Mirroring Myopias

In an essay today on Jihad Watch, Spencer rightly criticizes the central myopia of President Bush:

When he spoke this week at the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said:

“In the Middle East, we have seen instead the rise of a group of extremists who seek to use religion as a path to power and a means of domination. This self-appointed vanguard presumes to speak for Muslims. They do not.”

There we are again. The Administration and the mainstream media (both Left and Right) take it as axiomatic that the jihad we see all over the world today represents a perversion of Islam, repudiated by the vast majority of Muslims.

Here, Spencer delimits and constricts the central problem that in our time is preventing the West from rationally analyzing, and then rationally constructing policy against, the threat of Islam. In Spencer’s focus, the central problem becomes limited to politicians and mainstream media. His delimitation, thus, effectively and clearly brackets out the larger sociopolitical scope of the phenomenon that is enabling and nourishing those politicians and mainstream media pundits. But it is that larger, broader and deeper phenomenon (PC Multiculturalism)—sociological and systemic in nature and scope—that makes possible most, if not all, of the traction those politicians and mainstream media pundits enjoy.

When Bush, for the umpteenth time, purveys that central axiom of PC Multiculturalism with regard to the problem of Islam—that, in effect, there is no problem of Islam but only a peripheral problem of a small minority of Muslims whose problematic ideas and actions are unrelated (indeed, antithetical) to Islam—Bush is not being a maverick pioneer: Bush is not being a brave rhetorician going against the grain of his surrounding Western society: Bush is not resisting fashion in order to present a marginal, minority point of view. No, when Bush touts that central axiom—and its many radiating axioms that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle in the dominant and mainstream PC paradigm—Bush is merely breathing the air of the atmosphere, playing it safe by massaging the already prevalent worldview about Islam that has been laid down layer by complex layer over the past 50-odd years, woven into the complex tissues and fabrics of the broader sea change in sociopolitical consciousness that characterizes the ongoing, dynamic, organic process known as Western Progress.

Spencer either has no idea this broader and deeper process pertains, and explains, a Bush or a Blair repeatedly defending Islam; or Spencer does not care to advert to it in any of his regular, and increasingly pedagogically influential, communiqués. Either way, Spencer mirrors Bush’s myopia with a comparatively egregious and unacceptable myopia.