Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald exposes the dhimmi idiocy of all too many “expert” analyses of “terrorism”:
The solemn analyses we frequently see in the media by “terrorism experts” who flail furiously to explain terrorism and suicide bombing in terms of anything — anything — except Islamic jihad are comical, or tragical, or both at once.
They are comical because of such things as the list that some “experts” have offered up as delineating the different “kinds” of terrorists, according to this BBC story:
the entrepreneur
the protégé
the misfit
the drifterThese are very large categories indeed. Who could not be, at one time or another, described as a “misfit” if he does not fit into a pattern of complete and total success? Who could not, at some time in his life, be described as a “protege” of some more powerful and seductive influence (presumably, in the case of jihad terrorists, those who are the imparters of what they describe as “real Islam” to others who fall under their spell)? Who could not be described as an “entrepreneur” if that means”¦well, means what? Perhaps it means an “entrepreneur” in the sense of one who exploits a situation for his own advantage. Could it mean someone who becomes a “terrorist” for financial or other worldly gain, rather than for those six dozen virgins waiting on the other side of that famous singles bar, the Pick-Up Styx?
The point is that such categories are so broad that they could include almost everyone. And that’s the point. Almost everyone, rich or poor, successful or unsuccessful, if a deep believer in the tenets of Islam, could become a terrorist –or, at least as importantly, could support and defend terrorists. All those parents who made the name “Osama” the most popular name in the Arab Muslim world after 9/11/2001 — what are they? Are they “drifters” or “misfits” or “entrepreneurs” or “proteges”? Or are they just normal, Allah-fearing Muhammad-worshipping Muslims, exhibiting the attitudes that come naturally if you take your Qur’an and Hadith seriously?
That is why this solemn taxonomy is so telling — not because it is helpful, but because it isn’t. Because it includes, in its categories, almost everyone at one time or another in their lives. Infidel “drifters” and “misfits” and “proteges” and “entrepreneurs,” lacking the belief-system of Islam, are not a threat. But those who view the world through the prism of Islam, a prism that was handed to them often at birth, and through which others they know are also viewing the world, teaches them, encourages them, reinforces in them at every step to view that division between Believer and Infidel as the one that matters, and to work, not always violently, but still to work, for the goal of spreading Dar al-Islam until Islam everywhere dominates.
That is the comical aspect.
2) The tragical aspect of these meetings of “terrorism experts” is that they focus attention not on the most effective and dangerous weapons of Jihad — demographic conquest, Da’wa, and the use of the “wealth” weapon to fund mosques, madrasas, and to buy armies of Western hirelings, as well as to fund propaganda campaigns at the E.U., at the U.N., and within the individual countries of the Western world. Conferences on “terrorism” or even on “Islamic terrorism” miss much of the point about the Jihad, and reinforce the wrong idea that this is a “war on terror” — which, if such were to be believed, would ignore the behavior of Muslims within Europe which, while not to the level of terrorism, have deeply unsettled, and caused changes to be made, in those European societies.
Attacks on Western ideas of free speech, on Western ideas of freedom of conscience, and on Western notions of the importance not of the collective but of the individual, are all now under permanent Muslim attack. They are being undermined whenever Westerners refuse to defend them, or to recognize the superiority of their own civilization compared to that of Islam, which has been a political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failure.
Yet this is a failure that we are not allowed to perceive or discuss. It is a failure that is hidden, in large part, only because of the accident of geology that has supplied ten trillion dollars since 1973 — and as someone who spent years in Saudi Arabia once said to me in summing up his experience, “money can buy everything — except civilization.”
Comical and Tragical.
Shakespeare has already been here:
“The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral….” says Polonius to Hamlet.
But Polonius in his listings merely rings the changes. The “terrorism experts” provide a telling example of the “comical-tragical.”
A comedy of errors blending with a tragedy of terrors into a “comical-tragical” farce that ‘taint funny, McGee.