Spencer’s misplaced astonishment (and a reader’s misplaced frustration)

Spencer writes today:

The Wall Street Journal's dogged cluelessness about the jihad ideology never ceases to astound me, and here we go again.

Spencer should not be astounded by this cluelessness—much less should he “never cease” to be so. What should astound him are the few times a Wall Street Journal (or any other mainstream media outlet, or practically any other damn body with a pulse throughout our Western societies) shows they have a clue about the problem of Islam.

And, sure enough, one of his readers and followers in the comments section of the thread from which the above quote was culled shows a similar misplaced emotion:

For the last five minutes I have literally been banging my head on my desk, and crying with frustration and anger, luckily I don't have much hair. Like most of my fellow countrymen in times of adversity I have gone and mashed myself a good strong cup of tea. My blood pressure is going down, and my dog has resumed her usual position curled up at my side by the computer. The pure inanity of some of the people in power defies belief.

The problem does not merely reside in “some of the people in power”—a somewhat vaguer locution than the usual one trotted out by Jihad Watchers to denote various configurations of those dastardly “Elites”—: the problem is far broader, far deeper, far more systemic and historically long-standing, pervading the sociopolitico-cultural atmosphere of the entire West.

If typical Jihad Watchers like “Holger Dansker” whom I quoted above would broaden their peripheral vision, they might feel even worse—more throttled with frustration and anger, more paralyzed, more hopeless—than they even do now: for at least now, with their convenient scapegoats of various flavors of “Elites”, they have something manageable to focus their anger and frustration upon. Unfortunately, by delimiting and thereby denaturing the problem so, they are putting off any substantive solutions to it, and they will keep hitting that strange brick wall out there, that strange force field, whereby most people throughout the West—Left, Right, In-Between, High, Middle and Low, of all flavors and colors and genders—will continue to regard them as kooky bigots and racists whenever they try to thrust the truth out of the dark interstices of the Internet and out into the sunshine of the mainstream.