What the left calls the, uh, you know

Mainstream conservatives, known at VFR as right-liberals or “natural-rights” liberals, do not refer to Islamic terrorists as Islamic terrorists, since that would suggest that terrorism is an expression of Islam itself, which would violate the right-liberal belief in a single humanity of individuals all potentially assimilable to democracy. So the mainstream conservatives speak instead of “Islamist” terrorists or “Islamofascist” terrorists, inventing a fictional entity which is an offshoot of Islam but is not Islam itself. This way they feel that they are not saying that Islam as such is the enemy.

However, for left-liberals, or “openness” liberals as I call them, such as President Bush, the terms “Islamist” and “Islamo-fascist” are not acceptable either, because, even though “Islamism” and “Islamofascism” are not the same as Islam, they still suggest some connection with Islam, and thus imply that at least a part of the Muslim population is not instantly and automatically assimilable to democracy, which would suggest that we cannot be equally open to all groups. So left-liberals refer to Islamic terrorists simply as “terrorists,” avoiding any verbal link between Islam and terrorism. [See note below.]

However, for some on the radical, anti-Western left, even “terrorists” is too harsh, since it still amounts to singling out a defined group as “our” enemy, implying that the enemy is “bad,” and “we” are “good,” or that “we” are not equally as bad as the supposed enemy, or that we are not at fault for the “terrorist” turning to terrorism. At the same time, since everyone knows that all the terrorists are in fact Muslims, to speak of “terrorists” as the enemy still comes dangerously close to indicating that Islam is the enemy.

So, given that the radical left, or at least the most politically correct sectors of the radical left, will not refer to Islamic terrorists as “Muslims,” or as “Islamo-fascists,” or as “Islamists,” or even as “terrorists,” how can they refer to them?

The answer is found in the following story that appeared yesterday at website of the BBC:

Men ‘planned airliner explosions’

Eight men planned to detonate bombs aboard flights from London across the Atlantic to create deaths on an almost unprecedented scale, a court has heard.

Homemade devices were to be smuggled on to passenger aircraft and detonated mid-flight, Woolwich Crown Court heard.

After their arrests in August 2006, passengers were banned from carrying most liquids on board aircraft.

The eight men all deny conspiring to murder others and endangering aircraft bound for the US and Canada in 2006.

Prosecutor Peter Wright QC said the men planned to inflict heavy casualties, “all in the name of Islam.” [LA notes: they are accused of planning a vast mass murder, all of them acting in the name of Islam, but they are never once in the article identified as Muslims.]

He told the court: “These men were, we say, indifferent to the carnage that was likely to ensue.

“Some of the men you see in the dock are those who were prepared to sacrifice their own lives.”

Mr Wright said two of the men were watched by police as they met in Walthamstow on 9 August, 2006.

“The disaster they contemplated was not long off,” he said.

“They were prepared to board an aircraft with the necessary ingredients and equipment to construct and detonate a device that would bring about not only the loss of their own lives but also all of those who happened by chance to be taking the same journey.”

Mr Wright said Mr Ali, Mr Sarwar and Mr Gulzar were the main men behind the plot.

“Unfortunately for these men, but to the considerable good fortune of those that were their intended targets of those devices, their activities had come to the attention of the police,” he said

He said from what police had observed “it was realised that these men, together with others, were engaged in some sort of terrorist plot”.

That’s one of two times that the word “terrorist” appears in the article, and, just like “Islamic,” which appears just once, it is not used as a direct descriptor of the suspects, but in a prepositional phrase, and even there it is further softened into “some sort of terrorist plot.”

Finally, this box appears below the photos of the eight suspects:

EIGHT ACCUSED MEN
TOP ROW OF PICTURE (L-R):
Abdul Ahmed Ali, 27
Assad Sarwar, 24
Tanvir Hussain, 27
Mohammed Gulzar, 26
BOTTOM ROW (L-R):
Ibrahim Savant, 27
Arafat Waheed Khan, 26
Waheed Zaman, 23
Umar Islam, 29

“Men” did it! I can’t remember seeing a headline like “Men planned airliner explosions.” And even when it comes to the leaders of the plot, who would normally be described as “ring-leaders” or some similar phrase, the BBC calls them “the main men”. Not the accused terrorist leaders, but the main men.

And the box listing the names of the accused, already quoted, which includes such names as “Umar Islam,” refers to them as:

EIGHT ACCUSED MEN

That’s bizarre. News coverage would normally say something like “Eight Accused Terrorists.” After all, they are not accused of being men, they are accused of doing something, something very particular, namely planning a vast act of mass murder in the name of Islam. If a group of men accused of murder were on trial, the defendants would be referred to as “the accused murderers,” not as the “accused men.” If a rape case, the accused would be called “the accused rapists,” not “the accused men.”

A normal mind can only go so far in understanding the evil demented left.

And if there were any life in the British people, there would be mass demonstrations in the streets of London—there would be a national strike calling for the dismantling of the BBC, a state-funded organization devoted to the demoralization and destruction of Britain.

* * *

Note: As an example of the relationship between right-liberals and left-liberals, in 2006, President Bush on one occasion spoke of the enemy as “Islamic fascists,” and his mainstream conservative, right-liberal supporters went into hysterics of joy that finally he was speaking the truth about the enemy! The conservatives’ celebration of Bush’s newfound willingness to talk about “Islamic fascism” continued for several weeks, during which time they failed to notice that he had never once repeated the “Islamic fascism” phrase. Evidently he had instantly realized that he had gone over the line of acceptable, left-liberal speech, and had returned to speaking of our enemies as “terrorists.” And when the conservatives finally realized what had happened, they didn’t say, “Bush has gone back to saying ‘terrorism,’ we’ve been fooled,” they simply went silent on the issue. For more on this, see my article, “Playing on them like a pipe: An open letter to Bush’s supporters.”

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James M., who sent me the BBC article, writes:

“A normal mind can only go so far in understanding the demented evil left.”

I would have said the Independent was part of that, but it didn’t conceal the truth in its reporting:

Martyrdom videos revealed ‘chilling sentiments’, court told, Friday, 4 April 2008

Six Islamic extremists recorded violent martyrdom videos as they prepared a terrorist attack on transatlantic aircraft, a court heard today.

That might be explained by its hostility to religion, including hostility to Islam, which, however, doesn’t stop it from supporting mass immigration, of course. The atheist left want to let Muslims in by the hundreds of thousands, then persuade them out of their misguided beliefs with rational argument and satire. To oppose letting them in would be racism, which is ideologically equivalent to heresy for the atheist left.

Thucydides writes:

Your post on the verbal obfuscation deployed in order to protect liberal human universalism from reality is excellent.

Islam is a paradigmatic example of intractable human particularism. It creates terrific problems for liberal neutrality because of its vicious inhumanity. And the problem is not merely Islam in the traditional sense, though that would be bad enough: it is a modern Islam with heavy accretions of Western utopianism. The suicide bomber in pursuit of transcendent goals was a figure well known to 19th century Europe. Islam in power, as we saw in Afghanistan under the Taliban, bears a striking resemblance to the various 20th century totalitarianisms.

The problem runs much deeper than refusal to recognize the threat of Islam. The human universalism that blocks this recognition is itself a symptom of a refusal to face reality about human nature and the conditions of human existence. It represents the denial of evil and of tragedy which proceed from our human imperfectability. This denial finds expression in utopian visions of reworking the world and remaking institutions in the hopes that our tragic limitations can be abolished, and we can live in a world more to our liking.

We have become Pelagians, addicted to a shallow and sentimental belief in the goodness and reasonableness of man, either as he is or as he could be if only we had the right social arrangements, and we cannot face the cold shower of reality.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 04, 2008 07:08 PM | Send