The President Is Not the Leader of the Free World

To the extent that the world has a leader, it is not free.

I should end this post there, but something else occurs to me.

Obama, by virtue of his international and liberal upbringing, Muslim father, and not least his African lineage, may be tempted to see Southwest Asian and African leaders as more like himself than not.

Perhaps that will be a net positive for civilization in the long run, but there remains a distinct possibility that he will presume a false familiarity. Like an undercover agent trying to infiltrate a criminal operation, there are shades of loyalty and of distrust that no American can ever cast aside, as long as he remains such. Will the mullahs and warlords play on his heritage, and if so, will he play along as the cat or as the mouse?

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Michael Rubin Nails Islamism

Writing at The Corner, Michael Rubin takes on what is so troubling with the Western response to Islamic terrorism. Are terrorists good Muslims? Who cares! Read the whole thing, as it's only a couple of paragraphs. The money (my emphasis):

While it’s fashionable to argue that terrorists in Mumbai do not act out of religion, but are simply misguided, the fact of the matter is that they justify their actions in Islam. For the purposes of policy and security, religion should be what its practitioners believe it to be rather than what academics or outside commentators say it is. It is much more important to determine how terrorists are brainwashed in madrasas, then passing judgment on whether what they believe conforms to what academics believe Muslims should believe.

All the talk about whether Al Qaeda practices Islam, or whether we should avoid a backlash against Muslims, misses the point. There should be a backlash against anyone, regardless of their religious affiliation, who excuses or condones terrorism.

Further, as Rubin says, forget the question of whether it's based in religion or not. Because terrorism catches hold somewhere in the maturation of these devils, and it is foolish to cast aside a potential source as politically incorrect.

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Assimilist

Michelle Malkin reports receiving the following email from an Obamunist:

My sympathies. I did some research, and you are exactly what I thought - an assimilist with no knowledge of themselves. What a hater! You attract minions of jealous non-thinkers. Thank you for making me proud to have voted for Obama.

A person's ancestry matters only to geneologists and racists, though I don't mean to tar one with the brush of the other. The idea that a person must cling to the culture of her parents is so illiberal as to be its antithesis.

By the way, Michelle, I think assimilist is code for 'Uncle Tom'.

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Department of Kumbaya

Department of Peace? Please, let's strangle H.R. 808 at birth:

(a) In General- The Secretary shall--

1. work proactively and interactively with each branch of the Federal Government on all policy matters relating to conditions of peace;
2. serve as a delegate to the National Security Council;
3. call on the intellectual and spiritual wealth of the people of the United States and seek participation in its administration and in its development of policy from private, public, and nongovernmental organizations; and
   
4. monitor and analyze causative principles of conflict and make policy recommendations for developing and maintaining peaceful conduct.

The Secretary of Peace will have the authority to bureaucratically muck around with the entire government, including the judiciary. The Secretary will be on the NSC, and able to leak anything that goes on there. The Department will give a cabinet-level megaphone to every lunactivist academic kook who claims to oppose something bad, though that may be trice redundant.

Kum Ba Ya.

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No Child Left Below Average

Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute takes on the Federal Government's No Child Left Behind law, showing it to be the failure of wishful thinking and faulty dogma of the education establishment that it is.

We are not talking about a political speech or a campaign promise. The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.

Read the whole thing. You will not be smarter afterward, but you will be more free.

w/t Steve Burton at WWWW

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Unlimited Government

We decided as part of the Civil War that there was a hard limit on the freedom of the individual: we cannot sell ourselves into slavery. Similarly, there is a hard limit on the sovereign public, that no matter how great the majority it cannot dictate certain things to the minority.

Among the things the majority cannot dictate are its religion, its opinion, and whether or not a person may own and carry a gun.

And yet the government schools try, to varying degree of effort and success, to do all three.

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Education

Ironically, I do not believe that I have ever in the halls of the Academy touched on the topic of education, that is, what the government proffers as such.

For it is galling that the State should be a provider of education at all.

We have in the free world in general and the United States in particular a fine tradition of the free press, which institution generally operates as a check against government excess. If there is a hint of the personal peccadilloes of an elected official or if someone claims that the single most nationally unifying event in the last 50 years was the product of a government conspiracy of absurd design and dubious motivation, our faithful media are there to report it.

But the media have shown themselves completely unable to fulfill this function in one key aspect. While the press do jealously guard their own sacred cows in the First Amendment, they fail miserably as guardians of the others. Pointedly, they fail to question the legitimacy of government involvement in new ventures as they come along. They regard their role as ensuring proper government function and spreading truth, yet they disregard the fundamental truth of our republic, that government should only be allowed to interfere in certain matters, but no others. While they seem to understand particular limits on government, the more general concept of a limited government eludes them.

And I place the blame for this failure at the feet of government-run education. Whatever else a government school teaches, the superiority of private education is not it. Rather, the goal of public education is to socialize, to create a population that is not wary of government intrusion but accepting and welcoming, even demanding of it.

The schools should teach basic skills in letters and numbers, literature, the sciences, and mathematics. They should provide knowledge about our history and that of the wider world. And they should teach critical thinking skills such as logical analysis and the spotting of demagoguery. But there ought to be a wild diversity of political, religious, social views taught, and none to the exclusion of the others. When the State hires the teatchers and the State mandates not just what is to be taught but how, no doctrine which is contrary to its expansion can long expect currency.

So the problem isn't merely, or precisely, that the media is full of liberal hacks, which it incontrovertibly is. The problem is that thanks to years of government training, it's full of closed-minded liberal hacks.

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The Cheerleaders of Hate

You want hate crime? This is a hate crime. Palestinians cheer a massacre at a Jewish school. Eight students were killed, 35 others injured. The gunman, a Muslim and supporter of Hamas, was killed by a an off-duty Israeli Army officer who lived nearby.

The jihadist hate group Hamas probably planned the attack, and certainly praised it afterward. This is their modus operandi: stir up hatred and praise terrorism, lob bombs at the Israelis, and then become outraged when they retaliate on poor widdle Hamas. It's possible that Hamas didn't actually get involved in the attack until it was clear that it was popular with the Palestinians, at which time they opportunistically and cynically claimed credit.

Like the attack at Norris Hall at Virginia Tech in 2007, there was a Jewish hero. Unlike Professor Librescu, trapped in a gun-free zone, this hero was armed and stopped the killer dead.

Now that's a cause for celebration.

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More Lunactivism

In my previous post on lunactivism I should have defined it: activism taking positions which are harmful to a central cause, usually from a desire to appear ideologically consistent.

Most lunactivists are liberals who get sidelined by the search for the approbation of a good cause defended, and fail to sanity check their own actions. Liberals tend to believe that integrity entails always "speaking truth to power" on every issue, where truth is whatever they feel and power is whichever tradition or institution they wish at the moment to destroy. Lunactivism occurs when activists get carried away with excitement over side issues, overreach, or choose the wrong fellow travelers.

My favorite early blogger, Ralph Waldo Emerson, said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Means: you don't have to conform for the sake of conformity, either in fashion or in substance. And if your zeal for conformance to the logical implications of an ideology puts you someplace doing something that you know is wrong, then you probably ought to reconsider that ideology, or at least your own zeal.

As part of the Law of Unintended Consequences, there is always a backlash against activism of any kind. The activism can be seen to be lunactive if negative consequences exceed the progress toward the intended goal.

Conservatives are also guilty of lunactivism, though on nothing like the same scale. I mention two examples below, and there may be others. Some examples of lunactivism:

Animal Rights

• Wanting to kill the baby animal who loses its mother, because growing up around humans is a fate worse than death.
• Not allowing human predation (so more animals suffer longer)

NAACP

Abortion is the leading cause of African American deaths, yet the NAACP supports it because that's the ideologically correct liberal position.

Anti-War activists

In 2006, opposition to the Iraq war led liberal anti-war activists to support Ned Lamont for Senator in Connecticut, eventually defeating Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary. Lieberman, however, is among the most liberal of Democrats on most issues, but happens to support the Iraq war. So the activists spent all of their effort to unseat a popular liberal Senator in a liberal State, a "safe seat", only to have him win the general election as an Independent.

This Spring (2007), Harvard College Democrats displayed on the school quadrangle 3,200 red bandannas "to visually illustrate the sheer magnitude of what Iraq has become", according to a piece in The Crimson.
"Unfortunately for the Dems, their Iraq display in the Quad looks nothing like a memorial for the lost soldiers and civilians in Iraq."

Prior to their installation of the Iraq Awareness Display, the Dems held a Candlelight Vigil at Tercentenary Theater. There were also a number of projects undertaken to physically support the troops (a phrase we invoke, but often don’t act upon), including a donation drive they co-sponsored with the Harvard Republican Club and ROTC. In other words, the Iraq Awareness Project was a series of solidly forward-thinking events. But the display–well that’s a prime example of how progressives lose focus at Harvard.

When Confronted By Contrary Opinion

Students at college campuses from Columbia to Berkeley have begun raising such a fuss against anyone who disagrees with the leftward agenda that they silence any contrary voice, often with violence and the explicit denial of the right to free speech.

The Sicko

By gushing over the wonders of the Cuban health care system, Michael M0ore undercuts his own message by choosing a tyrant as a fellow traveler. Viewers will draw the implication that America must emulate Cuba's totalitarianism if it is to achieve good health care.

Multiculturalism

Multiculty is an inherently contradictory dogma, which says that all cultures are to be valued and preserved, even ones which deny basic human rights. This principle trumps religious freedom, free speech, women's rights, and just about everything else when it comes to Islam. Liberals ignore the hatred pouring from the mosques, as well as the fact that Islam and liberal ideology simply do not mix.

As the Vanishing American put i:

Somehow liberal Christians and secular liberals and leftists alike believe that anyone who suffers or is 'oppressed' even if by their own fault is automatically to be exalted. This is what is at the core of the leftist/liberal reverence for the 'Other', the stranger, the outcast, the invader.

AIDS and Abstinence

Gay Pride and liberal correctness mean that abstinence is anathema. Even though abstinence education has proven effective against the spread of AIDS, activists will have nothing of it.

Fox News

Debates: Fox has a bigger audience than any other cable news outlet, and boycotting them only hurts the candidates in their efforts to become known.

O'Reilly boycott: Bill O'Reilly is not a conservative. He's a populist who explicitly distances himself from many conservative positions. Yet lunactivists are staging a boycott. Why? Could it be because O'Reilly points out the disproportionate and controlling influence of Moveon.org and George Soros on the Democratic Party?

Global Warming

The "Climate Crisis" and the Union of Concerned Scientists:

The UCS doesn't understand that their advocacy, following as it does a pattern of liberal orthodoxy, detracts from the authority their voice would otherwise have. People notice the pattern, and think "Oh, it's them again."

Vigilante Killing of Abortionists

Though it hasn't happened for about 10 years, right-wing anti-abortionists have murdered doctors who perform abortions. Again, this is taking ideology to the extreme, committing acts that are wrong and justifying them by the logical implications of ideology. The backlash against these killings continues today, typically in an application of the ad hominem tu quoque fallacy ("And what of you?").

Traitors and Criminals

Finally, as Becker points out at Redstate.com, it is a misuse of language to call anti-war politicians "traitors". Contrarily, saying that the Iraq war is illegal and that the Administration is "criminal" is equally wrong. That kind of hyperbole does more harm than good. "Treason" and "criminal" have specific meanings, and throwing these words around without carefully considering those definitions is crying wolf. It allows the object of the name-calling to generalize and blur the lines, so that in the future some real traitor or criminal may go unpunished.

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Whence This Hysteria?

Dr. Sanity likes to refer to the Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) as displacement: unable to attack Islamic fascism because to do so would violate Tolerance, Multiculturalism, and their anti-jingoism, the Western Left instead turns their ire against George Bush.

But what of these memes:

• American elections are rife with fraud
• Americans soldiers are torturers
  
• Global Warming will kill us
  
• Safe Sex
• Better single parenthood than a bad marriage
  
• Embryonic Stem Cells will save us
• Impeach!

How did these get to be such popular notions on the left?

I have a theory, which like all such theories do, simplifies a complex subject into a simplistic model.

When there is a societal consensus on some topic, such as "Marriage is between a man and a woman" or "Terrorists and those who support them are bad", there is always a tiny splinter group on the left that opposes that consensus.

This group "tells truth to power", standing bravely against the gale-force winds of cultural norms, and disagrees with the consensus. From high moral indignation, or sometimes simply to get attention, the group inserts itself under the fingernails of society.

Then a logically fallacious but no less powerful cultural identification occurs between that splinter group under our fingernails and the Pilgrims, Boston Tea Party braves, homesteaders, and cowboys, the lone individual or tiny group fighting for its beliefs against the odds, an iconic American hero. They believe it, so it must be true.

The group attracts fellow travelers, who often even claim personal danger for holding their idea, pointing to an isolated incident here or there in which someone was 'attacked' for holding the idea, where an 'attack' ranges from being dragged by a moving vehicle to perceiving raised eyebrows at the mall. Whether the target of the attack was targeted specifically because of the issue at hand, or even whether the attack is ever actually carried out, is irrelevant to the cohesive power of the shared feeling of danger.

As the idea spreads, it retains its counter-cultural tag long after it has ceased being "dangerous", and it is in fact advantageous for those who adopt it that others believe they hold it. More and more people hop on the bandwagon, lest they be left out of the movement and seen as backward, or not fully liberal.

If there is sufficient fuel in the form of demagoguery, displacement, or simple partisanship, the idea can take on hysterical (pun intended) proportions. It doesn't take long, unless something else takes its place, for the particular bit of madness to embed itself in the canon of leftist ideology.

And I am given cause now to wonder whether all leftist ideology arrived that way.

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This will hurt me more than it hurts you

If we need an example of truth being in the mind of the believer, perhaps that qualifies. A child about to get his backside warmed knows it can't possibly be the case that his Dad will be harmed in any way by the event. And yet, every parent who has performed the ceremony knows that the sense of failure, of inflicting pain on a loved one, and even the sting on the hand are all things to be avoided whenever possible.

But sometimes physical pain is necessary. Some children don't need it, and that may be why some parents get the silly idea that spanking children is wrong. Or rather, I would say that of course it's wrong, but it's just less wrong than allowing them experience their first pain as their last, or to grow up to be sociopaths who never learned they have to obey the rules.

There is a human tendency to secretly believe that we ourselves are fit and intended to rule the world (why else are we us and not someone else?) When a child looks you in the eye and says, "You ain't the boss of me!", it's time to let them know what, as they say, is what.

Sometimes children grow up without ever being disciplined, without ever learning that no, they aren't intended to rule the world. These adult children struggle to fit in to civilized society. They need a lot of correction, usually by an institution designed for such, or by the end of a rope. In extrema, they find a following of others, who transfer their own uncorrected desire to rule the world to one leader, or to one movement.

And so it is with radical Islam.

While anthropomorphism is always a tricky business, I think the parallel between religious movements and individuals is striking. Some religions may have quirky ideas, but for the most part they don't hurt anyone, break things, or leave the park messy. But this one does.

Despite the Big Lie inherent in cries of "Zionism!", Judaism has learned, through a really long struggle, that it cannot force people to adopt itself. Christianity started out knowing that, then kind of forgot it for a thousand years or so, but now has learned the lesson. While after 9/11 some people, I hope snarkily, suggested forced conversion to Christianity as some kind of solution, I think Christianity as a whole has returned to its forceless roots once and for all.

Other religions operate in the world of ideas, and don't seek to spread by force. And there are some Islamic sects, perhaps including the majority of Muslims, who don't run around blowing themselves up to spread the word.

Those are some of the reasons we don't want to spank Islam as a whole for the sake of its most radical practitioners. But most importantly, we know something that the child only vaguely comprehends: disciplining Islam will in fact cause pain for Western Civilization. We know it, and those who call for disciplining the child with physical force are shouted down as abusers. The child sees only a weak authority, unable to assert itself for lack of moral conviction.

But rather than weakness, our hesitancy to lump all of Islam together comes from the core of our culture: we believe that lumping people together is wrong. It would be something of a refutation of our ideals to persecute a religion in general for the actions of a minority of its adherents.

But Islam grew up with the ability to force its will on non-believers, and includes in its sacred text instructions on how to make second-class people out of them. The voices crying out "Death to America" and such aren't merely expressing some religious ideal, but laying out the grand strategy. America, as symbol of Western Civilization, must die.

Just as the Muslim Saddam Hussein paid $25K to the families of suicide bombers. Pakistani ministers of parliament are now saying that suicide bombing is justified.

If someone blows himself up he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?

You start by realizing that you weren't born to rule the world.

But it isn't Islamic nations that are the problem, it's Islam. No, it's that faction of Islam, the noisiest one, that desires to spread itself by force which needs to be told that it has to share. It won't listen to reason, to compassion, or to restraint. Violent Islam will only listen to blood, the blood of its adherents, spilled in massive amounts by people explicitly doing so because they will not be assimilated. Only then will it learn, its power-hungry mullahs forced to teach tolerance alongside proselytism.

Islam needs the spanking it never got as a child.

Probably the same folks who consider all physical punishment to be immoral will disagree with me, and say that attacking the violence of Islam with our own violence will only make things worse. Well, we've tried ignoring them, and it still got worse. We've tried giving them what they demand, and they wanted more. We've tried standing them in a corner, and where did that get us?

We have been fooled into believing that religions deserve special protection, because the religions we've been used to seeing promote civilized behavior. But in Islam we find a child with a "struggle": should it throw a tantrum and demand its own way, or should it listen to its parents and play nicely? We'd like not to have to resort to spanking, but for this kid, I think it's going to be necessary. I only hope we gather the fortitude to do what will need to be done.

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Why America Needs One Language

America, from her birth, has had as a common bond a single language. It's not the only language in the world. It wasn't even invented here. But in hard times and prosperity, safety and danger, through political struggles and wars, the single language has allowed Americans of all origins to take full part in public life. Without the ability to speak a common language, we are a mere collection of colocated tribes, soon to disintegrate and be cast into the dustbin of history.

If they share a language, the poorest child can converse with the wealthiest financier, should the need arise. Without a common tongue, the rich and powerful can easily ignore even a mob in the street, a mob much more likely to turn to violence when its well-spoken, cogent and passionately delivered points are, through lack of understanding, ignored as gibberish.

Several factors contribute to the necessity of a common language. I apologize for the lack of scholarship here; your refund is in the mail.

• Efficiency
  
  The amount of waste and energy required to accomodate multiple languages is staggering. Teachers, government workers, and really everyone would be asked to communicate in the language preferred bythe few, at the expense of the many. While the elitist would suggest that is good and proper, it is no more realistic than it is just, and it is even less just than it is efficient. Far better to have a single standard and let everyone conform than to have as many standards as are required, which is to say, no standard at all. Taken ad absurdum, we would strain efficiency if all official functions had to have the capacity to be conducted in Esperanto or Klingon for the two people with those as their native languages.
  
  
• Psychology
  
  Language is not just a tool for communication, it is a mapping of ideas into reality. Language introduces an historical bias in favor of its roots. While both Spanish and English are European, and thus impart a European viewpoint on their speakers, the differences are pronounced. Americans have an ingrained trust and loyalty toward the United Kingdom, stemming initially from our common language and smelted in two world wars. We say we share a common history with the British, but we really mean a common language.
  
  
• Safety
  
  When a call comes to a 911 dispatcher, safety demands clarity, and clarity is shattered by a language barrier. The same applies to any interaction with police, fire rescue and emergency medical technicians.
  
  Captain's Quarters has the horrific story of a group of illegal immigrant women forced into prostitution by the "coyotes" with whom they had contracted for passage across the border. It turns out that the coyotes were actually pimps who took their identification and forced them to be used in a way so inhuman that 'prostitution' doesn't quite cover it. The business apparently was conducted all in Spanish. I make no attempt to create a bogeyman here: I believe the business was conducted in Spanish to obscure its purposes.
  
  Not speaking English, the girls were unable to call for help or explain their circumstances.
  
  
• Trust
  
  People who speak the same language trust each other more. Traveling in a foreign country and meeting a person who speaks your language, a level of trust is established immediately. Conversely, speaking in a private language engenders distrust among those who are excluded.
  
  Without a shared language, we rely on translators. Translators must not only convey the nuances of thought between two languages, but they must avoid the temptation to insert their own bias. So we must trust the group speaking the foreign language, and also the translator.
  
  
• Economy
  
  Encouraging a person to speak a language that most others do not is not doing it a favor. Those who cannot fluently speak the dominant language are destined to a life in the underclass.
  
  
• Unity
  
  Employers and employees, lawyers and waitresses, cops and prostitutes are united together in communication. A nation is united by history, culture, and defense of shared territory -- all of which for all practical purposes require a shared language.

We must resist all attempts to characterize monolingualism as racism, nativism, or any kind of intolerance. It is necessary. Without it, sooner or later we all end up working for the coyotes, or unwittingly becoming them.

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In Which a Banana is Exposed

What an amazing feat of mental acrobatics.

Ali Eteraz knows that something is wrong in politics, and his answer is to throw out all religion under the guise of throwing out jihad:

When I say “religious supremacism” I mean the ideology of theocracy, which in the Muslim milieu agitates for the domination of political Islam, ...

(ok so far)

... and in the Western milieu agitates for infiltration of the government by religious (usually Evangelical) zelaots who then legislate on the bases of their religious belief.

Spellcheck aside, the only place that superficially fits his opiated description is the United States, albeit with a President who has never once, in his entire career as an executive, legislated.

But to be as charitable as possible, I will assume that what he meant to say was that he can't oppose religious extremism that wishes to destroy his civilization without opposing all religious involvement in government. This, despite the historical and prima facie evidence that religion is a civilizing influence, serving to keep men from tearing at each other's throats. Religious fervor has helped, along with the respect for science, logic and the rule of law, to create and sustain the very civilization he is so quick to abandon.

It is exceedingly rare for a Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, or even a Gaian to use force to advance his religion.

By applying the label "theocracy", he lumps jihad and social conservatism together. It's the same old brown moral equivalency banana, wrapped in shiny yellow paper.

He goes further and exploits without development a false choice, as Simon outlines in his post, that he must either oppose or support religious and ideological exclusion in unison. As far as I know, neither Republicans nor Democrats are planning to decapitate their opponents following a feisty episode of Meet the Press, or no matter what happens in a given election. The French may see things differently, but in the country with Evangelicals pushing their narrow religious agenda, political violence seems not to be part of the strategy.

I find it entertaining that the explanation he gives for opposing the institution of partisanship includes a justification by status quo of institutions generally.

That might confuse, except when seen in light of his unstated premise: all cultures and philosophies are equally valid. If one distrusts the adequacy of his own philosophy so much as to regard it the equal of those who openly advocate genocide for those who fail to fully agree, I see no reason to grant him even the smallest concession of insight. Perhaps I am wrong in this, for he also appears to believe quite strongly in the moral superiority of his position.

To sum up: Ali, reject the choices you have for political parties, if you wish. While almost any explanation would suffice for such a step, the one you gave did not.

w/t: Simon at Classical Values

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Socialist Pecking Order

The irrepressible Dr. Sanity writes today about the socialist pecking order:

From the perspective of the socialist utopian, what matters more than Women's rights or Gay Righs [sic] are the rights of a designated culture. The dogma of multiculturalism trumps the dogma of women's superiority. This is probably because for the socialist utopian, might makes right and the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few--and the few better remember that fact, or else. In the socialist utopia, there is no room for individuality or personal preference; or tolerance for differences. You always must subsume yourself to the collective; and the bigger the collective, the more power victimization can be exploited.

But the first (and only) lefty "virtue" is furthering social justice, and when you realize that there are more women than jihadists, it must be that jihadists are more oppressed than women. In lefty logic, allowing jihadists to abuse women furthers social justice.

In The Happy Chains of Individualism I tried to lay out the case for individualism as the basis for success in the American experiment. But the leftist multicultural agenda, being all about groups, has no room for individualism. The group is considered autonomous, its will inarguable. Dr. Sanity notes that there is a conflict between accepting the premise that all cultures should be considered equal and the obvious fact that in some cultures, we would not be able even to mouth the words that all cultures should be considered equal.

The discussion brings to mind the downfall of Tolerance: since all things should be tolerated except the intolerant, the only state of mind allowed should be toleration. To the pathologically tolerant, no rule or guideline can hold sway, because it would be intolerant to impose rules. Toleration as a basis for living is as disingenuous insipid as it is cowardly.

Yet Dr. Sanity is not the first to note the fundamental conflict between multiculturalism and liberalism. Paraphrasing Salman Rushdie, a voice of some gravity in liberal circles:

Western liberal intellectuals have become accustomed to believing that those the world over with darker skin are oppressed by the lighter-skinned ones. That almost instinctual belief is so intertwined with what it means to be a good liberal that all an African or South Asian demagogue need do is decry Western imperialism or oppression, and Western liberals will buy it hook, line, and lead-free sinker.

So Muslim extremists, with very illiberal points of view, engage the Western liberal media as willing allies simply by asserting the common enemy of Western dominance.

A parallel development is equally troubling to Rushdie, and that is the growth of multiculturalism. There is a pointed difference, Rushdie says, between rejoicing in the many and varied cultures we find thrown together in an increasingly global, mobile, interconnected world, and refusing to place boundaries of acceptability around behavior.

Those identifying with their own oppressed victim group should take note how quickly, if some culture wishes it, their socialist brethren will send them back to the kitchen, the closet, or the back of the bus.

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