The Soul of the Plot

The frost’s on the pumpkin, the fodder’s in the shock, the turkey’s in the straw, the bat's in the belfry…what else can all this mean, but that Islamofascism Awareness Week is drawing nigh?

All over “Christendom,” respected scholars like David Horowitz will be putting aside their alembics and retorts, their abaci and astrolabes, and training their penny-bright eyes firmly on this underexamined issue. Don’t expect Michelle Malkin to concern herself with immigrant lepers, or Baron Bodissey to speak out against leprous immigrants; the week will be consecrated to nothing but the contemplation of Nazi Ragheads, and no quarter will be asked or given.

Cynics might be amused by this proclamation. They'd probably say it's a bit like a child who wakes up screaming every night declaring Nightmare Awareness Week, or a miser declaring Hoarded Treasure Awareness Week, or a prisoner in solitary confinement declaring Cell Awareness Week, or Christopher Hitchens declaring Alcohol Awareness Week, or Thers declaring Bacon Awareness Week.

Cynicism, fortunately, died on 9/11, along with 3,000 brave, God-fearing, all-American heroes whose spirits will not rest easy until every Musselman from here to Chinnanallaballi is wailing in Hell.

Though Horowitz and Co. have often been accused – with some justice - of cowardice, and opportunism, and dishonesty, and stupidity, and ignorance, and venality, and racism, and silliness, and incoherence, and irrationality, and defamation, and amorality, and fraudulence, and viciousness, and paranoia, and authoritarianism, and stark staring insanity, it’s only fair to point out that fighting a phantasmagorical catch-all enemy is in many respects more difficult - if not more heroic - than fighting a strictly intelligible one.

As harrowing as it may be to dodge bullets and IEDs in Iraq, can it really compare to battling the miasmic influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism, or hunting for defeatist messages in the latest offering from Pixar, or cataloging the prospective rampages of that pitiless Wahhabist firebrand John Edwards?

Fire a round of bullets into an Iraqi hospital orderly, or an Afghani wedding guest, and the threat he posed to Civilization dies with him. Write a broadside against postcolonial theory, and you’ll just make its adherents more determined than ever to theorize. Sad to say, this is an all too typical denouement of this “play of hopes and fears,”

With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

Though the subject doesn’t really call for it, I’ll end on a slightly serious note. The last time I made fun of “Islamofascism” – or one of the last times - I was challenged to explain my problems with the term. This time around, I’ll state my objections up front:

I view fascism as implacably statist and/or racist, which doesn't seem to fit Wahhabist Islam very well.

Also, the blanket term implies that there's a single ideological cause for violence committed in a variety of locales by a variety of groups, which is pointlessly reductive; its only real purpose is to blur the distinction between religious and secular violence, and between legitimate and illegitimate grievances.

It's convenient for propaganda purposes, granted, but it makes it harder to address real-world problems, whether you're talking about addressing them through warfare or diplomacy or education or what have you. Which seems to me to be a high price to pay in order to provide cowardly layabouts…with a unifying myth.