What Cathy Young Describes As "Bigotry"

Rebecca let me know that Cathy Young has mentioned a posting I had put up at Jihad Watch in 2006, one which she adduces as an example of the extraordinary “bigotry” of those associated, as she sees it, with Robert Spencer and, through him, Pamela Geller. I have never had any connection with Geller; my association with the website Jihadwatch ended in 2010; I was never its “co-administrator” but something else —  a regular poster.

But what about that “bigotry” she claims is to be found expressed  in a post I wrote? That selfsame post I’ve re-posted below, so that you can make up your own mind:

Fitzgerald: She can’t figure it out. But we can.

Hugh Fitzgerald examines the words of the sister of Tarheel jihadist Mohammed Taheri-azar:

“Please let us echo in your ears that my brother was and always has been a kind, gentle and pure soul,” she read from a statement. “His current actions and words are as much a source of shock and distress to us as they are to you.”
— from this AP article, from the sister of the kind and gentle soul who plowed an SUV into a crowd of college students.

 

No doubt, for a Muslim, much of it true — he is a “kind, gentle and pure soul” in many ways. But not toward Infidels. There the adjectives begin to jostle one another. The purer his Islam, the less kind and gentle he would be toward Infidels — as the Qur’an tells him (48:29), as the Hadith makes clear in its most authoritative recensions, as the example of Muhammad instructs.

And when an Infidel experiences mental desarroi or depression, he can blame his parents, his children, his siblings, his karma, The System, Amerika, the stars, fate, his cholesterol level, his serotonin level, or even — himself. When a Muslim falls into any kind of distress, with that mental vademecum and pocket prism through which to view the universe, Islam, he can blame the Infidel. (And this assumes, which may not be true, that Taheri-azar did not quite take the tenets and attitudes of Islam as much to heart before, when he was merely that “kind, gentle and pure soul.”) As Taheri-azar did.

This kind of thing, this Muslim version of the old immigrant mother in the Jimmy-Cagney movie assuring the police that “my boy’s a good boy,” is particularly telling. For it happens all the time, with suspect after suspect — the terrorists in London or Madrid or elsewhere are always being described, by a brother, an uncle, a father, someone, as “kind” and “gentle” and “pure.” The message always is: How Could It Possibly Have Happened?

Now, two things are possible. Both should not relieve, but increase, the alarm and suspicion felt by intelligent Infidels. One possibility is that this sister is flatly lying, that she knows perfectly well her brother was consumed with the anti-Infidel teachings of Islam, and had given many signs of it. The possibility is that all these family members (that uncle of one of the London bombers, who first expressed his “amazement” at his nephew’s action, and later expressed not amazement at all, but pride in the actions) understand perfectly why their son, brother, nephew, did what he did, and the obvious sources for his attitudes and actions.

The second possibility, far less likely, but still conceivable in a few cases, is that some of these people really are not quite aware of the natural effect of Islam on those who take Islam seriously. Again and again “moderate” Muslims, or those who are not even really Muslims but rather “Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only” Muslims, have themselves been amazed, when they return to a Muslim environment, to see the effect of Islam. How many of those the American government listened to in fashioning its Iraq policies were of the latter kind, the Allawi-Chalabi-Makiya kind — the essentially secular Shi’a who had spent decades in the West and became westernized, and forgot or allowed themselves to forget just how crazy, how aggressive, how conspiratorial, how antipathetic to the ideas of compromise and power-sharing and common sense, is the world of Islam, a world that combines a dreamy blend of inshallah-fatalism with the duty of Jihad, which requires action, action, action (not the action of Western man, going to work every day, piling one stone on another to build the edifice of an economy or a civilization). That action is not to build but to either destroy (what the Infidel has) or to appropriate it (through Jizyah in all of its disguised and undisguised forms) or to seize it, as Muhammad seized the booty of those he would declare, in order to seize that booty, his enemies, such as the inoffensive Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis.

So which is it? Is it the deliberate attempts by all these family members of all these terrorists to deceive us, which means they are exhibiting the problem with so-called “moderate Muslims” whose behavior simply deceives us and keeps us fooled a bit longer?

Or are those family members themselves fooled? And if they are, then how is that Infidels should be expected to detect the Muslim immigrant who is like, or will turn out to be, just like Taheri-azar, and the one who is like, or will turn out to be, just like his presumably inoffensive sister? If “only” 10% of Muslims in the West support “suicide bombing” (the figure is much higher in the opinion polls) or “only” 40% of Muslims in England support the imposition of Sharia’ law in England — which would mean the end of England as it has slowly been fashioned since the days of the Standing Stones of Callanish, and Stonehenge, and woad-painted tribesman — what does this mean?

Why should Infidels take a chance, if the likelihood of their being able to distinguish the “moderate” from the “immoderate” Muslim is even slimmer than that of the closest relatives of those Muslims found to have engaged in would-be, or successful, acts of terrorism — and given that the problem is complicated by the “My Son the Fanatic” problem where the children or grandchildren of “moderates” who may be classified mainly as economic migrants “return” to Islam, with dangerous consequences for Infidels?

The sister of Taheri-azar, like all the other relatives “amazed” at the “inexplicable” behavior of their relatives, are apparently unable to, simply cannot figure out what it is, what doctrines and attitudes, what passages in what set of texts, taken seriously, might have caused her kind, her gentle, her pure-souled brother to do what he did.

She can’t figure it out. But we can.

Posted on March 28, 2006