Analysis of a Dennis Prager essay
When the better and the brighter succumb to the disease of the Age -- particularly when that disease is in many complex ways rendering us vulnerable to an unprecedented (and inveterate) enemy -- one is sorely tempted to pack it up and give up hope for one's civilization. Dennis Prager is one of those better and brighter souls who, alas, has so succumbed.
Were the reader to substitute "Nazi" for the word "Muslim" in his piece, he would see the preposterous tragicomedy unintentionally constructed by Prager. Let us try that little experiment (with a couple of minor tweaks here and there for consistency), shall we...?
It is not to "prove [her] patriotism" that people ask her [a Nazi who admires Der Fuhrer as the "best model of conduct for all mankind" and who treats Mein Kampf as holy writ and as a guide for a good society] to condemn Nazi mass murder, torture and sexual enslavement. It has nothing to do with patriotism.
Decent people (including many decent Nazis) make this request for three other reasons: One is to ascertain the moral views of those Nazis. The second is to ascertain how widespread Nazi views are among Nazis. And the third reason is to have as many Nazis as possible condemn Nazi violence in the hope that Nazis considering supporting or engaging in terror will think twice about doing so. It is the most logical request people of goodwill can make when they ask Nazi spokespeople to react to atrocities committed by Nazis in the name of Nazism. How else are non-Nazis to assess Nazism and Nazis? [bold emphasis added]
After this simple exercise, Prager’s entire argument falls apart. The only way to salvage it would be to insist that the proper SAT analogy would be – INTOLERABLE MUSLIM : MUSLIM :: Nazi : German. The situation of analytical incoherence in the Counter-Jihad is sufficiently complex such that it necessitates some explanation of terms before we can fully clarify the usefulness of the SAT analogy.
First of all, we have the problem that in the contextual meaning of the analogy, “Germans” were indeed our enemy in WW2, not merely “Nazis”, and tragically we were forced to kill hundreds of thousands of ordinary German people during the war. So, if the Counter-Jihad Softy (defined, for starters, as a morosoph who glibly lets slip such asinine phrases as “decent Muslims”) would try to salvage Prager’s argument by appealing to a distinction analogous to the “German/Nazi” distinction in its WW2 context, he would run up against the formidable, if not impossible problem the Allies actually faced (and, needless to say, any attempts at 20/20 hindsight would be specious in this regard) when fighting the enemy presenting itself as a fusion of those two categories.
Secondly, the Counter-Jihad Softy who rejects the elementary comparison of “Muslim : Nazi” would be obliged to give us good reasons why we should play Muslim Roulette – trusting innumerable Muslims as “decent” partners (and/or as innocents we are supposed to respect and protect) in our frightfully exigent project to manage the dangerous evils which their Islam is causing the world -- given the mountain of data we already have indicating the formidable, if not impossible problem of taqiyya and the False Moderate. Additionally, this problem, bad enough as it is, is exacerbated by the related, subtler problem of the function of various modalities of Stealth Jihad and their overarching goal & effect of lulling us over a long arc of time into a complacent willingness to accept the modus vivendi fait accompli of innumerable terrorists hidden and swimming among seas of millions of Muslims circulating like cancer cells throughout our Body Politic and its more general socio-cultural organs (not to mention that we reasonably assume that this problem, alarming enough as it is, is metastasizing at an exponential rate we cannot fully calculate in order to manage or prevent).
Thus, for example, we see in Prager’s argument the term useful for all Counter-Jihad Softies – “Islamist” (we also see "Salafist" and "Wahhabist" in this regard' but more subtly, there is the closely related one is Robert Spencer's seemingly more robust "Jihadist"). Such terms that denotes a non-existent category in the actual Muslim world; a term that has been generated by anxious Westerners trying to grapple with the out-of-control problem of 1.5 billion members of a psychotic cult dedicated to our destruction – whether by hook (visible violence & incitements thereof), or by crook (pretending to be “decent Muslims” and fooling people like Prager). Such terms tend to be based on an artificial taxonomy of Muslims calculated to exempt vast (but never pinned down, numerically) swaths of Muslims from the concerns of our rational self-defense.
Were the reader to substitute "Nazi" for the word "Muslim" in his piece, he would see the preposterous tragicomedy unintentionally constructed by Prager. Let us try that little experiment (with a couple of minor tweaks here and there for consistency), shall we...?
It is not to "prove [her] patriotism" that people ask her [a Nazi who admires Der Fuhrer as the "best model of conduct for all mankind" and who treats Mein Kampf as holy writ and as a guide for a good society] to condemn Nazi mass murder, torture and sexual enslavement. It has nothing to do with patriotism.
Decent people (including many decent Nazis) make this request for three other reasons: One is to ascertain the moral views of those Nazis. The second is to ascertain how widespread Nazi views are among Nazis. And the third reason is to have as many Nazis as possible condemn Nazi violence in the hope that Nazis considering supporting or engaging in terror will think twice about doing so. It is the most logical request people of goodwill can make when they ask Nazi spokespeople to react to atrocities committed by Nazis in the name of Nazism. How else are non-Nazis to assess Nazism and Nazis? [bold emphasis added]
After this simple exercise, Prager’s entire argument falls apart. The only way to salvage it would be to insist that the proper SAT analogy would be – INTOLERABLE MUSLIM : MUSLIM :: Nazi : German. The situation of analytical incoherence in the Counter-Jihad is sufficiently complex such that it necessitates some explanation of terms before we can fully clarify the usefulness of the SAT analogy.
First of all, we have the problem that in the contextual meaning of the analogy, “Germans” were indeed our enemy in WW2, not merely “Nazis”, and tragically we were forced to kill hundreds of thousands of ordinary German people during the war. So, if the Counter-Jihad Softy (defined, for starters, as a morosoph who glibly lets slip such asinine phrases as “decent Muslims”) would try to salvage Prager’s argument by appealing to a distinction analogous to the “German/Nazi” distinction in its WW2 context, he would run up against the formidable, if not impossible problem the Allies actually faced (and, needless to say, any attempts at 20/20 hindsight would be specious in this regard) when fighting the enemy presenting itself as a fusion of those two categories.
Secondly, the Counter-Jihad Softy who rejects the elementary comparison of “Muslim : Nazi” would be obliged to give us good reasons why we should play Muslim Roulette – trusting innumerable Muslims as “decent” partners (and/or as innocents we are supposed to respect and protect) in our frightfully exigent project to manage the dangerous evils which their Islam is causing the world -- given the mountain of data we already have indicating the formidable, if not impossible problem of taqiyya and the False Moderate. Additionally, this problem, bad enough as it is, is exacerbated by the related, subtler problem of the function of various modalities of Stealth Jihad and their overarching goal & effect of lulling us over a long arc of time into a complacent willingness to accept the modus vivendi fait accompli of innumerable terrorists hidden and swimming among seas of millions of Muslims circulating like cancer cells throughout our Body Politic and its more general socio-cultural organs (not to mention that we reasonably assume that this problem, alarming enough as it is, is metastasizing at an exponential rate we cannot fully calculate in order to manage or prevent).
Thus, for example, we see in Prager’s argument the term useful for all Counter-Jihad Softies – “Islamist” (we also see "Salafist" and "Wahhabist" in this regard' but more subtly, there is the closely related one is Robert Spencer's seemingly more robust "Jihadist"). Such terms that denotes a non-existent category in the actual Muslim world; a term that has been generated by anxious Westerners trying to grapple with the out-of-control problem of 1.5 billion members of a psychotic cult dedicated to our destruction – whether by hook (visible violence & incitements thereof), or by crook (pretending to be “decent Muslims” and fooling people like Prager). Such terms tend to be based on an artificial taxonomy of Muslims calculated to exempt vast (but never pinned down, numerically) swaths of Muslims from the concerns of our rational self-defense.
posted by Hesperado at 12:50 AM
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