Hugh Fitzgerald misses the point yet again

Fitzgerald wrote today in a comment on Dhimmi Watch another example that illustrates the many aspects of PC MC that continue to elude his grasp. I shall first quote it in toto, then re-quote it interspersed with my comments in non-italics:

Few Infidels do the work necessary to grasp [what Jihad Watchers grasp about the Problem of Islam]. And it is too unpleasant to grasp. One wishes it were otherwise. But in the end, one need not be apologetic, or forever grasping at the straws of this or that individual Muslim, whose personal charm and plausible presentation (heavy on tu-quoque and taqiyya) we allow ourselves to be taken in by. Learn, study, and then resist, without yielding to the temptation to see things, as a good liberal, “from the Muslim point of view.”

This is part of the duty that Western man owes his Western legacy: to protect and defend it from Islam and the instruments of Jihad that matter most: the Money Weapon (see the fury against Wilders by moneyed interests in the Netherlands), Da'wa, and demographic conquest.

Let the tone be harsh. Let more and more Muslims conclude that the tone has changed—irrevocably.

Re-quoted with my comments:

Few Infidels do the work necessary to grasp [what Jihad Watchers grasp about the Problem of Islam].

It’s not merely a matter of “doing the work necessary”. In between the Islamically illiterate Westerner and the “grasping” at the end of his education about Islam lies not merely a pile of data for him to assimilate, but a massive, dominant, mainstream, extraordinarily efficient paradigm of axioms that are intimately intertwined with the data about Islam—axioms which filter that data and channel it into an interlocking system of interpretations of that data. And these interpretations systematically frustrate all significant criticism of both Islam itself and the vast majority of Muslims who follow Islam. In the West, millions of relatively nice, decent and intelligent people are beholden to this paradigm of axioms: PC MC (Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism). This paradigm does not prevent their access to the data about Islam. It’s more insidiously effective than that. It permits access to that data, but filters and channels and re-interprets that data into axiomatic interpretations of that data. And the assimilation and acceptance of these interpretations does not make these millions of people any less nice, any less decent, any less intelligent. (We are not here including other millions of Westerners—outright Leftists—who are, in fact, more or less pathologically irrational at best, Gnostically seditious at worst.)

And it is too unpleasant to grasp. One wishes it were otherwise.

Here, Fitzgerald is implying that the majority of Westerners who are remiss in “grasping” the problem are in fact aware of the problem but are more or less in a state of denial, out of fear of the implications. This, of course, would be one of the many hypotheses, ultimately inadequate, that perforce would have to be grasped at desperately, like straws, in the absence of the sociologically systemic nature and dimensions of the problem of PC MC which is being ignored.

But in the end, one need not be apologetic, or forever grasping at the straws of this or that individual Muslim, whose personal charm and plausible presentation (heavy on tu-quoque and taqiyya) we allow ourselves to be taken in by. Learn, study, and then resist, without yielding to the temptation to see things, as a good liberal, "from the Muslim point of view."

Between the “learn, study” and then the “resist”, Hugh is myopically oblivious to the massive and psycho-sociologically powerful obstacle of PC MC. Precious little “resisting” will ensue—except by members of that tiny minority of Jihad Watchers, the choir to whom Hugh is really preaching whether he knows it or not—when nothing will be done about what isn’t even recognized to stand in the way of that resistance.

This is part of the duty that Western man owes his Western legacy: to protect and defend it from Islam and the instruments of Jihad that matter most: the Money Weapon (see the fury against Wilders by moneyed interests in the Netherlands), Da'wa, and demographic conquest.

Here, Fitzgerald is repeating his implication he has made many times before, that Islamic terrorism and violence do not constitute a necessary and crucial part of the other “instruments” of Jihad. A misguided theory of his, and of Spencer’s.

Let the tone be harsh. Let more and more Muslims conclude that the tone has changed irrevocably.

Here, Fitzgerald is vastly overestimating the capacity of Westerners to even get to the point where they could heed his advice. And he overestimates because, in his mind, there is no massive, dominant, mainstream, systemic sociological ideology of PC MC standing in the way.