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Another typical Marisolism at Jihad Watch

Reporting on Tunisian Muslims resenting the more "hardline" "Salafists" trying to horn in on Tunisia's freshly minted revolutionary state, Marisol of Jihad Watch quotes an emblematic exchange between one of these supposedly milder, more modern Muslims and her reaction to a supposedly more retrograde Muslim:

"The grocer told me the other day, 'I don't like your jeans,'" said Leila Katech, a retired anaesthesiologist. "I told him I didn't like his beard."

And, after adding that bold emphasis, Marisol, sporting her hopefully Wildersianist spectacles, editorializes smartly:

Outstanding.

What Marisol fails to note is the far more important agreement behind the ostensible, distracting disagreement between the retired anaesthesiologist and the extremist grocer:

They both like Muhammad.

Kind of tempers the "outstanding" part, doesn't it? Kind of puts blue jeans into their proper perspective, doesn't it?

The "Self-Hating Jew" -- and the Self-Hating Westerner

Israel over the past couple of decades has become increasingly identified as part of the bad white West; meanwhile, Muslims have over the past 60-odd years become increasingly fit into the PC MC paradigm that irrationally protects, defends, even supports any culture that is deemed to be non-Western, "ethnic", non-white. Israelis (and by extension all Jews) have become "honorary whites" as well as Westerners, and thus they are seen by the majority in the white West itself (paradoxically, incoherently and perversely) as at best corrupt, at worst evil "oppressors", since the PC MC view has become irrationally excessive in its self-criticism.

The "self-hating Jews" (example, Prof. Lowenstein) are not some rare birds of a minority: they are solidly ensconced in the majority view of PC MC that is dominant and mainstream throughout the West.

The problem of the "self-hating Jew" is part of a deeper, broader phenomenon throughout the West -- that of the "self-hating Westerner".

What's left of the Left: Lévy .

A man of the European left, particularly of the French left, Lévy maintains, cannot be other than . . . ashamed "of France’s brutal efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to maintain control of Algeria -- so Peter Berkowitz paraphrases the Leftist intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy on Algeria.

Lévy is hardly alone in this: the memory of the Algerian War of the mid-20th century has become, for France, the PC MC equivalent of America's "shame" about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's internment of Japanese-American citizens during WW2, and America's "shame" about Vietnam. I.e., it is a non-negotiable axiom of PC MC in France to decry and feel shame about what the French had to do in Algeria. A man of consummate reflection and intelligence, such as Lévy, apparently cannot even accomplish the elementary operation of thought of which any sophomore should be capapble: to consider the context and the nature of the enemy that is the principal feature of that context. The French colonization of Algeria was the best thing that happened to that Islamic hell-hole. For the century and a half that France ruled Algeria, that Islamic hell-hole finally saw glimmers of social, legal, political and technological progress. France's beneficent rule over Algeria began to fall apart in the mid-20th century for two reasons:

1) the West itself was undergoing a cataclysmic sea change in consciousness consequent upon the dismantling -- materially, structurally, institutionally, and philosophically -- of its various colonialist territories; and

2) various forces of Islamic jihad in Algeria, due to a concatenation of circumstances and opportunities (including the weakness of the Infidel due to #1), were finally getting their shit together to resist and overthrow the Infidel occupiers.

Lévy's unremarkable and, alas, all-too common "shame" about France's conduct toward Algeria neglects to factor in two things: a) the French were defending the only good rule Algeria had ever had; b) the French were fighting a grotesquely ghoulish and evil enemy of fantically determined savagery. Rather than feel "shame" about the whole Algerian mess, the more appropriate sentiment would be, if not actually pride in having attempted to salvage a good polity, French Algeria, then at least a grim solidarity for the efforts of the French in having tried valiantly.

The only "shame" about Algeria any self-respecting Frenchman should feel is the shame at having lost Algeria and, thus, for having not been sufficiently brutal against those utterly demonic Muslims who -- to pick just one of thousands of barbarities out of a fez of which they are capable -- routinely slit the throats of whole families in the name of their Satanic ideology.

While Lévy has been somewhat commendable for his ability to cut through a certain layer of PC MC bullshit about the Third World and Islam, his hangover about Algeria reflects the underlying reason why not only the Left, but nearly the entire West, cannot rationally think about, and act against, the metastasizing global menace of an Islam Redivivus.

Update:

No wonder, then, that Lévy (according to this otherwise unsurprisingly flawed analysis by Spencer) subscribes basically to the PC MC paradigm about the problem of Islam -- perhaps the high end of that paradigm, possibly the low end of the asymptotic view -- including the view that "Islamist" extremism is a modern phenomenon fueled in one way or another by Western forces. And for his trouble at being PC MC (or asymptotic), Lévy has been honored with death threats from Muslims. And if the reader scrolls down the Jihad Watch article linked above, they will find this informative comment about how Lévy stupidly befriended and supported the Bosnian Master Jihadist Izerbegovic (in addition to supporting the Bosnian Jihad in general). Someone as intelligent and well-informed as Lévy does not become this stupid by inexplicably vacating his brain: this (and innumerable other similarly infuriating examples that could be adduced throughout the West) can only be explained, as I have reiterated tirelessly in dozens of essays over the past two years at The Hesperado and Jihad Watch Watch, by a complex psycho-socio-cultural sea change in consciousness by which the West has come under the mainstream dominance of a new worldview, a new paradigm -- Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC).

Another Muslim "reformer"

The interviewee here, a "liberal" Muslim by the name of Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi (I doubt he's a Shaker or a Quaker), demonstrates the same flaws that all Muslims who are historicist reformers demonstrate -- namely, they locate all the pathology of Islam in post-Mohammedan (and post-Koranic) history, and leave Mohammed and the Koran pristine.

Thus, Al-Nabulsi describes that the pernicious fusion of state and religion -- the nodal source of Islamic pathology -- "is the stratagem at which Arab rulers have excelled, from the era of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan up until today." Notice how he locates the beginning point of that deleterious "stratagem" decidedly after Mohammed's death. Has it not occurred to Al-Nabulsi that Mohammed himself solidly and clearly established that pathological "stratagem"? No, apparently Al-Nabulsi cannot possibly face this terrible fact about his Prophet: the "stratagem" must have been the result of machinations of later Caliphs and Sultans and other clerics, in their pathological self-interest and misunderstanding of their own Islam politically fusing the sacred and the profane.

Such an astounding lacuna in the mind of Al-Nabulsi can only be explained two ways: either he is so mentally impaired that he can actually be a Muslim and study his own Islam and still miss the massive fact that Mohammed himself is the source of the pathology of Islam; or he is lying to us. There is no third alternative. Or, rather, the third possible alternative -- that Al-Nabulsi is actually that shockingly ignorant of a subject in which he has dedicated his life and study -- is highly improbable.

The queer dilemma of Muslim reformers like Al-Nabulsi that I have described applies also to the other reformers touted by FrontPage on their front page (on the lower left): Raheel Raza, Hasan Mahmud, Tarek Fatah, Linda Ahmed, Edip Yuksel, Thomas Haidon, Khalim Massoud (and likely the pitiably small numbers of others one may be able to scrounge up here and there). We may, in addition, add to this list Spencer's token, and now deceased, Muslim who had officially joined the staff of Jihad Watch, Tashbih Sayyed (whose linked name is solemnly displayed on the side banner of Jihad Watch along with luminaries who have died, including Oriana Fallaci -- a reckless juxtaposition).

These strange Muslims -- though not strange at all if they are simply trying to deceive us -- are not at all like the others who are listed beneath them on FrontPage's front page: among them Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Walid Shoebat, and Abul Kasem. These latter expatriates have cut the cord to their insanity, and/or to their inveterate taqiyya: they have escaped the mental, physical, cultural and spiritual Gulag of Islam and rejoined humanity, much as the Egyptian-Italian Muslim, Magdi Allam, did earlier this year when after a life of struggling with his Islamic "struggle" he finally brought himself to the logical conclusion of his mind thinking Islam through, which, to any sane and intelligent person -- unlike the list of Muslim "reformers" --, leads to rejecting Islam altogether.

FrontPage.com and its "Reformist" Muslims

It's nice to see a sign of some internal criticism of FrontPage on this issue. I have long been concerned about the undue hope placed in the "moderate" or "reformist" Muslim at FrontPage.

Raheel Raza is not the only one of concern. The same problems that Carl Goldberg raises about her in the above-linked FrontPage article apply equally to the other poster boys and girls of "moderate Islam" listed on the lower left hand side of the front page of FrontPage under the immoderately hopeful rubric of "Islamic Reformation": Raheel Raza, Hasan Mahmud, Tarek Fatah, Linda Ahmed, Edip Yuksel, Thomas Haidon, Khalim Massoud.

All of these Muslims are a strange breed. While it is meet to say, along with Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch, that the Ex-Muslim represents the best and the brightest of the Muslim world -- but, alas, all too rare a bird -- the "reformist" Muslim represents an altogether different, and strangely paradoxical species. The screamingly obvious and apposite questions posed by Carl Goldberg in this article could be amplified by hundreds of other verses from the Hadiths and Koran, as well as most of the Sira (biography of Mohammed). Given the essence of Islam in all of its texts and laws, and given the historical character of Islam and of Muslims throughout the ages into our own increasingly bloody and hateful present, these "reformist" Muslims touted by FrontPage who continue to follow Islam are either 1) unusually mentally damaged; or 2) lying and practicing taqiyya. There is no third alternative.

Their strange mental impairment is seen chiefly in what Goldberg has noted -- the monumental cognitive dissonance between their persistent idealization of Islam and the grotesquely ghoulish and ethically depraved nature of Islam from its roots to its fruits and right down to its very heart.

See my essay on my blog about some of these issues: A chewy, sweet, nougaty center to Islam? --

http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2008/11/chewy-sweet-nougaty-center-to-islam.html

Denise Spellberg, Dhimmi Extraordinaire

Denise Spellberg, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin is a pro-Islam apologist in academe who, in typical Islamic fashion (though she may well not be Muslim herself), became hysterically concerned over the possible publication of the recent fictional novel about Mohammed and his 9-year-old wife Aisha (The Jewel of Medina) and effectively put a stop to that publication.

One of her scholarly articles is "Could a Muslim Be President? An Eighteenth-Century Constitutional Debate" published in the journal Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39.4 (2006) 485-506 -- a discursus that is unctuously reeking of the gymnastically bending-over-backwards genuflection toward the Orient with her rear end facing her own Occident that has become so typical of MESA Nostra. One wonders why the vast majority of Western people tend to be PC MC in the first place; and one wonders even more why certain numbers of them devote their lives to being such in the context of Islam: this wonderment becomes all the more acute when we ponder that Ms. Spellberg might be Jewish -- which would be like a Jewish scholar spending their lives lovingly and hagiographically studying the history of the Nazis.