Are you a believer?

(Be sure to see the discussion below about the things that anger Muslims enough for them to threaten terrorism.)

How many people watching President Bush’s speech last night believed it?

How many people believe that we are in a war, a war with those who seek a “radical Islamic empire,” and that the way we win this war is by depending on the “most powerful force for peace and moderation in the Middle East: the desire of millions to be free”?

How many people believe that the way to defend ourselves from terrorism and jihadism is by persuading a billion Muslims that that what really want is not submission to Allah, but the liberal freedom to do what they like?

How many people believe that you win a war by evangelizing the enemy?

How many people believe that we are in a real war, when the man leading this “war” keeps speaking of the people on the other side as our friends, as “moms and dads,” whom, by the way, he keeps permitting to migrate en masse into our country (96,000 new Muslim legal permanent residents in 2005 alone), thus steadily increasing the power of the enemy among us?

How many people believe all this? Horrifyingly, lots of people believe it, including some otherwise very intelligent people.

Here is your brain …. Here is your brain on Dubya …

I’m (metaphorically) tearing my hair out.

- end of initial entry -

Mark G. writes:

Even if one believes in this Bushism, “most powerful force for peace and moderation in the Middle East: the desire of millions to be free”, one still must question how the “war” could be conducted with open-borders and enthusiastic importation of millions of hostiles.

Does Bush thinks it is of very little importance compared with the overwhelming power of US Army?

One would think that coming doom in Iraq should remove this illusion.

Is Bush simply not capable to understand that immigrants could be hostile?

Ben writes:

This was probably the first important Bush speech I didn’t even bother to listen to. I already knew what he would say so that’s why I didn’t bother. It’s like listening to a broken record. I figured I would just wait to find out what he said on the web, talk radio, etc. It seems I was right. He didn’t change anything and just gave us the same speech he has been giving for 4 years.

It’s always the same format every time. Talk about freedom and democracy. Talk about the world’s desire to be free of tyranny. Slap in a few stories about some military families he talked to during his travels, preferably a minority of either of Mexican ancestry or Middle eastern. Talk about how we need to stand strong and have resolve. Then throw in a few inane comments about terror, how our enemies are terrorists, and you have a George Bush speech for the past 4 years. Every once in awhile he’ll shock his supporters getting them really excited by injecting the word fascists or even going so far as to use Islamic, Islamists, or some word with Islam in it while always making sure to put the word radical/perversion of in front of it to show he is a true liberal thinker at all times.

You need to be a true believer to continue to believe anything that comes out of this Presidents mouth.

LA replies:

My thoughts exactly. It’s unbearable. Yet so many react, “Oh, a good speech, the best he’s given in a while, one of the best he’s ever given, we’ve been needing something like this,” as though it weren’t exactly the same speech as before, over and over, like in some bad dream from which one cannot escape. Eight years of the same blatantly untrue, insulting-to-one’s intelligence, messianic boilerplate. It’s unreal. More than unreal, it’s Kafkaesque, because everyone accepts this unreality as normal.

Yes, yes, I know, “the Democrats would be worse.” What does that have to do with it? Is Bush up for re-election? Why does the fact that the Democrats are horrible mean that we should not call it as we see it when it comes to Bush?

The idea that we shouldn’t criticize Bush because the Dems are so much worse not only is senseless, it gives the left power over us. All they have to do is become insane anti-Americans, and that assures that no Republican president will ever be criticized again by conservatives. This means the end of politics. And that’s what happened in recent years. I don’t think our debates should be determined by the left’s evil and lies, and by our fear of their coming to power, but rather by our desire for truth and the national good.

My model is the Miers nomination fight. For once conservatives had enough with Bush and they stood up and yelled and forced him to change course. If there had been more of that in these recent years, we’d be in far better shape. But unfortunately it is only the rarest of outrages, a pure outrage such as the Miers nomination, that gets people sufficiently steamed to break through the usual notion that we shouldn’t criticize the president because that will strengthen the left. And by the way, did the right’s uprising over Miers, and Bush’s eventual surrender and nomination of a more morthy judge, help the left? No. It strengthened conservatism and strengthened America. It even strengthened the Bush adminstration.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

This is great.

After expressing dismay over the shocking news that a tribal Muslim society like newly-liberated Kurdistan is still conducting itself like a tribal Muslim society, Michael Rubin at The Corner he huffily insists, “If Iraqi Kurdistan is a democracy, it is time it started abiding by the rule-of-law.” Well, a couple of questions arise from that, but the most important one is, “Or what?”

Oh, how the Muslims are failing you, Mr. Rubin. What a disappointment they must be.

LA replies:

It’s the “Therefore, what?” question, which liberals never answer. Liberalism is a world without consequences, because consequences imply standards and discriminating acts of authority—which means inequality. At the same time, liberal society requires the show of authority and standards. This takes the form of saying, “The Kurds must do such and such.” “If the Palestinians want peace, they must do such and such.” “I favor immigration, so long as the immigrants assimilate.” It’s like a test that a child is allowed to keep re-taking forever, no matter how many times he fails it.

Liberal society—or, in this case, Bush’s hyper-liberal democratize-the-Muslims project—wants the appearance of truth and of standards based on truth, because its legitimacy requires that it claims to rest on some principle. But it doesn’t want the reality of truth and standards, because then it would cease to be liberal. Or, rather, if it insisted on truth and standards, the liberal project, whether we’re talking about Muslim democratization, the peace process, or non-Western immigration—would be discredited and come to an end.

Liberal politics simultaneously require both the appearance of truth-based standards, and their actual absence.

David B. writes:

I did some driving today and listened to talk radio a little. Limbaugh (the Liar) and Hannity (the Dupe) loved every bit of the speech. Neither has any idea that their Heroic President let over 96,000 Islamics into the America last year.

Lars writes:

I was discussing with an ultra-liberal friend how Muslims react angrily even to solicitous non-terrorist stereotypes. For example, Australian prime minister John Howard made the perfectly unbigoted statement that “No decent genuine Muslim would support terrorism.”

The following is my colleague’s take:

“It seems that Australian Moslems resented being automatically associated with terrorism. After all, Howard didn’t say, ‘All moderate people would deny terrorism!’ He made a point of naming Moslems. It might sound touchy to us, but I suspect that dark skinned Australians who don’t look like aborigines are getting sick of being singled out as the enemy.”

In other words, we’re not even allowed to declare that Islam is a religion of peace, because that entails singling out Muslims!

LA replies:

No, there’s more to this than a simple statement that Islam is a religion of peace. Howard is saying there is an easily rebuttable presumption that Muslims are pro-terror. Given actual Muslim terrorism and widespread Muslim support for terrorism, that is both true and eminently fair. All the Muslims have to do is to demonstrate that they indeed are not on the same side as the terrorists. But to the Muslims Howard’s statement means that they are not simply being accepted as they are, that they are under suspicion and must prove themselves, and this is intolerable to them. Of course, if the Muslims were in good faith, they would understand the problem Australia and other Western countries have with Muslim terrorism, and they would willingly cooperate with them. They would understand that it is reasonable to subject them to more security checks, for example, and they would not resent it. That’s what reasonable people who were actually anti-terrorist and who were acting in good faith would do. Instead, as Muslim Miss England said the other week, the British “stereotyping” of Muslims makes them so angry that they have turned to terror. Got that? First terrorism was supposedly about something really really bad, like Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; then it was about “blaspheming” Muhammad and insulting Islam; now it’s about stereotyping. A week later the head of the British Muslim Council took Muslim Miss England’s threat further and said that if the British suspicions of Muslims continued, there would be two million terrorists in Britain, i.e., the entire Muslim population would become terrorists. And of course, Muslim Miss England and the head of the BMC represent Britain’s “moderate,” assimilated Muslim establishment. The previous head of the BMC, Iqbal Sacranie, was knighted.

If even the respectable moderates are threatening mass terror, the game’s up. It’s like Camp David in 2000. Arafat rejected out of hand even the most generous Israeli offer, being unwilling to accept any final deal short of the destruction of Israel, and started a terror war instead. Just as the “peace” process was decisively refuted then, the idea that Muslims can be a part of Western society is being decisively refuted now.

Jake F. writes:

When I was in the Marines, we were often told that we needed to pay attention to the “Hearts and Minds” of the civilian population within which our enemies might be fighting. I agree that this is a good thing, and the desire for millions of people to be free could be an incredibly powerful force.

That said, it cannot be the only thing we do. My biggest problem with Bush isn’t the invasion of Iraq, but his belief that democracy is the cure for what ails Iraq. A majority of voters can still institute Shari’a if that’s what they believe in, so democracy clearly can’t be the answer to the “Islamist” problem.

Richard B. writes:

Wow, weren’t we being sold some of that old cure-all democracy snake oil? I wish it wasn’t so painful, then I could laugh it off. There must be “other forces” at work here. I see why people jump on the “new world order” conspiracy-groups bandwagons. How else can you explain it? Let’s hope for someone with a grasp on reality in 2008.

Paul K. writes:

Regarding last night’s speech, there are only two possibilities, which I find equally alarming: (A) Bush does not believe what he is saying, or (B) he does. Either Bush is the most cynical president we’ve ever had, or the most dangerously deluded. I suspect the latter.

Which brings up a thought: Imagine a test of mental faculties in which a subject has to look at a series of cards which are either black or white and correctly identify them. If he consistently identifies the black card as white and vice versa, it would be reasonable to doubt his sanity. If, in addition, he grows petulant about being corrected, and insists that if people would only listen to him they would come to understand that the black card is white, those doubts would be amplified.

Is Bush going to keep looking at black and telling us it’s white?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 12, 2006 11:06 AM | Send