Esdrujula Watch

At Jihad Watch today, in a comment—one of those imperiously rough-hewn perorations destined soon to become a Jihad Watch article in its own right—Hugh Fitzgerald pulls out his Esdrujula Elves again; though this time those sock puppets are somewhat disguised:

. . .if. . . Western Europe. . . too becomes islamized (through the negligence, foolishness, timidity of its own leaders and much of its own idiotized-by-hedonism population). . .

To remind the reader of Fitzgerald’s “Esdrujula Explanation”, we quote him from an old Jihad Watch essay:

The three words that compose the Esdrujula Explanation—timidity, stupidity, cupidity—explain the folly. When it comes to the widespread inability to grasp the the promptings, the instruments, the full menace of Jihad—those three words usually do.

Later on, Fitzgerald added “rigidity” to his descriptive cocktail.

In the first quote above, we see stupidity (foolishness), timidity undisguised, and a variant on cupidity (idiotized-by-hedonism). Possibly negligence is a new Esdrujula Elf, or it is simply a variant on timidity and/or stupidity. Whether new or old, negligence somehow more acutely than the others begs the question: Why are people being negligent? For, a person isn’t simply negligent for no reason.

Doubtlessly, Fitzgerald would insist on dissolving the question into one or more of the other of his idiotic Idities that serve to explain nothing, and continue to put off, in our analysis of the West’s irrational whitewashing of Islam, precisely what he otherwise counsels us to do with regard to Islam itself: to probe the deeper, broader sociological and ideological underpinnings of the phenomenon in order to explain—and through the explanation, to unify into a coherent analytical model—the more superficial atmospherics of problems and dangers we see and suffer. For, the problems and dangers of the one would not be nearly as formidable as they are, were there not the problems and dangers of the other.

But it’s so much easier to whittle the problem down to the manageable proportions of personal flaws and foibles that have no sociological, ideological or historical depth. Isn’t it?