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The Left’s Proxy War with Islam
The Left’s most recent bout with insanity is, at least in part, due to increasing turmoil and carnage in the Islamic world. Progressives oppose most of the Islamist agenda — the subjugation of women, execution of gays, slaughter of innocents — but their belief that Western Culture, Western Imperialism, and (worst of all!) Western Cultural Imperialism are responsible for all of the world’s ills make it impossible for them to speak out against any culture but their own. Instead, they attack such proxies as they can find in the West with an intensity that is all out of proportion to the offences they claim to perceive.
Any resistance to allowing men dressed as women to use women’s restrooms is denounced with a fervor that would be far more appropriate were it reserved for the routine execution of homosexuals in some Muslim countries. Micro-aggressions against women perceptible only to themselves are the focus of a rage that would be understandable were it directed against the execution of Muslim women for the “crime” of being raped. Their conflation of distasteful speech on college campuses with violence and rape lies in sharp contrast with their disregard for ISIS’s violent rape of thousands. Their promiscuous use of the word “genocide” in connection with cultural evolution would make sense were it in response to the wholesale slaughters of Christians, Jews, and Yazidis in the name of Allah.
Like the drunk who searches for his keys under a street light, the Left searches for injustice only in the West. And find (or invent) injustice they must, because that’s the only way they can prove to themselves and others that they care. As their ideology requires them to discount the elephants of Islamic violence and hatred, so the gnats of Western injustice they denounce become ever more microscopic in order to demonstrate just how exquisitely attuned they are to human suffering.
As the disparity grows, the more ludicrous they become and the more vehemently they shout down anyone who points out their moral nakedness.
Published in Islamist Terrorism
I beg your pardon? Progressives oppose “suppression of dissent”? When did that happen??? I thought that if you looked up “suppression of dissent” in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of a progressive. Richard, you need to visit a university campus.
Other than that, nice post.
Is this not our only reason for hope in the otherwise sorry mess that passes for the culture of our intellectual class?
These people beclown themselves every day. In the face of real Islamic horrors, only their narcissism shows through. If your biggest challenge is the sight of a sombrero or other “culturally appropriative” Halloween costumes, who can take you seriously? They marginalize themselves by their antics. Only their college professors and college administrators take them seriously, and when those overpaid babysitters lose their jobs because of it, no one cares.
Larry,
You’re right. There’s no way I can square that with what’s happening on the Left. I changed it in accordance with reality.
So much to applaud! Nice work, Richard!
One can criticise other countries and cultures as much as one wants, but the country and culture one can most feasibly change by criticising them are one’s own.
Iow: Saudi doesn’t care what you think but your Congressman will.
Zafar,
Then why does Saudi Arabia spend tens of millions of dollars to sway public opinion in this country? Why do CAIR and Al Jazeera exist? Why are so many of the Middle East’s petro dollars lavished on American universities and think tanks? Do you really think that if Americans were united against Saudi barbarism, the Saudi ambassador would shrug?
I think it spends a lot of money to sway the Administration this way or the other. From wiki, but fwiw:
None of which affects how the US public sees Saudi. The royals make themselves useful to the Administration.
CAIR is a lobby group, like AIPAC. Al Jazeera is a news channel whose focus is not the US public. ??
Americans already think Saudi is barbaric. But it’s still a strategic asset, and a good market. Saudi is “supported” despite its human rights record due to self interest, not because it’s liked.
In #5 you imply that the Left is making a tactical choice when they ignore injustice in the Middle East. I disagree. The Left certainly does not ignore what they consider injustice by Israel, nor did they ignore South Africa. They’ve made it quite clear that they believe any injustice in the Middle East is in reaction to American policy and not to jihad.
I’m not opposed to Wikipedia, but when you use it you have to recognize that it’s no better than its sources. In this case, the Economist. What, no Vox article was available?
Sometimes the administration puts pressure on the Saudis, though. This is why, for instance, Bush was able to get them to introduce municipal elections in a capacity building effort to democratize either after the current generation dies, bestowing goodwill on the next.
Al Jazeera has some focus on the US Public. It’s not Saudi, and it’s not generally a good idea to conflate the Gulf States into one entity, but it is one way in which the Saudis express their concern with public opinion. They can’t act too directly in this sort of matter because, as with some Christian movements in the US, Saudi Islamists have anti-Islamic measures as their fundraising lifeblood. The Saudis have been extremely useful allies, and they do try to improve their reputation, but it’s difficult doing PR when the message you want heard abroad is diametrically opposed to the message you want heard at home.
I’d go further and say that Americans generally overestimate Saudi barbarism. Saudi millions are spent on trying to mitigate the harm to the US policy from hostility to Saudi, more than trying to control everything.
It’s helpful to remember, for instance, that the US has pretty comprehensively ignored the primary Saudi interests for almost the entirety of Obama’s administration; Iran had a hand reached out to it, the Green Revolution was ignored, aid to Iraq fell and was not particularly tied to support for Sunni Arabs (it was tied to the welfare of Sunni Kurds, but Saudis are ethnically conscious as well as theologically so), Assad’s butchery went unanswered, etc. etc. etc.
Indeed, to give credit where credit is due, the Obama administration has, in general, served as a strong rebuttal to the claim that US policy in the Middle East is chiefly guided by Arab and Jewish lobbies, which were united on most of this stuff (less so on Assad). And if they’re not particularly important when it comes to Middle Eastern policy, they’re probably not that important when it comes to anything else.
You changed it to the Left being opposed to the slaughter of innocents. I think you’ll find that the problem is that it’s the wrong innocents being slaughtered.
Because Israel is utterly dependent on/even a part of the West.
Ditto. Apartheid South Africa was created by the British Empire. The West did have some moral responsibility for its misdeeds.
I don’t know that they’re so one dimensional about it.
It is hard to argue that the West’s support of sundry dictators in the ME had nothing to do with the jihadi outburst we’re seeing today.
Nooooo James, I love the Economist and will not hear a word against it. Their smug superciliousness, their air of nerdy superiority – I melt, I tell you, I melt.
Aljazeera is a product of the Gulf’s red haired step child Qatar. Not Saudi. (Very different.) Its focus is overwhelmingly the Arabic market – but it’s grown to include much of the Third World which is delighted to receive news without a spin that requires one to believe three impossible things a day before breakfast.
The Saudis’ relationship with the US depends on how useful they are to the Administration – I think they’ve (realistically) given up on the public. You know they still execute people for witchcraft in that country?
100% agreed, though I’d add that I’m fairly certain that the majority of ISIS’ victims are Muslim who are the wrong sort of Muslims.
“News channel”….good one :) Like Pravda was a “news” paper.
Have you ever watched it? Or looked at their website?
Have a look before deciding so conclusively. You may be pleasantly surprised : – )
No, I reckon they get it just about right. I’m not sure what polling data suggests Americans think, but I’d guess they’d put Saudis among the top five worst human-rights abusers in the world. And this would be accurate by every standard way of measuring it. Wouldn’t you agree?
Their English-language version is excellent (because they bought all the unemployed British and American journalists). Their Arabic version is notoriously a very different animal.
I am admittedly judging them on editorials pieces more than their actual news reporting so I will give it a look. I fully expect them to be more even handed than MSNBC at least!
That was my question….I was going to look for opinions on that from elsewhere.
Looked like a better version of CNN’s leftist material but not terrible to be sure. Lots of environmental nonsense (probably due to the very exciting Climate Summit!). A quick search of the word “Israel” on their site pulls up a lot about new settlement construction and palestinian problems but not one word about the knife attacks or any attacks on Israelis…so yeah a pretty typical American news site.
There are people for whom reality is whatever they deem it to be.
Superb post on the reworked gospel of liberals, which always beholds the speck in Western eyes but considers not the beam in the eyes of foreign barbarians (or their own barbarism).
I don’t think you improved your piece with the “slaughter of innocents” edit. Since the French Revolution, leftists have reveled in the slaughter of innocents, or at least of those largely innocent of leftist accusations.
No beams in Gosnell’s eyes.
Why not replace “oppose” with “pride themselves on opposing”? Incredible, but leftists, even campus leftists, believe as an article of faith that they are the true champions of dissent and free expression. The cognitive dissonance of leftists is hard as gemstone. Approaches that of the Afghan warrior who regards himself as fulfilling the moral commandments of his stern faith, while his ten year old sex slave is chained to his bed back in the barracks.
Al Jazeera is my go-to. Superb coverage from a range of perspectives (including geographic). Best on-the-ground video coverage. No endless phone interviews with some tangentially connected bystanders concluded with creepy therapeutic are-you-okays. Terrible on Israel, but who isn’t? If you haven’t found corrective lenses (and x-ray specs) by now, you should.
If “men dressed as women” actually was the criterion being proposed, I wager that there would be much less opposition to the concept.
It isn’t.
The criterion is “anybody that self-identifies as a woman”. What the person looks like or how they are dressed is immaterial.
If I had to choose between letting men dressed as women into public restrooms with my 16 year old daughter, or letting a jihadi dressed like the Dalai Lama through customs because he self-identifies as an oppressed Buddhist, I don’t know what I’d do.
But we better start a thread on it, because it can’t more than a few years away. Certainly by the middle of the Castro administration.
Richard,
Exactly so! This is why our current political dialogue is completely absurd. To start from the patently wrong assumptions of the SJW gang is to try to circumnavigate the globe to the East when there is a grocery store you are trying to get to 1 block away to the West.
Very well said Richard. Thank you.
Regards,
Jim
Per this month’s NR on-dead-tree, Saudi Arabia imprisoned Raif Badawi in 2012 and sentenced him to be beaten 1,000 times with a cane. His crime? Calling for human rights in the country.
Well you can’t have looked very hard, let me help you:
Here
and
Here
I have heard that the content of Aljazeera English is different from Aljazeera Arabic – but I still think Aljazeera English should be criticised on its own merits. (I think it’s pretty good.) “Aljazeera English is bad because it’s different from Aljazeera Arabic” makes no sense.
(Also – apparently Aljazeera America is not as good as Aljazeera English.)
Edit: though also, channels are often criticised because they have an editorial position we disagree with (Fox, MSNBC, Aljazeera, ??) and therefore aren’t proselytising the position we want to their target audience. But making people agree with us isn’t their job.
This literally boggles my mind. I see it constantly. And my only understanding is that they turn a blind eye to the human rights hell holes that are most Islamic countries because being critical of a non-Western culture, in their eyes, only affirms Said’s Orient vs. Occident distinction, and by critiquing a culture not their own renders them as “West-splainers” (yes I made that up). I had a critical theory professor in graduate school claim she “didn’t know enough about Islam” to comment on the violent subjugation of women and execution of homosexuals when I reminded her of such commonplace events. Under the intellectual ruse of identity politics, they literally won’t comment, or critique cultures other than the West. The Left is intellectually dead.
Have you considered [redacted]?
[Editors’ Note: Advocating violence in response to a non-violent situation; wouldn’t hold up in a court of law and for good reason.]
So does that mean I should renew my New York Times subscription?