying to us -- there is no 3rd explanation!  So why don't they apply the same logic to the square circle of the "secular" Muslims...?

One step forward, two steps back

Another September 11.

The Counter-Jihad Mainstream as usual is pointing fingers at the broader Western Mainstream for its failure, still, to wake up to the problem of Islam.

So, Robert Spencer puts up this headline on Jihad Watch today:

9/11 Commission top dogs say “terrorism needs to be prevented at the source,” ignore its source

Well, when the  Counter-Jihad Mainstream regularly invokes the term "political Islam" as the problem (see for example here, here, and here), rather than plain old Islam, are we that much ahead of the broader Western Mainstream...?

Over the years on my old blog, The Hesperado, I alluded to this trope many, many times.  For example, as I put it a little more than 2 years ago:

“ Robert Spencer, the éminence grise of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM), actually used the term 'political Islam' with a straight face.  That's how you know he's part of the CJM.  And he will remain so, comfortably and arrogantly, until enough of his civilian supporters call him on it (I wouldn't hold my breath on this).”  

A particularly good essay on this point (if I don't say so myself) I wrote a little more than 3 years ago:

Better Cops Watch, Cont.

The Counter-Jihad Mainstream dips its big toe ever so briefly into the shallow end of Paradigm Shift

By the term "Counter-Jihad Mainstream" I mean that this still minuscule, albeit growing, sociopolitical movement often called "the Counter-Jihad" has a "mainstream" which in many ways resembles the "mainstream" of the MSM -- soft on Islam and hostile to internal quality control & self-criticism.  Sure, the CJM is much tougher on, and much more literate about, Islam than is the MSM; but that doesn't mean the CJM doesn't have deficiencies in this department.

One of the bastions of the CJM is Jihad Watch and, as it's quite an industriously active venue, it's a good laboratory to study these deficiencies.

One deficiency I've written about and analyzed at length in previous essays on this blog and at my former blog (The Hesperado) is the failure to shift paradigms from "Islam is the problem" to "Islam is the problem and all Muslims enable that problem".  An incomplete list of my essays in this regard, but one which should get the reader started, may be found here.

Recently, a leading member of the Jihad Watch team, Hugh Fitzgerald, wrote an essay which, for the first time as far as I can tell, dipped a cautious toe into the dangerous waters of this paradigm shift.  Of course, Hugh, in his arrogance, writes as though what he's saying is perfectly sensible and hasn't been a controversial direction to take the Counter-Jihad, as evidenced by countless instances of various leaders of the CJM -- including his own esteemed colleague, Robert Spencer -- timidly shrinking back from drawing the logical conclusion Hugh in his essay articulates so matter-of-factly:

[Richard] Dawkins frequently claims that Islam is the sole object of his criticism, not Muslims, and those  who label Islam’s critics, such as himself, as “bigots,” are failing to recognize the distinction he makes between Islam and Muslims. Some may think Dawkins is too soft on the adherents of Islam, as he depicts them as victims of brainwashing; he claims endlessly that Muslims are the “greatest sufferers” from Islam as a way of justifying, quite unnecessarily, his criticism of the faith; over the past 1,400 years, on the receiving end of Muslim aggression and murder, many Infidels would disagree. Does one find fault only with the ideology of Nazism and give members of the Nazi Party a pass, as victims of brainwashing who do not deserve criticism?

Hugh goes on to explain why one should expand one's fault-finding from the ideology to its members, but for some strange reason fails to mention two of the most glaring reasons why it applies searingly to Islam:

Members of Islam -- i.e., Muslims -- are not merely, as Hugh says, choosing freely to belong to the faith that Dawkins calls the “greatest force for evil in the world today”; they are more importantly regularly defending it, either through sophistry in order to fend off criticism of Islam, or by actively promoting it.  The tiny number of Muslim "reformers" out there who affect to be criticizing Islam (but really, when one examines their rhetoric closely are only criticizing an artificial "Islamism" ingeniously in order to protect Islam) should be condemned no less than the garden-variety taqiyya more Muslims purvey, when they try to sell the idea that "Islam is peace" and "Islam does not condone terrorism" etc.  But I've noted many times how many in the CJM have soft spots for one or more of these "Better Cop" Muslims.

Secondly -- and closely related to my first point above -- the CJM should know by now that Muslims are not merely a problem because of the terrorism-slash-(pun intended)-jihad which a relatively small minority of them pursue in our present time, but also because of the impetus & goal of that terrorism/jihad, firmly ensconced in the mainstream Islam of all Muslims: the conquest of the world.  This goal of mainstream Islam will not be realized by Muslims solely through terrorism now, but through a coordinated strategy of terrorism plus deceit, where the deceit is a diverse combination platter of tactics, primarily consisting of Muslims lying and pretending that they and their Islam have nothing to do with the terrorism and the expansionist, supremacist jihad that is its guiding framework & context. 

The CJM should know by now that the only reason Muslims aren't simply waging frank warfare against the West (as they did for the first millennium after they stormed out of the Arabian desert, from the 7th century clear through to the 17th century) is because Muslims (correctly) perceive themselves as far too weak relative to their enemy (the West).  What this means is that innumerable, and largely indistinguishable millions of Muslims among their total population in its complex and alarmingly kinetic diaspora post-911, expanding into the West in unprecedented numbers, are pursuing various forms of stealth jihad to lay the ground over many decades for the day (I estimate 100 years or so) when they feel they will be able to take off the mask and pursue jihad more honestly against us.

This is why the Counter-Jihad -- whose primary programme should be to try to wake up the West about the problem of Islam -- needs to undergo the paradigm shift I mentioned at the beginning.  Hugh's essay -- so far an anomaly in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream -- is probably more like too little, too late, than a sign of hope.

The Monthly Decaf every day (= the Muslim Reformer)

Holy Toledo, I see that my last posting here was August 2, over three weeks ago!  Maybe I should change the name of this blog to The Monthly Decaf...

What I've said more than a few times in the past I fear is true: My concern to be scrupulous about a posting -- not only to back up (or amplify) key claims with links, but also to flesh out the "connective tissue" (as Frank Gaffney has put it) amongst the complex of dots being palpated -- inevitably causes me to spend more time at the drafting board than I wanted to, and thus inhibits me the next time.  If I could only learn to be punchy with my postings...

Let's try it now (don't hold your breath):

Egypt: President lets Muslim cleric who promotes violence against women and infidels to preach at Alexandria mosque

So runs a headline Robert Spencer put up on Jihad Watch today.  The first thing I thought was, "So much for the new and improved Egyptian leader, the Moderate Al-Sisi".  Then I see Robert's editorial remarks, which even surprised me, a long-time Spencer critic, with their retrograde learning curve:

Sisi generally stands against the Salafists, but he also recognizes that they constitute a major portion of Egypt’s population. So he, like many other Egyptian Presidents before him, has to practice steam control, allowing them to have their way enough to pacify them somewhat and keep the whole country from exploding.

The first error that glares at us (or at which we should glare) is the Counter-Jihad howler Robert seriously employs, "Salafists" (a term as misleading as the previously fashionable one, "Wahhabists", and possessing no useful function beyond what other terms offer -- terms often (and aptly) derided by the Counter-Jihad: "extremists", "radicals", "Islamists"), about which we could ask rhetorically -- "What's a 'Salafist' and how is he or she different from any standard-issue garden-variety Muslim?"

More broadly, while Robert may be technically and superficially correct in his description quoted above, he provides not even one sentence indicating the deeper problem -- the stealth jihad.  Does Robert honestly think Sisi is not a stealth jihadist? That he's a sincere "reformer" with a zebibah on his forehead who reveres Mohammed, Islam and the Koran?  (I.e., that he's the same square-circle any Muslim is whom one is claiming just wants to have a sandwich...).

Not to mention that Robert's own Jihad Watch has a growing paper trail indicating the dubiousness of Sisi's so-called "reform".

And that Robert's off-and-on-again colleague, Andrew Bostom, about five years ago collected information indicating Sisi's stealth jihad.  As my former self put it on a Jihad Watch comments thread back in early January of 2015:

On Sisi, in another JW thread I adverted to an important Andrew Bostom report from August that provides sound interpretation of evidence that Sisi is a normative Islamic jihadist and not some kind of “reformist” (and shame on any JWer for entertaining the notion that someone as learned in Islam as Sisi must be could possibly be a “reformist”!).

֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍

On second thought, I could just keep my blog name, The Daily Decaf, and blithely post only once a month (or once in a blue crescent moon), under the Spencerian fiat that what is monthly can (without any explanation needed) be called "daily" -- just as Al-Sisi can be called a "bulwark against political Islam" (as Robert indeed, with a straight face, has) .

"Wake up and smell the decaf..."

I've suspected that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has softened up in terms of her critical stance against Islam.  And I further suspect that behind this decaffeination of Ayaan, there lurks the wily effects of Maajid Nawaz, that snake posturing as a "reformer".  I've written before on my old blog, The Hesperado, about how he seems to have "turned" Sam Harris from something resembling a robust cup of black espresso (in terms of Islam) into (at best) a cup of weak coffee with milk.  And I've put up a few postings on the matter here on this little old cafe bulletin board as well.

Soon, I will see if he may have done the same with Ayaan.  Three YouTube videos may help my investigation by plotting the stages of the "Maajidization of Ayaan": All are round table debates/discussions on the problem of Islam where Ayaan and Maajid are featured. The first one is clearly a debate by Ayaan against Maajid (on Ayaan's team is also Douglas Murray, another anti-Islam analyst who seems to have been "turned" by Maajid, about which I may write in the future). My prediction is that by the time I start analyzing the third video, from 2016, I will already see the effects of Ayaan's Maajidization, whereby she will have transformed from being his opponent on this issue, into his partner.

2010:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shwhgV733Kg

2013:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2prB3weT4c

2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV_GMeZ_XmA

The 2010 video is over 3 hours, and I suspect the other two are no less than about 2 hours; so this will take some time for my to process.  Stay tuned.

P.S.:

Maajid having a grand old time with Douglas Murray in 2017?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx0fyYVebbE

And of course, on my old blog The Hesperado, I devoted two or three essays to the Maajidization of Sam Harris.