The ‘Hail Mary’ That Came Off

It is rare for debates of a political or intellectual nature to have sharp delineations. One such instance was 9/11: the moment the first plane hit the North Tower, the notion that Islam had a place within any civilized society disintegrated. What, then, were the devout to do?

Islam, with its vague and angry denunciations of infidels, legalized misogyny, and incitements to violence, was never going to cut it in the “marketplace of ideas” in the twenty-first century. The situation was desperate, but the younger generation of Muslims had an idea: Islam would get “woke.”

The religion of Mohammed would be repackaged, not as an imperialist Arab ideology imposed on dark-skinned people at the point of the sword, but as an integral part of black culture. This would imply that pesky folks who complained about Islamist terrorism are simply racist.

This strategy of “racializing” Islam has been surprisingly effective. The effects on our socio-political discourse are, at times, bizarre.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to poke the Islamist academic historian, Will Scates Frances (also known as ‘Will Abu Muezz’). Frances reacted the way you’d expect a Sunni supremacist to — with threats of violence. The unusual part is that he denounced me as a “white supremacist.”

Now Will Scates Frances is a white man. Frances gave no examples of my alleged white supremacist leanings, so why would he say that? One explanation is that Frances has become so bamboozled by the conflation of blackness with being Muslim that he’s convinced himself that he’s a black man.

Whether or not Will actually believes that he is a black man, he seems to act as if he were black, aggrieved by the intolerance of whiteys such as myself. That urban hipster crypto-Leftists like Liam Hogan, or pseudo-arnarchists like Andy Fleming, would fall for this kind of posturing is no surprise. More hardened and cynical creatures, such as myself, are not fooled.