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nasigoreng
Joined: 14 May 2004
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 Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 8:26 pm Post subject: The Liberals' War |
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The Liberals' War
Why is the left afraid to face up to the threat of radical Islam?
BY BRET STEPHENS
Sunday, September 17, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
"When I was 19, I moved to New York City. . . . If you had asked me to describe myself then, I would have told you I was a musician, an artist and, on a somewhat political level, a woman, a lesbian and a Jew. Being an American wouldn't have made my list. On Sept. 11, all that changed. I realized that I had been taking the freedoms I have here for granted. Now I have an American flag on my backpack, I cheer at the fighter jets as they pass overhead and I am calling myself a patriot."
-- Rachel Newman, "My Turn"
in Newsweek, Oct. 21, 2001
Here's a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains--namely, liberals--are typically the most reluctant to fight it?
It is often said, particularly in the "progressive" precincts of the democratic left, that by aiming at the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and perhaps the Capitol, Mohamed Atta and his cohorts were registering a broader Muslim objection to what those buildings supposedly represented: capitalism and globalization, U.S. military power, support for Israel, oppression of the Palestinians and so on.
But maybe Ms. Newman intuited that Atta's real targets weren't the symbols of American mightiness, but of what that mightiness protected: people like her, bohemian, sexually unorthodox, a minority within a minority. Maybe she understood that those F-16s overhead--likely manned by pilots who went to church on Sunday and voted the straight GOP ticket--were being flown above all for her defense, at the outer cultural perimeter of everything that America's political order permits.
This may be reading too much into Ms. Newman's essay. Yet after 9/11 at least a few old-time voices on the left--Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, among others--understood that what Islamism most threatened wasn't just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40 years: civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses, the right not to worship at all. And so they bid an unsentimental goodbye to their one-time comrades and institutions: the peace movement, the pages of The Nation and the New York Review of Books, "the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth," as Mr. Rosenbaum wrote in the New York Observer in 2002.
Five years on, however, Messrs. Hitchens, Bawer, et al., seem less like trendsetters and more like oddball dissenters from a left-liberal orthodoxy that finds less and less to like about the very idea of a war on Islamic extremism, never mind the war in Iraq. In the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows, formerly Jimmy Carter's speechwriter, argues that the smart thing for the U.S. to do is declare victory and give the conflict a rest: "A state of war with no clear end point," he writes, "makes it more likely for a country to overreact in ways that hurt itself." Further to the left, a panoply of "peace" groups is all but in league with Islamists. Consider, for instance, QUIT!--Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism--a group that, in its hatred for Israel, curiously fails to notice that Tel Aviv is the only city in the Middle East that annually hosts a gay-pride parade.
An instinct for pacifism surely goes some way toward explaining the left's curious unwillingness to sign up for a war to defend its core values. A suspicion of black-and-white moral distinctions of the kind President Bush is fond of making about terrorism--a suspicion that easily slides into moral relativism--is another.
But there are deeper factors at work. One is appeasement: "Many Europeans feel that a confrontation with Islamism will give the Islamists more opportunities to recruit--that confronting evil is counterproductive," says Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, former Dutch parliamentarian whose outspoken opposition to Islamism (and to Islam itself) forced her repeatedly into hiding and now into exile in the United States. "They think that by appeasing them--allowing them their own ghettoes, their own Muslim schools--they will win their friendship."
A second factor, she says, is the superficial confluence between the bugaboos of the Chomskyite left and modern-day Islamism. "Many social democrats have this stereotype that the corporate world, the U.S. and Israel are the real evil. And [since] Islamists are also against Israel and America, [social democrats] sense an alliance with them."
But the really "lethal mistake," she says, "is the confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity." Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore almost a species of racism. Yet Muslims, she says, "are responsible for their ideas. If it is written in the Koran that you must kill apostates, kill the unbelievers, kill gays, then it is legitimate and urgent to say, 'If that is what your God tells you, you have to modify it.' "
A similar rethink may be in order among liberals and progressives. For whatever else distinguishes Islamism from liberalism, both are remarkably self-absorbed affairs, obsessed with maintaining the purity of their own values no matter what the cost. In the former case, the result too often is terror. In the latter, the ultimate risk is suicide, as the endless indulgence of "the other" obstructs the deeper need to preserve itself. Liberal beliefs--and the Rachel Newmans of the world--deserve to be protected and fought for. A liberalism that abandons its own defense to others does not, something liberals everywhere might usefully dwell on during this season of sad remembrance.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.
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khyber
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Compunction Junction
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| Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:19 pm Post subject: |
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Any time I worry that what I'm reading may be too classy for me, I just look for....
Whew...this relates to my inflated sense of self importance and the given fact that what I feel in my gut is true....
Excelsior, dear reader!!! |
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dulouz
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: Uranus
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| Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 4:24 am Post subject: |
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Hey everyone! What should I do with my brown rice?
Oh I'll tell you what you can do with your brown rice alright.
1) take one even cup of brown rice and 3 parts water.
2) soak for 3 hours
3) take two even cups
4) stuff both up rectum
5) bake for 5 -6 hours
6) remove from rectum, allow to cool for 20 minutes
7) serve at next ACLU potluck*
Makes 4-6 servings! |
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daskalos
Joined: 19 May 2006
Location: The Road to Ithaca
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| Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:53 am Post subject: |
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| ddeubel wrote: |
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Hey everyone! What should I do with my brown rice?
Oh I'll tell you what you can do with your brown rice alright.
1) take one even cup of brown rice and 3 parts water.
2) soak for 3 hours
3) take two even cups
4) stuff both up rectum
5) bake for 5 -6 hours
6) remove from rectum, allow to cool for 20 minutes
7) serve at next ACLU potluck* |
So now we know more about you.....you like it up the ass!!
Go back to your cave, better privacy for you there..
DD |
Wow. Guess I'll assume, ddeubel, that you're having some computer glitch, as no one can be that anally fixated. Still and all, even once was probably more of a glimpse into your psyche than you'd have liked, going pretty far toward shredding your carefully cultivated reputation as the all-compassionate, always correct, loving, simply living apotheosis of humanity. Stooping to impugning people's character by insinuating they're buggerers? You'll probably want to delete that post in the morning, all 20-some-odd iterations of it.
Anyway, I'm one of those liberals who gets it, who gets that though George Bush is an idiot who doesn't want me to get married and whose policies are causing grave damage to the world, he is nothing as compared to the danger that Islamic fundamentalists pose to the world and to my right to live my life. Who gets that Bush's bungling of quite a lot of things doesn't mean that the real threat to the world doesn't exist, doesn't need to be resisted, to be fought with everything we have. But then I'm one of those liberals who isn't politically correct. Just correct.
Anyway, dduebel, it was satisfyingly illuminating to have the insight into your true character that your post revealed. You're a fraud. Please go back to your cave if you can find one that'll have you. |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:58 am Post subject: |
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Ummm OooooKay... Note to self. Stop doing anything.
| khyber wrote: |
Any time I worry that what I'm reading may be too classy for me, I just look for....
Whew...this relates to my inflated sense of self importance and the given fact that what I feel in my gut is true....
Excelsior, dear reader!!! |
I know what you mean..
I'd like to send this to the Prussian consulate in Siam by Aeromail. Am I too late for the 4:30 auto-gyro?
Pimpled Kid: Uh, I better look in the manual.
(groans) Oh, the ignorance
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out of context
Joined: 08 Jan 2006
Location: Daejeon
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| Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:32 am Post subject: |
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| This may be reading too much into Ms. Newman's essay. |
"May be" is an understatement. I find it infinitely amusing when the same conservative voices who caterwaul about the erosion of tradition family values are crestfallen when they can't find immediate sympathies among the liberals as soon as they start in on their anti-Muslim harangues, as if they assume that a common enemy automatically guarantees a unified stance, ignoring all previous rancor. What they don't seem to factor in is that the very same groups that they suggest should feel sympathy in this situation know very well the difference between the enemy of their enemy and the person who would back their rights all other things being equal. So this crap
| Quote: |
| Yet after 9/11 at least a few old-time voices on the left--Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, among others--understood that what Islamism most threatened wasn't just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40 years: civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses, the right not to worship at all. |
isn't fooling anybody. (Bruce Bawer represents the left? Just because he's gay? Oh, help me.) Let's take a poll and see how many of the people fighting the "war on terror" are willing to stand behind all of those issues. That Islamism is opposed to these issues is incidental; yes, it would certainly be nice if the injustice accorded to proponents of civil rights, gay rights, etc., were done away with, but we've seen way too much of the right's track record to trust them with spreading the gospel. I'll gladly eat my words if the US presence in the Middle East takes a hard line to enforcing liberal stances of these issues. Even if they were willing to, it wouldn't work. Until then, it's just a particularly disingenuous spin on one of the oldest lines in the book, "<Opposing faction> doesn't love America as much as we do." |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 1:02 pm Post subject: |
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Quote:
This may be reading too much into Ms. Newman's essay.
"May be" is an understatement. I find it infinitely amusing when the same conservative voices who caterwaul about the erosion of tradition family values are crestfallen when they can't find immediate sympathies among the liberals as soon as they start in on their anti-Muslim harangues, as if they assume that a common enemy automatically guarantees a unified stance, ignoring all previous rancor. What they don't seem to factor in is that the very same groups that they suggest should feel sympathy in this situation know very well the difference between the enemy of their enemy and the person who would back their rights all other things being equal. So this crap
Quote:
Yet after 9/11 at least a few old-time voices on the left--Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman and Ron Rosenbaum, among others--understood that what Islamism most threatened wasn't just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40 years: civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses, the right not to worship at all.
isn't fooling anybody. (Bruce Bawer represents the left? Just because he's gay? Oh, help me.) Let's take a poll and see how many of the people fighting the "war on terror" are willing to stand behind all of those issues. That Islamism is opposed to these issues is incidental; yes, it would certainly be nice if the injustice accorded to proponents of civil rights, gay rights, etc., were done away with, but we've seen way too much of the right's track record to trust them with spreading the gospel. I'll gladly eat my words if the US presence in the Middle East takes a hard line to enforcing liberal stances of these issues. Even if they were willing to, it wouldn't work. Until then, it's just a particularly disingenuous spin on one of the oldest lines in the book, "<Opposing faction> doesn't love America as much as we do." |
Well stated and argued. I get a laugh out of the facile arguement that the "right" fighting to protect all these rights when we see exactly the opposite every day in Good Moral America....
DD |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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ddeubel wrote:
Quote:
Hey everyone! What should I do with my brown rice?
Oh I'll tell you what you can do with your brown rice alright.
1) take one even cup of brown rice and 3 parts water.
2) soak for 3 hours
3) take two even cups
4) stuff both up rectum
5) bake for 5 -6 hours
6) remove from rectum, allow to cool for 20 minutes
7) serve at next ACLU potluck*
So now we know more about you.....you like it up the ass!!
Go back to your cave, better privacy for you there..
DD
Wow. Guess I'll assume, ddeubel, that you're having some computer glitch, as no one can be that anally fixated. Still and all, even once was probably more of a glimpse into your psyche than you'd have liked, going pretty far toward shredding your carefully cultivated reputation as the all-compassionate, always correct, loving, simply living apotheosis of humanity. Stooping to impugning people's character by insinuating they're buggerers? You'll probably want to delete that post in the morning, all 20-some-odd iterations of it.
Anyway, I'm one of those liberals who gets it, who gets that though George Bush is an idiot who doesn't want me to get married and whose policies are causing grave damage to the world, he is nothing as compared to the danger that Islamic fundamentalists pose to the world and to my right to live my life. Who gets that Bush's bungling of quite a lot of things doesn't mean that the real threat to the world doesn't exist, doesn't need to be resisted, to be fought with everything we have. But then I'm one of those liberals who isn't politically correct. Just correct.
Anyway, dduebel, it was satisfyingly illuminating to have the insight into your true character that your post revealed. You're a fraud. Please go back to your cave if you can find one that'll have you. |
I am who I am and I am not "all compassionate, bla bla bla...." , whatever you said.
I called him out for what he is -- a freak! And I'll use all means to do it when the mods on this board let comments such as his ride. (but I agree keep it there for all to see, and keep mine out there, we are all adults.). The mods in any case, have no right to delete my post and not that of Dulouz.......any dim wit can see that.
Dulouz wrote a very racist and offensive thing -- he deserves to have that pie put into his face. I don't have to apologize for nothing and the only thing it reveals about my character is that I have the passion to stand up to racists and bigots. You don't like the language, boo hoo.
DD |
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nasigoreng
Joined: 14 May 2004
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| Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 8:44 pm Post subject: |
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| out of context wrote: |
| What they [conservative voices] don't seem to factor in is that the very same groups that they suggest should feel sympathy in this situation know very well the difference between the enemy of their enemy and the person who would back their rights all other things being equal. |
And just who is that? I don't think the ACLU has an aircraft carrier. Do you really consider Christian conservatives to be just as evil as Islamic radicals despite the fact that Iran has executed thousands of people for homosexuality since the 1979 revolution?
| Quote: |
| I'll gladly eat my words if the US presence in the Middle East takes a hard line to enforcing liberal stances of these issues[civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses, the right not to worship at all]. |
So you support fascism when it's your own values that are forced on others? |
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