The “conservatives” continue their make-believe opposition to the Islam threat

(Note: Ron L. kindly posted this article at Free Republic, and there is discussion of it over there, but mostly it’s clueless.)

I invite the reader to a thought experiment. Imagine that it is the late 1930s, and “conservative” intellectuals in Western Europe and the United States formulate an ideology which says that their countries should be open without discrimination to all people of all political persuasions. Then imagine that large numbers of immigrants of all political persuasions begin entering and settling in those countries, including many Nazi immigrants from Germany and Austria. Then imagine that the Nazi immigrants, following the Nazi ideology as laid out in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, begin promoting the spread and institutionalization Nazism in their new countries, while also using verbal intimidation, threats of violence, and actual violence to silence critics of Nazism. Now further imagine that “leftist” and “liberal” intellectuals in those countries support the Nazis’ campaign to suppress all truthful statements about Nazism, and that these “leftists” and “liberals” construct a vast media and government propaganda machine that whitewashes Nazism. Meanwhile the “conservative” intellectuals, who had eagerly let the Nazis into their countries in the first place, begin to attack the “leftist” intellectuals for coddling the Nazis. The “conservatives” write an endless number of articles in munificently endowed “conservative” magazines and deliver an endless number of speeches and panel discussions at “conservative” conferences held in luxury hotels and resorts where they unburden themselves of the profound outrage, alarm, even panic they feel about the growth of the Nazi menace in Western society, foaming at the mouth against the “leftist” intellectuals for promoting the policies of “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” that have made it impossible to do anything about the Nazi menace. Furthermore, imagine that the “conservative” intellectuals never once let on that the Nazis are only present in these countries because of the immigration policies that the “conservatives” supported and still support.

That is the current situation of the “conservative” intellectuals of America and Britain with regard to Islam. For the latest example of this massive intellectual fraud, see Bruce Bawer’s article, “An Anatomy of Surrender,” in the Spring 2008 City Journal. In this 4,000 word article Bawer only uses the words “immigrants” or “immigration” twice in passing. The West’s Islam problem, Bawer informs us, is due solely to the left, not to the fact that millions of Muslims reside in Western countries, solely as a result of immigration. As he shows through numerous examples (and the article is a useful and disturbing catalogue of the phenomenon), the left has disseminated a wholly positive picture of Islam and suppressed critical speech about Islamic extremism. Here he introduces his argument:

Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

In short, the Western leftist elite has taken Islam’s side against the West. Any Western resistance to—or even honest speech about—Islamic extremism is attacked as bigotry, while leftist-dominated government agencies, schools, and TV paint Islam in glowing colors.

Furthermore, according to Bawer, it is ONLY the left that is the problem, not conservatives, and certainly not President Bush. Here is the only time in the article that Bawer mentions Bush:

When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims’ and multiculturalists’ furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term “war on terror.”

Painting Bush as a victim of leftist and minority political correctness, Bawer hides the fact that Bush himself from 9/11 onward has been the West’s leading promoter of Islam as the “religion of peace,” and the West’s leading censor of criticism of Islam. For Bawer, only the left—the big, bad, evil left—is the problem, not the “conservatives” who, in the name of non-discrimination, have done just as much as the left in letting Islam into the West and prohibiting any meaningful opposition to it.

The subtitle of Bawer’s piece is: “Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.” But could it not be said of Bawer, and of legions of right-liberals and neocons like him: “Motivated by fear and by belief in the non-discriminatory inclusion of all mankind, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping Islamization”?

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Paul Gottfried writes:

I agree entirely with the thrust of your critical observation. But did you ever think that if neocons expressed our views on immigration, the liberal establishment would treat them the same way they treat us?

LA replies:

So what you’re saying is, the neocons, while producing an endless flood of articles and speeches protesting the politically correct liberal establishment that puts people in fear of speaking the truth about Islam, refuse themselves to speak the truth about Islam out of fear of the politically correct liberal establishment.

In other words, the liberal establishment will allow conservatives to protest the political correctness that keeps people from speaking the truth about Islam; but it won’d allow conservatives to speak the truth about Islam. The neocons are aware of these parameters and willingly operate within them.

Which means that the neocons are frauds. They pretend to oppose the liberal establishment’s restraints on speech. But they obey and observe those restraints. Their opposition to liberalism is a masquerade.

It’s like what Scott of Powerline said about Peggy Noonan the other week, in a rare moment of insight into the fraudulence of his fellow conservatives (a moment that he only had because the conservative in question was attacking the object of Powerline’s constant solicitude, President Bush). Scott wrote:

The underlying political realities that give us the airport security system described by Noonan are related to the boundaries of political correctness that Noonan herself carefully observes in this column.

To which I commented:

It’s a fair point. Since Noonan thinks the equal screening of all people … is wrong, she must logically support the idea that screening be focused on Muslims. But she doesn’t say that.

It is, in other words, the typical conservative syndrome…. Conservatives endlessly grumble about the inevitable consequences of the ruling liberal ideology of non-discrimination—in this instance, an airport security system that absurdly and equally targets all passengers. But they are unwilling to take a principled stand against that liberal ideology—by, in this instance, calling for discrimination against Muslims.

What is a conservative? A liberal who complains a lot.

However, it would be wrong to say the neocons are complete frauds. There is something genuine in their protest. They don’t like the whitewash of Islam, they don’t like the punishments meted out to critics of Islam. They would sincerely like to have more freedom of speech and a more open debate about Islam, while, at the same time, they don’t want actually to do anything about Islam.

But this position is still a liberal delusion. The neocons remain blind to the reality that once you have a significant, influential, and growing Islamic presence in your society, the increasing suppression of truthful speech about Islam is inevitable. Which means that if you want people in your society to be able to speak the truth about Islam, your society must be essentially free of Islam. There’s no middle ground.

The neocon position is like someone saying, “I want the lion to be free to enter and roam around in our village, and I want to be free of any fear of the lion.” Again, a liberal fantasy. If you want to be free of fear of the lion, you must at the very least expel the lion from your village and keep him far away.

Paul Gottfried replies:

You have obviously crossed the authorized limits of sensitive discussion

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 05, 2008 04:05 PM | Send