Still nowhere on Islam

Here is another illustration of why I now believe that America will not turn around before it’s too late.

Several weeks ago an acquaintance told me how the subject of Islam had come up among some colleagues of hers. In the course of the conversation, these people—intelligent conservatives working in a conservative organization—said that Islam is one of the Abrahamic faiths and therefore compatible with our society, that Islam is a tolerant religion, that Islam was an advanced civilization when Europe was backward—all the pro-Islam clichés.

When I heard this, my heart sank. If, after ten years of incessant debate and discussion in conservative publications about Islam, intelligent conservatives have no idea what Islam is but mindlessly repeat the slogans about how it’s a tolerant and culturally advanced religion, if they know nothing more about the subject than what they’ve heard from the Islam apologists, what does that say about our ability as a society to grasp the nature of the Islamization threat and defend ourselves from it?

In this connection, consider Robert Spencer. This industrious man has been incessantly publishing books, blogging, and speaking on the subject of Islam for many years. He is deeply informed on Islam and authoritatively devastating on the side of Islam that of most interest to us, the treatment Islamic law requires of non-Muslims. As an author of books, he is genial, witty, a good writer, and not any kind of fanatic. We are fortunate to have him. (I say nothing here about Spencer’s negative side, which is not relevant to the discussion.) Also, he is not obscure, but is reasonably well known, certainly in conservative circles. Yet the academics and conservatives of whom I speak—again, very intelligent people—seem never to have heard of him, never to have read him or other Islam critics or taken in anything they have to say.

If Spencer’s labors—combined with every day’s news stories which mightily back up his analysis of Islam, not to mention 1,390 years of well-documented Islamic history—have achieved so little, if so many people are not even aware of the deadly and threatening nature of Islam but look on the religion approvingly and welcomingly, or at least complacently, what then will wake them up, other than actually coming under Islam’s power and seeing the truth for themselves? And then it will be too late.

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Irv P. writes:

And the same is true of the other important issues facing us as a people (race, demographics, the growing tyranny of our own governmental institutions, etc.). We are truly dumbed down. Every issue is what the media says it is. We live under a dark cloud of propaganda which only a select few are even interested in seeing past.

That is why I used the phrase, “except in our little enclaves,” when I responded to something on your site last week. I also remember saying, “We are on the outside looking in.”

It’s very disheartening to most VFR readers I’m sure. All we can do is keep telling the truth to anyone who will listen. Relentlessly, repetitiously, endlessly … keep telling the truth (and keep praying for Divine intervention).

JC in Houston writes:

I know it’s depressing that the great majority of even ‘“conservative” Americans don’t have even an inkling of the basic facts about the grave threats facing us. That’s why I’m going to retreat into my little enclave, pour myself a few drinks and celebrate my birthday tonight! You can only carry the weight of the world for so long!

January 31

Buck O. writes:

I don’t think that recognizing or not recognizing that Islam is an existential threat to the West, is a function of intelligence. It can’t be. There are millions of measurably intelligent people who argue that Islam is not our threat. There has to be something more important than intelligence at play.

Just as the most intelligent people cannot reason their way to God, intelligent people can not reason their way out of modern liberalism or avoid cognitive dissonance. Something other than abstract or corporal intelligence is at play. Something other than intelligence has to intervene.

LA replies:

It’s a truism discussed many times at this site that intelligence in the IQ or academic sense is not correlated with a grasp—particularly a conservative grasp—of moral and social issues. Here, however, I was speaking not just of intelligent people but of intelligent conservative people, and, moreover, of intelligent conservative people whose business it is to be engaged with contemporary cultural issues.

Second, I wasn’t speaking only of having a grasp of the truth about Islam, but of having at least a minimal familiarity with the ideas of our society’s most prominent writer on a subject—Islam—that has properly obsessed conservatives for the last ten years.

Therefore it would seem that the ignorance of Islam criticism displayed by the people I was discussing cannot be written off to the familiar fact that highly intelligent people are often clueless.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 30, 2012 01:54 PM | Send