Liberal Hopes For Right Wing Extremism Dashed in Boston
So contrary to the hopes of some on the Left, the bombers of the Boston Marathon are not white tea party types like myself but Muslims from Chechnya. Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had been in the country for several years. One of the assumptions made by liberals about Islamists is that they misunderstand us, that if they only got to know us better (and if we stopped blowing them up in their homeland and supporting the evil Jews) they’d like us and wouldn’t want to harm us. Attacks like 9-11, the thwarted Time Square bombing, and the Fort Hood Shooting are in the eyes of liberals based on ignorance just as much as they are on misguided foreign policy.
This thinking has its roots in the writings of Erasmus, something that I covered here a few years back.
From the Machiavellian perspective, the struggle between Islamic terrorists and the Free World is a zero-sum game of winners and losers whereas Erasmus’s humanists view it as a game where everyone can win. Once the Islamic terrorists are educated to understand that America isn’t anti-Islamic, they won’t seek to destroy it. Terrorists and Americans can coexist in peace – all that’s necessary is a few apologies and a worldwide media campaign showing the terrorists how much we love Muslims.
Cases like the Tsarnaev brothers undermine the “they don’t understand us” argument originally put forward by Erasmus 500 years ago, as do the inconvenient facts that all of the 9-11 hijackers as well as the plotters including Osama bin Laden himself spent years studying in the United States and the West. These men are not ignorant, and to imply that they are shows an elitist and racist arrogance that liberals would abhor if they could see themselves from a perspective other than their own. A photo narrative by Johannes Hirn notes,
Tamerlan says he doesn’t drink or smoke anymore: “God said no alcohol.” A muslim, he says: “There are no values anymore,” and worries that “people can’t control themselves.”
Let’s consider that a moment. I don’t believe I am stuffing a straw man when I write that to a greater degree an American liberal believes the following:
1. Atheism is the sign of an enlightened mind.
2. All religions are the same, based on ignorance, and the enemies of knowledge.
3. Women are the equal of men and should be treated as such in all spheres both public and private.
4. Western culture is inferior to other cultures, or at best, equivalent.
5. Sexual freedom is the only expression of freedom that must be protected at all costs.
In the US there are no doubt several protestant denominations of Christianity that would agree with at least some of these propositions. The most liberal sect of Islam I know of is the Ismaili sect, and even that sect would disagree with all of the propositions. Do you think Tamarlan Tsarnaev believed in any of those propositions with the possible exception of western inferiority (or rather did, evidently blowing himself up before capture)?
My abhorrence of Islam isn’t based on fear or ignorance. I’ve read the Koran and more importantly, the Hadith, or interpretations of the Koran in the centuries following Muhammad’s death. I’ve lived in a Muslim country, eaten halal food and have celebrated Muslim holidays. I have studied Islam and its history and although do not consider myself an expert on either I know my way around the religion well enough so that I can confidently say that I know what I don’t know. How many liberals have done the same? A liberal looks at the Muslim community and blames American conservatives for Islamic extremism. I look at the Umma and wonder why, based on the teachings of Muhammad and the interpretations found in the Hadith, all Muslims aren’t Islamic extremists. Muslims have a pretty good idea of what American life and life in general in the West is like, and the truth is that a sizeable minority of them don’t like it.
These Muslims find the idea of a government without G-d just as abhorrent as liberals find a government with G-d. Islam makes it clear that all law derives ultimately from Allah through his prophet Muhammad, which is why the Hadith sprung up to handle legal questions that Muhammad himself didn’t address while alive. By this logic Western society and the Shi’a heretics who accept a limited separation between religion and state is heretical by its very existence, and lacking Allah’s support, weak and Evil. In Islam there is no freedom in the Western sense of the word; instead there is a freedom that comes through submission, a type which any pre-Enlightenment European, fundamentalist Christian married woman or perhaps any dedicated servant or slave could relate to, but a concept which would be completely alien to most raised in the post-Enlightenment West. What liberals refuse to understand is that the message of Islam, of complete submission to Allah, can be appealing on its own. The idea that a man like Osama bin Laden, born of wealth, educated in the finest schools in the West would choose a philosophy where women have few rights, homosexuality does not exist, and unbelievers are allowed to live only as future converts to Islam over the Leftist paradise of sexual and economic equality must rankle the liberal, if she would only allow herself to be rankled. I suppose it is possible. After all, Charles Krauthammer, David Horowitz and are ex-liberals as am I.
Charles Krauthammer once wrote Conservatives think Liberals are stupid, whereas Liberals think Conservatives are Evil. What’s ironic is that libertarians and their conservative allies feel towards Liberals the same way Liberals feel about Muslims, that they are ignorant and misguided, that if they just understood us better they’d like us. But unfortunately Liberals see us the way we see jihadists, as enemies meant to be crushed. How else to explain the vain hope by the Left that the bombers turned out to be white men from the Right? And how sad?
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