One reader of my post on the attitude of secular liberal intellectuals toward the Middle East writes,
I think the answer is somewhat simple. Muslims are brown people. If Islam were a religion drafted from white westerners, it might have been persecuted out of existence by now. You alluded to this when you said, "In short, many secularists, terrified of being labeled an -ist, -ite, or -phobe, are unwilling to draw moral lines except within the boundaries of the United States (and even then, not against anyone of a different ethnicity"
Polygamy was an abomination to the women's rights movement, that is, when Mormons were doing it. Now, especially in Europe, leftists are turning a blind eye to it, because the minority groups are doing it. Islam is conflated with race, as if religion practiced by racial minorities is not a set of values or behaviors. This is intrinsically racist because it treats the minorities as if they are subhuman insects who can only act according to their religious tenets whithout choice or moral clarity. For that reason, we best lay off like David Attenborough in a nature documentary, studying the wild migrating aboriginies from afar with binoculars.
The key to leftist thinking is that of class warfare, haves vs have nots, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Because class is so closely identified with race in the post-colonial west, sometimes that bond is simply too difficult to break in the minds of the typical leftist. Double standards emerge to bring about social justice, and any negative judgement of their beliefs or practices become "racist."
I think that's exactly right.
Another reader writes,
You describe a population of secular liberals who decry our fight against Islamofascism as a sort of imperialism. When I have read this on the left, I usually see it in terms of questioning the effectiveness of imposing a cultural value as a product of warfare. The assertion that occupying a nation to remove a despot and his supporters can be - and is - respectably challenged by the heartiest of American patriots. But do you have examples of secular liberals who say our fighting against Islamofascism is in itself Imperialistic and thus wrong? And are these examples from influential people?
Fighting back the Nazis and other fascists was an easier task than fighting Islamofascists because then we had to fight a military state. Boom boom gone. Now we have to fight martyrs who believe that losing against us is a fate that God himself cannot tolerate, and that the death of one martyr is victory, and a seed sown for more martyrs to come.
A good friend of mine who trained in counter-insurgency in the 1980s has often supported the idea that he was trained with: the Israeli Entebbe option. Kill as few of your own as possible while killing all the bad guys. He felt comfortable in his assertion because El Al flights had not been bothered much since 1976. What he neglects to realize is that the Entebbe hijackers wanted to live. Our new enemies want to die.
So my questions are: Who are these secular liberals who are saying that our fighting against Islamofascists is in itself wrong? and; What is today's A-Bomb?
By the way, I agree with your central assertion that we need to go after these bad guys. I just don't know who the Americans are who are saying we don't.
Well, as far as liberals who think we're being "cultural imperalists" for defending human rights against theocratic regimes, I think there are quite a lot of them, and they're quite prominent. But I wasn't concerned so much with the prominent ones as the rank and file folks--with conversations I've been in or overheard. This post itself was inspired by a comment on an email list I'm on in which a liberal scientist acquaintance of mine complained that the word "terrorist" was only used aganist Arabs "because they're brown people"! I responded that it seems to me quite the opposite--there are a great many media outlets far more willing to use euphemisms like "militant" and so forth precisely because they're afraid of making moral condemnations out loud.
I hope it really is the case that most secular liberals take seriously the enormous threat posed by Islamic fascism and particularly if it's armed with a nuclear bomb. But the feeling I've got from conversations with others is just the opposite: many if not most of them seem to believe that "we should not impose democracy" on the middle east (when democracy is not "imposed" in the first place; tyranny is imposed), and that we shouldn't pass judgments on the tyrannies and brutalities committed by middle eastern regimes in the name of religion. If that is a misimpression, I wish I could have that point clarified by prominent liberal intellectuals. So far as I can tell, Hitchens and Sam Harris are quite alone on this matter.
Update: I did just a quick search and found this Matthew Yglesias post in which he characterizes the Iraq war as "foreign policy [based] on self-righteousness...[and] idea that the highest expresion of humanitarian impulses is launching unilateral wars surrounded by high-minded rhetoric. " Here's an article from The Progressive accusing Pres. Bush of trying to start a nuclear war with Iran because he is not "sane, rational, and humane" and because he listens to advisors with a "twisted sense of rationality" who are devoted to eliminating threats to Israel. PZ Myers had a guest blogger a while back who urged us to "snuggle up to Iran, admit how bad we screwed them, and be pals," because Iran is "progressive" and had "had a legit revolution [which] brought America to it's knees, without killing a single American." Here's Brian Leiter referring to the confrontation with Iran as "invented," and to Pres. Bush as a "madman" of "moral depravity and craven villainy" because of his willingness to confront Iran.
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