Sunday, December 03, 2017

Cherry-picking is not always fallacious



Image result for cherry picker lift

I've written a couple of times about the new book by Christine Williams-Douglass, one of the evidently important colleagues of Robert Spencer and an important and frequent contributor to Spencer's Jihad Watch.  Her new book being a compendium of "Reformist Muslims" whom she describes and interviews and supposedly vets with tough questions (I'll be the judge of that, when I purchase it and read it in the hopefully not-too-distant future):  The Challenge of Modernizing Islam: Reformers Speak Out And the Obstacles They Face.  See my two-part discussion of the problems of the whole premise of that book.

For now, I have a tasty cherry for my readers.

"...I support this ancient-to-modern-day reformist movement..."

Those are the words of the above-mentioned Christine Williams-Douglass referring to a "reformist movement" of Muslims that she (and, alas, many others in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream) supposes exists (or, incoherently, could exist (again...?)).  Here is the larger, tasty muffin in which this plump cherry was nestled:

"One of the cardinal services of my book The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is that, after defending why I support this ancient-to-modern-day reformist movement, it educates readers about Muslims who posture as moderate, while they wage a campaign of war against those who report on the global atrocities being committed against innocent people simply because those innocent people are of another faith and belief system."

One can plainly see that the noxious cherry I plucked out is not contravened in the least by the larger, muffiny context.  And the worst part of this is that not one single Jihad Watch reader has raised a stink, politely but firmly demanding to know why Robert Spencer is countenancing and showcasing this steaming camelcrap on his supposedly boldly "Islamophobic" website.

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