Monday, April 21, 2008

Robert Spencer On Why The Anti-Jihad Resistance Is Not About Race

Right now seems like as good a time to tell you, I will be interviewing Robert Spencer on the Infidel Bloggers Alliance Radio Show on Thursday May 1st at 7:00 PM Pacific Standard Time.

Do you think I will be talking with him about his subject, the subject that, divided this blog, and destroyed my naiive faith in the counter-Jihad movement?

I sure will.

From Jihad Watch:


I've said it before, but like so many things in this struggle, I'm going to keep saying them until someone listens and probably after that as well. A race-based approach to the anti-jihad resistance is harmful in a number of ways:

1. It's the wrong way to fight the global jihad. The jihad is not a race, Islam is not a race, Muslims are not all of one race. The issues between the Islamic world and non-Muslims are not racial. They are about religious supremacism. Bringing in race just confuses the issue, and allows jihadists and their de facto allies among the Eurabian elites to claim that this whole thing is about racism.

2. To form one group for indigenous Europeans, as has been done in several countries, reduces virtually every issue to the one non-negotiable issue of race and ethnicity, discourages cooperation, and thus encourages Balkanization, works against the idea of representative government, and obscures the common values of Judeo-Christian civilization that are shared by people of many races and ethnicities.

3. This approach hamstrings and marginalizes the anti-jihad movement. Many people who oppose the Islamization of Europe will never join with a race-based party to do so. Hugh Fitzgerald and I have often commented here over the years about the tragedy in Europe: the mainstream political parties have completely abdicated any responsibility to deal with the Islamization of Europe, thus leaving the field open to groups that obscure the issue with racial politics.

4. Many, many people have written here, and will no doubt write again in response to this post, that the parties that speak of race are the only ones in Europe that are doing anything to resist Islamization, and thus they deserve the support of all those who believe there is something worth defending in Western non-Muslim civilization. I don't think that is any sounder an argument than the claim that we must support Hizballah because it builds schools and runs charities when not lobbing rockets at Israeli civilians.

Also, people I respect have pointed out that European culture is being overwhelmed and transformed by out-of-control Muslim immigration, and there is nothing wrong with defending it from that. I agree. But while culture has a racial component, culture and race are not identical. To reduce culture to race on a continent that has seen six million sacrificed to the idolatry of race and blood is not, in my view, the right way to defend European culture --

and there must be articulated a sane and moral alternative that is clearly distinct from that and rejects it utterly.

Geert Wilders in the Netherlands has managed to mount a strong stance against Islamization while avoiding dalliance with racial groups. While I am not a European and am conscious that Europeans will probably charge me with naivete and ignorance (the last time I posted this I inspired not one, but two websites charging me with being a secret jihadist, so this time I'll probably be Satan himself), I still don't see why it can't be done elsewhere. Such dalliances inevitably raise the specter of neo-Nazism and white supremacism, and allow the mainstream parties to pretend that Europe faces a choice between becoming Eurabia and reviving the gas chamber. There are other ways, there have to be other ways, to deal with this.

The anti-jihad movement, if it is to become mainstream in Europe or the U.S., must articulate a positive vision of defense for the human rights of all people against the ways in which those human rights are contravened under Sharia, and avoid being diverted into side issues and non-issues, or formulating the problem incorrectly.

8 comments:

Damien said...

He absolutely right. Islam is not a race. Islam is a belief system. Criticizing any belief system is not racist. Was Ayn Rand a racist for criticizing Communism? Is Greg Nyquist a racists for criticizing her objectivist philosophy? Off course the answer to both of these questions is no. So criticizing Islam is not racist. Islam is a religion, but its not religious bigotry either to criticize Islam. People criticize Christianity all the time. They are not condemned as bigots or racists.

Treating the fight against Jihad as a race issue also harms the movement, because it reinforces the notion that any criticism of is Islam is a form of bigotry. We don't want to play into the hands of Islam's politically correct apologists.

Pastorius said...

Hi Damien,

I agree.

In fact, criticizing religions is absolutely imperative.

Religion, along with business and government, is a center of power in a society. We would never even entertain the idea that we ought not criticize business or government. So, why would we think we shouldn't criticize religion?

Anonymous said...

Pastorius, you know that you're herding cats, right? People have minds of their own and will act based on their own circumstances and prejudices. There won't be one perfect counterjihad where all march in unison to the same song. It will be a smorgasbord of counterjihads worldwide, shaped by local geopolitics and the resources each can muster. I admire your consistent stance on this issue but there just isn't a single answer to the question of "who can you trust when things blow?".

Pastorius said...

Look, I'm no Lincoln, but by your definition, Lincoln was also herding cats.

I think of it as swimming upstream. I'm expecting that I'm gonna get a good piece of ass with a hot salmon when I make it to the top.

The Judeo-Christian tradition, with its appeal to the idea that we are one in the dust from which we are formed, and one is the blood by which we are redeemed, is opposed to racialism.

The Western tradition, with its idea of equality before the law, is opposed to racialism.

These are the things we stand for as a culture. We must stand on what we claim to believe in; all men are created equal and were born with the same unalienable rights.

If we don't stand for that, then we shame ourselves.

Give me naiivety of give me death.

;-)

Damien said...

Pastorius,

Amen! You Rock!

Pastorius said...

Thanks, bro.

Always On Watch said...

The issue which won't go away--and with good reason.

That Robert Spencer felt the need to post a comment at LGF--after all these years of not being registered there--tells us just how volatile this issue is.

BTW, WC and I did discuss this matter with Mr. Spencer when we interviewed him on The Gathering Storm. Obviously, Mr. Spencer has given this critical issue much thought because he identifies the coming trouble of portions of the counter-jihad movement with certain associations and ideologies. Mr. Spencers Point #4 is particularly well made, I think.

Anonymous said...

When Dubya announced the manned mission to Mars, he was roundly ridiculed, especially by the scientific establishment, for proposing a pie-in-the-sky kind of project with no practical scientific benefit. In light of this heated argument about race, I think Dubya's idea is worth pursuing for its future sociological merit. It starts the quarrelsome tribes on Earth down the path of planetary colonization and when that happens, the white racists, black racists, multi-culturists, communists, socialists, baptists, methodists, free marketeers, vegetarians etc., etc., can all split and found their own nations. Then we'll see the ills and benefits of the values each tribe espouses. It will be a grand experiment that sociologists have wet dreams about. Well, if we don't become pedophile-worshipping zombies first, that is.