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The last time I replied to Cathy Young, several people asked me why I bothered, and advised me against replying to any and every attack from anyone with a weblog. And of course that is true. Recently someone sent me the URL of a weblog of someone who had fabricated an entire dialogue with me -- with no indication, of course, that the exchange was fictional. And another site purports to catalog my enormities, but its operator has proven to be just a liar. That sort of thing is not worthy of any reply, but Cathy Young still writes for the Boston Globe, as well as Reason magazine, and while it is increasingly clear that she is impervious to logical argumentation on these matters, I reply again not only because of her ability to disseminate her views widely, but because no doubt people of good will who, like her, have not sufficiently informed themselves on these matters, think the way she does. If they see our exchange, perhaps some of them will come to perceive some realities they have hitherto not noticed.
Anyway, her latest, "JihadWatch.com and anti-Muslim bigotry," is here.
In it, she again takes up the irrelevant question of comparative knowledge of Islam, stating, in contradiction to her earlier statement, that I know more about it than she does, which may or may not be true, and then concluding:
Just as clearly, a lot of people who have at least as much knowlege of the subject as Robert Spencer does, or more, radically disagree with his interpretations.
I wish she would be specific on who she means here. The only people she mentions in the rest of the piece are Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes. If she means them, she will run into difficulty. More on that later.
On the subject of Oriana Fallaci's preoccupation with Somali street vendors in Italy, and her failure to distinguish between those vendors and Islamic terrorists, Spencer asks if I think it's inconceivable that jihadist terrorists could be recruited among Somali street vendors. Of course I don't think so. I do, however, think it's absurd to excoriate those vendors, as Spencer does, for failing to "make any serious attempt to root jihad terrorists out of their ranks" (a task that the average immigrant surely doesn't have the time, the resources, or for that matter the guts to undertake).
Here Cathy Young is adopting an extremely narrow and restrictive interpretation of what I said, in order to portray my statement in the worst possible light and simultaneously avoid dealing with the point I was actually trying to make. I was not actually calling upon Somali street vendors in Europe to begin engaging in energetic anti-jihad activities within Muslim communities there, although of course I and any sane person should welcome their doing so, if they found the time, the resources, and the guts. The actual point I was making was that the aggregate of moderate Muslims in Europe, among whom surely there must be a few who do have time, resources, and guts, there is no concerted or organized effort to combat the spread of the jihad ideology. This is a grave and telling omission. Cathy Young has ducked out of dealing with its implications by focusing on Somali street vendors.
Then Young jumps back to another red herring, public urination by Muslims. She ignores the point that was being made by Oriana Fallaci, and by Hugh Fitzgerald in the comments field to my last reply. The point was not that only Muslims urinate in public, but that they have targeted places of significance for European culture. As Hugh said during the last go-round:
Not Robert, but I, pointed out that the defecation and urination -- deliberately done when other places were available -- in churches (where Muslims have in the pastbeen given refuge as squatters by islamisant tiers-mondistes among Italian clergy, mocked by that old anti-clerical anti-fascist anti-Communist anti-everything Oriana Fallaci). And the particular incident that inflamed Fallaci were the streams of urine that flowed down the Baptistery in Florence, which the world-travelling Cathy Young may recall, and may also recall the effect of urine on the "Gates of Heaven," that is the doors of the Battistero sculpted in metal by Ghiberti, who famously won the commission.Let me try to think of an analogous situation. Imagine a group of Muslims encamped near, say, the Bridge in Concord (the rude bridge/that arched the flood - that one), or possibly near the Lincoln Monument. And imagine that everyday, though there were plenty of other places to urinate, they deliberately aimed their ruder streams not into the Concord River, but right on the bridge, or on the obelisk erected in 1836 that stands right before that bridge. Or imagine that they did so, and repeatedly, to the Lincoln Monument. I offered Cathy Young the testimony of an outraged Italian at the same site -- she appears not to have paid any attention.
But to this Cathy Young replies only:
I'll leave it to the reader to decide who is veering toward the ridiculous. Spencer's "logic" seems to be that even if Muslims and non-Muslims are equally likely to pee in public places, when Muslims do it it's different and hostile toward "infidel society." And the evidence is .... ? (By the way, ranting is not quite the same thing as documenting.)
Well, the evidence was presented. If she may be excused for not reading Hugh's comment (although she read, and tried to use for her purposes, comments on previous posts), she likewise ignores this statement in my main reply: "Does the existence of public urination among non-Muslims somehow mean that public urination by Muslims is not ever and cannot be an expression of contempt for infidel society? Even when that urination targets landmarks of that society, as Fallaci has documented?" Fallaci was ranting, and not documenting? But Fallaci likewise lists specific incidents of these acts of contempt. Yet Young is evidently sure, despite the widespread presence among Muslims in Europe of an ideology that justifies such contempt, and the ready presence of facilities that would make this targeting of monuments unnecessary, that these acts have no significance. Why? Because non-Muslims urinate in public also. For someone who writes for a magazine called Reason, this is a disheartening incidence of narrow dogmatism and unwillingness to consider evidence.
Spencer also disputes my claim that JihadWatch has labeled Bernard Lewis, the eminent historian of Islam who warned about the danger of Islamic radicalism all the way back in 1990, a "dhimmi." He says that the article I linked does not support such a claim. Never mind that it appeared in the "Dhimmi Watch" section of the site.
We have never called Bernard Lewis a dhimmi. We have disagreed with certain elements of his analysis. The articles about him appeared at Dhimmi Watch because Dhimmi Watch, as the explanation on the left side of the page should make clear, deals not only with outright dhimmitude but also with academic distortions of the elements of Islam that give rise to fanaticism and violence. For Bernard Lewis to engage in some of these distortions, as in his dismissal of "dhimmi-tude" and of the Islamic grounds for suicide attacks, and for us to speak about it here does not make him a dhimmi. It had to be posted either here or on the Jihad Watch side; I suppose that if I had posted it there Young would be saying I called Lewis a mujahid. I don’t have a “Great and Renowned Professors of Middle East Studies With Whom I Largely Agree But With Whom I Have Some Disagreements Watch.” Perhaps I should register that domain. But until then, appearing in the New York Times does not make one a New Yorker; appearing in Time magazine doesn’t make one a wristwatch (and no, I am not comparing us to the NYT or Time mag). In employing this Argument By Masthead, Young is once again grasping at straws, apparently so intent on portraying us as wicked Islamophobes that she cannot even take my avowal of the importance of Bernard Lewis' work and denial that we consider him a dhimmi at face value.
Finally, Spencer takes issue with this passage:...honesty about the harsher and darker aspects of Islam and Islamic history is not the same as tarring all of Islam with the same brush and denying that the moderate strands even exist.Spencer calls this a "little calumny," and asserts that he does, in fact, acknowledge the existence of moderate Muslims and moderate strands of Islam.
Cathy Young has misread what I wrote. I said that "I have discussed (and Hugh Fitzgerald has as well) the issue of moderate Muslims and moderate Islam at great length, again and again." I did not say that I "acknowledge the existence of moderate Muslims and moderate strands of Islam," although of course I have said many times that the existence of moderate Muslims is an obvious fact, while moderate Islam remains elusive. There are moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate: all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence and all sects generally recognized as orthodox teach, with some variations, violent jihad and the necessity to impose Islamic law over the world.
What I took issue with as a calumny was Young's assertion that I tar "all of Islam with the same brush and [deny] that the moderate strands even exist." If I could not adduce evidence of the jihad ideology from all the madhahib, and were misrepresenting the teaching of some "strands" of Islam as the teaching of all of them, Young might have a case. But she is assuming I am doing that without evidence, and assuming that moderate Muslims represent an established tradition within Islamic theology and law -- again without evidence.
As an example, he cites this item, about a Muslim named Souleiman Ghali who has been fighting a battle against more hardline Muslims in San Francisco (and has lost some court battles when a radical imam accused him of wrongful discharge). All right then, a few questions: Does Spencer believe, as his website argues, that a moderate Muslim like Ghali is still a danger to the West because he has not renounced Islam and because his children may yet revert to a more militant form of it?
I thought the story of Ghali, who lost battles again and again against jihadists in San Francisco, was extremely revealing of the sensibilities of American Muslims. I never said or suggested that Ghali himself is a danger to the West. I would like to know, however, how Cathy Young can guarantee that Ghali's children will not "revert to a more militant form" of Islam. We recently saw that Nada Farooq, the wife of one of the suspected Canadian jihadists, is much more militant than her parents, who left Saudi Arabia to escape strict Islamic law. This is a phenomenon that needs to be acknowledged; no amount of scorn that Cathy Young can heap upon it will make it go away. Can she point to programs in mosques designed to keep this radicalization of youth from happening? Can she bring forth textbooks and seminars conducted by Muslims for Muslims, to counter the jihad ideology? She cannot. Yet she still attempts to suggest that even raising this question is somehow prima facie evidence of bigotry.
Had he pointed out the existence of Muslims like Ghali to his friend Oriana Fallaci, who is very vocal in her assertion that there is no such thing as moderate Islam, there is only one Islam?
Oriana Fallaci and I have talked extensively about these matters, in fact. But here Young is confusing the existence of moderate Muslims with the existence of moderate Islam. There is not only one Islam; there are many Islams, but none of those Islams that are generally considered orthodox reject jihad and Sharia supremacism. If Cathy Young thinks I am wrong in this, she should adduce some actual evidence to that effect.
Does he find it troubling that on his own site, the commenters on the item about Ghali put the word "moderate" in scare quotes and argue that Ghali needs to convert to another religion?
No more than that it troubles me that at my own site, Islamic apologists attempt to convert people to Islam and defend jihad violence. Unlike some vanity bloggers who allow only comments telling them how great they are, I allow virtually unrestricted commenting here. Comments are unmoderated, although if someone calls my attention to a post that is abusive or genocidal or obscene, I will remove it. As I said before, and as Cathy Young seems to have some difficulty grasping, if she thinks I agree with any given comment, let her establish that I believe what that comment said from my own writings. But of course, that she cannot do.
Spencer links to several other items in which he discusses moderate Muslims. The first two are attacks on moderate Muslims. The third asserts that while there are some moderate Muslims, they are not true Muslims at all because the essence of Islam is militant, and all attempts to reform Islam are quixotic. Indeed, Spencer specifically states:Some analysts have maintained that to note the existence of moderate Muslims is to assume the existence also of moderate Islam, but there is no reason why this must be the case, and the analysis itself betrays an awareness of the contents of the texts without a concomitant awareness of the realities of Islamic history and culture.Yet, in response to my assertion that he does not recognize the existence of moderate Islam, he points to an item in which he mentions a moderate Muslim.
Sleight of hand, anyone?
No. Her assertion, as I explained above, was actually that I tar "all of Islam with the same brush and [deny] that the moderate strands even exist." I was responding to that, and showing her that I had discussed the problem of Islamic moderation in some detail and on many occasions. If she thinks my conclusions are wrong, let her bring evidence. But that she cannot do.
The she goes on to criticize an Andrew Bostom piece I posted here a few days ago, in which he says that "the Koran’s 'verses of peace', frequently cited by both Muslim and non-Muslim apologists, most notably verse 2:256, 'There is no compulsion in religion', were all abrogated by the so-called verses of the sword...":
But here's the curious thing. The "Jihad Watchers" claim that Islam is uniquely impervious to reformation because its adherents regard all of its dictates as the absolute word of God, beyond human interpretation or reinterpretation. Yet here, Bostom is, in fact, talking about human interpretation by "classical Muslim Koranic commentators." What man can interpret, man can reinterpret.
In fact, I have never said that Islam is "uniquely impervious to reformation," although I have pointed out that such reformation will be extremely difficult -- precisely because mainstream Islamic thought on those "classical Muslim Koranic commentators" is that their interpretations cannot be challenged. Cathy Young has evidently never heard of the gates of ijtihad -- that is, open interpretation of Islamic texts in order to formulate laws -- or of the fact that they were closed a thousand years ago, and that mainstream Islamic sects and schools teach that all major questions have long been settled.
She then adduces Daniel Pipes, who points out that the Qur'an can be interpreted. Of course it can. The question is to what extent, and to what end. Young repeats Pipes' discussion of the thought of Mahmud Muhammad Taha, without pointing out that Taha was executed in 1985 for heresy, and his followers compelled to renounce his teachings. So this sterling example of a Muslim reformer is actually an example of the difficulties reformers face. But we don't hear that from Cathy Young.
Anyway, before she goes too far in putting a white hat on Pipes and a black one on me, Cathy Young also may be interested in what Pipes said about my book Onward Muslim Soldiers:
To understand the ideological sources of the terrorist enemy, read Robert Spencer's succinct, knowledgeable, and important book, Onward Muslim Soldiers. His systematic survey of such vital topics as radical Islam's aspirations, its unlikely alliance with the far left, and the need to encourage a moderate Islamic alternative are all valuable. But Spencer's signal contribution is his focus on the 'global threat to the West' that so many Western analysts and policymakers persistently refuse to see: jihad, or sacred war for Islam. There is no more important topic for citizens to comprehend.
Back to you, Cathy:
Spencer argues that Islam, unlike Christianity, has a specific theological mandate to expand by force and to convert, kill or subjugate nonbelievers. To this I can only say that, mandate or no, historically Christianity (until relatively recently) does not seem to have been far behind Islam when it comes to forcible conversion, slaughter or subjugation. Christianity has modernized; Islam, by and large, has not. The theological and cultural causes of this can be debated ad infinitum. Islamic reformation may well be more difficult than Christian reformation. It does not follow that it's impossible.
Right. But why will it be more difficult? Why has Christianity modernized and Islam has not? I am not going to be cowed by Cathy Young or anyone else into not daring to investigate these questions, and I am not going to shrink from pointing out that Islam has a doctrine of violence and subjugation while Christianity does not. The existence of such a doctrine is a matter of fact, not bigotry. Let Cathy Young prove me wrong if she can. Anyway, this question is distinct from that of what evil has been committed by Muslims or Christians or anyone else. No group has a monopoly on evil. But if Islam has a doctrine of violent jihad and subjugation, peaceful Muslims must confront and repudiate it. Accusing those who point this out of "Islamophobia" is not quite the same thing as genuine reform.
Theological debates aside, the incontrovertible fact is that many so-called "anti-Jihadists" use well-founded concerns about Islamic radicalism to promote bigotry and paranoia. The false alarm about the alleged "Jihadist connection" in the suicide of a University of Oklahoma student last fall was one such example.
Lots of strange questions about that one. Perhaps Cathy Young would be so kind as to provide answers to them -- answers free from "bigotry and paranoia."
The blog rumors about a "Jihadist connection" in the murder of a Coptic Christian family in Jersey City, were another. (JihadWatch continued to stoke these suspicions even after the alleged murderers were arrested and the case turned out to be a "simple" robbery.)
In that case, I was approached by a Copt who said he was a close friend of the murdered family. He gave me names and addresses, as well as a motive, of the people he said committed the murder. His story was confirmed by other Copts in New Jersey. I turned this information over to police. When others were arrested in the case, the Copts who had contacted me and some others had some lingering questions. Those questions have never yet been answered. If Cathy Young or the Jersey City police would care to answer them, I would appreciate hearing the answers. I don't know what motive the Copts with whom I spoke could have had in passing on false information to me, and I think there is much more to this case than meets the eye -- which is not to say that I think at this point that it was a jihad slaying. In any case, I never presented the material I had been given as certainly true; in fact, I never published here or anywhere most of what I had been told. For Cathy Young to present all this as continuing to stoke suspicions simply ignores a good deal of what happened. But it doesn't seem from her whole reply that sticking to the facts is very high on her list.
And here, again courtesy of JihadWatch.com, is the latest example: a news story about a Safeway clerk in Denver, Colorado, Michael Julius Ford, who went on a shooting spree at work and was shot dead by a SWAT team. Ford's mother and sister said that he had been teased at work about being a Muslim -- a fact that is duly highlighted by JihadWatch.com...
All right, Ms. Young. It was reported that his mother and sister said that. Did they not say it? Should I have ignored that they said it, despite the fact that it was the only actual clue presented as to the shooter's motive? They denied saying it later, in fact, and I reported that too. In any case, Young's coup de grace follows that:
Because, as we all know, non-Muslims never snap and go on shooting sprees at work or at school.But, of course, when Muslims do it, it's different. Just like public urination.
Were there no jihad ideology or impulse toward Sharia supremacism, were there no deeply inculcated contempt for unbelievers, Young's point would hold: human nature, after all, is everywhere the same, and people of all kinds snap. It would be absurd to assert that evil is the province of only one group, and of course I never have, despite Young's attempt at a reductio ad absurdum here. The problem is that she seems adamantine in her unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that something is known as a religion could teach anything but general benevolence, and to point out otherwise could be anything but bigotry.
It is this kind of willful ignorance that leaves us so vulnerable to continuing jihad activity in the West.
Posted by Robert at July 6, 2006 6:53 AM
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Robet, don't waste your time with her. She has a boss (or two) if she writes for more one publication unless they are owned by the same company. Tell her boss(es) you will take legal action if she continues to defame you by making these charges and misquoting you.
Posted by: Bohemond_1069![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 6, 2006 12:32 PM
....her unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that something is known as a religion could teach anything but general benevolence, and to point out otherwise could be anything but bigotry.
Don't let her get under your skin. Having just read three books of the History of Al-Tabari, I can safely say that anybody who claims Islam is normal is, well, abnormal.
Lotsa that going around these daze.
Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at July 6, 2006 12:37 PM
Robert,
I for one do think it's important for you to respond to Ms. Young, even if she's unable to see the forest for the trees. We need people such as yourself engaged and talking about Islam. Hopefully, her readers will look beyond her ignorant opinions and come to JW/DW to look for themselves.
at July 6, 2006 12:43 PM
I smell taqiyya...
Posted by: eloivsdiablo at July 6, 2006 1:02 PM
Cathy Young appears to be a proper "dyed in the wool moon-bat: "
Ideological blinders, selective memory, limited hearing and listening ability, overall shallowness.. and so very typically obsessed with her very own importance!
She comes across as Inflexibly opinionated, without inspiration, in defensive mode, which prevents her to develop the ability to logical reasoning. Cathy Young needs something that could possibly penetrate that psychological Hitler-helmet that she so proudly wears....
Posted by: sheik yer'mami at July 6, 2006 1:04 PM
I enjoy the irony of Young writing for a magazine called Reason.
Posted by: BadaBingBadaBoom at July 6, 2006 1:06 PM
Cathy, Robert's response was excellent. Would be best if you spent some time reading, from Spencer to Bostom to Bat Y'eor and beyond. (Bat Y'eor and Beyond. Isn't that a retail outlet?)
You have refused to accept that even those of use who are paranoic have a significant real-world enemy in the religion of eternal, just-under-wraps violence.
Even the Church is getting up to speed:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23225
The truth will set you free, or at least free of willfulness. Take a hike... and open a book.
Posted by: StillBreathing at July 6, 2006 1:10 PM
This just pisses me off.
Posted by: JanuaryMan at July 6, 2006 1:21 PM
Robert,
Dealing with people like Young* is frustrating, but someone's got to do it. Your efforts are appreciated. As you've noted, one can't overlook the fact that she has a fairly wide readership. You are not only countering her errors but getting publicity for JW/DW at the same time.
*By that, I mean people who (a) haven't read the material (Koran, Hadith, Sira), but who (b) remain steadfast in their initial biased assumptions about said material.
Dealing with politically correct misconceptions is half the battle. In the case of Young, it is not simply a matter of political correctness. Rather, she has started out with an erroneous set of assumptions. Having stated those publicly, she has now got herself into a situation where she is unwilling to admit, even partly, that she might have been mistaken or had misunderstood. In other words, at this point, she's just being stubborn.
Posted by: Archimedes at July 6, 2006 1:21 PM
Don't Infidels do what Believers do, asks Cathy Young? Don't Infidels urinate and micturate in public sometimes, just as Believers do? And Robert answers, as I did before, that there is a difference between those who deliberately, even though there are alternatives, defecate on the floors in churches that they squat in, where they have been given refuge, or urinate -- as they have, on the walls of the Battistero in Florence, which is what an enraged Oriana Fallaci mentioned in "The Rage and the Pride." Young appears not to know very much about the behavior of Muslims in Europe, and especially in Italy, where every corner of every Umbrian or Tuscan village, and in every city, appears to be the site of a work of Western art, differing only in what layer of the palimpsest -- Etruscan here (in Perugia or Viterbo or other of the Twelve Cities), Greek there (in Magna Graecia), Roman all over, and then finally Christian -- the work of Western man, sculpting and painting and drawing the human form.
She does the same with this business of Muslims simply "snapping." [How often is it merely a matter of "snapping"?] Here is how she puts it:
"Because, as we all know, non-Muslims never snap and go on shooting sprees at work or at school.
But, of course, when Muslims do it, it's different."
Well, in fact it is different. And let us explain why. When non-Muslims, Infidels, "snap," they have any number of people or things to blame, and they may, or may not, seek to wreak revenge, to "even the score," with all kinds of people.
But Muslims have been provided the mental grid of Islam, and on that grid the world is laid, uncompromisingly divided between Believer and Infidel, between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. And if a Muslim "snaps," or is simly depressed, then he has the Infidel to blame, to find fault with. For the Nazis, it was Treitschke's "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck." For Muslims, it is, in a less hideously violent key, the Infidels who are "unser Ungluck." Cathy Young, knowing almost nothing of Islam, but presumably having plausible, friendly, affable, possibly ignorant-of-Islam Muslim friends (raised in the United States, unfmailiar with the texts, unfamiliar with what affecct those texts ordinarily have on people who take them seriously, and are raised in Muslim societies where nothing else gets through), prefers not to see this.
Here is how I put it in a previous posting from which an excerpt is below:
"...the problem is that in any society, millions and millions of people at one time or another fall into depressions. In the United States, more than 15 million people at any one time are said to be severely depressed. When this happens to Infidels, they can blame all sorts of things: their parents, their children, their siblings, Amerika, The System, the Republicans, the Democrats, immigration, affirmative action, lack of affirmative action, crooked financial analysts, Wall Street speculators, Chinese and Indian competition, Fate, the stars in their alignment, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level -- even, at times, themselves.
What happens when a Muslim finds himself in disarray? You are Muhammad Atta, and things are not working out in Hamburg, where you set off to study urban planning, and you are not the great success you were supposed to be, and the Western world is so baffling, so confusing. You are Albanna, dancing the night away in cocaine-soaked clubs of West Hollywood, and you are piling failure upon failure, for you failed to establish a practice as a lawyer in Jordan, and you need to find a solution more permanent and steady than that offered by that cocaine, those girls, that music by Nine Inch Nails.
When "Mike" Hawash, an Intel engineer with an American wife and three American children, earning $360,000 a year and the respect of his colleagues, turned to Islam, and more Islam, and then to deed over his house to his wife, and to make plans to fight the Americans in Afghanistan, after the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, was he a "nut case"? Or was he someone who, in his recent return to Islam, only reflecting his need for Islam and more Islam as a stay against confusion and depression? And if the Answer for Muslims, even those who are not especially observant, those who seem to be thoroughly Westernized and to have been the recipients of the best the West has to offer, is Islam and more Islam, then the Western world, the world of Infidels, owes it to itself to protect its own legacy, and to keep out those who, in moments of the kind of doubt or depression that come on all of us, will always and everywhere turn, or re-turn, to Islam."
[Posted by: Hugh at April 15, 2006 10:40 AM]
And who are these Muslims who, in Cathy Young's phrase, simply "snap"? Did "Mike" Hawash "snap" or did he over a very long time become more religious, and then systematically deed over his house to his wife, write his will, and make other plans before going off, hoping to kill Americans in Afghanistan? Did Richard Reid simply "snap"? Did Jose Padilla? Did the people in Lackawanna, or in Texas, or in Oregon, or in Virginia, "snap" in their plotting? How many of the attacks planned, or then carried out, are those of Muslims who simply "snapped"? Did Taheri-Reza, the student who had been raised in the United States, by parents who had fled Iran, and who by all accounts were largely indifferent to Islam, but who in his mental disarray and ill-digested bits of philosophizing (in his pages of handwritten explanation explaining his motivation, in between his perfectly doctrinaire citing of Islamic tenets and Qur'anic passages, he also manages to repeat, as if to show he was a deep thinkger, a single phrase from Descartes, no doubt picked up in some Intro to Western Phil. course -- "clear and distinct ideas." Did he "snap"? No. He planned for quite a while.
But let us posit that the single case Cathy Young describes as unfair to mention -- that of the man who killed fellow workers because they teased him about being a Muslim. Does this tell us anything? How many people are teased about this or that, and how many of them "snap" and then try to kill those teasing them? And is it not important to note that the target of Muslim blame for all possible setbacks, of the kind we all experience, is always and everywhere the Infidel?
This is one point that Cathy Young fails to grasp. There are so many others.
Posted by: Hugh at July 6, 2006 1:32 PM
One more thing. Cathy Young describes the practice of writing "moderate" Muslims rather than moderate Muslims, a silly and sinister use of scare quotes. No, it isn't. It is a way to suggest that the word "moderate" means nothing here unless it is defined; that the word is never defined by those who use it, and that it is a panacea, guaranteed to cure all Infidel fears, but a silly one, promoted by the mountebank with his coney-pitch, outside the tent, foisting his wares on innocent Infidels.
Making the point of the pointlessness of this term "moderate Muslim," these quotation marks are useful, as useful as around the word "Palestinian" to express doubt about the existence of a separate "Palestinian people," doubts based on the sudden invention of that people after the Six-Day War, and on the complete absence of any mention of this "Palestinian people" by any Arab spokesman prior to that date. For before it was always used merely as a geographic adjective when it was used at all -- as the "Palestinian" Arab people.
Finally, the subject of the "moderate" and, therefore, the "immoderate" Muslim, and our poor powers to distinguish one from the other, or our transparent attempt to soothe ourselves with the notion that the "moderate" Muslim is the one who tells us he is a "moderate," and that this somehow guarantees not only his own "moderation" but also that of his offspring in perpetuity. As the Chapel Hill would-be murderer of Infidels demonstrates, and as so much other evidence piles up from the Muslim communities within Europe, where the My-Son-the-Fanatic phenomenon, with the second and third generation of Muslims being far more religious, far more fanatical, than, often, the first generation of Muslim immigrants, there is no way to know if this self-described "moderate" is
1) telling the truth
2) means by "moderate" what we Infidels think that word should mean
3) will remain forever "moderate" whatever happens to him
4) guaranteeing that his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren will also inherit, in a wierd Lamarkism, the acquired characteristic of "moderation."
It is entirely fitting, and not a cheap use of scare quotes, as Young would ahve it, to write "moderate" Muslim and not moderate Muslim.
Posted by: Hugh at July 6, 2006 1:45 PM
As dew-fresh today as it was when first posted on November 25, 2004 is the following:
November 25, 2004
Hugh Fitzgerald: Ten Things to Think When Thinking of Muslim "Moderates"
Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald's...exploration of the very concept of moderate Islam and the existence of moderate Muslims:
"1. Not only Muslims, but "islamochristians" objectively promote and push the propagandistic line that disguises the Jihad (evidence of which can be found worldwide), and mislead as to both what prompts that Jihad (not "poverty" or "foreign policy" but the precepts of the belief-system of Islam) and what will sate it (not Kashmir, not Chechnya, not the absurd "two-state solution," not continued appeasement in France and Holland -- there is nothing that will sate or satisfy it, as long as part of the globe is as yet resistent to the rule of Islam). "Christians" such as Fawaz Gerges or Rami Khoury, or someone who was born a Christian, such as Edward Said, are Arabs whose views are colored by that self-perception. Their loyalty to the community and history of Arabs causes them to be as loyal to the Islamic view of things as if they had been born Muslim. They stoutly defend Islam against all of Western scholarship (in Orientalism), or divert attention away from Islam and constantly assert, in defiance of all the evidence, from Bali to Beslan to Madrid, that the "problem of Israel/Palestine" -- the latest, and most sinister formulation of the Jihad against Israel -- is the fons et origo of Muslim hostility and murderous aggression throughout the world. Save for the Copts and Maronites, who regard themselves not as Arabs but as "users" of the "Arabic language" (and reject the idea that such "users" therefore become "Arabs"), many Arab Christians have crazily embraced the Islamic agenda; the agenda, that is, of those who have made the lives of Christians in the Middle East so uncertain, difficult, and at times, imperilled. The attempt to be "plus islamiste que les islamistes" -- the approach of Rami Khoury and Hanan Ashrawi -- simply will not do, for it has not worked. It is Habib Malik and other Maronites in Lebanon who have analysed the problem of Islam in a clear-eyed fashion. Indeed, the best book on the legal status of non-Muslims under Islam is that of the Lebanese (Maronite) scholar Antoine Fattal.
Any "islamochristian" Arab who promotes the Islamic agenda, by participating in a campaign that can only mislead Infidels and put off their understanding of Jihad and its various instruments, is objectively as much part of the problem as the Muslim who knowingly practices taqiyya in order to turn aside the suspicions of non-Muslims. Whoever acts so as to keep the unwary Infidel unwary is helping the enemy.
Think, for a minute, of Oskar Schindler. A member of the Nazi Party, but hardly someone who followed the Nazi line. But what if Schindler had at some point met with Westerners -- and had continued, himself, to deny that the Nazis were engaged in genocide, even if he himself deplored it and would later act against it? Would we think of him as a "moderate"? As someone who had helped the anti-Nazi coalition to understand what it was up against?
Or for another example, think of Ilya Ehrenburg, who in 1951 or so was sent abroad by Stalin to lie about the condition of Yiddish-speaking intellectuals whom Stalin had recently massacred. Ehrenburg went to France, went to Italy. He did as he was told. "Peretz? Markish? Oh, yes, saw Peretz at his dacha last month with his grandson. Such a jovial fellow. Markish -- he was great last year in Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District -- you should see how it comes across in zhargon, Yiddish..." And so it went. Eherenburg lied, and lied. He was not a Stalinist. He hated Stalin. He of course hated the destruction of Peretz, Markish, and many others who had been killed many months before -- as Ehrenburg knew perfectly well. When he went abroad and lied to the editors of Nouvelle Revue Francaise, what was he? Objectively, he was promoting the interests of Joseph Stalin, and the Red Army, and the Politburo. We need not inquire into motives. We need only see what the results of such lying were. And the same is true of those Christian Arabs who lie on behalf of Islam -- some out of fear, some out of an ethnocentric identification so strong that they end up defending Islam, the religion of those who persecuted the Christian Arabs of the Middle East, and some out of venality (if Western diplomats and journalists can be on the Arab take, why not Arabs themselves?), some out of careerism. If you want to rise in the academic ranks, and your field is the Middle East, unless you are a real scholar -- Cook or Crone or Lewis -- better to parrot the party line, which costs you nothing and gains you friends in tenure-awarding, grant-giving, reference-writing circles. There is at least one example, too, among those mentioned, in a situation where an Arabic-speaking Christian, attempting to find refuge from Muslim persecution, needed the testimony of an "expert" -- which "expert," instead of offering a pro-bono samaritan act, demanded so much money to be involved (in a fantastic display of greed) that the very idea of solidarity among Arab Christians was called by this act permanently into question.
2. The word "moderate" cannot be reasonably applied to any Muslim who continues to deny the contents -- the real contents, not the sanitized or gussied-up contents -- of Qur'an, hadith, and sira. Whether that denial is based on ignorance, or based on embarrassment, or based on filial piety (and an unwillingness to wash dirty ideological laundry before the Infidels) is irrelevant. Any Muslim who, while seeming to deplore every aspect of Muslim aggression, based on clear textual sources in Qur'an and hadith, or on the example of Muhammad as depicted in the accepted sira -- Muhammad that "model" of behavior -- is again, objectively, acting in a way that simply misleads the Infidels. And any Muslim who helps to mislead Infidels about the true nature of Islam cannot be called a "moderate." That epithet is simply handed out a bit too quickly for sensible tastes.
3. What of a Muslim who says -- there are terrible things in the sira and hadith, and we must find a way out, so that this belief-system can focus on the rituals of individual worship, and offer some sustenance as a simple faith for simple people? This would require admitting that a great many of Muhammad's reported acts must either be denied, or given some kind of figurative interpretation, or otherwise removed as part of his "model" life. As for the hadith, somehow one would have to say that Bukhari, and Muslim, and the other respected muhaddithin had not examined those isnad-chains with quite the right meticulousness, and that many of the hadith regarded as "authentic" must be reduced to the status of "inauthentic." And, following Goldziher, doubt would have to be cast on all of the hadith, as imaginative elaborations from the Qur'an, without any necessarily independent existence.
4. This leaves the Qur'an. Any "moderate" who wishes to prevent inquiry into the origins of the Qur'an -- whether it may be the product of a Christian sect, or a Jewish sect, or of pagan Arabs who decided to construct a book, made up partly of Christian and Jewish material mixed with bits and pieces of pagan Arab lore from the time of the Jahiliya -- or to prevent philological study (of, for example, Aramaic and other loan-words) -- anyone who impedes the enterprise of subjecting the Qur'an to the kind of historical inquiry that the Christian and Jewish Bibles have undergone in the past 200 years of inquiry, is not a "moderate" but a fervent Defender of the Faith. One unwilling to encourage such study -- which can only lead to a move away from literalness for at least some of the Believers -- again is not "moderate."
5. The conclusion one must reach is that there are, in truth, very few moderates. For if one sees the full meaning of Qur'an, hadith, and sira, and sees how they have affected the behavior of Muslims both over 1400 years of conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and in stunting the development -- political, economic, moral, and intellectual -- of Muslims everywhere, it is impossible not to conclude that this imposing edifice is not in any sense moderate or susceptible to moderation.
What must an intelligent Muslim, living through the hell of the Islamic Republic of Iran, start to think of Islam? Or that Kuwaiti billionaire, with houses in St. James Place and Avenue Foch and Vevey, as well as the family/company headquarters in Kuwait City, who sends his children to the American School in Kuwait, and boasts that they know English better than they know Arabic, helps host Fouad Ajami when he visits Kuwait, is truly heartsick to see Kuwait's increasing islamization? Would he allow himself to say what he knows in public, or in front of half-brothers, or to friends -- knowing that at any moment, they may be scandalized by his free-thinking views, and that he may run the risk of losing his place in the family's pecking order and, what's more, in the family business?
The mere fact that Muslim numbers may grow in the Western world represents a permanent threat to Infidels. This is true even if some, or many, of those Muslims are "moderates" -- i.e. do not believe that Islam has some kind of divine right, and need, to expand until it covers the globe and swallows up dar al-harb. For if they are still to be counted in the Army of Islam, not as Deserters (Apostates) from that Army, their very existence in the Bilad al-kufr helps to swell Muslim ranks, and therefore perceived Muslim power. And even the "moderate" father may sire immoderate children or grandchildren -- that was the theme of the Hanif Kureishi film, quasi-comic but politically acute, "My Son the Fanatic." Whether through Da'wa or large families, any growth in the Muslim population will inhibit free expression (see the fates of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the threats made to Geert Wilders, Carl Hagen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others), for politicans eager to court the Muslim vote will poohpooh Muslim outrages and strive to have the state yield to Muslim demands -- for the sake of short-term individual gain. And Muslim numbers, even with "moderates," increases the number of Muslim missionaries -- for every Muslim is a missionary -- whether conducting "Sharing Ramadan" Outreach in the schools (where a soft-voiced Pakistani woman is usually the soothing propagandist of choice), or Da'wa in a prison. The more Muslims there are, the more there will be -- and no one knows which "moderate" will end up distinctly non-moderate in his views, and then in his acts.
And this brings up the most important problem: the impermanance of "moderate" attitudes. What makes anyone think that someone who this week or month has definitely turned his back on Jihad, who will have nothing to do with those he calls the "fanatics," if he does not make a clean break with Islam, does not become a "renegade" or apostate, will at some point "revert" not to Islam, which he never left, but to a more devout form, in which he now subscribes to all of its tenets, and not merely to a few having to do with rites of individual worship?
6. The examples to the contrary are both those of individuals, and of whole societies. As for individual Muslims, some started out as mild-mannered and largely indifferent to Islam, and then underwent some kind of crisis and reverted to a much more fanatical brand of Islam. That was the case with urban planner Mohammad Atta, following his disorienting encounter with modern Western ways in Hamburg, Germany -- Reeperbahn and all. That was also the case with "Mike" Hawash, the Internet engineer earning $360,000 a year, who seemed completely integrated (American wife, Little League for the children, friends among fellow executives at Intel who would swear up and down that he was innocent) -- until one fine day, after the World Trade Center attacks, he made out his will, signed the house over to his wife, and set off to fight alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan (he got as far as China) against his fellow Americans. In other words, if fanatical Muslims exist, it does not mean that they all start out as fanatics. Islam is the necessary starting place, and what sets off a "moderate" may have little to do with anything the Infidels do, any question of foreign policy -- it may simply be a crisis in an individual Muslim's life, to which he seeks an answer, not surprisingly, in ... more Islam.
7. Much the same lesson can be drawn from the experience of whole societies. In passing, one can note that the position of Infidels under the Pahlevi regime was better than it had been for centuries -- and under the regime that followed, that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that position of Infidels became worse than it had been for centuries. "Secularism" in Islamic countries is never permanent; the weight and the threat of Islam is ever-present.
The best example of this is Turkey since 1924, when Ataturk began his reforms. He tried in every way he could -- through the Hat Act (banishing the salat-friendly fez); commissioning a Turkish translation of the Qur'an and an accompanying tafsir (commentary) in Turkish; ending the use of Arabic script for Turkish; establishing government control of the mosques (even attacking recalcitrant imams and destroying their mosques); giving women the right to vote; establishing a system that discouraged the wearing of the hijab; encouraging Western dress; and discouraging, in the army, preferment of any soldier who showed too great an interest in religion. This attempt to constrain Islam was successful, and was reinforced by the national cult of Ataturk.
But the past few decades have shown that Islam does not die; it keeps coming back. In Turkey, it never went away, despite the creation of a secular stratum of society that amounts perhaps to 25% of the population, with another 25% wavering, and 50% still definitely traditional Muslims. Meanwhile, Turks in Germany become not less, but more fervent in their faith. And Turks in Turkey, of the kind who follow Erdogan, show that they may at any moment emerge and take power -- and slowly (very slowly, as long as that EU application has not been acted on, one way or another) they can undo Ataturk. He was temporary; Islam is forever.
8. That is why even the designation of some Muslims as "moderates" in the end means almost nothing. They swell Muslim numbers and the perceived Muslim power; "moderates" may help to mislead, to be in fact even more effective practitioners of taqiyya/kitman, for their motive may simply be loyalty to ancestors or embarrassment, not a malign desire to fool Infidels in order to disarm and then ultimately to destroy them.
9. For this reason, one has to keep one's eye always on the objective situation. What will make Infidels safer from a belief-system that is inimical to art, science, and all free inquiry, that stunts the mental growth, and that is based on a cruel Manichaean division of the world between Infidel and Believer? And the answer is: limiting the power –- military, political, diplomatic, economic power -- of all Muslim polities, and Muslim peoples, and diminishing, as much as possible, the Muslim presence, however amiable and plausible and seemingly untroubling a part of that presence may appear to be, in all the Lands of the Infidels. This is done not out of any spirit of enmity, but simply as an act of minimal self-protection -- and out of loyalty and gratitude to those who produced the civilization which, however it has been recently debased by its own inheritors, would disappear altogether were Muslims to succeed in islamizing Europe -- and then, possibly, other parts of the world as well.
10. "There are Muslim moderates. Islam itself is not moderate" is Ibn Warraq's lapidary formulation. To this one must add: we Infidels have no sure way to distinguish the real from the feigning "moderate" Muslim. We cannot spend our time trying to perfect methods to make such distinctions. Furthermore, in the end such distinctions may be meaningless if even the "real" moderates hide from us what Islam is all about, not out of any deeply-felt sinister motive, but out of a humanly-understandable ignorance (especially among some second or third-generation Muslims in the West), or embarrassment, or filial piety. And finally, yesterday's "moderate" can overnight be transformed into today's fanatic -- or tomorrow's.
Shall we entrust our own safety to the dreamy consolations of the phrase "moderate Muslim" and the shapeshifting concept behind it that can be transformed into something else in a minute?"
One waits, no doubt in vain, for Cathy Young to take this in. But at this point, she can't back down. She can't concede. She can't be -- Reasonable. Amour-propre before all else. So much for that Contributor to "Reason" Magazine.
at July 6, 2006 1:50 PM
All I can think of, in relation to Ms. Young's 'reasoning' is the song by the band Garbage (pun not intended, but welcomed): "Stupid Girl".
She's got more strawmen going than a tap-dancing platoon from "The Wizard of Oz".
Rather than read the source materials, she argues fatuously about their uncomprehended epiphenomenon.
It's the jihad, stupid (girl)!
(Do I hear her humming "If I Only Had A Brain"?...)
Posted by: profitsbeard at July 6, 2006 2:00 PM
A silly vain woman. She's been caught out and now can't admit she was wrong. So we get all these absurd twists and turns - anything but actually think about what Robert and Hugh (and Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina and Aayan Hiris Ali and a dozen others) have written. What a waste of everybody's time! The journal she writes for should be renamed Unreason magazine.
Posted by: Yojimbo at July 6, 2006 2:13 PM
All the stories posted daily on JW and DW since its founding and Young can find fault in only enough to count on one hand (and the reality of those particular posts far outweighs her complaints)... Keep up the exceptional work Mr. Spencer.
Ms. Young reminds me of the "poppin' jay" King Tolerance who used to comment on DW a while back. All style, no substance and completely devoid of intellectual honesty. Mesmerized by her own brilliance she is liable to trip and fall over the reality of the ROP.
Posted by: Alone at July 6, 2006 2:16 PM
I stumbled upon it today.
http://radicalwatch.blogspot.com/2006/01/radical-website-jihadwatch.html
Posted by: arjun.sevak at July 6, 2006 2:42 PM
Not "mesmerized." Just not willing, not now, not at this point, to sit and study and think. How can she, at this point, decide that what was pointed out above by Robert and others, makes sense, is not easily dismissable "bigotry" or "islamophobia," but makes sense? And what can she do with such people as Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ali Sina, Mohammed Al-Garbi, and so many others? The question of Islam, of the textual sources and the varied instruments of Jihad, which along with the possibly unreversible changes in the environment is the most important question of the age, is now one where she cannot make sense. She cannot even permit herself the luxury of trying to make sense. And this she must, however dimly, realize. How difficult it must be for her, and at least one pang of fellow-feeling cannot be disentangled from other, less sympathetic, emotions.
Posted by: Hugh at July 6, 2006 2:45 PM
Cathy Young writes: Because, as we all know, non-Muslims never snap and go on shooting sprees at work or at school. But, of course, when Muslims do it, it's different.
Robert replied: Were there no jihad ideology or impulse toward Sharia supremacism, were there no deeply inculcated contempt for unbelievers, Young's point would hold: human nature, after all, is everywhere the same, and people of all kinds snap.
Cathy Young would, by her logic, irrationally limit law enforcement in its rational pursuit of narrowing the field of data whenever it can. All law enforcement agencies around the world utilize the technique of profiling for the simple reason that they do not have infinite resources, manpower and money.
Now, if out of that amorphous and unmanageable criminal pool of "any human being who could snap and go postal", law enforcement agencies could narrow down at least subcategories of that pool, and help prevent crimes in the near future, what reasonable person would object to that?
To the degree that a subcategory of "spontaneously going postal" people whose "postal" outbursts are motivated by ideology in addition to the typical "postal" motivators appears on the radar, it would be irrational to expect law enforcement to ignore this.
How would law enforcement act on this subcategorization? By setting up criteria whereby certain behaviors are "flagged" as indicators of a potential for Islamic "snapping":
a) when a Muslim undergoes a change and noticeably starts taking his religion (particularly the intolerant aspects of it) "seriously"
b) when a Muslim starts saying and writing things that reflect the aspects of Islamic intolerance such as the division of the world between Infidel and Muslim, an outlook on world politics where Muslims are perceived as being "attacked" everywhere by Infidels and consequently in need of being "defended", the numerous commands to kill Infidels in the Qur'an, the numerous descriptions of Infidels as vile and worthy of damnation in the Qur'an, the virtues of jihad, the virtues of dying while "defending" Islam from its "enemies", etc.
c) when a Muslim begins to associate with other Muslims who have a paper trail or web of associations linking them to extremist Islamic groups.
These three criteria (there could be more) to be useful to law enforcement would have to involve a certain degree of monitoring of the general Muslim population, for the obvious fact that law enforcement cannot predict when any given Muslim will begin doing this, and for the less obvious fact (at least less obvious to the likes of Cathy Young) that the general Muslim population has shown itself reluctant to assist law enforcement in rooting out their extremist bad apples.
For more exploration of profiling (including the additional wrinkle of racial profiling) and the problem of Islam, see my blog, The Hesperado, at
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/
at July 6, 2006 2:51 PM
Mr. Spencer:
I found your point-by-point response to Ms. Young's column instructive and for that reason alone I am glad you "bothered" with making a response.
Two things impress me in particular from this exchange. The first is that Ms. Young originally declined to engage you in live debate, yet she continues to snipe from behind her editor. This smacks of uncertainty or -shall we say- faint-heartedness on her part. The second thing that impressed me was your description of her stance as one of "willful ignorance."
Willful ignorance, or deliberately turning away from all of the facts that are inconvenient to a prestated position, runs counter to open and productive discussion. If Ms. Young doesn't want to bother with the facts because her mind is already made up, then the evidence indicates that her editors support her in this, perhaps even with the support of Reason's owners. Nevertheless it seems to me that they owe you the opportunity to put your position forward in their publication, fair and square. Have you looked into doing this?
Posted by: Chatillon at July 6, 2006 3:06 PM
Chatillon,
Please note that only Cathy Young's initial sally against Jihad Watch appeared in Reason magazine. The others have been at her website.
I sent my initial response to Reason magazine. They did not reply, and, of course, they did not publish it.
Cordially
Robert Spencer
at July 6, 2006 3:11 PM
Erroneous assumptions, as Archimedes mentions, and 'Amour-propre', as Hugh point out, seem to be insurmountable obstacles to something so very simple. It has nothing to do with political agendas, demonizing Muslims, racism, or anything else. It simply has to do with confronting a few troubling facts.
Can't one set aside all the political noise, preconceptions, self love, pride, for just a moment to find the silence to think? And then can one read the Qur'an, Hadith and Sira as the texts require one to read: with complete earnestness and seriousness. Any sane human being with an education should not be able to finish the Qur'an without feeling a horrible sense of unease. Treat the existential requirement of the text with the attention it deserves. You have been given a direct revelation from Allah, do you believe or not? And what does the text say about those who do not believe? What implications does that choice carry for you? These questions may seem idiotic to an educated Western person, but this is the way a believer is required to look at the text, and the purpose of the reading is to discover how a true believer might view the Infidel, the person who rejects Allah and his Prophet. But again, texts are not people, ideas are not people. And the world is fortunate that there exist so many who say they accept the Qur'an as a perfect relevation from Allah, but who either do not know what is in the text or do not take the text with the seriousness that the text itself demands of the reader.
Read the hadith. Discover what it means to be a 'martyr' in Sahih Bukhari and Muslim. Read the Sira and discover the moral examples of Muhammad, the perfect man. And you, the Infidel, what do Mohammad's examples imply for you? How did Mohammad treat those who denied his authority? How did he treat those who criticized him or opposed him? What does he say about the worth of those who deny his revelations? And for those who truly believe that Mohammad was a perfect moral example, for those who believe
that Sahih Bukhari and Muslim hadith, for instance, provide authoritative rules and examples for how to live, how do you, the Infidel, figure in their view of the world? How should they behave toward you if they truly believe what they say they believe?
Can't one simply read without evoking political ideology,self pride or some preconceived ideas about what the text 'must mean'? The driving force of any ideology is in the plain meaning of foundational sources; and the only way to alter meaning that is too plain, too obvious, is by explicit emendation or deletion. Hence the uphill struggle of refomers, radicals, like Irshad Manji.
These simple exercises bring us to a disturbing confrontation with the ideology of Islam. What to do next? That is another question that cannot be approached rationally without first a few simple exericises in reading and thinking.
Is this too difficult?
Posted by: JTF at July 6, 2006 3:14 PM
arjun
Have you seen this one?:
http://watchjihadwatch.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Silvester at July 6, 2006 3:36 PM
Silvester-
And here's one antidote to that site:
http://www.islam-watch.org/SRamesh/UnveilJihad.htm
Posted by: profitsbeard at July 6, 2006 3:55 PM
A common sophistry in rhetoric is to cherry-pick the most extreme or ridiculous statements ever made by the opposing side, so as to tar with a broad brush and to discredit everyone on the opposing side.
In this case, what Cathy Young is doing is even worse. She keeps cherry-picking extreme statements made by commenters to JW and DW, as if those are representative of what Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald believe. Regardless of whether Robert or Hugh have endorsed those statements or commenters as authoritative (usually they haven't).
I wonder how Cathy Young would feel if I cherry-picked some of the most extreme statements ever made in Reason Magazine or by libertarians generally. Or Ayn Rand's seeming obsession with the basic act of screwing. Over the years, I've heard some real howlers coming from them. But I understand that libertarians don't all march in lock-step on every issue. I wish Cathy Young would extend the same consideration to us here at JW.
For example, I've disagreed with Robert and Hugh several times. I once criticized one of Hugh's theories as an "isolationist fantasy." To which he replied at length. I also have defended Bernard Lewis against some other commenters who did dismiss him (wrongly) as a "dhimmi." So when "characterizing" JW, whose statements will Cathy Young cite? Hugh's, mine, or some other commenters'?
at July 6, 2006 4:20 PM
"You're a kaffir, Miss Young," the Muslim said,
"And your thoughts are very pat;
And yet you incessantly defend Muhammed --
Do you think an infidel should do that?"
"In my folly," Cathy Young replied
"I'll adopt all causes which suit me;
Though I know little, have no point to make,
Are you saying you want to recruit me?"
"If you'll wear this tent" the Muslim rose,
"And subject yourself to Allah,
Perhaps then I'd avert my nose,
And ask the local Mullah..."
"Oh would you!?" asked the old grey mare,
"I think it would be grand!
I'm filled with rage and would love to wear
That garment -- I could make a stand!"
"It is done, then" The Muslim did opine,
"You are my trophy wife,
Clearly you love Islam more than truth divine
Now shut your pie hole or I'll take your life!"
at July 6, 2006 5:25 PM
Perhaps Cathy Young's refusal or inability to examine the problem that is Islam is rooted in her "liberal" education. Her profile says she was born in Russia 1963, came to the States in 1980, and is a graduate of Rutgers University. Since she was about 17 when she came to the US, she undoubtedly would have attended Rutgers in the early 1980s. Coincidentally, a certain Professor Amiri Baraka taught English at Rutgers in the 1980s. Those of you who have read "The Professors" by David Horowitz may be familiar with him. From the aforementioned book:
"Amiri Baraka was born Everett Leroy Jones in 1934...then adopted the name Amiri Baraka after his conversion to Islam in 1968.
...Jones's writings took on an increasingly anti-Semitic tone. In his poem 'For Tom Postel, Dead Black Poet,' Jones refers to his ex-wife as a 'fat jew girl.' The poem also contains these sentiments: 'Smile, jew, Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew. I got something for you now though...I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured.' In another poem, he writes, 'Atheist Jews double crossers stole our (black peple's) secrets...They give us to worship a dead Jew and not ourselves...Selling fried potatoes and people, the little arty bastards talking arithmetic they sucked from the arab's head.'
...In October 2001, Professor Baraka capped his anti-Semitic furies with a screed called 'Somebody Blew Up America,' pointing his finger at the Jews, while repeating a disproved canard: 'Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed?' reads the poem. 'Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin towers to stay home that day? Why did Sharon stay away?'"
Horowitz goes on to inform us that Baraka was named poet laureate of New Jersey in 2002 (this raised such outrage that officials "avoided firing Professor Baraka by eliminating the position entirely.")
More nauseating, Horowitz reveals, "In April 2005, the Middle East Studies Program at Columbia University advertised a gala celeration for Professor Baraka's 70th birthday, and encouraged students to attend.
Young, and so many other students at our "liberal" universities, hardly stand a chance. Whether or not she ever attended one of Baraka's classes is inconsequential. Our colleges are filled with academics of his ilk.
But she is a big girl now, out in the real world. Time for her to take off the blinders.
Posted by: IrishEi at July 6, 2006 5:54 PM
Ms Young:
Regarding Muslim pissing on/desecrating Western symbols, have fun with this one:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=20846&only
What is it you're saying? That it's just a political cartoon?
Posted by: ovidius_naso at July 6, 2006 8:07 PM
From the blog;
"Foehammer" = stupid white trailer trash. "jihadwatch" is nothing but a cesspool for mental defectives and hatefull missfits who think their illterate views of world have any real meaning.
Hate white people, do you? Always with the "trailer trash" stuff. There are lots of houses without wheels where I live, genius.
A lot of white people are educated and quite prosperous, thank you.
/deleted name calling
at July 6, 2006 11:29 PM
Sorry, from this blog
http://radicalwatch.blogspot.com/2006/01/radical-website-jihadwatch.html
at July 6, 2006 11:42 PM
jsla, I had no idea you were a poet! Apt verse for the argumentative Ms. Young, another fawning apologist for Islam yet utterly ignorant of what she is defending.
Ms. Young, journalist extraordinare, should certainly realize that intelligent debate requires expert knowledge of the subject being debated, not a left-wing yen for inclusiveness and tolerance of any and all beliefs. She does not care what the doctrine of Islam espouses, she is only interested in what she perceives to be bigotry toward muslims. It has never occurred to this woman that Islam might really be a death cult bent on the destruction of Western Civilization. Such a far-fetched notion is utterly beyond her limited comprehension, all things being equal, of course.
Posted by: Susanp at July 6, 2006 11:56 PM
alexon-
To keep it both scatological and clean:
There was a 'Cat' lady named Young
Who tripped on her very slick tongue
Which tried to entangle
A Spencerian angle
About the jihad he called dung.
(I know she is obsessed with a different bodily function, but I needed something that both rhymed with her name and stayed in the same excremental region. Plus, "micturation" doesn't seem fit anything but "sprung" verse.)
Posted by: profitsbeard at July 7, 2006 2:47 AM
A BBC reporter just interviewed the family of Phillip Russell, killed last year on 7/7. He stated that the attack was inexplicable. The family agreed.
The reporter spoke with the police about "certain" communities and their cooperation.
If only they had read Onward Muslim Soldiers. Page 57 British Muslim, Shakil Muhammad, sad that he would be willing to follow in the footsteps of Hanif and Sharif by becoming a suicide bomber as well. 'I would volunteer; more and more people will follow him. To be a martyr in our religion is a great honour. It's only a matter of time before somebody blows themselves up in this country - that will definitely happen.
...We are going to make a change...
...if he was doing it for God himself - then fair enough....
Inexplicable? I don't think so. It's in a book that Robert Spencer wrote in 2003. When Ms. Young can show what is going to happen before it happens then I will consider her wise. Until then Mr. Spencer, who predicted what has happened, is wise and should be listened to by journalists who know how to write but don't know history or the depths of islam. And, more importantly, what it holds for our future.
Look into Spencer's crystal ball. Try page 55 of his Onward Muslim Soldiers book.
Omar Bakri Muhammad boasts about exploiting the contradiction between freedom of speech and self-preservation. He openly declares his intention to "transform the West into Dar A-Islam" and establish the Sharia on British soil. " I want to see the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street, he has said, and his group is dedicated to this goal.
The determined and the persistent decide what happens to a country. The moderate muslim is neither, the strict muslim is both. They will decide.
The domino of countries falling into islam is pretty clear to anyone who reads. Anyone who thinks that this is ancient history and will not happen now is foolish. WISE UP.
Posted by: Borg at July 7, 2006 7:21 AM
There are Muslim moderates. Islam itself is not moderate.
This is impossible, of course, but a perfect example of the confusion Islam induces.
610 * 623 * 732* 1066* 1215 * 1453 * 1492 * 1683 * 1928 * 1938 * 1948 * 1996 * 2001
The practice of Islam is a crime. It's a world takeover cult, and that's criminal.
Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at July 7, 2006 8:32 AM
Robert is so good at debate and knows the evidence in the case so well that people like Cathy Young only do him a favor.
Posted by: traeh at July 8, 2006 1:32 AM
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