Muslims and Jihad Watchers Agree

In a story today on Jihad Watch, we are informed of a most recent, official view from one of the largest representative bodies of the Muslim world, the OIC (the Organization of the Islamic Conference): to wit, that the West is not “de-linking” Islam from terrorism.

Curiously enough, Jihad Watchers would agree—but mistakenly, I maintain. The erroneous disagreement of Jihad Watchers is not simplex, but duplex:

1) We the People, the vast majority of ordinary folks in the West, so say the Jihad Watchers, understand quite well the fact that Islam is directly linked to terrorism (and to jihad)—indeed, that it enables, sustains and nourishes it now, and has for 1,400 years since its founder, Muhammad, first began terrorizing his neighbors in Arabia;

and

2) Only a small minority of “elites” in the West do not understand this linkage between Islam and terrorism (and to jihad), mostly out of corruption and greed as well as out of a persistent strain of Leftism in politics.

I have dealt with this issue in all its manifold variations time and time again on this blog and on my companion blog, The Hesperado. Suffice it to say here that both Jihad Watchers and the OIC are wrong: in fact, the vast majority of ordinary people in the West do not link Islam with terrorism (let alone do they even think, intelligently, to link it with jihad, not really knowing what jihad entails).

Furthermore, this vast majority of ordinary people are not at all disconnected from their “elites” in Politics, Business, the Media and Academe. Rather, all combined—the vast majority of masses of ordinary people and their “elites”—breathe deeply, in and out, day after day, the atmosphere of Politically Correct Multiculturalism with regard to the Problem (or, rather, Non-Problem) of Islam. The overarching problem is not one of a concatenation of greed, laziness, corruption and Leftism—which do exist, of course, and which do contribute to this problem.

The overarching problem is, rather, more of a diffuse and complex sociological phenomenon, a dominant and mainstream world-view connected in complicated ways with other ideas that have become dominant in the West, intimately tied to its ongoing liberal-in-the-classical-sense Progress, combining unhealthy and deleterious axioms with healthy and beneficial ones in a complex bundle difficult to tease out of its synergy of co-dependent inter-relations, whereby both Left and Right (and Center) all merge, at least certainly in terms of swallowing whole the PC Multiculturalist paradigm.

This is not to say that the situation is static, and that cracks are not beginning to show, and that a steady, albeit still pitifully slow and small, trickle of more and more people waking up to the Problem of Islam is not manifesting itself. Nor is it to say that some of those who partake of the vast PC majority are not showing, here and there in different ways, signs of incipient defensiveness about having to maintain, against the ever-burgeoning mountain of evidence to the contrary, their paramount Commandment of the PC Multiculturalist Paradigm: to wit, that:

Islam on the one hand, and Bad Things Some Muslims Say and Do on the other hand, Must Always Remain De-Linked.

(Implict in the above de-linkage, of course, is the complementary de-linkage of the vast majority of Muslims of the world who are, of course, harmless “moms and pops” just like us, from the tiny minority of “extremists” who are trying to “hijack” that forever de-linked and wonderfully peaceable Islam.)

Nevertheless, while Muslims represented by the OIC are exhibiting an irrational paranoia, Jihad Watchers are exhibiting, in mirror-image fashion, an irrationally inflated sense of self-importance, persistently and increasingly conceiving their awareness as some broad social movement when there are no substantive reasons to suppose that the anti-Islamic movement remains, throughout the West, as anything more than a very small minority. For example, let us not forget the pathetically small turnouts recently at the protest against the Muslim Day Parade in New York City on September 9 (upwards of 150 people by the accounts of those anxiously wishing to hype the numbers) as well as the protest against the denial of right of assembly to “stop Islamisation” in Brussels on September 11 (again, roughly 150 people, by more accurate estimations)—when, by contrast, thousands were able to be mobilized in dozens of locations around the globe to protest the ramping up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And let us not forget also that, six years after 911, there has not been a “Million Man March” on Washington, D.C. to protest the Problem of Islam and our West’s inability to deal properly with it. There has not, indeed, been any significant mass demonstration, anywhere. Pathetic. And apparently indicative of a glaring absence of a majority of those who “get” the problem and are, therefore, sufficiently alarmed about it to organize such demonstrations.

No. Both the Muslims of the OIC and Jihad Watchers are wrong. The West does, in fact, de-link Islam from terrorism. This de-linkage, as I maintain, is the pre-eminent shibboleth of the West’s guiding, dominant and mainstream PC Multiculturalism. Not only does the West continue to de-link Islam from terrorism in a variety of ways (not the least of which being the fact that the USA has thousands of Muslims in its military and even has Muslim chaplains and mosques on American soil to service their religious needs), not only has it sustained this de-linkage for at least the past 50 years, but there are no indications that it will not continue to do so for a few more decades. Granted, the ultimate outcome will likely not be as bleakly pessimistic as I may seem to be implying: during these coming decades, the obstinate machine of the PC Multiculturalist paradigm with regard to the Problem of Islam will likely continue to suffer its excruciatingly slow attrition in the face of the stillicide of facts that undermine it, finally to succumb to an epochal paradigm shift which—tragically, however—might not occur without the additional, catalytic force of horrific attacks by Muslims on multiple Western targets during that same time.