Prosecutor of Arkansas jihad murderer: "Whether he claims to be a Martian who flew in here on a spaceship or whatever doesn't matter"

Oh, Paleo, it might be ovaries rather than gonads. :-)

I'll bet the troops are soooooo glad to see him, knowing that their commander in chief will make sure that whatever military response they're sent to fight in, it will be one of halfway measures. You know, so as not to project such a large fingerprint, and all. To keep up appearances for that annoying other half of America, at the expense of those that put their lives on the line. I'm sure they love him and his crew.

Think Thrice wrote:

They also never want to follow up on motivation when it involves black on white crime.
................

I think you are right in many cases, Think Thrice. But Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula was Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad's other victim, who was wounded in the attack. Muhammad tried to murder Private Ezeagwula as well—and he is black.

Here's a picture of Pvt. Ezeagwula:

http://iraq.pigstye.net/images/articles/WilliamLong_3_original.jpg

Here he is back with his family after being released from the hospital—he is second from the left, still looking very somber:

http://www.arkansasleader.com/uploaded_images/IMG_5781-731386.gif

The former Carlos Bledsoe shot Pvt. Ezeagwula three times. I think his main concern was killing Kafirs.

ThinkThrice's point stands, however, for the reason that the sociopolitical process that has led our society to evade the problem of black racism against whites while absurdly exaggerating white racism against blacks, is a part of the same sociopolitical process that continues, in a myriad ways, to suppress rational thought in the face of the problem of Islam.

And no matter how many times we repeat the genuinely true mantra that "Islam is not a race", it seems to have little or no effect on the PC MC perception of Muslims as a wonderful rainbow of Ethnic Peoples or even, in the sense of a Lévi-Straussian construct, as members of a Race. And this PC MC perception is not merely a fanciful crotchet pulled out of thin air: it is enormously reinforced by the fact that 9 times out of 10, when we see a Muslim, we see someone who looks "ethnic".

Amen, Wellington; as often, your insights are spot-on. I would sure like to know what was going on in young Bledsoe's mind during that time he was searching for his spiritual home. That would make some interesting, if depressing, reading, I'd wager.

If we start conflating the struggle against Islamic law with racial issues, we hugely burden the struggle against the spread of political Islam (jihad and sharia). Why burden that struggle, which is already difficult enough? Unlike Islam, race does not threaten fundamental Western values of freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, etc.

And diverting the fight against totalitarian Islam into racial issues will understandably turn off many potential allies who might have been interested in resisting Islam. Not because those potential allies are PC. If you try to turn jihad and sharia into a racial issue, one may wonder if you are a biological or racial determinist. And if that is what you are, what place does freedom of spirit have in your worldview? Too little. And that's what makes a certain kind of emphasis on racial distinctions misguided. If human beings have within them no real freedom, no non-physical core of spirit, then of course race and genes matter more than anything, because then we are merely biologically beings subject to a rigid physiological determinism. Then biology, race, and genes are destiny. But if we are free beings, or beings at any rate partly free, we cannot be completely reduced to our genes or our race.

I don't see how your expression of racial resentments or racial disdain here, at this website, helps the resistance against Islam, and I do see how it hinders that resistance. Do you really think that whatever benefit there might be from expressing those resentments here, and uncovering at this website one or another PC deception with regard to race, outweighs the damage done to the resistance against Islam?

I'm not saying there is no place for greater honesty or openness about racial issues. Shelby Steele, who like Obama, is half white and half black, but unlike Obama, is conservative, has become well-known for delving insightfully into the psychological complexes many whites and blacks have developed in relation to each other on the basis of race. All that is interesting. But does it help the resistance against Islam to express racial resentments here?

I'm not sure why race has come into this discussion, and why you repeatedly bring it up here at Jihad Watch, as I've never heard Spencer talk about race (except to point out that Islam is not a race, it's an ideology) nor have I ever sensed any racial agenda whatsoever in anything he has said or written. He is clearly not about race. He's about protecting freedom of religion from the spread of supremacist Islam. I think most of us here value your highly perceptive and insightful writing, Hesperado, but I find this tendency of yours to bring up race misguided, at least for this website and for the resistance against political Islam.

If I've mischaracterized your statements or position, I imagine you'll enlighten me and others who might be wondering...

In Sahih Bukhari, the most canonical of hadith collections, Muhammad said, "Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him."

traeh,

Thanks for your questions -- they'll give me an opportunity to clear up some misconceptions about my position.

"If we start conflating the struggle against Islamic law with racial issues, we hugely burden the struggle against the spread of political Islam (jihad and sharia)."

I'm not conflating them; I'm pointing out how PC MC conflates them.

"Why burden that struggle, which is already difficult enough?"

Our struggle is burdened in great part precisely because of the conflation by PC MC of racial issues and Islam.

"...one may wonder if you are a biological or racial determinist."

I don't see the symbolism "race" as having much to do with biology. I don't subscribe to any theory that claims to gnostically explain why Mankind is mysteriously differentiated. At best, we can have recourse to an analysis of behaviors of cultures and subcultures, and go from there. There has developed a definable, and sociopolitically powerful, ideology of anti-"racism" in the past century, where the "racism" to which they are opposed has morphed irrationally out of contact with the reality of racism: and this irrational hypersensitivity to an imagined white Western "racism" allegedly of monumental proportions requiring massive government actions is directly related to the very similar posture, by the same PC MC types, of an irrational hypersensitivity to an imagined "Islamophobia".

"I don't see how your expression of racial resentments or racial disdain here, at this website, helps the resistance against Islam"

I haven't expressed any racial resentments or racial disdain that I can think of. As Spencer says to those who accuse him of Islamophobic resentments and disdain, if you could prove I have through my writings, I'd appreciate it. What I have been doing, however, is pointing out the racial resentments and disdain by PC MCs against Western whites, through their ideology and agenda of anti-"racism", and how that ideology and agenda has a direct relationship to why they persist in defending Muslims and in vilifying critics of Islam.

"I'm not sure why race has come into this discussion, and why you repeatedly bring it up here at Jihad Watch..."

I hope my responses above clarifies this.

Whenever a Muslim commits a terrorist act, he does it because of the exhortations to war in Islamic scripture and tradition, i.e. Qur'an 9:5, 9:29, 9:111, etc., etc., ad nauseam -- as Bledsoe/Muhammad candidly stated:

I wasn't insane or post-traumatic, nor was I forced to do this act, which I believe, and it is justified according to Islamic laws and the Islamic religion.

Right back at you, boy.

traeh,

In putting "race" between quotation marks, and then referring to "cultures and subcultures," you seem to be putting in doubt the very concept of "race," and denying the significance that racists give to that concept.

Like most ideologies, including irrational or gnostic ideologies, they are not utterly devoid of truth. They are a mish-mash of fact and fiction. As I said, Mankind is mysteriously differentiated: there do seem to be differences and different groupings. That over the centuries there has occurred lots of intermixing doesn't wipe the slate of differences blank.

Perhaps you agree with those scientists who deny strict scientific meaning to the concept of race, insofar as all the races have intermingled and none are pure anymore.

Your formulation expresses an apparent contradiction: if there is no meaning to the concept of race, then there cannot be "races" that have intermingled and are no longer pure.

Insofar as the concept of race assumes a non-existent racial purity, and absolutely differentiated racial groups, there is no such thing as race.

That strikes me as an unwarranted, or unnecessarily restrictive, "Insofar as". The ostensible fact of Mankind has two components:

1) a differentiation into groupings that have physiological components

2) varying and complex degrees of intermixing among these groupings that tend to obscure, but not eliminate, "purity" of any one grouping, if by "purity" is meant any criteria at all by which to distinguish the groupings. "Purity" in this context is not perfect, but nevertheless must be posited as a factor, else there would be no differentiations into groupings.

...I wonder if you underestimate the significance of the fact that in the U.S. people who are dark-skinned only got full equality in law about a generation ago, after a century of Jim Crow and centuries of slavery. Some hypersensitivity is to be expected.

Even granted expected reactions against an unjust past, there is the problem of over-reactions. And that is what has developed throughout the West: a massive, mainstream, pathological over-reaction, which directly impacts upon the West's inability to condemn Muslims for the Islam they support. Also, the massive irony and paradox of this post-modern development of Western anti-racism seems lost on the Leftist/PC MC ideologue: the racist West changed and became anti-racist! And furthermore, no other culture now or in all history, has achieved such a degree of enlightened freedom from xenophobia and tribalism as the post-modern West has. Instead of relaxing and being proud of that massive fact, the Leftist/PCMC maintains a paranoid vigilance about elements in his own society that must be monitored and controlled, lest this tenuous progress slip away into ultra-right-wing lynch mobs and Evangelical militia groups who are always lurking ready to plunge the West back into its former evil self. Meanwhile, a very real, and not fantasy-based, danger presents itself massively all over the world and within the West, but because the people who concretize that danger don't fit the anti-racist template and stereotype (White, Far Right, Christian), the danger they present is not only ignored, it is positively supported and protected, while those sounding the alarm are vilified and smeared as "racists". If you can't see this as a profound and reckless disease of the heart & mind throughout Western culture, I don't know what would convince you.

What you are saying will often, indeed perhaps most of the time, be taken as having an underlying racial agenda of some sort.

Because of my faith in the West, and because I see PC MC as an irrational hiccup in history that cannot last long (it has only been dominant and mainstream for the past 50 years in the West), I refuse to comport myself according to its irrational rules. Besides, even the most careful anti-Islam critics (such as Spencer and Pipes), including those who go out of their way to avoid uttering anything remotely even smelling of racism, are regularly accused of "racism" and bigotry by PC MC.

...unless you explicitly say, no, I am against those things, I believe in full legal equality for the races.

Nah, that will hardly placate the voraciously irrational maw of PC MC. They have a non-negotiable axiom: Any condemnation of anything Islamic is ipso facto racist. The anti-Islam person who would try to protest sincerely that he is not racist would just be assumed to be lying.

A few years ago I wrote a long essay delving into these issues. If you're interested (warning -- it is very long!), here's the link:

Racism

http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2006/10/racism.html

Abdal, you silly muslim! No other "religion" in the world today universally promotes and executes terrorist attacks except...that's right...ISLAM! Munich, The Achille Lauro, Rome, Lockerbie, Nairobi, 9/11, Nigeria, to name but a recent few. We know what the common denominator is here, don't we? Is it any wonder that when the word 'terrorism' comes up, MUSLIM is the first word associated? Wives beheaded, genitals mutilated, cartoonists attacked with axes, adulterers stoned to death, again, to name but a few. All performed by muslims--muslims who are so proud of their "accomplishments" that they jump to claim "credit" for their atrocities. What a sorry record for this ugly, disgusting lot.

Are you, then, the islamic brain-trust here?
You make shooting fish in a barrel look difficult--it's like dueling with an unarmed man!

"OF COURSE it matters...jeez! As we all know, WHENEVER any Muslim does anything bad, he did it BECAUSE he is a muslim...case closed! No need for any further investigation of causation."

It is cute how "Islam" or "Muslims" collectively, as a group, try to pass off any problems in their societies as being remnants of the civilization from before the time that Islam arrived. Honor killings for instance, they stomp their feet and wail that it has nothing, nothing nothing nothing to do with Islam, it is all religions, it is from before Islam came. Well if Islam was so great then it would have by whatever doctrines or beliefs make it so great found some way to stop those bad practices from before. So the problem is not Islam's fault, sure, check, got that. Then, at the same time, even though Islam did nothing but conquer a land and subjugate it, making all forms of study and progress near impossible, they do claim as "Islamic" all sorts of advancements from civilizations they conquered and subjugated but whose advancements only survived in spite of Islam not because of it. Just like Muhammad himself, the ideology he created is utterly delusional.

And one more thing, when Islam fights so bitterly and ceaselessly to gain and maintain absolute total 100% control of a society, that every single move anyone makes is scrutinized and held up against the demands of Islam, then when things go wrong they still find someone or something else to blame.

traeh,

"You seem to be treating the Islamic division of the world -- Muslims vs. Infidels -- as a racial division. I don't understand that."

As I argue elsewhere in that essay, "race" is not merely a biological category, it also has become a mythological / ideological category. If we were to rigorously require that the concept of "race" be only about physical biology, then of course the Islamic division of Mankind would not be a racial category. But I use the term as ideologues have twisted it -- for when ideologues create their alternative realities and cause sociopolitical disturbances in the world, then alternative realities become, unfortunately, part of reality. And the Islamic division of Mankind is not totally disconnected from perceived physical differences, insofar as Muslims tend to believe that the physical matter of Infidels is impure and can have actual concrete effects, such as the soiling of the Koran when an Infidel touches it, or the ruining of a Muslim's prayer if he comes in contact with the skin or hair of an Infidel just before or during prayer -- or even more radical manifestations, such as avoidance of contact at any time; and of course, the general revulsion, hatred and paranoia Muslims feel about Infidels that attends these physical manifestations.

"You also speak of

the paradox between amorphous boundaries and distinct entities

That seems to me a paradox central to all that is."

Yes; and my point was that PC MC tends to suppress one half of that paradox (the mysterious phenomenon and persistence of differences), while genuine racism tends to suppress the other half (the unity aspect in tension with the differences).