Do-Gooders Without Borders

Debbie Schlussel many moons ago, referring to various Westerners (some Americans among them) who ended up suffering the horrific ordeal of being beheaded by ISIS and other Muslim terrorists (e.g., perhaps the first to come on our Western radar, Daniel Pearl), wrote:  

"...few people can really handle it, as they’d rather be infantilized and told that every American In Name Only put out of his/her misery by ISIS is really a hero fighting the good fight against Islamic terrorists (when in almost all the cases, the newly beheaded are really America-haters and Muslim apologists who were lucky enough to be born here)."

Schlussel is correct; and it's a curious phenomenon, until you think about it more. Part of what's going on, I think, is that there exist a large number of these starry-eyed cosmopolitan Do-Gooders-Without-Borders (and Without Brains) who have realized that even more glamorously humanitarian than the Third World Classic of yesteryear (various Indian tribes of central and South America oppressed by cruel right-wing (never left-wing, of course) dictators; various generic black African people suffering from their perennially Biblical afflictions of drought, famine, pestilence and wars) -- are the Suffering Victims of the Muslim World. Not the non-Muslims whom the Muslims are oppressing and massacring, of course, but the Muslims themselves who, when they keep getting embroiled in their Bloody Borders (not to mention internecine fitna), need the help of all the bleeding hearts who can pitch in to try to do their part to alleviate the suffering of those Poor Muslim Victims.

I think it's reasonable to suppose that these Do-Gooders love to plunge into the thick of Muslim hot spots to assuage their White Guilt and appease their ethical narcissism, spend a lot of time "getting to know the locals" and finding so many friendly, hospitable Muslims, learning their culture more deeply, and doing their small part to find ways to help them out of the morass of the mess which the evil West has inflicted upon them. In so doing, sometimes spending months, years, sometimes moving from country to country, hot spot to hot spot, they fall in with various Muslim helpers, guides, translators, habibis who "know someone who can help", etc. -- and by naively and gullibly trusting these seemingly nice Muslims, they set themselves up to be ensnared by less visible networks of various Muslim gangs, tribes and jihadist groups, ambushed and kidnapped for ransom and eventual execution.

"T-U-L-S-I -- Straight Ahead...!"

Tulsi Gabbard is a Congressional Representative for Hawaii.  She's 37, so she's just barely eligible to run for President (minimum age requirement, 35). I'd vote for her in a heartbeat, notwithstanding that she tends to indulge the dysphemism of attaching the adjective "radical" to the problem of Islamic terrorism. But compared with other American politicians, she's miles ahead of them.  She's also female, telegenic, and "ethnic" (half East Indian -- she swore in as Representative on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita).

One couldn't find better reasons for supporting Tulsi than this Leftist attack on her at the amusingly titled "Jacobin" website.  Even though she's a Democrat who supported Bernie!

For example, the writers at Jacobin say:

So what is the cause of terrorism, according to Gabbard? Islam, of course.

Can I get an ROMPRLMAO (Rolling On My Prayer Rug Laughing My Ass Off)...?

Before the Great Inhibition...

Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville in Caen, France 

We can add Alexis de Tocqueville to the list of luminaries from yesteryear (before the Great Inhibition of our era) who in 1838 served up this cup of coffee stronger and more robust about Islam than the insipid whitewash we get these days (jar tip from Andrew Bostom):

“Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. … The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels … [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran … The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.”

Re-entering through the side door

I've decided to slink back into "the Counter-Jihad" (such as it is), since I can't help myself. Hopefully, my renewed activity will be less time-consuming and less beleaguering to my psyche.

Rather than use my wheezing aircraft-carrier (the H.M.S. Hesperado) as my re-launching pad, I figured this little ol' café here will do just fine, after a slight makeover of its name.  I like the sound of The Daily Decaf; and also it refers to the daily attempts -- whether concerted, conscious, or semi-conscious and incoherent -- by our Western Mainstream and by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream -- to whitewash the horrible, toxic coffee of Islam we need to wake up to and smell.

For more about my "re-entry" listen to my Intro piece linked up top somewhere, over by the non-dairy creamer, I think.

"At the Jihad Watch Café, we serve incoherent coffee..."

 
...it is “fundamentally wrong” to use the phrase “Islamist terrorism,” because it is actually “Islamic terrorism,” no steps removed from Islam as such.

So intones Robert Spencer, the éminence grise of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, at that bastion of same, Jihad Watch.  One of his customers (moi, who has purchased one of his books and found it, frankly, a rather lackluster cut-and-paste job) asks from on low:

How is the “fundamentally wrong” phrase “Islamist terrorism” any worse than the “radical Islam” of Jihad Watch contributor Raymond Ibrahim?

And the question becomes (as William F. Buckley used to say), why can't the Counter-Jihad get its rhetoric together?  If one were to do a survey of the last few years since “Islamist” and “Islamism” became fashionable in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (e.g., Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of many Counter-Jihad Mainstreamers who have lauded Robert Spencer's new book), one would find those dysphemisms sprinkled throughout like coconut flakes at a Starbuck's.

One would think, then, that in an essay titled -- Why We Don't Need Words Like 'Islamist' -- in which author Robert Spencer is critiquing Raymond Ibrahim's positively titled -- Why We Need Words Like 'Islamist' -- Spencer wouldn't commit any gaffes.  Unfortunately, I tripped over one glaring one, twice: his use with an utterly sincere straight face, of the dysphemism “political Islam” as though it were any better than “Islamism”.  As Robert Spencer's other self (the more robustly anti-Islam Mr. Hyde, as opposed to his “I am not 'anti-Islam' ” Dr. Jekyl) might say to himself (on a rare good day when he's not feeling the need to double-virtue-signal):

...it is “fundamentally wrong” to use the phrase “political Islam,” because actually all of Islam, from top to bottom, the whole kit and fucking kaboodle, is “political”.

He even has the gall to specify with an example, of what kind of Muslim would not be an adherent of this curious fantasy concept:

...many analysts use the term “Islamist” to mean an adherent of the tenets of political Islam. And certainly, as Raymond points out in his piece here, some term is needed for such people: for example, a follower of Mubarak in Egypt would likely be a Muslim but not an “Islamist”: i.e., not a proponent of Sharia rule.

Is that as clear as the mud on the banks of De Nile...?

"Barista-terrorista, my latté has so much milk, it's white, not brown..."

A member of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Readership (i.e., an anti-Islam commenter on Jihad Watch) named "tim gallagher" complains:

Islam is ferociously repressive and far right wing ( well, 7th century barbarism really) in every regard and it’s staggering the way the left wingers side with it. It defies any logic.

Well, tim wouldn't find this so "staggering" and logic-defying if he paused to consider (or if he read outside the Counter-Jihad Mainstream Reservation once in a while -- oh, say, at The Hesperado blog).  The short answer to tim's aggravating bafflement is that Leftists perceive Muslims as Brown People, and this in turn triggers the psycho-cultural mechanism analyzed by blogger Lawrence Auster (and further clarified by moi) as "Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations".

Why did the decaf suddenly turn into regular...? Part 2.

Actually, my title should be: "Why did the decaf suddenly turn into a quintuple espresso...?"

As I analyzed in Part 1, Hugh Fitzgerald's guesses are inadequate to explain why an anti-Islam politician in Germany, Arthur Wagner, converted recently to Islam.  Hugh is presented with a German political activist who 4 years ago left the more Left-leaning CDU party to join the more Islam-savvy AfD party which opposes Islamization of Germany -- and yet who has lately converted to Islam.  Hugh guesses Wagner must have converted to Islam either for sex or for money; or both.  (Hugh's first guess he tosses off as unlikely, that Wagner was actually convinced of the beauty of Islam.)

The problem with the sex and/or money explanation is not that it's impossible; sure, that's always possible, but it would perforce require either 1) ignorance of Islam, or 2) evil.

#2: If a Westerner is not ignorant of Islam, but knows Islam (and hence knows it's evil), then if he joins Islam for sex or money, he's also being evil.

#1: The ignorance explanation becomes strange, given that Wagner was in an anti-Islamization party for 4 years, and actively joined it in the first place.

Once we palpate #1 further, we begin to open up an avenue of a subtler, more intelligent speculation.  Are there degrees of ignorance of Islam?  There do seem to be.  I've written probably hundreds of essays (out of a total of 1,400 plus) analyzing this welter of a problem.  The more interesting end of the spectrum, to me, is the person who actually knows about Islam, or who is learning more and more about the horror, the full catastrophe of Islam, but can't quite fully follow the logic to where their growing familiarity with the data of Islam leads them.

Why can't they follow the logic of the data? Because they are afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of the thread that leads from condemning Islam to condemning Muslims. Why is that something to be afraid of? Because it would mean they would succumb to "racism".

This thought process I am unraveling is the thought process of PCMC; and it is present even in the Counter-Jihad.  A fear of enacting the paradigm shift from a problem of Islam to a problem of Muslims.  It seems to me this thought process is quite prevalent and motivates all forms of Denial in this regard.  Interestingly, this dynamic becomes more pronounced the more, not the less, one knows about Islam.  The PC MC majority in the West knows less about Islam than the person who has chosen to be "in the Counter-Jihad", but they know enough -- from the pressure of the news -- to realize, if only subliminally, that it's a horrible problem. But two factors allow them to remain in a state of relatively stable, comfortable Denial (at least consciously): 1) their habit -- reinforced by the peer pressure of their surrounding culture, suffused as it is with PC MC, of not taking the time to investigate past the PC MC mainstream whitewashing of Islam to uncover the seamier underside of Islam; and 2) their dominant PC MC sensibilities which, among other things, keeps their internal Censor strong out of a deep, peculiarly Western phobia about being "racist".

The Westerner who has embarked upon the long, complex journey of being "in the Counter-Jihad", however, doesn't suffer from these two factors, at least not in such a marked way. But #2 does still exert its unconscious force on him; and because it does, it comes into psychological conflict with his growing awareness (through his self-education) of the horrors of Islam and the obvious logical connection this has to Muslims.  The result is an incoherent attempt to have his cake (of being anti-Islam) while eating it too ("I'm not against Muslims" or some even more elliptical version of this).

Now, I am not trying to say that Arthur Wagner was "in the Counter-Jihad" per se; there is no delimited definition of that state (to a great extent because the movement itself remains incoherent). Some are halfway in / halfway out (e.g., Sam Harris).  The psychological dynamic is the same, variantly, depending on the degree of PC MC in the heart and mind of the person involved.

So my guess as to why Arthur Wagner converted to Islam may not be as colorfully specific as two of Hugh's guesses (women and/or money), but I argue it's more reasonable. In a word -- 4 words, to be more precise -- Arthur Wagner converted to Islam because of PC MC: Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism.  But wait, my readers may counter, Wagner four years ago had joined the anti-Islamization party opposed to the disastrous Angela Merkel policy of Muslim immigration; how could he be affected by PC MC...?  If my readers, or anyone "in the Counter-Jihad" has to ask that question, he hasn't fully grasped the Problem of the Problem.  This secondary problem (persistent Western myopia to the primary problem, Islam) reflects a complex paradox of fear and admiration of Islam, centrally motivated by the twin Dogma of PC MC:

Respect for the Other / Self-Criticism of the West Bordering on Self-Hatred. 

The second thing to know is that this PC MC neurosis that cripples any critical understanding of the primary Problem of Islam is not merely the province of "Leftists" over there: it is, in various degrees, in all Westerners, including those who are "in the Counter-Jihad".  And as we know from Psychology 101, if you don't realize you have a neurosis, you'll be less able to overcome it.  Those who are "in the Counter-Jihad" are particularly vulnerable to this kind of Denial, mainly because their self-identity is so dependant upon a bravado about being oh so tough on Islam.  Arthur Wagner, a political activist in the German anti-Islamization party AfD qualifies as being vulnerable in this way, even if he may not be, strictly speaking, "in the Counter-Jihad".  His previous allegiance to the party of Merkel, before he joined the AfD, likely continued to be present deep in his heart & mind; as PC MC is present in the heart & mind of nearly everyone "in the Counter-Jihad".  We can reasonably assume that Wagner's PC MC was a stronger psychological force than his new career as an "anti-Islamization" activist. So, rather than spend years developing incoherent ways of pretending to be anti-Islam while avoiding a condemnation of Muslims (as most in the Counter-Jihad seem to like to do), he found psychological release by going all the way, one way: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Why did the decaf suddenly turn into regular...? Part 1

On Jihad Watch, that bastion of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the curious case of a German politician, Arthur Wagner, who for the last 4 years has been a member of the supposedly tougher, more conservative and anti-Muslim Immigration party, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland or "Alternative for Germany") -- a party that is routinely labeled "far right" probably mainly because of its stance against "Islamization" -- has himself converted to Islam.

Hugh's essay is an exercise in educated speculation on why Arthur Wagner, a member of an essentially anti-Islam political party (or more likely "anti-Islamist" or "anti-political Islam" party) would himself convert to Islam.  The reason Hugh has to speculate is because Wagner has refused to answer questions about his conversion, maintaining it is none of the public's business.

Hugh's speculative diagnosis is more revealing of Hugh, and of the schizophrenia about Islam indulged by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (tough on the outside, nougaty soft on the inside) to which Hugh can be said (based on hundreds of essays he has written, which I've analyzed over the years) to belong.  Here's how Hugh handles this curious conversion to Islam by a formerly anti-Islam guy:

"It seems to me that there are three possible reasons why Arthur Wagner decided to convert to Islam."

So begins Hugh, and I cringe and brace myself for the subtly asymptotic locutions to come.

The first is the most obvious: that having been dead set against more Muslim immigrants, he decided to have a look into the faith whose adherents, according to his own party, “have no place in Germany,” and was struck by the sheer wonderfulness of Islam. After all, the refugees he’d been assisting were mostly Muslims, and inclined to sing the praises of their faith. To do what Wagner did out of genuine belief is not impossible — strange things happen every day. 

No Hugh, that's not an explanation for Why; it's just a rephrasing of the What, without providing any insight leading from that What to the Why.  Let's see what his other two, supposedly more substantial guesses are:

But there are two other conceivable explanations for Arthur Wagner’s behavior. The first may be called the “cherchez-la-femme” (look for the woman) theme. Among the refugees Wagner had been helping, there might well have been a Muslimah who caught his fancy. And if she responded, well, since he’s not exactly Gregory Peck, he might have been thrilled. As a female refugee, she would of course see a solution to all her problems if she could land this particular fish, and he, in turn, would be delighted to have such a mate. Of course, given that in Islam, men are superior to women, it would be unthinkable for a Muslim wife to submit to a non-Muslim husband. Before getting married, the non-Muslim husband-to-be must, therefore, convert to Islam. Which Arthur Wagner may have been perfectly willing to do. There is still another conceivable variant. Muslims in Brandenburg, knowing of Arthur Wagner’s work with Muslim refugees, and of his desire for a mate, might have persuaded a Muslim woman, refugee or not, to respond to him, all in the path of Allah of course, and then to demand that he convert so that they might marry. What a coup for Islam that would be — and has now turned out, in fact, to be. You can just imagine how often Muslims will be bringing up the case of Arthur Wagner, as proof of Islam’s greatness, for it can “overcome even the worst sort of islamophobia.” 

Okay, that speculative guess at least has some meat to it.  However, it still begs the question a bit; unless Hugh is trying to say that the mere motivation of an older guy feeling unattractive and needing female companionship suffices, completely, to explain why he would convert to Islam -- which is what his rather verbose paragraph certainly seems to imply.  This would be a variant on Hugh's "Esdrujula Elves", trying to explain the West's seduction to Islam (whether all the way, to conversion, or short of that, to its mainstream tendency toward fawning adulation) by recourse to vaguely human foibles, such as greed, stupidity, or timidity (not sure what "-idity" would apply here, as another facile label for Hugh to slap onto the midlife crisis of a horny guy as the sole motivation for his conversion to Islam; but the specious principle would be the same).  It goes without saying, then, that this second guess is pretty flimsy (for those who can't see why Hugh's thesis is specious, my link just given may help them).
 
Let's see if Hugh's third guess gets any warmer:

The third possible explanation is of the filthy-lucre sort.

Oh God; he's still stuck on the Esdrujula Explanation -- this time having recourse to Greed. Will he stay stuck on that level or expand it to something more substantive? Let us see:

He might have thought of it himself, or someone may have suggested to him that, by turning Turk, there was money to be made. Think of all the speaking engagements now available to Arthur Wagner, throughout the deepest-pocketed Muslim lands — in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar — or even audiences of Muslims in Germany. His subject would be the one that every devout Muslim wants to hear: “Why I Became A Muslim.” That triumphalist topic ought to be worth 50-100,000 dollars per speech, given that he was a high-ranking official in the AfD, the most unlikely, and therefore the most valuable, kind of convert. And after all, Wagner would have done nothing wrong. He became a Muslim, and now he’s speaking about it. Why shouldn’t he? How dare anyone question his motives? Is he any worse than so many of our past presidents, secretaries of state, national security advisors, big shots of every sort, who once out of office head out to the Gulf (Persian, Arabian, take your pick) to pocket most generous honoraria? Arthur Wagner has a story, he wants to tell it, and there are people, his fellow Muslims, who want to hear it. Eventually we’ll find out what led Arthur Wagner to the One True Faith. If there’s a woman involved, he’s not going to keep her waiting. If it’s money he is after, just keep track of his speaking schedule. And if, mirabile dictu, he actually went from warning about Islam to becoming a Muslim, because he has indeed become a True Believer, then not just in Houston, but in Germany, Europe, the entire Western world, mein damen und herren, we have ein großes Problem.

As I guessed, Hugh's third guess remains stuck on the level of his Esdrujula Elf, Cupidity.  Completely unexplored by Hugh's speculative discursus on this most curious phenomenon -- of a formerly anti-Islam person converting to Islam -- are more positive reasons having to do with ideology.  Such as, for example, the virtues of the dominant worldview of the West in our time, Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism -- virtues such as Respect for the Other and its other side of the same coin, Excessive Self-Criticism about our own Western civilization.  And many other related phenomena which I have analyzed at length over the years.  Instead, Hugh serves up a simple-minded analysis, at this late stage of the game.  It's 2018, for Crissakes. You'd think the Counter-Jihad would have evolved by now beyond its flawed template.  The dismaying reality seems to be that it has fossilized into a Counter-Jihad Mainstream.

Part 2 to come, for my guess, which probes more deeply this issue than Hugh does.

For now, I hazard a guess explaining Hugh's curious analytical deficiency: It's probably because, as a member of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream and its asymptotic tendencies, Hugh can't see how he himself shares with Arthur Wagner an underlying PC MC that disposed the latter to convert to Islam.  Hugh's myopia to the PC MC inside himself thus blinds him to its presence in, and key influence on, not only the Arthur Grants of the West who "go native" by conversion to Islam, but the much more numerous Westerners (the majority, in fact) who stop short of that by fawning all over Islam like it's the best thing since sliced falafel.

"Get your Mo Joes here... Iced Muslim with milk, Mohammedan Venti, Grande, Trenti, Blonde Roast Revert, Decaf Moderate, Triple Decaf Reformer (the "Tarek Fatah"), Shia Latté, Sunni Black, Extremist Espresso..."

One of the staunchly anti-Islam Civilians from the Readership commenting in that flagship of the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, Jihad Watch, boldly writes:

roger woodhouse says

Jan 22, 2018 at 6:03 am

....There is no ‘radical Islam’There is just Islam.Muslims can decide which parts of the quran they want to practice.The more ‘educated’ amongst them choose to ignore their book. ‘Education ‘being the factor.Islam depends on the ignorance of its followers to survive.Without Jihad Islam will die.

How does roger know this?  He doesn't of course, unless he has a Mohammedan Mind-Reading App™ -- and even if he had one, that App, if it can't read hundreds of millions of Mohammedan minds, would be worthless to our sprawling, massive, complex security needs, with millions upon millions of Muslims pouring into the West and roiling and percolating throughout all institutions of our Body Geopolitic.  Not to mention that time and time again, we have found terrorists and terrorist supporters to be college educated and middle class or above in wealth.

At any rate, his "educated Muslims" is yet another flavor of harmless Muslim to add to the list which the Counter-Jihad has generated over the years in its asymptotic anxiety trying to forestall the inevitable rational prejudice against all Muslims which the weight of the mountain of data about the problem of Islam leads us: 

Lax Muslims,  
Non-Observant Muslims,
Muslims Who Don’t Know Their Own Islam,  
Muslims Who Don't Take Islam Seriously, 
Muslims Who Are Too Afraid To Come Out of the Secularist Closet,  
the MINOs ("Muslims In Name Only")
Muslims Who Lack Conviction to Carry Islam Out, 
the Not Fully Compliant Muslims,
Reluctant Muslims,
Muslims Who Truly Don't Care About Islam,
Non-Muslim Muslims,

Etc. etc. et al. (qaeda)...

As with the panoply of different coffees at a typical café, many of these flavors don't seem to be that different from some of the others. At the end of the day, all of them have a basic function: to forestall our inevitable wake-up call to smell the Mohammedan coffee.

Decaf pretending to be caffeinated...

The Counter-Jihad Mainstream reporter, Christine Douglass-Williams (CDW) editorialized on a recent Jihad Watch notice:

Last January, one of Charlie Hebdo’s most outspoken journalists quit her job because “it has gone soft on Islamist extremism. Zineb El Rhazoui accused the weekly of bowing to Islamist extremists and no longer daring to draw the Prophet Mohammed.” Then she was threatened by Islamic State supporters who called for her murder by “lone wolves.”

The supreme irony here once again on display -- what I call the Nawazian Voldemort Effect after Maajid Nawaz's clever (and quite successful) attempt at it:

Namely, the subtle usage of the dysphemism "Islamist" (buttressed by "extremism" as though mainstream, ordinary Islam isn't already by nature extremist) is already telegraphing, and reinforcing, a soft position on the problem of Islam -- even as it is couched in a seemingly robust stance against the problem of Islam.  Essentially, trying to pass off a cup of decaf as a robustly caffeinated espresso.

How many people in the Counter-Jihad are fooled by this?  How many of the Readership agree with their Leadership to soften their stance on the problem of Islam this way?  How many care either way?

P.S.: This is not to say that the Moroccan apostate upon whom CDW relies, Zineb El Rhazoui, would herself frame the issue this way.  It's difficult for me to tell, as I only have, as yet, a cursory familiarity with her writings and interviews and analyses by others on her. For example, Zineb has said: "I am against Islam and Islam is against me" ("Je suis contre l'islam et l'islam est contre moi.") -- no "Islamism" there.  On the other hand, she sometimes slips in the Ism, and sometimes seems to take care to distinguish Islam from Muslims: As the French feminist 'Elisseievna' reports: "She explains that "to realize that Islamism is a fascism allows us to stigmatize the ideology but not the individuals of the Islamic culture." (Elle explique que « prendre conscience que l’islamisme est un fascisme permettra de stigmatiser l’idéologie et non les individus issus de la culture islamique »).  Then there's the further complication that, apparently, in French, as in English of an older time (perhaps the early 20th century at the latest, but certainly earlier), the "-ism" ending is not necessarily a decaffeination of Islam at all, not a truncation to dilute the Islamophobic caffeine as it has become for the likes of Sam Harris (under the tutelage of his partner-in-bromance, Maajid Nawaz), but merely a denotation of it, largely redundant.  However, do the millions of Americans and modern English-speaking people of the world who read Jihad Watch know this -- that when CDW quotes Zinab's "Islamist extremism" approvingly, this may not mean it in the veritably soft way intended by CDW and her colleague Robert Spencer?

"Barista-terrorista, I'm allergic to raisins, and there are clearly at least 4 raisins in this cinnamon scone......"

I was pleased to see a post by Cinnamon Stillwell featured on Jihad Watch this morning -- she's a writer who (notwithstanding her occasional asymptotic raisins) deserves a wider audience (and years ago I put her on my blogroll over at The Hesperado).

Her piece on Jihad Watch involved a Good Cop Muslim (defined as such because he would easily fool the broader Western Mainstream, but not the Counter-Jihad Mainstream), an academic named Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, senior lecturer in history at King’s College London, invited to deliver his taqiyya to a select Harvard audience.  As Cinnamon Stillwell reports it and mostly ably analyzes it, his lecture at Harvard was an exercise in Equivalencism and Tu Quoque -- more specially, the claim that "Islamophobia" is equivalent to anti-Semitism, and that both are in effect racism.

The raisins in the otherwise scrumptious & nutritious cinnamon scone Stillwell served up may be spotted in this sentence of hers:

Never once did Zia-Ebrahimi address the reality of such practices within Islam, nor the fact that Islamists advocate Islamic supremacism and are implacably hostile to Europe – seen as Christendom. In his eagerness to whitewash all things Islamist, Zia-Ebrahimi ignored the multiple terrorist attacks throughout Europe and the often-contorted Western reaction to Islamist aggression.

That's three raisins.  And, after I carefully extracted them out of my cinnamon scone with my fork, I almost bit into one more after I thought I was in the clear:

That Harvard would host an Islamist apologist masquerading as a champion of virtue exposes the intellectual weakness, duplicity, and true intents of scholars who charge their opponents with “Islamophobia.”

If the "Counter-Jihad" doesn't stop using these dysphemisms that have the effect of reinforcing our reflexes to exonerate Islam itself by locating the problem in some other entity ("Islamism", "radical Islam",  "political Islam", etc.), we will be failing in our ultimate duty to wake up our West to the problem of all Muslims in diverse ways enabling their Islamic imperative to conquer the world.

"I'll have an Intifadaccino, please..."

"How to successfully stop illegal immigration: Follow Israel’s model" -- reads a recent headline on Jihad Watch (Robert Spencer's flagship blog) penned by the egregiously soft-on-Muslims writer Christine Williams-Douglass (CWD), collaborator & colleague of Robert Spencer.

To which I would retort: Yes, we should follow Israel's model, so that we may have our own innocent citizens -- including men, women and children -- routinely mass-murdered and occasionally tortured by Muslims! Israel's model of allowing Muslims to enter and reside inside Israel has not been working -- unless one defines "working" as an allowance of the aforementioned mass-murders and tortures.

Not to mention a story that came out in June reported by the Times of Israel that Israel's intelligence service, Shin Bet, announced in a statement that as of June 2018, for the preceding 5 months since January, they had foiled some 250 terror plots (not by Buddhists or Wiccans or Hindus or Jews or Christians or Atheists or Polytheists).  So how's that policy of allowing Muslims to reside in Israel working?

The Counter-Jihad Mainstream has many foibles, which I've recounted in the past; among them being this silly notion that Russia, China, Japan, and Israel are perfect bulwarks against Islam who suitably clamp down on Muslims: "Them Ruskies wouldn't let Muslims get away with what the rest of the West does!" Etc. All one has to do to counter such specious nonsense is survey the litany of Mohammedan terror attacks on especially Russia and Israel over the decades (Japan has only escaped this because of a dearth of Muslims, due almost wholly to factors unrelated to any anti-Islam vigilance on the part of its people and government; ditto for China, although they have had a spate of Muslim attacks in recent years).

And let us not leave without making sure we don't let CWD get away with her careful notation of "illegal" immigration -- leaving us wide open to a flood of a protracted legal invasion of Muslims.

UPDATE:

Within hours of the rosy post on Jihad Watch I discussed above, by Robert Spencer's colleague & collaborator Christine Williams-Douglass, hailing Israel as a model of success against the jihad, what does Jihad Watch post, but this headline:

Judea and Samaria: Muslims murder Israeli rabbi and father of six in drive-by shooting

And this headline:

Israel: Two teenage Muslimas charged with joining the Islamic State, plotting New Year’s jihad massacre

-- just the latest carnage in years, decades of carnage by Muslims within Israel and without Israel.  The Israeli leadership (and how much of its sophisticated, Leftish civilian population?) evidently agrees (at best) with the Counter-Jihad Mainstream that Muslims inside Israel are magically delicious and harmless, even though they keep killing Jews and/or plotting to kill more Jews and/or believing fervently in the righteousness of killing more Jews.

"I'll have a Better Joe, to go with my Better Moe (since I lost my Mojo)..."

Jamie Glazov, a notoriously soft counter-jihadist (softer even than Robert Spencer's more recent collaborator & colleague, Christine Williams-Douglass), so soft you wouldn't want to dunk him in your coffee you've woken up to and smelled, in a recent posting on Spencer's Jihad Watch pulled the envelope of his nougat egregiously (which is saying a lot) when he called attention to the sins of Linda Sarsour, a Good Cop Muslim -- an easy mark, for the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (CJM) -- who, in a recent tweet, attacked ex-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in a most sordid manner:

"Brigitte Gabriel-- [sic: sloppy -- if not incorrect -- use of an em-dash by Linda] Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She's asking for an a$$ whippin'. I wish I could take their vaginas away - [sic: now just a single dash substituting for an em-dash which, in any case, would be incorrectly used here] they don't deserve to be women."

Where Glazov lurches off the rails (but remains comfortably on the CJM Reservation) is where he ensconces this in a framework uncritically allying himself with Better Cop Muslims -- in this case, two of them. First he appeals to the latest Moderate Medicine Muslim selling Islamic reform from the back of his wagon, Imam Tawhidi, when he begins his post with this shot out across the bow:

Fake feminist and Jihad-promoter Linda Sarsour has blocked Muslim reformer Imam Tawhidi on Twitter because he asked her to apologize for her grotesque and vicious tweet about the courageous truth-teller about Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 

Note that utterly uncritical favor Glazov handed Imam Tawhidi on a silver platter, granting him without a hint of sneer quotes the title of "Muslim reformer".  Directly related to this, Glazov is publicly relying upon one Muslim (Tawhidi) to condemn another Muslim (Sarsour) -- which only reinforces our unfortunate disinclination we Westerners, being relatively decent and civilized as we are, have to cultivate a rational prejudice against all Muslims (a prejudice that nevertheless must be cultivated if we want our civilization to survive this 21st century from Mohammedan devastation).

Close on the heels of this faux pas, Glazov continues his Reliance Upon the Traveler by relying upon another Better Cop Muslim (for a Muslim becomes a Better Cop by being relied upon by the Counter-Jihad), Shireen Quudosi, an up-and-coming Better Moe joining the ranks of the others (Maajid Nawaz, Zudhi Jasser, Asra Nomani, Tarek Fatah, Irshad Manji, etc., etc., et al. (qaeda)...). Indeed, Qudosi is the source Glazov uses for the notorious Sarsour tweet against Hirsi Ali, and he further quotes her salty riposte to Sarsour.  Does the Counter-Jihad really need to use two catfighting Muslimas when we can just condemn Sarsour ourselves?

Anyway, Qudosi has a glaring problem she hasn't successfully squirmed out of -- probably because she can't: namely, her admiration, as a Muslim, for the horribly foul and psychopathic Prophet Muhammad.  As long as any Muslim is a Muslim they are burdened by this malignant mole disfiguring their Moderate countenance (easily seen, by those with critical eyes to see (unlike Glazov, Williams-Douglass, Robert Spencer, and the rest of the CJM) through their Better Mask).  And as such, they are not only useless to us, they become positive handicaps for us, since they reinforce our aforementioned disinclination -- to cultivate the rational prejudice against all Muslims that will be the only way to save our civilization from Mohammedan ruin before (or after) this 21st century is over.

The Counter-Jihad Cafe: "Wake Up and Smell the Decaf"

Yet another random stabbing by a Muslim, this time in Ireland, as reported at Jihad Watch.  And, naturally, authorities of the broader Western Mainstream say there is "no link to terrorism".

As Robert Spencer editorializes on this, he unwittingly puts his foot in his mouth:

Quoting the mainstream Irish news source, RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann) -- “Gardaí have said they have found no established link to indicate the attacks, in which the Japanese national was fatally stabbed and two other people were wounded, were terror-related.”

-- Spencer writes:

They mean that they haven’t found that he was in contact with someone in Iraq or Syria, or has any ties that they can discover to jihadis anywhere. But that doesn’t mean this has nothing to do with jihad, and this false assumption stems from the further false assumption that jihad terror has nothing to do with Islam, and those who engage in it are only members of jihad terror groups, who themselves also have nothing to do with Islam. The Muslims who are misled into joining these groups are, this mistaken view goes, quite different from ordinary Muslims, who are peaceful and tolerant and have nothing to do with terrorism. 

What's ironic here is that Spencer does essentially the same thing he is accusing the broader Western Mainstream of doing; he only does it to a lesser degree, and dressed up with affectations of no-nonsense "counter-jihad" articulations (even while he has insisted that he is "not 'anti-Islam' " and that only "elements of Islam" are problematic).

P.S.: As this companion blog (to my main blog, The Hesperado) is meant to be as pithy as an espresso shot, I often don't riddle my posts with added evidence and links; though just for you, my rare reader, I slide a saucer your way with this plump scone of relevant data about Spencer fresh out of the oven -- on the house.

"I'll have a double Schizaccino, please..."

A Jihad Watch headline (culled from a BBC report):

New York City to spend $50,000,000 on “security infrastructure,” including 1,500 steel street barriers 

What we have here, essentially, is the broader Western Mainstream unwittingly telegraphing their schizophrenia about the problem of Islam:  On the one hand, they are deathly afraid of Muslims -- i.e., a perfectly rational fear of Muslims is operative in their minds on some deep level where their normative Orwellian denial hasn't (yet) extirpated it.  On the other hand, this Orwellian denial has taken over their public conscience because of a second fear: the fear of their own white Western "racism" -- which, if not checked, curbed, denied and (if necessary) self-flagellatingly shamed (but more often projected outward on various fellow Western, usually "right wing", scapegoats), will result in "another Holocaust" against the New Jews, the Muslims (better than the old Jews, because Brown).

Is this second fear as rational as the first?  Only on one level, not on both levels as their schizophrenia indiscriminately mashes together.  On the level of a fear that the problem of the danger of Islam is systemic and metastasizing throughout the Muslim demographic in alarming ways such that we cannot ultimately discern the difference between a harmless Muslim and a dangerous Muslim (and/or between a harmless Muslim and a Muslim who is not deep down beneath his outward smiles & wiles of a false moderation in solidarity with the jihad against us and thus lends his support to it in one way or another), it is a perfectly rational fear.  And the broader Western mainstream knows it -- but only deep down inside, beneath their consciousness, smothered by their waking denial.  On the other level, that the only way the West could handle this problem is to round up all Muslims and "genocide" them, it is not rational, since there are other ways to protect our society from Muslims -- including rounding them up and deporting them back to their Dar-al-Islam.

If that isn't bad enough, the only area within the West where education has been cultivated about the catastrophe Islam represents -- "the Counter-Jihad" -- indulges its own form of schizophrenia: On the one hand, they industriously churn out information about the ghastly, alarming nature of the problem of Islam; but with their other hand they are busy denying that this has anything to do with Muslims generally speaking (only with some whittled down, amorphously delimited subcategory of "jihadis"). 

This Counter-Jihad schizophrenia is a kind of mirror image of the broader Western Mainstream schizophrenia. 

"I'll have an unrealistic cup of coffee, please..."

A leitmotif Robert Spencer indulges in:

Editorializing on this headline -- "New York City jihad bomber is now recruiting for jihad in prison" -- Spencer remarks:

Nothing is done with jihadis in prison to try to change their jihadi mindset. To attempt any such thing would have been “Islamophobic.”

Au contraire, my counter-jihad frère: In fact, nothing should be done with jihadis in prison or elsewhere in the West -- except deport them from the West.  Or does Spencer honestly believe that jihadis can be deprogrammed? 

Good Coffee, Bad Coffee

"BC" wrote of UK Muslim columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who, Jihad Watch reported today, says Christmas is “Islamophobic”:

She used to write a lot of sense about Muslims in UK and she got a lot of abuse as well but then she seemed to lose it. 

So while Yasmin was writing "a lot of sense about Muslims", our stalwart Jihad Watch reader "BC" had, apparently, no problems with her and even found her viewpoint salutary -- until she "seemed to lose it".  How about we never trust any Muslim in the first place?  Too tall an order, I guess, for many (if not most?) in the Counter-Jihad...

"Bus your own table, please..."

As I've been saying for years (but nobody seemed to listen), Muslims have been elevated to the top of the Aggrieved Ethnic Minority/Leftist Cause Célèbre Food Chain -- such that when any other ethnic minority or cause célèbre (e.g., gays, women) comes into conflict with Muslims, the former are thrown under the bus to protect the latter (the Mother of All Others, Muslims).

Yet another confirmation of this when recently Jihad Watch posted stories about how one of Robert Spencer's main collaborators & colleagues -- one Christine Williams-Douglass -- a black female writer from Canada (would that be "African-Canadian"...?) was thrown under the bus by the Canadian government to placate Muslims:

"Christine Douglass-Williams fired from Canadian Race Relations Foundation for writing for Jihad Watch"

"Canada: Hamas-linked Muslim group crows, government mum on firing of Christine Douglass-Williams from race board"

P.S.: It's ironic, given that Douglass-Williams is markedly soft on Muslims, exemplifying yet another phenomenon I've been calling attention to over the years (and nobody has seemed to be listening): the "damned if you do/damned if you don't" dynamic.

Good Coffee, Bad Coffee, Better Coffee... hmmm, hard decision there...

But what's the better coffee going to cost me...?

A recent headline on Jihad Watch:

UK: Muslims threaten to kill Muslim boxer for putting up a Christmas tree 

From the story:

“Amir Khan and wife Faryal Makhdoom receive death threats for putting up a Christmas tree,”

The Muslims who threatened Amir and his wife Faryal are, of course, the Bad Coffee/Cops/Muslims.  The interesting question is whether Amir and Faryal are Good Cops, or Better Cops.  That depends entirely on whom they fool -- the broader Western Mainstream, so easy to fool? Or the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, less easy (but, alas, not at all impossible) to fool?  Whichever demographic Amir and Faryal's behavior fools, the fooling consists primarily in the effect their valiant action to put up a Christmas tree (made even more heroic by receiving death threats) will have: tending to reinforce  our decent Western disinclination to cultivate a rational prejudice against all Muslims.

And as long as that rational prejudice is, in myriad ways, many of them quite subtle -- but all involving Muslims who just wanna have a sandwich and coffee -- inhibited, Muslims will continue to have a good chance to realize their dream of destroying "Rome" (i.e., us).

Coffee for thought...

Jihad Watch headline:

Oklahoma: Muslim who beheaded coworker gets death penalty 

Robert Spencer opines:

This is just what Alton Nolen wanted (which is not to say that it should not be done). He “justified his actions based on his reading of the Quran.” The Qur’an promises Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).

Better than the death penalty would have been to deport him as soon as he converted to Islam (along with all the other Muslims in the West).  But no, the Counter-Jihad Mainstream refuses to push the Meme of Total Deportation. 

"I'll have a schizoccino, please -- oh, and also a cake I can have and eat too..."

Of the thousands of examples of the schizophrenia of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism throughout the West over the years which one could serve up, I saw yet another this morning, pregnant in this headline at Jihad Watch:

Canadian Senate passes bill to remove mention of “barbaric cultural practices” from law banning FGM... 

The frothy schizophrenia with which this headline is brimming must be palpated.  The Canadian Senate, anxious to protect Muslims, 1) prohibits the use of the phrase “barbaric cultural practices” from a practice that, because it is self-evidently horrible (female genital mutilation), it otherwise anxiously hastens to remind its citizens has nothing to do with mainstream Islam and with the vast majority of Muslims who are decent moms and pops like the rest of us; but 2) in this very prohibition's motive to protect Muslims, it is clearly telegraphing a direct connection between Muslims and the banned practice of FGM.

"I'll have a single Decapuccino, please..."

A Jihad Watch headline from a while back:

Italy: Muslim migrant slits non-Muslim’s throat... 

Did the Muslim merely "slit" the Italian's throat, or did he actually behead him (or try to behead him, as with the assassinations of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam and Lee Rigby in London)?

That would be a good assignment for the Counter-Jihad: Make a tally of all the times the mainstream media have reported a beheading as a far more anodyne "slit his throat" or "cut his throat" or just "kill" in a generic sense.

Such euphemisms would be the Kuffar form of Kitman -- telling part of the truth, but not all of it.  It's true that when a Muslim beheads someone, he is cutting and slitting (and slicing and dicing).  But that's not all he's doing; and the gruesome act and its horrifying result are qualitatively significant and distinct from what it involves (viz., cutting and slitting).

What lovely topics Islam brings to mind on a pleasant wintry morning as we sip our coffee...

Drinking the previous coffee

Drinking the previous coffee, fighting the previous war.

"35,000 jihadists now present in the UK, almost two full World War II divisions" so Robert Spencer informs his readers on Jihad Watch.  What about the other two million, 700 thousand plus Muslims in the UK (total population of Muslims in the UK, at least 2,786,635)?

How do we know they are all not "jihadists"?  Is Spencer relying on the UK government to be able to discern which Muslims are jihadists and which are not?  And what is a "jihadist" anyway?  A practitioner of Jihad, one would assume.  And what is Jihad?  Spencer seems to think, or certainly is massively communicating to his audience, that a jihadist is a front-line soldier -- with the implication that any Muslim who is not on the front lines (driving a vehicle over innocent people in the street, stabbing people, exploding in public places, etc. -- but not including "crime") is therefore not waging jihad.  It's as if all his former years of warning us about the stealth jihad have been replaced by a warning only of jihadists (or, sometimes for an Arabic twang, Spencer writes "jihadis" without the Western t).  And aren't there a multitude of forms of jihad, many not involving any overt violence at all?  And aren't they all needed, in order to enable far worse violence in our future?

Without that 1) broader, more complex and deceptive tissue of non-"jihadi" Muslims practicing their various forms of stealth jihad; and without 2) our Western naivete and phobia of Islamophobia -- #2 massively reinforced by #1 -- all the divisions in the world composed of the Minority of Extremists would be unable to do much more than pose a minor security risk for the indefinite future.

"I'll have a Radicalized Espresso, please..."

In a notice about two Muslims in Texas who joined ISIS, Robert Spencer writes:

Arman and Omar Ali, Muslim brothers from Texas who became devout in their observance of Islam and then joined the Islamic State (ISIS).

First of all, Spencer can't know whether or not they "became devout" without having a mind-reading machine.  Or does he assume, after the jihadi-fact, that they must be devout?  Our whole quandary with regard to Islam is that we need to determine before Muslims explode that they are "devout".  Or better yet, just use rational prejudice to assume they are already, by the mere fact that they self-identify as Muslims.  He's inferring that from the fact that they joined ISIS.  This implies a cluster of things: that Islam leads to (or better yet, is) dangerous fanaticism, since increased devoutness to it leads to joining ISIS; and that increased devoutness is, apparently, functioning as Spencer's back door to the Radicalization Meme.

The Radicalization Meme, in turn, implies that Muslims who are not "radicalized" are not of concern, or should be of less concern, than the "jihadis".  This in turn implies that not all Muslims are "jihadis" (perhaps even most are not) -- which in turn implies that "jihad" is only violent.  What happened to the Stealth Jihad which in the old days Spencer used to mention every other time he mentioned "jihad"?

Our first inference -- that Islam leads to (or better yet, is) dangerous fanaticism -- would set up a paradox for Spencer's perpetually elliptical rhetoric about the problem of Islam -- since not only would he have to disavow his statement that he is "not anti-Islam", it would also imply that all Muslims are already "radical" (with their apparent diversity explained through our knowledge of taqiyya and of the diversity of flavors of jihad).

The Civilians of the Counter-Jihad will likely never get any straight talk from Spencer on these important questions, since the Civilians don't seem to care to ask them of him.

"Sikh, and ye shall find..."

In the wake of the latest New York City attack by Muslims, Jihad Watch reports that a Sikh who happens to be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas (and Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition, whatever the heck that is) tweeted an anxious appeal to protect "brown people".

"Historically," the Sikh professor says, "attacks like these have been followed by violence against innocent brown Americans."

Then Robert Spencer writes:

Here is still more in the Left’s endless quest to portray everything as a racial issue. 

No, not everything.  It's mostly Islam that Leftists racialize (and that surely is our chief concern).  And it's not merely Leftists who indulge in this racialization of Islam -- innumerable non-Leftists throughout the West also wring their hands about the possible "bigotry" and "racism" involved in condemning Islam and the Muslims who promote it (and how many Muslims don't promote it...?)

And since when is a Sikh a "Leftist"?  The term "Leftist" applies only to Westerners, as it is a sociopolitical, cultural deformation organically grown in the West.  A non-Westerner may put it on like an overcoat and sport it around town, but that doesn't make him a "Leftist".   

A much more appropriate, and historico-culturally accurate term for this Sikh professor would be dhimmi, since we know that Sikhism developed in a context of relentless, horrific attacks and oppression by Muslims on non-Muslim Indians in the Asian subcontinent over centuries of unspeakable brutality.  Anyone who derives from this ancestral holocaust and still defends his people's enemy is clearly crippled, psychologically and culturally, by the Stockholm Syndrome of dhimmitude.  But no; Spencer ignores all this and leaps straight for the Leftist jugular.  This is yet another example of Robert Spencer seeing only Left.  I hope he doesn't do that when he's being tested with the eye chart at his next optometrist's appointment...

"That coffee chain sells toxic coffee that has already killed thousands of people -- but I'm going to write an essay about how the music they play in their shops is atrociously cheesy 90s pop..."

Hugh Fitzgerald, the Poet Laureate of the Counter-Jihad (or at least he used to be, until for some inexplicable reason after he returned from a long mysterious hiatus from Jihad Watch, he changed his literary style), recently penned a long essay about how, pace the mainstream Western media, Jerusalem's significance to one of "the three Abrahamic faiths" -- Islam, natch -- is much less historically substantial than its significance to Judaism and Christianity.

The problem with Hugh's essay is that it's arguing about the wrong thing (or as I put it years ago, "It's the Violence, Stupid").  If Muslims weren't killing people -- escalating in their murderous violence as part of a perennial, expansionist supremacist blueprint to ruin all civilizations in order to make their fanatical, flawed, evil and toxic regime supreme -- then this issue about whether Jerusalem has equal or less significance to Islam than to the other Two Faiths would be academic.

In fact, if Muslims were behaving like the members of any other religion on the planet instead of killing people, torturing people, oppressing people, plotting horrific terror attacks all over the place, rioting at the drop of a hat over cartoons, treating women like shit, enslaving people, raping people, violating the chastity of countless underage girls and boys, and then adding insult to injury by lying to us about all of the aforementioned -- most in the West would extend the favor to Muslims of saying, "Hey you guys, sure, we get it -- you have a tradition that makes you think Jerusalem is a vital holy city in your faith: Go for it! We support you!  We'll make room for you!"

"Garçon, where is my croissant, s'il vous plaît...?"

I watch (and read, and analyze) Jihad Watch pretty much on a daily basis.  I suppose this has happened before in its 14-odd-year career, but I've never noticed it before. A report that was up a couple of days ago has vanished into thin air.

It was a report on a female British activist Jayda Fransen who, along with members of her party Britain First (dubbed "far right" if not "fascist" no doubt, by the Orwellian media) has done things like walk through Muslim neighborhoods in various locations in England (e.g., Luton, a town north of London) carrying crosses -- and for this (along with giving public speeches in which she expresses her appropriate outrage at what Muslims are doing in England), she has been arrested and faces prison and/or stiff fines for "hate speech".  She recently became world-famous for being the source of the tweet which Trump retweeted and for which, of course, the entire Cosmos lambasted him.

So there was a notice about this on Jihad Watch a couple of days ago; and now it's vanished.  Naturally, Spencer is too busy jet-setting around promoting his book to bother to write a note (or have one of his underlings like "marc" his tech wizard write a note), briefly explaining why to his loyal readers who support him by buying his stuff and making him the counter-jihad celebrity he has become.

"Waiter, there's a fly in my coffee..."

A recent Jihad Watch report relayed this headline:

Pakistan: Video shows civilians aiding jihadis screaming “Allahu akbar” while murdering 13 at college

Robert Spencer editorialized:

“We can’t say for sure whether or not it was an inside job. But yes, there are some people in the footage seen guiding the terrorists.” Certainly there is no shortage of jihad sympathizers among Pakistani civilians. And why is that? Because they realize the Islamic justifications for what the jihadis do. 

The fly in my frappaccino was the phrase I bolded:  “they realized.”  Somehow, I don't think the fanaticism of a Pakistani Muslim rabble, inculcated over a lifetime of a sociocultural process of intricate inculcation steeped in the complex madness of Islam, involves any form of “realization.” One reasonably smells here in Spencer's phrase the telltale hint of the flawed “radicalization” meme (along with the implicit, corollary meme, “Muslims must be like us deep down, until outside forces adventitiously radicalize them”).   

"I'm not anti-coffee; I only oppose frappuccinos..."

Editorializing on a recent report of a Muslim out of New Jersey (probably yet another in a long line of black converts to Islam) who goes by the colorful name of “Mr. Supreme A. Allah” -- and who was charged with “murder, felony murder, robbery, carjacking, unlawful possession of a handgun, possession of a handgun for an unlawful purpose, and conspiracy to commit murder” -- Robert Spencer, less squirrelly than usual in this regard, just came out and blurted:

This story has nothing to do with jihad, as far as I know...

If this could not be clearer than the sky on a cloudlessly blue, sublime summer morning that Spencer understands jihad in a very limited way, I don't know what else to say.  (See my previous posting -- "I'll have an asymptoticcino, please..." -- on Spencer's myopia to that subtype of jihad we could (and should) call the jihad of criminality.)

"I'll have a counter-jihad croissant with plenty of soft nougat inside to go with my triple decaf counter-jihadaccino, please..."

Editorializing on one of his own recent Jihad Watch headlines --

Michigan: Court rules that Muslim woman in danger of honor killing in Jordan will not be sent back 

-- Robert Spencer writes:

"The ruling is good."

Here we have our American government actually deporting a Muslim from the U.S. (her student visa, which should never be issued to Muslims anyway, expired), and we have Spencer wanting this Muslim to stay.  Apparently, Spencer believes that when a Muslim is victimized by other Muslims, that victimized Muslim must be harmless and should remain in the West.

The point is not merely, nor even mainly, that this particular Muslim (Olga Jad Kamar) poses an imminent threat to Westerners; but that our Spencerian need to exude humnitarian concern for Muslim Victims (of other Muslims) only tends to reinforce, in the long run, our unwillingness to grow a rational prejudice against all Muslims, thereby helping to make sure Muslims will continue to be accepted by us as part of our broader Western sociopolitical tapestry -- which eventually, perhaps by the end of this 21st century -- will allow Muslims in the West to pull off the kind of terror attacks which will make 911 look like firecrackers at a 4th of July picnic.  Attacks of such numerous incidence, broad dispersal, and mass-destruction capability as to portend widespread disabling if not destruction of our social, economic and material infrastructures while, of course, mass-murdering perhaps millions of our men, women and children. But apparently, Spencer doesn't see the threat of Islam as being that dire.  Confessions of an Islamophobe! Can I get a ROMPRLMAO (Rolling On My Prayer Rug, Laughing My Ass Off)...?

"I'll have a cup of non-anti-caffeine decaf, please..."

In a Jihad Watch posting today, we got a glimpse of Robert Spencer's inner incoherence (which he keeps disguised from his followers -- though with a few wardrobe malfunctions they are too obtuse, or too slavish, to detect -- nowadays, at least, unlike several years ago when he actually engaged his civilian readership).  In a notice about a Muslim activist, San Diego State University professor Khaleel Mohammed, Spencer editorialized:

Professor Khaleel Mohammed of San Diego State University appeared in the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West,” but then had the realization that he was aiding “Islamophobia” and repented publicly of his participation. Whether his coreligionists threatened him or he decided on his own to join the jihad, I do not know. 

It's difficult to bold only for emphasis, so numerous and clustered are the counter-jihad solecisms in that brief passage.

The first problem here that glares at us (at least those of us who are actually anti-Islam (which, when “actually,” means also anti-Muslim -- neither of which, by his own admission, Spencer is) is where he imputes a “realization” on the part of Prof. Khaleel Mohammed.  It is not reasonable -- nor judicious in light of the Counter-Jihad's main task to wake up the West to the danger of the global revival of Islam -- to indulge in speculation about any “realizations” a Muslim may or may not have; and most certainly not in the crucial context in which Spencer is indulging here: giving this particular Muslim the benefit of the doubt as to whether (“I do not know”) he might have, in the past, been working with us against “the jihad,” but “then” at some point in time changed his mind to “join the jihad.”

Spencer is also, of course, clearly implying here that not all Muslims have “joined the jihad” -- indeed, that many, if not most, have not.  How else are we to parse his recent statement that: “not all Muslims, or even a majority, are terrorists”...?  Would Spencer, if he were confronted with a question on this (and why hasn't anyone confronted him with questions like this? or why hasn't he volunteered to clarify himself?), try to say that “well, certainly many Muslims who are not engaged in terrorism are engaged in various forms of jihad”...?  But the screaming question then is, how many? and then, how do we tell the difference between the ones who are and the one's who don't seem to be because they're pretending not to, through taqiyya -- hence the “stealth jihad” he used to talk about a lot (but interestingly, doesn't anymore).?  Questions like this pretty much ruin any attempt to erect some useful category of Harmless Muslims We Can Trust.  Then Spencer might say (again, it would be nice if he would clarify this for the rest of us) that we can discern the difference through vetting.  But how reliable is vetting? And are we prepared to play Muslim Roulette with our children's lives on whether crafty Muslims can pass our vetting examinations? Etc.

P.S.: Indeed, Spencer's curious statement about Khaleel Mohammed which we quoted up top indicates that, before this particular Muslim insulted Spencer recently, he was apparently willing to take him at face value as an ally, because he participated in the famous Counter-Jihad documentary, Obsession: Radical Islam's War With the West -- and that, thus, this is another in a long line of Better Cops who fool the Counter-Jihad Mainstream.

"I'll have an incoherently hypocritical cup of coffee, please..."

Our old friend "Angemon" -- whom I dubbed the "Energizer Bunny" for his literally hundreds of attacks on me in various Jihad Watch comments threads over the years (thus spawning my term "Rabbit Pack" to denote all the Jihad Watch regulars -- gravenimage, Phillip Jihadski, Wellington, Western Canadian, Mirren, dumbledoresarmy, PRCS, et al.(qaeda) -- who never came to my defense (unless you count one or two limp-wristed and bizarrely mild responses to Angemon), and even a few times, when they weren't pretending not to notice, taking the opportunity to join in Angemon's attacks on me) -- is back after a long hiatus (haven't seen his name pop up on Jihad Watch comments in months, it seems).

In a Jihad Watch thread about a French academic who envisions a solution to the metastasizing problem of Islam in a partition of France into a Muslim France and a non-Muslim France, after one newbie commenter wrung his hands about "unimaginable measures in democracy (remigration, forced evictions of the most radical)", Angemon has the rich temerity to reprove him.  After all the months, if not years, Angemon attacked me for advocating deportation of all Muslims from the West, he now affects to be oh-so tough against someone who opposes the Robert Spencer Lite approach.

And speaking of the "Rabbit Pack" member, gravenimage, she writes on the thread in question:

So Professor Christian de Moliner is horrified by the prospect of deporting Jihadists, but is fine with ceding part of civilized France to these barbarians, and seeing them flogging those who criticize Islam and stoning rape victims to death? *Ugh*.

That's rich; seeing how she did nothing to defend me from Angemon's countless attacks on me over the years for (among other judicious things) pointing out the need to deport all Muslims (and the incoherence of trying to granularize deportation short of all Muslims).

But that's typical for the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (of which Angemon is a particularly oily toady).

"I'll have an asymptoticcino, please..."

No, my title does not refer to a new, overpriced offering at Starbuck's, but rather to a term I developed many years ago to describe a subcultural phenomenon for which, as far as I know, no word had been designated -- the phenomenon, namely, of those "in the Counter-Jihad" who still retain, to one annoying (if not imperiling) degree or another, reflexes and instincts of politically correct multi-culturalism.

Today's single shot comes from Le Café Spencer along with a mazurka of tough nougat:

Editorializing on a recent news story --

“On Sunday night, a man identified as Mahad Abdiaziz Abdirahman, 20, of Minneapolis stabbed two men at the Mall of America after they tried to stop him from stealing clothes inside the dressing room at Macy’s.”

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch wrote:

I didn’t post about this incident here at Jihad Watch because, contrary to false claims, this is not “Muslims Committing Crimes Watch,” it is Jihad Watch, and there was no indication that this stabber was on a jihad. 

A very interesting parenthetical remark there (though pretty much unsurprising, to someone who has been paying attention over the years to Spencer's seemingly incoherent ambiguity about the problem of Islam). Another bit of evidence (to add to the mountain of coffeebeans) indicating Spencer conceives of -- or, perhaps worse, routinely articulates for the public -- the problem of Islam as a problem only of a Minority (Tiny? Small? As Large as a Pipes Dream? A Wee Bit Larger But Still Not the Majority? "Not all Muslims, or even a majority"...?   We'll never know for certain, apparently) of "Jihadists", not of all Muslims embodying in a wondrous diversity Islam's inherent expansionism.

"I'll have a bagel with my coffee..."

In the long run-up to Robert Spencer's upcoming speech at Stanford University, various PC MCs and Muslims have become hysterical about what this portends -- apparently imagining him to be some kind of racist, Islamophobic monster.  In Spencer's many short pieces on these irrational reactions, he has slung the epithet "Leftist" around at his various detractors liberally (pun intended) and well nigh universally. 

With one exception -- when a Jewish student condemned him for potentially fomenting an anti-Semitism against Muslims as, in effect, the "New Jews", I noticed a curious absence of the L word in his article in reference to this particular Jewish attacker.  He mentions "Leftist" all over the place in his commentary on the report, but only tangentially, never flat-out calling this Jewish writer, Courtney Cooperman a "Leftist" nor directly insinuating she is one.

"I'll have a cup of interesting, yet overly simplistic coffee..."

Raymond Ibrahim, part of the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (if only by virtue of the fact that he posts articles now and then on Jihad Watch, and has for years and is not just some pseudonymous slob in various comments threads attached to various counter-jihad blogs, but is well-known, at least in Counter-Jihad circles), published an interesting essay on Jihad Watch recently.  Its thesis is that Martin Luther's Reformation triggered a concatenation of a process that has paved the way for the currently widespread & dominant Western tendency to bend over and spread its butt-cheeks for Muslims.

In short,

-- Ibrahim writes, also relying upon historian Franco Cardini --

“The Reformation produced one logical if unexpected result: a definite boost to the positive evaluation of Islam, and therefore to the birth and development of an often conventional and mannered pro-Islamic stance.” This “mannered” and “pro-Islamic stance” continues to haunt the West to this day. After all, it’s not for nothing that naïve and favorable views of Islam — to say nothing of passive responses to Muslim aggression and a paralytic, all-consuming fear of being seen as “crusading” against Islam — are especially ingrained in and compromise the security of historically Protestant nations, including the U.K., Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, and the U.S.

While Ibrahimi's thesis is interesting (and I've noted how Martin Luther and Jean Calvin both made intemperate remarks about how the Pope is a worse evil than the "Turks" (the Muslims of the day)), the Counter-Jihad synthesis it would create would be overly simplistic.  For one thing, his list of "historically Protestant nations" who are soft on Islam leaves out Catholic Spain and Rome, no less soft (not to mention that the Papacy and much of its official culture is and has been for decades egregiously soft on Islam, with the previous Pope, Benedict XVI, the exception rather than the rule).  More importantly perhaps, it leaves out other contributing factors, including the collective PTSD (Post-Terrorist Stress Disorder) which the West suffered from for over 1,000 years (from the 7th clear up to the 17th century and beyond) of relentless attacks, tortures, massacres, and enslavements by Muslims; a PTSD that did not vanish when the West became spectacularly dominant globally beginning in the the late 17th century (after it won its last major battle, 1683 at the Siege of Vienna, defending itself against Muslim onslaughts).  As time went on and the West's amazing progress and expansion unfolded exponentially from the 18th to the 19th centuries, the PTSD only became submerged into a collective cultural unconscious, mingling with increasing fascination, sometimes morbid, sometimes forgetful & fanciful, of things Oriental.

As the West embarked upon its tumultuous yet still breathtakingly progressive 20th century, bringing the entire world with it, a collective amnesia about Islam became entrenched and this, coupled with the seeming backwardness of the Muslim world by the turn of the 20th century and into the first couple of decades, made it seem even to learned scholars and observers of Islam like Snouck Hurgronje that Islam's star (& crescent moon) was likely on the wane and its days of historical grandeur were gone, and it would be inevitable that most Muslims would change and therefore shed their "medieval" mores (a habit of mind condescendingly underestimating the atavistic fanaticism of Mohammedans that tends to persist into our 21st century in the broader Western Mainstream if not at times also in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream).

Also missing from Ibrahim's interesting yet overly simplistic brew are healthy factors from the West's Judaeo-Christian/Graeco-Roman heritage -- chief among which were an interest in other cultures, a self-criticism about our own culture, and a transcending of tribalism towards universalism -- which paradoxically provided a framework for their distortion in the later development of PC MC; a distortion whose major (though not the first) manifestation, symptom and further spur was the European Enlightenment of the 18th century -- itself with likely precursors in the cultural upheaval of the Reformation, though taking a more circuitous and complex route of development than Ibrahim seems capable of appreciating.

So we can add Ibrahim's factor to the hill of coffee beans as one more important facet -- but not the only one -- explaining why the West is now, in the 21st century, proceeding full-steam ahead toward civilizational suicide.