In my fundraising post yesterday — the one where I ridiculed that tired trope about eeevil white men — I quoted from several places to make my point regarding the muzzle of Political Correctness. As I said then, and will repeat more or less the same way now: the times are so fraught and the fear of being publicly shamed by those in power is so great that even the Right will stifle themselves for fear of not fitting in with the powerful Kool Kids, that ‘in’ crowd you remember so fondly from high school. It’s still in operation, only balder and more overtly tyrannical whilst pretending to a rational calm that is naught but a veneer. Remember Hillary Clinton promising to use shame and bully tactics to suppress speech? She wasn’t kidding.

This is the very same stifle that permitted the abortion butcher to operate with impunity in Philly for decades. Why? Because the cool kids decided that abortion is a settled issue and nothing is ever to be published which might cause the masses to question this purported consensus. To the Kool Kids, it is beside the point that half of their fellow citizens don’t agree. They decide what is Truth — and they also monitor what is permitted to be labeled Goodness or Beauty. Which is why there is so much Bad Art, and such rampant Mean Spirited Spite rampant in the zeitgeist. Because the KK have no standards beyond what is Rilly Kool Right Now, the world has become ugly and the people increasingly bad.

If that were not the case, we’d never have seen the rilly cutting edge art of a Christian cross in a jar of urine because they’d have refused to show us the pictures simply on aesthetic grounds. Nor would we be subjected to endless in-your-face “performance art” centered on the human vagina. Piss, poop, pee: are we grown-ups yet?

The Kool Kids are bullies; they block the portals to the press, to the academy and to success as defined by their ilk. That’s why Dr. Gosnell went undetected: he simply wasn’t newsworthy until they couldn’t avoid the truth any longer. It’s also why few conservatives exist in education, in government, or law. Fewer still have a public voice, unless they buy a venue of their own as Glenn Beck has done.

One writer has taken exception to my use of a snip from his essay in that post about the Boston Butchers. He says in the comment section to my post:

Hey, I wrote that post you linked:

Hey Look The Terrorists Are White Guys

It wasn’t meant to minimize the fact that Islam is behind a disproportionate share of the world’s terrorism. I was focusing on, as I put it, “certain liberals here who live with the smug certainty that most or all of their political adversaries are just Tim McVeighs waiting to happen.”

That’s the whole point of the post, and you’ve really gone a long way to take me out of context here.

You can click that link and read his whole post (as I’m sure some of you did while reading my essay), or you can read it below the fold, where I have put it in toto. [Note Mr. Freddoso’s use of the term “disproportionate share of the world’s terrorism”. That is a tell, if ever there was one, and it is deeply saddening.]

But here is our bone of contention, the snip I took from Conservative Intel’s essay to make my point about the fact that many conservatives appear to be allergic to frank discussions of the role of Islamic terror abroad in the world. Mr. Freddoso said:

The Boston Bombers are white guys. They’re religious extremists. They’ve spent their formative years in Cambridge. They’re foreign-born. They’re Muslims. And each of these facts matters a lot less than anyone seems to think.

I disagree strongly with his statement that “these facts matter a lot less than anyone seems to think”. Two ‘facts’ matter a whole lot: (1) they are “religious extremists” and (2) they are Muslims. Now, he did manage to separate those two by other ‘facts’ but when you put them together you have Muslim religious extremists. There are lots of secular Muslims in our country and those folks have done well. No problem whatsoever with their success.

But the fact of their existence doesn’t change the danger that the JIM variety of Muslim represents to the American public. Accepting that uncool fact is crucial to parsing the reality of what happened at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. That Mr. Freddoso chose to widely separate the fact of their religious extremism from the fact of their Muslim identity seems disingenuous at best. It makes him appear — to me — to be a conservative of the National Review variety.

Here at Gates of Vienna we track the activities of JIMs all the time. Ninety-nine percent of the time our suspicions turn out to be founded. JIMs are those violent Jihad, Islam, Muslim boys and men whose destruction has a clear signature. Thus Mr. Freddoso’s claim that their religious extremism and their denomination “matter less than anyone seems to think” simply doesn’t make sense if reality rather than being a Kool Kid is your operating principle. It’s precisely the cognitive dissonance demonstrated so well in that snip which is crippling us right down to the level of basic awareness. That is, we’re not supposed to pay attention to the crucial experience which bears on the facts of this case, or else we’re being racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic. Labels are handy duct tape to be applied by the Left to the mouths of the uncouth truth tellers; sadly some conservatives grow to resemble Leftists as their fear of being labeled uncool trumps their love of truth.

It’s time to make important distinctions between JIMs and those deeply disturbed post-adolescent American suburban white boys who emerge from their darkness laden with powerful weapons and bent on quick destruction of as many as possible before killing themselves when the police show up. In other words, it’s time to profile, something that security-minded adults are willing to do

Here are some distinctions between the Boston Butchers and the plague of mentally unbalanced white boys who find their parents’ guns and go off on a rampage before turning the weapon on themselves (usually as the police are closing in):

• JIMs are not marginalized losers.
• Their friends express shock and surprise when a JIM finally reveals what he really is.
• JIMs are often intelligent, even accomplished.
• Many JIMs are strictly observant followers of Allah who disdain the culture in which they live. In which they choose to live so they can destroy it.
• JIMs will avoid death if they can. The point is to live to kill another day.
• JIMs work toward the utopian Ummah where Allah will reign supreme.
• There are both black and white JIMs (those teenage warriors are usually white).

In the case of the Boston Butchers, the older brother was a particularly observant Muslim. He spoke of saying his prayers and urged his uncle to do likewise. He married an American girl who promptly converted to Islam and donned the clothing of a fundamentalist Muslim woman.

We weren’t “hoping the killers were of a particular ethnic or political background” — as Mr. Freddoso put it. We’ve been watching these events take place for years and it looked awfully like a JIM operation to us. Nor are JIMs our political adversaries; they are the overt enemies of Western civilization. They have sworn to destroy us and make no bones about it. This goes far beyond politics.

Stratfor discusses how they operate (good sources at the original, linked below):

Given that they are grassroots actors, there is likely only a small chance that the authorities will discover a formal link between the suspects and a state sponsor or a professional terrorist group such as al Qaeda or one of its franchise groups. Any link will likely be ideological rather than operational, although it is possible that the two have attended some type of basic militant training abroad. Given what we have learned about the suspects and the nature of the improvised explosive devices they constructed, it is very likely that the authorities will find that the brothers had read and studied al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire Magazine. [My emphasis — D]

This supremacist ideology differs from its predecessor, Marxist communism, in a surprisingly few ways. The spy networks of the 20th century are gone. No more secret meet-ups, no more separate ‘cells’ and spies who report to their handlers in Moscow, no more turncoats lurking in the shadows, etc. At least that’s what we say isn’t going on. Never underestimate our State Department, though. And never underestimate their fellow-travelers in the MSM, who will betray their mother for a good lead. What remains unchanged is their goal, destruction of the West from the inside. Only JIMs call it our “miserable house” instead of “capitalist pigs”. And they burn to destroy us, while the Russians were content to “bury” us.

Stratfor continues:

This case also highlights our analysis that the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from grassroots operatives who live in the West rather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks. This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in severity but broadened in scope in recent years — a trend we expect to continue.

[Boston Bombing Suspects: Grassroots Militants from Chechnya is republished with permission of Stratfor.]

As the ‘scope’ broadens, expect more flagrant lying from our political class. As these killers shred our public confidence, slowly but surely they make us more tractable about obeying orders from Washington.

This growing paralysis couldn’t happen if our governments and ancillary judicial and legal arms didn’t tie us down with lie after lie, piled on with distracting shocks to our sense of security and well-being.

It would be less likely to happen if our elite class, especially the MSM, didn’t work so hard to make truth-tellers into pariahs. Racist. Xenophobic. Islamophobic (yes, they even stoop to using the neologisms of our sworn enemies like Iran).

We would be much safer if Academia hadn’t sold its soul and our children’s minds to the Marxists and then to the Saudis.

What hope do we have when even our military leaders are so consumed with ambition and so hampered by the blinders of political correctness that they willingly sacrifice our soldiers’ lives to their own careers?

Americans are willing to live in peace until the lambs among them turn into wolves. And make no mistake, JIMs are indeed rapacious. But all we have in the way of protection from our leading classes is a mess of lies, misdirection, and scurrilous attacks. They are determined to stifle free speech and they collude with the JIMs, the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, ISNA, and all the other arms of the Islamic supremacist octopus hell-bent on our defeat.

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Here is Mr. Freddoso’s essay. Judge for yourself whether I took that snip out of context. As I said at the time, his material has merit. But on this subject he is simply part of the problem we see every day among conservatives who don’t grok JIMs and refuse to learn the situational awareness they need if we are to survive:

As the police close in on the Boston bombers, the discussion of what the bombings mean is becoming somewhat irritating. All the asinine hopes and fears of those hoping the killers were of a particular ethnic or political background have now been resolved one way or the other. I hope you’re happy, David Sirota.

The Boston Bombers are white guys. They’re religious extremists. They’ve spent their formative years in Cambridge. They’re foreign-born. They’re Muslims. And each of these facts matters a lot less than anyone seems to think.

Perhaps someday, we’ll live in a country where political partisans’ first reaction after every shooting and bombing is NOT to blame their political adversaries — and yes, there are some conservatives who say such things, but I’m especially thinking of certain liberals here who live with the smug certainty that most or all of their political adversaries are just Tim McVeighs waiting to happen. The funniest part is that they probably look down their noses at those who crudely (and wrongly) stereotype all Muslims as terrorists. Please remove the plank from your own eye, brother, then remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Perhaps someday, people will learn that they only hurt their cause (whatever it is)) when they score political points this way. And no, they don’t score any points, either — they just increase the noise level (because every shout gets a shout in response, of course) and make public conversations about important topics more difficult.

In reality, if anarchists had planted the bomb, it would not have been a reflection on all liberals or even on all anarchists. If gay activists try to shoot up the Family Research Council, it does not reflect on gay activists. And when an anti-abortion fanatic shoots an abortionist or bombs a clinic, it doesn’t reflect on pro-lifers or their cause, either. If the bombers had acted under the inspiration of a stupid David Sirota column on how people aren’t paying enough in taxes (“pay now, you jerks!”), that also would not reflect on David Sirota.

Instead of crudely stereotyping people we disagree with, or hiding behind political correctness, how about we all embrace realism. Threats of and motives for terrorism are what they are — excuses for violence taken up by weak-minded people who think they are a lot smarter than they really are, and who want their lives to amount to something but aren’t capable of constructive achievement.

Any idea, no matter how sound or how stupid, can be misused in this way. So let’s all stop making the reverse ad baculum argument — that the violence of your adversaries makes your case for you. We’ll all start thinking more clearly.