Fitzgerald: Islamic heretics? Really?

Oh Hugh, Brilliant! Please tell us you posted this to the article in the LA Times.

The LA Times article is disturbing.

What are these people talking about? Either Spencer, Fitzgerald, et al. are largely (or completely) correct, or they are not; but the way that the major outlets deal with the jihadwatch challenge is to deride it.

Do you see a lot of reviews of Spencer's work?

Madness.

I'd be delighted if someone could post this piece at the LA Times site. I'd do it myself, but when I go to the site I can't figure out how, where to post. I must be missing something. In fact, I'd be delighted if anyone, for any reason, wanted to take anything I'd written here and post it elsewhere.

"We are at war, whether we like it or not, with Islamic heretics who argue that their own beliefs supersede traditional Islamic law, and that traitors to Islam as they define it should be killed. Our enemies are members of a violent cult that uses the language of religion to achieve political aims. Believers in such heresies have more in common with other violent political extremists --" - Op Ed (my bolds)

While this op ed is confused in may ways, as noted above, especially with false equivalence with 'other immigrants' and Jews (even the lone actor McVey loony) there is cause for glimmer of optimism that something of the truth about Islamic terror is beginning to sink in, even if only semantically. "Violent cult" is a first important step in acknowledging this is not a religion as understood. Now the next important step is to transcend the PC/MC model and actually connect the dots, that it is not the 'heretics' of Islam who are committing these heinous acts of jihad; not the Baha'i, nor Yazidi, nor Ismailis, the Hurufiya, the Alawis, the Bektashi and even the Sufis, all of whom are either direct or indirect Islamic 'heresies'; but these acts are committed by mainline, mainstream strict conservatives of Islam, the so-called 'extremists'. They are not extreme in the least, they are the real thing, people who interpret Islam as it was written literally. So what's the complaint about 'heresies' all about? As Hugh said, the comparison between Christian heresies and Islamic heresies are a totally false premise from the start, so the rest of the LA Times op ed is foolish nonsense.

But this once again holds out some promise: "Jihadists are the latest bearers of an ideological virus -- the idea that one can accomplish millenarian political aims by murdering innocents -- that has done terrible damage to human societies. Our response should be zero tolerance for political cultists who try to achieve their goals through violence,.." except it once again falls into the 'equivalence trap comparing Islam with other world religions. There ain't no comparison folks. Islam stands alone as a non-religious political cult movement written into text by followers of a 7th century warlord, not a prophet of any kind. And that is no heresy, not moral equivalence, not comparative religious equivalence, but the truth to say so! Just connect the dots.

"There may be prudential considerations, wherever Muslims are perceived as still too weak, for the avoidance of violence as the chosen instrument of Jihad. Besides, other means - deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest (discussed openly by Muslims as the surest way to take over the historic enemy, "Christian" Europe) -- to conduct Jihad that are far more effective, because they are not recognized as such, and are therefore not alarming to the great heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus masses of non-Muslims."

Again, this description of the two types of Jihad -- Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad -- misses the point of their paradoxical nexus. The point is being missed probably because the paradoxicality offends logic: Why would stealthy jihadists, who need to conduct their jihad stealthily -- such that, as Hugh describes they are not recognized as such, and are therefore not alarming to the great heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus masses of non-Muslims -- be colluding with violent jihadists whose violence, one would think, would precisely undermine the whole point of Stealth Jihad?

One would ask such a rhetorical question -- and answer it with a dismissal of any nexus between Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad -- if one failed to perceive how, massively all around us and for many years, after every violent attack by Muslims against non-Muslims, whether killing thousands spectacularly as in 911 or hundreds blatantly as in Madrid or London, or on smaller scales as in the scores of cases in the last quarter century, or in the hundreds of examples of bloodthirsty language and demonstration Muslims in large or small numbers, whether masses in protest or violent riot or individual clerics hailing from places all over the globe -- if one failed to perceive how after all this the non-Muslim West not only continues to fail to recognize the menace of Islam and not only remains "heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus" but positively becomes more heedless, if not more eager to exculpate and whitewash Muslims and Islam.

It is reasonable to suppose that Muslims have long ago become aware of this amazingly strange and reckless propensity on the part of post-modern Westerners -- and that they have been exploiting it. (Indeed, we can see this type of exploitation at least attempted in the 17th century by a Muslim sultan in the south Pacific, pretending this his mainstream Islam had nothing to do with the frequent suicidal attacks on Spanish outposts in the Philippines, that the suicide attackers were just "renegades" over whom he had no control -- until the Spanish called his bluff and told him that cannons from an array of ships might begin to assail his palace unless these mujahideen stopped; after which lo and behold, the mujahideen magically ceased their activities.)

There is thus a nexus between Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad. Each instance of the former actually strengthens the latter. It does this in two ways:

1) The old-fashioned way -- by instilling fear in the non-Muslim populace such that they begin adapting themselves to the Muslims in their midst in gingerly walking-on-eggshells solicitousness;

but also -- and this is the exquisitely crucial juncture of the argument here that repeatedly and obtusely goes ignored even in the still inchoate and amorphous Anti-Islam Movement:

2) by exploiting this strangely new West that has become dominantly PC MC in the last 50-odd years where before that time it was only marginally and occasionally so, if at all.

And what is it about the new PC MC nature of the West that permits exploitation by Muslims pursuing their Jihad in both violent and stealthy forms?

The answer to that goes back to #1 above, the first of two ways by which violent jihad actually -- seemingly paradoxically -- strengthens stealth jihad:

by instilling fear in the non-Muslim populace such that they begin adapting themselves to the Muslims in their midst in gingerly walking-on-eggshells solicitousness.

But PC MC people are not fully conscious of what they do and why they do it. Thus, they are not fully conscious of being afraid of Muslims, nor of why they are afraid. Semi-consciously, there is a psychological mechanism at work here, whereby they have convinced themselves that the vast majority of Muslims are harmless, peaceful, nice and law-abiding and will always be so, and that -- on the flip side -- only a tiny minority among them may be dangerous but for reasons that have nothing to do with the culture of Islam that makes Muslims Muslim. This assuages the lurking logic of the fear, that one has to fear from untold numbers in one's midst: by whittling it down to a manageable "tiny minority" who are relatively easily spotted, one's fear is managed.

Furthermore, PC MCs have convinced themselves that Muslims, being ostensibly "ethnic", must be accorded extraordinary protections -- both from the thought crimes of bigotry, prejudice and "racism", as well as from the physical crimes to which white Westerners as we all know are all too prone: lynchings, rounding up, interning in camps, ethnic cleansing, and of course, at the inexorable bottom of the slippery slope, genocide. The vast majority of Muslims therefore according to this mindset cannot possibly be guilty, can never be guilty -- for if they were, we as white Westerners would have no choice but to begin rounding them up and instituting a Holocaust of Brown People. We must therefore of course inhibit ourselves from that horrible (but obviously erroneous) eventuality at all cost. And one paramount way of controlling our white Western urge to abuse Brown People is to make sure that the belief in the Vast Majority of Peaceful Nice Muslims remains an iron-clad dogma, and that anything that smells of disobeying that dogma be ostracized from polite society, if not demonized.

Thus, each violent attack by Muslims, each instance of violent behavior by Muslims, each instance of bloodthirsty expression by Muslims -- only strengthens the general solicitousness toward Muslims; and this general, strengthened solicitousness in turn massively enables the stealth jihad both by reinforcing the mendacious propaganda of Muslim advocacy groups and individual Muslims who work tirelessly to spread the lie that Islam is good and peaceful, and by reinforcing the growing presence of Muslims in the West through immigration and through their increasing presence in every institution of our sociopolitical fabric, from Academe to Government to Media to public education to the public sector in general.

This paradoxical nexus probably can only subsist as long as the violence of the violent jihadists remains below a certain threshhold; but we have seen over the years that that threshhold may be ridiculously high precisely because of the pathology of PC MC. There is probably a level, nonetheless, which Muslims may in their impetuous and impatient fanaticism reach and cross, which would be too much even for the PC MCs, and would be the straw that broke the camel's back and the splash of cold water that would wake up the fevered dhimmis to dispel from their eyes once and for all that idiotic mirage to which desperately they continue to hang on: the Oasis of the Moderate Muslim.

And here we have more western wunderkindt telling us how they know more about mohammedanism than whole battalions of jihaddi theologians, from the guy at the corner mosque to the senior ranks of Al Azhar.

Great.

"There may be prudential considerations, wherever Muslims are perceived as still too weak, for the avoidance of violence as the chosen instrument of Jihad. Besides, other means - deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest (discussed openly by Muslims as the surest way to take over the historic enemy, "Christian" Europe) -- to conduct Jihad that are far more effective, because they are not recognized as such, and are therefore not alarming to the great heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus masses of non-Muslims."

Again, this description of the two types of Jihad -- Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad -- misses the point of their paradoxical nexus. The point is being missed probably because the paradoxicality offends logic: Why would stealthy jihadists, who need to conduct their jihad stealthily -- such that, as Hugh describes they are not recognized as such, and are therefore not alarming to the great heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus masses of non-Muslims -- be colluding with violent jihadists whose violence, one would think, would precisely undermine the whole point of Stealth Jihad?

One would ask such a rhetorical question -- and answer it with a dismissal of any nexus between Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad -- if one failed to perceive how, massively all around us and for many years, after every violent attack by Muslims against non-Muslims, whether killing thousands spectacularly as in 911 or hundreds blatantly as in Madrid or London, or on smaller scales as in the scores of cases in the last quarter century, or in the hundreds of examples of bloodthirsty language and demonstration Muslims in large or small numbers, whether masses in protest or violent riot or individual clerics hailing from places all over the globe -- if one failed to perceive how after all this the non-Muslim West not only continues to fail to recognize the menace of Islam and not only remains "heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus" but positively becomes more heedless, if not more eager to exculpate and whitewash Muslims and Islam.

It is reasonable to suppose that Muslims have long ago become aware of this amazingly strange and reckless propensity on the part of post-modern Westerners -- and that they have been exploiting it. (Indeed, we can see this type of exploitation at least attempted in the 17th century by a Muslim sultan in the south Pacific, pretending this his mainstream Islam had nothing to do with the frequent suicidal attacks on Spanish outposts in the Philippines, that the suicide attackers were just "renegades" over whom he had no control -- until the Spanish called his bluff and told him that cannons from an array of ships might begin to assail his palace unless these mujahideen stopped; after which lo and behold, the mujahideen magically ceased their activities.)

There is thus a nexus between Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad. Each instance of the former actually strengthens the latter. It does this in two ways:

1) The old-fashioned way -- by instilling fear in the non-Muslim populace such that they begin adapting themselves to the Muslims in their midst in gingerly walking-on-eggshells solicitousness;

but also -- and this is the exquisitely crucial juncture of the argument here that repeatedly and obtusely goes ignored even in the still inchoate and amorphous Anti-Islam Movement:

2) by exploiting this strangely new West that has become dominantly PC MC in the last 50-odd years where before that time it was only marginally and occasionally so, if at all.

And what is it about the new PC MC nature of the West that permits exploitation by Muslims pursuing their Jihad in both violent and stealthy forms?

The answer to that goes back to #1 above, the first of two ways by which violent jihad actually -- seemingly paradoxically -- strengthens stealth jihad:

by instilling fear in the non-Muslim populace such that they begin adapting themselves to the Muslims in their midst in gingerly walking-on-eggshells solicitousness.

But PC MC people are not fully conscious of what they do and why they do it. Thus, they are not fully conscious of being afraid of Muslims, nor of why they are afraid. Semi-consciously, there is a psychological mechanism at work here, whereby they have convinced themselves that the vast majority of Muslims are harmless, peaceful, nice and law-abiding and will always be so, and that -- on the flip side -- only a tiny minority among them may be dangerous but for reasons that have nothing to do with the culture of Islam that makes Muslims Muslim. This assuages the lurking logic of the fear, that one has to fear from untold numbers in one's midst: by whittling it down to a manageable "tiny minority" who are relatively easily spotted, one's fear is managed.

Furthermore, PC MCs have convinced themselves that Muslims, being ostensibly "ethnic", must be accorded extraordinary protections -- both from the thought crimes of bigotry, prejudice and "racism", as well as from the physical crimes to which white Westerners as we all know are all too prone: lynchings, rounding up, interning in camps, ethnic cleansing, and of course, at the inexorable bottom of the slippery slope, genocide. The vast majority of Muslims therefore according to this mindset cannot possibly be guilty, can never be guilty -- for if they were, we as white Westerners would have no choice but to begin rounding them up and instituting a Holocaust of Brown People. We must therefore of course inhibit ourselves from that horrible (but obviously erroneous) eventuality at all cost. And one paramount way of controlling our white Western urge to abuse Brown People is to make sure that the belief in the Vast Majority of Peaceful Nice Muslims remains an iron-clad dogma, and that anything that smells of disobeying that dogma be ostracized from polite society, if not demonized.

Thus, each violent attack by Muslims, each instance of violent behavior by Muslims, each instance of bloodthirsty expression by Muslims -- only strengthens the general solicitousness toward Muslims; and this general, strengthened solicitousness in turn massively enables the stealth jihad both by reinforcing the mendacious propaganda of Muslim advocacy groups and individual Muslims who work tirelessly to spread the lie that Islam is good and peaceful, and by reinforcing the growing presence of Muslims in the West through immigration and through their increasing presence in every institution of our sociopolitical fabric, from Academe to Government to Media to public education to the public sector in general.

This paradoxical nexus probably can only subsist as long as the violence of the violent jihadists remains below a certain threshhold; but we have seen over the years that that threshhold may be ridiculously high precisely because of the pathology of PC MC. There is probably a level, nonetheless, which Muslims may in their impetuous and impatient fanaticism reach and cross, which would be too much even for the PC MCs, and would be the straw that broke the camel's back and the splash of cold water that would wake up the fevered dhimmis to dispel from their eyes once and for all that idiotic mirage to which desperately they continue to hang on: the Oasis of the Moderate Muslim.

"There may be prudential considerations, wherever Muslims are perceived as still too weak, for the avoidance of violence as the chosen instrument of Jihad. Besides, other means - deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest (discussed openly by Muslims as the surest way to take over the historic enemy, "Christian" Europe) -- to conduct Jihad that are far more effective, because they are not recognized as such, and are therefore not alarming to the great heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus masses of non-Muslims."

Again, this description of the two types of Jihad -- Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad -- misses the point of their paradoxical nexus. The point is being missed probably because the paradoxicality offends logic: Why would stealthy jihadists, who need to conduct their jihad stealthily -- such that, as Hugh describes they are not recognized as such, and are therefore not alarming to the great heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus masses of non-Muslims -- be colluding with violent jihadists whose violence, one would think, would precisely undermine the whole point of Stealth Jihad?

One would ask such a rhetorical question -- and answer it with a dismissal of any nexus between Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad -- if one failed to perceive how, massively all around us and for many years, after every violent attack by Muslims against non-Muslims, whether killing thousands spectacularly as in 911 or hundreds blatantly as in Madrid or London, or on smaller scales as in the scores of cases in the last quarter century, or in the hundreds of examples of bloodthirsty language and demonstration Muslims in large or small numbers, whether masses in protest or violent riot or individual clerics hailing from places all over the globe -- if one failed to perceive how after all this the non-Muslim West not only continues to fail to recognize the menace of Islam and not only remains "heedless complacent and too-busy-to-focus" but positively becomes more heedless, if not more eager to exculpate and whitewash Muslims and Islam.

It is reasonable to suppose that Muslims have long ago become aware of this amazingly strange and reckless propensity on the part of post-modern Westerners -- and that they have been exploiting it. (Indeed, we can see this type of exploitation at least attempted in the 17th century by a Muslim sultan in the south Pacific, pretending this his mainstream Islam had nothing to do with the frequent suicidal attacks on Spanish outposts in the Philippines, that the suicide attackers were just "renegades" over whom he had no control -- until the Spanish called his bluff and told him that cannons from an array of ships might begin to assail his palace unless these mujahideen stopped; after which lo and behold, the mujahideen magically ceased their activities.)

There is thus a nexus between Violent Jihad and Stealth Jihad. Each instance of the former actually strengthens the latter. It does this in two ways:

1) The old-fashioned way -- by instilling fear in the non-Muslim populace such that they begin adapting themselves to the Muslims in their midst in gingerly walking-on-eggshells solicitousness;

but also -- and this is the exquisitely crucial juncture of the argument here that repeatedly and obtusely goes ignored even in the still inchoate and amorphous Anti-Islam Movement:

2) by exploiting this strangely new West that has become dominantly PC MC in the last 50-odd years where before that time it was only marginally and occasionally so, if at all.

And what is it about the new PC MC nature of the West that permits exploitation by Muslims pursuing their Jihad in both violent and stealthy forms?

The answer to that goes back to #1 above, the first of two ways by which violent jihad actually -- seemingly paradoxically -- strengthens stealth jihad:

by instilling fear in the non-Muslim populace such that they begin adapting themselves to the Muslims in their midst in gingerly walking-on-eggshells solicitousness.

But PC MC people are not fully conscious of what they do and why they do it. Thus, they are not fully conscious of being afraid of Muslims, nor of why they are afraid. Semi-consciously, there is a psychological mechanism at work here, whereby they have convinced themselves that the vast majority of Muslims are harmless, peaceful, nice and law-abiding and will always be so, and that -- on the flip side -- only a tiny minority among them may be dangerous but for reasons that have nothing to do with the culture of Islam that makes Muslims Muslim. This assuages the lurking logic of the fear, that one has to fear from untold numbers in one's midst: by whittling it down to a manageable "tiny minority" who are relatively easily spotted, one's fear is managed.

Furthermore, PC MCs have convinced themselves that Muslims, being ostensibly "ethnic", must be accorded extraordinary protections -- both from the thought crimes of bigotry, prejudice and "racism", as well as from the physical crimes to which white Westerners as we all know are all too prone: lynchings, rounding up, interning in camps, ethnic cleansing, and of course, at the inexorable bottom of the slippery slope, genocide. The vast majority of Muslims therefore according to this mindset cannot possibly be guilty, can never be guilty -- for if they were, we as white Westerners would have no choice but to begin rounding them up and instituting a Holocaust of Brown People. We must therefore of course inhibit ourselves from that horrible (but obviously erroneous) eventuality at all cost. And one paramount way of controlling our white Western urge to abuse Brown People is to make sure that the belief in the Vast Majority of Peaceful Nice Muslims remains an iron-clad dogma, and that anything that smells of disobeying that dogma be ostracized from polite society, if not demonized.

Thus, each violent attack by Muslims, each instance of violent behavior by Muslims, each instance of bloodthirsty expression by Muslims -- only strengthens the general solicitousness toward Muslims; and this general, strengthened solicitousness in turn massively enables the stealth jihad both by reinforcing the mendacious propaganda of Muslim advocacy groups and individual Muslims who work tirelessly to spread the lie that Islam is good and peaceful, and by reinforcing the growing presence of Muslims in the West through immigration and through their increasing presence in every institution of our sociopolitical fabric, from Academe to Government to Media to public education to the public sector in general.

This paradoxical nexus probably can only subsist as long as the violence of the violent jihadists remains below a certain threshhold; but we have seen over the years that that threshhold may be ridiculously high precisely because of the pathology of PC MC. There is probably a level, nonetheless, which Muslims may in their impetuous and impatient fanaticism reach and cross, which would be too much even for the PC MCs, and would be the straw that broke the camel's back and the splash of cold water that would wake up the fevered dhimmis to dispel from their eyes once and for all that idiotic mirage to which desperately they continue to hang on: the Oasis of the Moderate Muslim.

Send an email to the LA Times like I did asking for further clarification. Mr. Spencer said it better than I so after my request I quoted him.

letters@latimes.com

Paraphrasing Robert Spencer, "Go ahead, Judith Miller...David Samuels. Consult, right away, with all the authorities on Islam -- those living and those dead. Yes, do look up, do wander in the pages of, the hundred greatest Western scholars of Islam who wrote between 1870 and 1970, and find in those pages any evidence, any evidence at all, that suggests that any of these scholars thought heretical the ideas of the centrality of Jihad, the natural violence of Jihad, the division of the world, in the Islamic view, between Muslim and Unbeliever, and the understanding that between the two a state of permanent war (though not always of open warfare), must exist until, at long last, the final triumph of Islam, and Islam dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere -- go ahead, quote chapter and verse.
Show us you are not cheap journalists of the kind famously denounced by Karl Kraus. Show us you have standards. Publish your findings in the Los Angeles Times, as a follow-up to your glib article there today.

In your new piece, explain more fully, please, exactly what you mean by "Islamic heretics."

While I am not Robert, I must explain to the poster just above that Robert, in similar fashion, is also not me.

Hersperado, I read your essay twice and suggest others do the same. (By the way, when you press Submit, you need be patient so as to avoid multiple posts.)

Took a while for me to figure out that MC meant multicultural...

Repeat posts are bad enough, but especially embarrassing when they are voluminous, as my thrice-posted one above is.

Thanks Still Breathing. On the repeat posts, I have learned to wait patiently after "submitting", but this time what happened was a variation of that theme: after I clicked "Submit", it chugged along forever it seemed, and then gave that message "Gateway Timeout" -- at which point I thought I'd be safe to just click refresh, to get me back to the threat itself. When I clicked refresh it kept on chugging forever, so I clicked it again -- thus engendering three posts.

Open letter to Judith Miller and David Samuels of the Los Angeles Times:

You say that jihad is heretical,
But its drift from Islam's hypothetical.
You don't make any sense
When there's no evidence -
So we think your condition is medical.