Hugh Fitzgerald is puzzled -- more detailed posting

"How the Left fell so hard for Islam is a puzzlement," says Hugh Fitzgerald in an essay published on Jihad Watch.

It's 2017 now, and Hugh is still puzzled by this?  There's no "puzzle" involved here, in the sense of a baffling mystery.  There is a puzzle about it, however, in the sense of a complex phenomenon that requires a bit of subtle, imaginative thinking.

Nevertheless, the thrust of the answer can be expressed swiftly and simply:

"Because Muslims are Brown People."

Complexities arise when one examines this more closely; but the heart of the matter is still the same.

One complexity is that, of course, when I put the answer that way, I'm not literally saying that all Muslims are "Brown".  I know there exist multitudes of Muslims who are olive, yellow, black, and white.  I know the tired, old, and almost comically ineffectual mantra of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, that "Islam is not a race".  The point about it is that this answer reflects how the Politically Correct Multi-Culturalists (PC MC) think about Muslims, not necessarily the factual reality, nor how those who are anti-Islam think about it.

Then we factor in the powerful cultural dynamic, throughout the PC MC West, of reverse racism, and its attendant White Guilt.

The unfortunately disastrous cultural fact is that, on the issue of Islam, PC MC continues to dominate the sociopolitical culture throughout the West – not because some insidious cabal is imposing it upon the hapless populace, but because the populace has learned, over a long arc of time involving complex cultural processes, to believe in its values. 

A further complexity is that this anxiously anti-racist dynamic that sees Muslims as an ethnic people (or a wondrous rainbow or tapestry or mosaic of many Kumbaya hues) and -- as a direct consequence, feels anxiously compelled to protect and "respect" their "culture" -- is not merely a neurotic habit of the Left -- for the mass neurosis of PC MC still affects probably the majority of non-Leftists throughout the West on this issue: Conservatives, Centrists, and what I call the "Comfortably Apolitical".

This Western mainstream neurosis (if it hasn't kicked into a mass psychosis by now) reflects what I call the Problem of the Problem.

The inability of those in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream, like Hugh Fitzgerald, to recognize this secondary problem is what I call the Problem of the Problem of the Problem.

Further Reading:

Color-Blindness 

Lawrence Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations, and Muslims