Missing: editorial remark

In yesterday’s Dhimmi Watch, Robert Spencer published an article under the rubric of “anti-dhimmitude”—which means it is about someone who gets the problem of Islam (though to register on the anti-dhimmitude radar screen, that someone has to be someone of sufficient power and influence). The someones in question are Baroness Caroline Cox, former deputy speaker of the House of Lords for 20 years, and author of The West, Islam, and Islamism, and Dr. John Marks, co-author of the book.

In the article from YNet News, it is reported that:

Cox quoted a senior British bishop as saying that “most of our educational institutions have been infiltrated,” and said university campuses were prime recruitment grounds for Islamist groups.

“They are using our institutions to recruit young people, and preventing any critical analysis of Islam. I recently visited a theology college in Wales. The first thing you see when you walk in is a giant plaque thanking a wealthy sheikh for his contribution. I thought, is there any way that a realistic assessment of Islam can take place at this college?” she said.

The problem with this warning from Baroness Cox and Dr. Marks is that it focuses unduly on the external threat and seems to ignore the depth and breadth of the internal predisposition not only to ignore this external threat, but to positively welcome and nourish it in terms of a paradigm—the PC Multi-Culturalist paradigm—that does not see it as a threat but as a logical flowering of its own axioms. Not only in England but throughout the West, this paradigm is dominant and mainstream, and as long as it remains so, then warnings such as these from Cox and Marks will be seen as “bigoted”, “Islamophobic” and even more or less “racist”. Indeed, under the regime of the current paradigm, it is more people like Cox and Marks who pose a threat, rather than purveyors of Islam.

And—to get to the point of today’s blog essay—the problem with Robert Spencer’s presentation of this article on Dhimmi Watch was that it lacked any editorial remarks, such as the one I provided in the paragraph above, that would properly frame the larger problem that makes the smaller one problematic and significant.

To reiterate three fundamental principles of this blog and of its sister blog The Hesperado:

1) Such problems, such threats, as those which Cox and Marks warn us about would have little or no traction, were there not firmly in place here in the West a dominant and mainstream paradigm of PC Multi-Culturalism. (Example: that wealthy sheikh’s generous endowment of that theology college in Wales which Cox decries would not be allowed to influence scholarship—or indeed might be summarily rejected in an extension of the principle by which Mayor Giuliani of New York City rejected Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s check for 10 million dollars—were the paradigm of PC Multi-Culturalism not firmly in place in that college and in the society at large surrounding that college.)

2) We, the West, will likely not be able to do anything significant about these problems, these threats, as long as PC Multi-Culturalism remains dominant and mainstream.

3) PC Multi-Culturalism will likely remain dominant and mainstream as long as too many among us few who are prone to oppose it continue to misunderstand its nature and dimensions.

Baroness Cox was quoted as adding:

“We need to wake up, draw a line in the sand, and say enough is enough.”

This of course is true, but it will likely not be realized as long as the actors in question—the “We” (both royal and common alike)—remain, for the most part, willing supporters and enablers of the dominant and mainstream PC Multi-Culturalist paradigm. The problem with this desideratum expressed by Cox is subtle, but it is important to note, since it reflects the same mindset that limits Spencer and Fitzgerald on this very same issue: the problem is that it seems to ignore the fact that there are two things we need to “wake up” to, not just one, as Cox’s plea implies. Or, to be more precise, her plea collapses the two things that need to be kept distinguished:

1) We need to wake up to the threat of Islam

2) We need to wake up to the fact that we are sleepwalking and thereby ignoring threat #1.

The Coxes and Markses and Spencers and Fitzgeralds of the world (and, it seems, most of the followers of Spencer and Hugh as evidenced by their comments at Jihad Watch which I have been reading over the past two years) persist in ignoring the facts that

a) #1 remains an unassailable problem as long as #2 is not addressed and solved;

and

b) #2 needs to be understood in its proper nature and dimensions before it can even begin to be solved.