The Liberal’s Blind Spot
I’ll admit I’ve been a bit mystified why the Left supports the misogynistic and homophobic religion of Islam, attacking Libertarians and Conservatives who question the religion as being “extremists” and “Islamophobes”. Benjamin Wiker, writing for Human Events, explains that modern liberalism has its roots in and defines itself against Christianity. As a result…
Liberals therefore tended to approve of anything but Christianity. Deism was fine, or even pantheism. The eminent liberal Rousseau praised Islam and declared Christianity incompatible with good government. Hinduism and Buddhism were exotic and tantalizing among the edge-cutting intelligentsia of the 19th century. Christianity, by contrast, was the religion against which actual liberal progress had to be made.So, other religions were whitewashed even while Christianity was continually tarred. The tarring was part of the liberal strategy aimed at unseating Christianity from its privileged cultural-legal-moral position in the West. The whitewashing of other religions was part of the strategy too, since elevating them helped deflate the privileged status of Christianity.
The problem is that Christians aren’t the threat to that Muslims are today, and so the Leftist view of the world has a huge blind spot that prevents it from seeing the threat Islam itself poses to the liberal ideals of women’s equality and the rights of homosexuals. As a former liberal myself it took the al Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to force me to question my beliefs, and the 9-11 attacks and the celebrations that erupted throughout the Muslim world to forever change them, but neither these attacks nor the many that have followed seem to have drawn many away from the self-defeating ideology at the heart of modern liberalism. So liberals will continue being blind to treatment of women and homosexuals, and the intolerance that lies at the heart of Islam.
Leave a comment