Gardening While Moslem

Commenter D. Eastbrook brought the following insulting bit of Islamist sympathy to my attention.

Today's gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission. If some of these attackers viewed their own bodies as pure instruments, and everyone else as wasteful and deserving of punishment, they could just as well have come to that conclusion through absorbing the healthy-living agenda of the gym as by reading the Quran. At the gym, Atta, Khan, and the others could focus on perfecting the self, the body, as a pure and righteous thing -- and hone their disdain for others.

So, should we shut down all gyms in the name of fighting terrorism? Of course not. It's a ludicrous idea. But no more ludicrous, perhaps, than the infiltration of Western mosques. [bold added]

Thank heavens we have the stalwart Brendan O'Neill to brave the great government-, media-, and blogosphere-wide conspiracy of silence designed to avert suspicion from Charles Atlas as the originator of the notion that Western infidels deserve to be killed! Had we all but known about the bodybuilding literature that keeps popping up among the Korans and bomb-making materials every time some Afghan cave or Canadian flat gets raided, we'd have known the error of our ways long ago.... Of course keeping an eye on a mosque is a silly an idea as closing a gym!

It has been nearly five years since the atrocities of September 11, 2001. The murders committed or attempted by terrorists in the name of Islam before, during, and since have been so numerous that there can be no reasonable doubt that Islam plays a role in motivating terrorists. And yet we have a constant parade of leftists telling us that if we're not simply excusing ourselves for waging a senseless war, we are somehow not being intellectually rigorous enough when we settle upon Islam as an animating ideology. In the Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand described this tactic, the argument from intimidation, as follows.

[It] consists of threatening to impeach an opponent's character by means of his argument, thus impeaching the argument without debate. Example: "Only the immoral can fail to see that Candidate X's argument is false." (139)

Here, O'Neil is saying something between, "Only the bloodthirsty would insult my intelligence by keeping an eye on a harmless mosque," and "Only someone too happy to jump to conclusions would do a thing like that." Indeed, on that latter score, there is perhaps even more than the argument from intimidation going on, as I will elaborate shortly.

The goal of such writers is to sap our resolve, by attempting to shame or gaslight us into doubting something that is plainly true, and so to make us less willing to act upon that truth by fighting even the limited war we have waged to this point with the Islamists. The shame is accomplished by the argument from intimidation.

The gaslighting is an attempt to take advantage of the decades of poor education inflicted upon millions of children in the West. Most people are unable to defend their opinions past a certain point, if at all. O'Neill and his ilk hope to cash in on that fact. Their concern is not debate as a means of reaching truth, but the raising of unwarranted objections in an effort to make Westerners doubt their own conclusions. Want to see some more? Consider the following comment by someone who recently visited my blog.

I wish to quote you:

"Islam, which has no strong tradition of rational inquiry or of religious toleration, and which incites violence and murder against unbelievers."

May I enquire as to the facts on which you base your confidant claim that Islam 'incites violence and murder against unbelievers. Although not a member of the faith myself, I would encourage you to do your homework before resorting to such seemingly authoritative but baseless and misinformed claims.

You will note that, without having bothered to see how I reached my conclusions about Islam -- or offering one scintilla of evidence to the contrary -- he has already decided that my "claims" are "baseless", and yet that I somehow owe it to him to spoon-feed him all the facts upon which I have reached said conclusion.

My response is more than this deserved. The relevant part I reproduce below.

[N]o. I am not going to reproduce this all in detail here, for you, personally. Why? Because if, in the years since September 11, 2001 you really haven't noticed a theme by now, you never will and nothing I can say is going to change your mind. And if you have, and are still asking questions like this, interrogating me as if I am some sort of war criminal, then you are no better than a terrorist yourself. In either case, I am wasting my time.

I do not owe you an explanation for my views, and I do not intend to give you one. I am finished with this conversation.

At this point, to ask me to name the facts behind my conclusion about something that the terrorists themselves constantly admit -- that they are moved to act by their faith -- is about as intellectually honest as to demand that I give a detailed description of the entire inventory of events I witnessed that led me to the "seemingly authoritative, but baseless and misinformed claim" that "What goes up must come down."

By that same line of reasoning, the recent arrest of seventeen bomber wannabes in Toronto was a mistake. The cell phone, batteries, soldering iron, voltmeter, and handgun in this picture being no more instruments for a contemplated murdering spree than the three tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer the group bought. These are just a bunch of talkative electronics enthusiasts who were getting ready for a nice trip to the firing range before a round of intensive gardening. And they just happened to be Moslems. The outrage!

So let's stop our racist persecution and start banning a few more things already. Clearly, stopping at chemistry sets and model rockets (HT: David Veksler) as we have in America hasn't been enough to protect us from the wild machinations of materials that seem prone to self-assemble into bombs and explode in the near vicinity of piety-mouthing Moslems and myriad unfortunate others denounced as "infidels", coincidentally by other Moslems.

On a serious note, the hysterical overreaction of our public officialdom to the ability of American citizens to procure certain substances, which I have blogged about before, plays into the hands of the likes of O'Neill, by making the war effort, such as it is, look absurd. And this is aside from the fact that such steps, accomplishing nothing of their stated purpose, are open-ended abridgements of our freedom, made without even the sunset provision a declaration of war would provide.

-- CAV