Summer Fundraiser 2015, Day Seven
We’re approaching the finish line in this summer’s fundraising week. Tonight is the last night we’ll be dunning our readers for donations this quarter. One more plea to help us keep the enterprise alive until the fall, and then we’ll resume normal programming.
And a good thing, too — these blegs really wear me out. I get very little sleep during fundraising week as it is, so if anything additional comes up, it really messes me up. Which is what happened this week — Hate Not Hope, the Internet, the phone, the car, and all the other odds and ends to cause crisis at Schloss Bodissey. Phew!
But our readers have been exceedingly generous, as usual, which makes it all worthwhile. If the final day turns out like the rest of the week, we should be A-OK here until the leaves start to fall.
As you all know by now, the theme of this week’s fundraiser is “Resources”. We’ve been talking most of the week about monetary and material resources, but since we have very little of those, how about the other kind? The, ahem, “human resources”?
I hate that term — let’s just call them “people”.
When a group of committed people opposed to Islamization first gathered together to form the 910 Group almost nine years ago, there was considerable discussion about what we should call ourselves. I pushed for the term “Counterjihad”, which seemed to be the pithiest and most relevant description of what we were doing. I couldn’t claim to have coined the term, although I had thought it up myself a year or two before. However, as I always do when I think of an original idea, I did a Google search at the time to see if anyone else had thought of it. Sure enough, it was already out there, although there were only about five hundred or so instances. I think one of them was in a Hugh Fitzgerald piece.
I just Googled it again, and there are now 112,000 instances. It even has a Wikipedia page. If you make it into two words (with a hyphen or without), you get 175,000 results. That’s quite a difference from ten years ago.
I met some resistance within the 910 Group to the idea of using the term. The main objection was that it was negative — it was “anti” something, and we needed a positive word or phrase. However, I maintained back then, and still believe today, that anytime our ideological opponents use the word in a disapproving, antagonistic manner, they are sending out the subliminal signal that they are pro-jihad. They can’t help delivering that message; it’s unavoidable: if a listener hears you disparage the Counterjihad, he subconsciously thinks you are in favor of Jihad.
The efforts of the Red-Green Alliance to make people think that jihad means an “inner spiritual struggle” have been a signal failure. When an ordinary Westerner hears the word jihad, he knows it means bloodthirsty Muslims screaming for unbelievers to be killed. It means cutting throats, beheading people, suicide bombings on crowded trains, and all those other lovely activities that keep Islam in the daily headlines. Most people aren’t fooled by the apologists’ attempt to cleanse the word of its traditional Islamic meaning.
So I continued to use the word “Counterjihad”. Whenever I was put in charge of graphics and publicity, I included “Counterjihad” in the materials. If not in the titles, at least in the subheads. The Brussels event in 2007 was featured as “Counterjihad Brussels”. After Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs attacked us for that in late 2007 and early 2008, the word gradually made its way into the lexicon used by our opponents. More and more people who hated what we did described us using our own chosen term.
Eight years later, when Hate Not Hope put out a report calling for legal action against us, they referred to us as the Counter-Jihad. That is, they used our terminology. This is a notable success for the Counterjihad. The people who consider us their enemies in this information war don’t realize it, but they are accepting and operating in a battlespace that was prepared by us. This is a serious strategic error that any student of Sun Tzu would strive to avoid.
“Wait, Baron!” I hear you cry. “Don’t tell them that! Why let them know all this?”
Well, it’s too late now to make any difference. This is a distributed operation, and an emergent phenomenon as well. It can’t be derailed by the writings of any one person, nor even those of a large group of persons. The train is careering down the tracks at full speed now. Our movement (and its opponents) are far past the point when anything I say or do can make a difference.
The Counterjihad has been mainstreamed.
I’m just glad to be here to enjoy the ride. And I’m pleased that so many of you resources people have decided to come along with us.
Yesterday’s donors arrived from:
Stateside: California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas
Near Abroad: Canada
Far Abroad: Australia, Germany, New Zealand, and the UK
That’s it for bleg posts this quarter. Sometime tomorrow I’ll post a wrap-up that includes all the locations that have checked in so far. Many thanks to all who gave!
The tip jar in the text above is just for decoration. To donate, click the tin cup on our sidebar, or the donate button, on the main page. If you prefer a monthly subscription, click the “subscribe” button.
Side-question: Should “counterjihad” be capitalized? I don’t see why. But then, I don’t see why “the internet” should be capitalized. Is it a proper name? Just because there is only one internet? And when data is stored offline in an NSA-accessible way, it is said to be stored in “the cloud”? “The” cloud? Is there only one? Should “the Cloud” be capitalized? I don’t know.
Good question. I prefer capitalization, myself, as if the Counterjihad were a formal and legally recognized entity, like the United Way or the Communist Party.
But we could use an uncapitalized adjectival version, too. For example, “a counterjihad sympathizer” or “engaging in unlawful counterjihad activities”…
Make it capital. Never mind what anyone else does.
The Germans, bless them, would capitalise it anyway, and not fail to subtsitute a single, multi-syllabled word for several shorter English ones.
I’m no etymologist, but I suspect that the stresses Brits and Americans place on different syllables within the same word derive from your German heritage.
There are varying influences. For example, we Americans pronounce “garage” “ga-RAHZH”, more like the French do, while Brits say “garridge”, or at least they did when I lived there.
And there are regional variations. Southerners say “IN-surance”, and northerners say “in-SURE-ance”, just to name one difference.
In my youth I once worked with an English migrant (London) who just couldn’t get his head around that us colonials would dare to distort the Queens English in some single word pronunciations, such as the word garage, mostly pronounced as gar-rardge or the word mall pronounced as mal in London but mostly as maul in Oz.
And putting lime juice in his beer nearly drove me cuckoo!
Ah yes, Lager and lime, I had almost forgotten.
It was a drink for 17 year olds, and the intro to the real thing, the lime was very sweet and took the edge off the (warm by Oz standards) lager.
I was brought up on Tiger, but sometimes it was Swan or another Oz brew I cannot remember.
I hope someday the Counterjihad will become the Anti-Islam Movement (it has the advantage of a cool acronym — A.I.M. — which sounds almost like a secret spy organization).