The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: Ptarmigan on July 29, 2013, 04:14:05 PM
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Notes on ‘Counterjihad’
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/notes-on-counterjihad/
“Counterjihadist.†If you had told me a couple of decades ago that this would be one of the many labels that would someday be attached to my name with some regularity, I would hardly have known what to say. Counter what? What jihadist?
But then these are strange times. On the evening of September 11, 2001, you might’ve expected responsible-minded, in-the-know public servants, journalists, and academic Islam experts throughout the Western world to start giving their respective publics a crash course (as it were) in Islamic jihad, so as to ensure that absolutely everybody understood exactly why those men wanted to take down those buildings. Instead, the President of the United States, the Karen Armstrongs and John Espositos, and virtually the entire Western media were quick to begin issuing fervent assurances that the terrorists were a fanatical minority who’d hijacked not only airplanes but Islam itself. Similar assurances followed hard upon every major terrorist act in the succeeding years. Those of us who knew better – who recognized that the terrorists were doing exactly what the Koran ordered them to do, and who believed that it was vitally important for everyone in the West to understand this – began to see our names yanked to a term that identified us not as people who were seeking to educate and inform but as antagonists of something to which every one of us, after all, should be opposed.
Back in the day, anti-Communists had a similar problem. I’m old enough to recall the obloquy heaped upon them by bien pensant types – professors and high-toned journalists who considered active, vocal opposition to Communism the most lowbrow of pastimes. Yes, whereas today’s counter-counterjihadists act as if jihad is a figment of counterjihadists’ fevered imaginations, the anti-anti-Communists (a label they wore with pride) at least acknowledged – albeit in a bland, bored way – that Communism existed. Sometimes they even admitted that it wasn’t all that terrific. But by focusing their animus on anti-Communism, and remaining all but silent about the evils of Communism itself – indeed, by insisting that the very application of words like “evil†to Communism (à la Ronald Reagan) was infantile and hyberbolic – they drove home the idea that overt anti-Communism was worse – by which they meant less intelligent, less sophisticated, less worldly – than Communism itself. Indeed, even as self-identified Communists in America and throughout the West held positions of trust in the academy, government, the arts, and elsewhere, anti-Communists came to be viewed as fanatical, paranoid conspiracy theorists who, in the phrase of the day, saw “a Communist under every bed.†Even now, the Hollywood Ten, a group of directors and screenwriters who in 1947 were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about their Communist Party affiliations, are considered heroes of American freedom, even though it is a matter of public record that all ten of them turned out, in fact, to be Stalinists, dedicated to destroying American freedom; meanwhile, director Elia Kazan – a former member of the Party who “named names†because he recognized Stalinism as a genuine menace to American freedom – is still remembered as a fink.
So it is today with Islam. The “counterjihadists†are the villains – the hysterics, the fools, who see a Muslim under every bed, with a bomb in his turban. Meanwhile the good guys are the counter-counterjihadists – the journalists, activists, and others who make a career of slamming Islam’s critics, whom they frequently represent (especially over here in Scandinavia) as “conspiracy theorists.†For just as the anti-Communists of yesteryear were viewed not as sober, well-informed students of life behind the Iron Curtain but as obsessive, ignorant haters, we counterjihadists are viewed not as people who’ve read the Koran and studied Islamic societies and subcultures but as semi-literate morons and bigots – and, according to one particularly noxious meme that has spread far and wide in the last couple of years, mindless disciples of what our enemies caricature as the mad ramblings of Bat Ye’or. (Never do any of these mud-slingers ever try to explain why so many writers and scholars around the world – people with a variety of professional and personal backgrounds, and with long records of thinking for themselves and of observing the world with their own eyes – all chose, apparently more or less at once, to become, supposedly, disciples of the same person.) It should be a matter of national shame for Britain that when its government banned Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller from its shores, it was doing the bidding of the counter-counterjihadists of Hope Not Hate – who, despite their manifestly Stalinist methods and sympathies, are treated by U.K. authorities as reliable ideological gatekeepers, even as the truth-telling Spencers and Gellers are tagged as anathema.
CounterJihad and CounterCommunism are the same things. What I see with Islam is similar with Communism. The left embraced both of them. Jihad and Communism are the same things in the end. Hateful, violent, and destructive.
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The enemy of my enemy is my friend...-Sun Tzu-
My enemy is the US, the enemy of the US is islam (used to be the communists, and still is to an extent). Therefore, as a good lib, my friend is the Jihadist, muslim, islam, Al Jazeera Al Arabiya !
PS on my other forum, when I post counterjihad I use the forum name "ROPER" (Religion Of PeacER).
edit PS