How Could I Forget? A Fourth Problem with Jihad Watch

In my previous essay, I listed three problems with Jihad Watch which I could “watch” here on this blog—its treatment of its reader population; its Christian bias; and its relative ambiguity about Islam. I forgot to mention a fourth problem:

Its failure to support and push for a comprehensive anti-Islamic manual to be used by any and all Jihad Watchers in the most exigent situation we all have to live and operate in throughout the West (and really the world), of PC-protected Islamic apologetics.

I have on my other blog, The Hesperado, written about the need for such a manual, and the prospective nature and scope of such a manual. For more in-depth analysis, the reader can therefore click the link below:

The Infidels Enchiridion: A Proposal

And for further related analysis, here are three more essays from that same blog:

The Levels of Infidel Intelligence re: the LCPOI

Urgent Tools for our War of Ideas

The Learning Curve: Hows Your IQ (Islamic Quotient)?


In addition, this failure on the part of Jihad Watch is directly related to the problem of PC, the primary problem to which I have been devoting this blog, Jihad Watch Watch. It is because of the mainstream dominance of PC throughout the West that the West remains ridiculously neutral, at best, and positively amicable to Islam, at worst.

And it is because of PC that concerned Jihad Watchers need a definitive and comprehensive manual as a toolbox to use against Islamic apologetics—both offensively in terms of laying out the pathological and dangerous nature of Islam, and defensively in terms of providing ammunition against the whitewashing of Islam as well as the typical counter-responses by Islamic apologists to criticisms of Islam. (Remember: the phrase “Islamic apologists” is not limited to merely Muslims: it also includes the millions of PC non-Muslims who tend to whitewash Islam.)

The target audience for such a manual would not be Muslims—since it is largely a waste of time to hope that a sufficient number of Muslims will wake up and see the light solely because someone has presented cogent arguments to them. Rather, the target audience would be the millons of Westerners who have been infected with PC and who think according to the axioms of the PC Multiculturalist paradigm. Only rhetorically would Jihad Watchers engage Muslims with the toolbox of this manual—insofar as any engagement with a Muslim would serve the purpose of being a spectacle for non-Muslims still under the influence of PC to watch and hopefully learn from.

It is, however, not only because of PC that concerned Jihad Watchers need such a manual. It is also because of two unavoidable complexities:

1) the bewildering richness and complexity of Islam itself—its history, laws, theology, and sociological complexion (which includes in our day the jungle of sects, organizations, and associations);

and

2) the bewildering richness and complexity of thousands of people with good intentions on the Internet providing excessively florid sources of information about Islam for any sincerely interested reader to have to spend a thousand hours of sifting through.

With particularly the problem of #2 above, I noted a few months ago on my blog The Hesperado how a certain essay—Islam 101—by a new Jihad Watch writer, Gregory M. Davis, not only provided insufficient aid to all the Jihad Watchers out there trying to put together an arsenal of precise critiques and rebuttals of Islam, such an essay in effect proves counter-productive. Recently, I have noticed that Robert Spencer has given Davis’s essay pride of place as a link on the top banner of Jihad Watch. This frankly half-assed contribution exemplifies, to me, Spencer’s lack of interest in really providing—or at least supporting and pushing for—what is direly needed today.

Here was the essay I penned previously about this:

We Don’t Need 1,001 “Islam 101”s

Another similar show of half-assedness by Spencer was when he posted an essay on Jihad Watch over a month (May 18, 2007) ago breezily proferring the idea of whipping together some counter-responses to typical Islamic apologetics. Not only did this essay show an utter ignorance of the hard efforts of at least three loyal Jihad Watch readers who had repeatedly and on many different threads posted comments adverting to their unremunerated work on a definitive manual (or “Booklet” as they call it—see my first link above for more) to use for critiques and rebuttals of Islamic apologetics; not only did Spencer affect an unseemly casual attitude about the whole thing as though this is not the single most screamingly paramount need in our current War of Ideas; but Spencer also implied he was going to follow up on this little exercise he was dabbling with in that essay, but—as far as I can tell—he never did. For more on this, read my previous essay on this blog about it here.

So, yes: how could I forget? This apparent disinterest by Spencer for such a definitive and comprehensive manual is a serious lacuna in his mission. Again—as with my critiques of Spencer concerning PC—I am not asking Spencer to drop everything and devote all of his time to this manual. I am, however, asking him to devote approximately 50% of his time for a certain period of time. The suggestions I laid out in my essay linked above (We Don’t Need 1,001 “Islam 101”s) would require Spencer to devote an initial burst of time to get the ball rolling, using his website of considerable influence to advertise the project and solicit both funding as well as volunteers to work on it. Whether or not Spencer is the right type of person to actually be involved in the content of such a manual is debatable; but he certainly would be the right man to help galvanize public attention to it, as well as the long preliminary work that would be vitally necessary to bringing the manual from ideation to realization.

Apparently, that is too much to ask of Spencer, Fitzgerald, or any of the Board Members at Jihad Watch—because of their lack of will, or their lack of imagination, or both. Their priorities continue to be elsewhere, doing great work to be sure, but increasingly peripheral to what should be crucially central in our War of Ideas.