Byron York writes in the Washington Examine regarding liberal Portland’s politically correct refusal to cooperate with the FBI on antiterrorism:
In 2005, leaders in Portland, Oregon, angry at the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror, voted not to allow city law enforcement officers to participate in a key anti-terror initiative, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. On Friday, that task force helped prevent what could have been a horrific terrorist attack in Portland. Now city officials say they might re-think their participation in the task force — because Barack Obama is in the White House. . . .
What is ironic is that the operation that found and stopped Mohamud is precisely the kind of law enforcement work that Portland’s leaders, working with the American Civil Liberties Union, rejected during the Bush years. In April 2005, the Portland city council voted 4 to 1 to withdraw Portland city police officers from participating in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Mayor Tom Potter said the FBI refused to give him a top-secret security clearance so he could make sure the officers weren’t violating state anti-discrimination laws that bar law enforcement from targeting suspects on the basis of their religious or political beliefs.
Other city leaders agreed. “Here in Portland, we are not willing to give up individual liberties in order to have a perception of safety,” said city commissioner Randy Leonard. “It’s important for cities to know how their police officers are being used.”
Bush was wrong, terrorists don’t hate us because our freedom.
And Obama (and his liberal followers) are wrong, in that terrorists don’t hate us because we’re mistreating certain Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, though that is their contemporary pretext for attacking the United States and Europe.
Muslims hate us because we’re not Muslim.
The more radical (i.e., pious) ones believe this justifies terrorism. The less radical believe that they must conquer us through persuasion, coupled with the ongoing demographic and moral collapse of the West. They hate the West because, historically, the West was Christendom, the great anti-Muslim force in history. It was other things, of course, the land of Michaelangelo and Kant and Issac Newton. That is, our identity was not solely anti-Muslim, though it was primarily Christian. And this Christianity required it to be anti-Muslim in self defense, which the West accomplished with great energy at Lepanto, Tours, and Vienna, as well as the Crusades.
After the Enlightenment, the West lost its way a bit; it stopped being self-consciously Christendom, but it never stopped being the dominant, attractive, wealthy, accomplished, anti-Muslim citadel to which the entire non-Muslim world looked to for leadership, technology, and also a bit of envy. We outshone the Muslim world, and this was unbearable to a people whose political, economic, and social system was supposedly divinely ordained, allegedly a formula not only for other-worldly happiness but also for worldly success.
Portland thought it was safe from this kind of thing because it felt so guilty for being Western and so consciously and publicly distanced itself from Bush’s wars to inculcate western freedoms to illiberal Muslim lands. But Portland’s deracinated leadership forgot one thing: that sometimes hate and injustice and aggressive rage arise naturally and predictably from the Others whom they hold so high on a pedestal. Appeasement does not work to appease the uneappeaseable, world-historical program of Islam, which demands complete submission by every person on Earth.
It’s not clear if an event like this, even if successful, can remove the politically correct scales from the eyes of Portland’s leaders. Theirs is a web of deception that will likely detect, even in this, a clarion call to redouble their efforts of outreach, tolerance, and the like. Liberalism like that of Portland’s mayor renders intelligent people stupid and blind to basic reality. It also can render whole societies dead if they do not have a revival of clear thinking and an affirmation of their right to continue to exist in their traditional form.
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“Portland thought it was safe from this kind of thing because it felt so guilty for being Western”
I have a bone to pick here. I really don’t think I’ve ever met a Leftist who felt “guilty” for being a Westerner. I think it’s actually the exact opposite emotion.
By tearing down their own civilization, and being sophisticated and “open-minded” enough to disparage it, they gain a feeling of superiority over the rest of us simple-minded rubes who take pride in our civilization.
It works quite well for both highly successful and highly unsuccesful Leftists. If they are failures, they can say, “of course I am doing badly, I live in the corrupt and rapacious West, and I am too good for this society”. If they are successful, they can say, “What a brave new world we are creating from this motley mess we inherited – if only the unintelligent masses didn’t cling to it so”.
These are the emotions they feel – guilt is nowhere to be found.
It’s true what you say. Some of it is a pose or a status conscious raising of oneself above the “ignorant masses.” That said, I have met some old school liberals–decent, WASPy, Unitarian types–who really genuinely and sincerely seem to feel guilty about their status, wealth, and position in society. They are sweet people, but also useless.
To bad this wasn’t a real bomb and that it didn’t go off. Less liberals, the better. Cruel, yes, but necessary.
Good piece.
You say, correctly, that the left is wrong in asserting that the Moslems hate us because ”mistreating certain Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, though that is their contemporary pretext for attacking the United States and Europe.”
Unfortunately there are even some on the right who make the same claim, that if we minded our own business (which I think we should, actually) then the Moslems would leave us in peace. So the left and some on the right think the same thing about Islamic aggression. How do we address that?
In some right-wing circles one is called a ‘neocon’ for believing that Islam is a threat.
-VA
I do believe that our current policies inflame Muslims and that some on the margins are inclined to terrorism for our conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan, presence in their perceived holy lands, and our support for Israel and Israel’s actions vis a vis the Palestinians. There is good reason to set up physical and practical barrier to our interaction with the Muslim world and other disorderly and hostile parts of the world.
That said, I don’t believe such a policy will completely free the western world from an Islamic threat, whether conventionally or through terrorism. Islam like communism is a world historical ideology and an expansionist and aggressive one. However, unlike Soviet communism, it is largely incapable of projecting power, and thus nearly all of its attacks upon us are (a) because we’ve moved into their neighobrhoods or (b) let them move into ours. Stopping these two policies will do much to undo the practical impact of militant Islam upon our lives.
As for those “conservatives” that call anyone who calls Islam a threat a “neocon,” all I can say is that they’re mistaken. They’re taking their annoyance with a particular policy and letting it cloud their judgment. It’s noteworthy 100 years ago Hiliare Belloc say the rise of Islam as a likely phenomenon of the near-future, and at the time very few people saw it so.
“They’re taking their annoyance with a particular policy and letting it cloud their judgment.”
This seems to be typical of many on the “Alternative Right” – just look at how much support there is among these folks on the web for the repulsive, nihilistic Julian Assange. It’s a deformity that I long ago came to associate with leftism – and it makes me worry about the future of the right as a force for sanity in the West.
[...] And I’m especially tired of hearing about how this will affect the enemy and his feelings. Muslim feelings are already inflamed against America, let’s not forget. We’ve been at war for ten years and every day they try to kill our troops. Before, during, and after this incident they will try abroad and at home to kill our countrymen. They likely will do so as long as we try to transform their backwards societies, and they will probably still hate us from afar even when this task is abandoned, because we are wealthy and powerful and, most important, because we are not Muslim. [...]