... If you're that eager to take offence, it's not difficult to find it. Or as President Bush said to me around the same time: "If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoons."
Which would make a great bumper sticker. It encapsulates perfectly not only the inability of the perpetually aggrieved to move on, millennium-in millennium-out, but also the utter lack of proportion.
... In the case of an enfeebled West at twilight, the fault is wholly in us. After Sept. 11, 2001, many agonized progressives looked at America and its allies' relations with the Muslim world and argued that we need to ask ourselves: why do they hate us? As Brian Dunn, a Michigan blogger, put it, a more relevant question is: why do we hate us? After all, if all our institutions, from grade school to public broadcasting to Hollywood movies to Canadian "human rights" commissars, operate from the basic assumption that Western civilization is the font of racism, imperialism, oppression, exploitation and all the other ills of the world, why be surprised that the rest of humanity takes us at our word?
"Multiculturalism" is a unicultural phenomenon. It exists only as a Western fetish, and we don't believe in it, not really. Most people, given the choice, want to live in an advanced Western society. That's why even impeccably PC lefties refer carelessly to other cultures as "developing nations": the phrase assumes they're "developing" into something closer to ours, because that's the direction of progress. Even hard-core multiculturalists only want to live in a Western society. For one thing, that's the only place you can make a living as a multiculturalist. The general thinking was summed up in an email I got the other day from a reader arguing that there was no point getting irked by the Archbishop of Canterbury's call for the introduction of sharia in the United Kingdom. We are, said my correspondent, "rich enough to afford to be stupid."
... the one identity we're enjoined not to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as citizens of a very specific kind of society with a very particular inheritance, built on the rule of law, property rights, and freedom of speech. Heaven forbid we should assert any of that: I am Western, hear me apologize! Say it loud, I'm Dutch and cowed! We're Brits, we're s--ts, awf'lly sorry about that!
If you no longer know what you stand for, how can you know what you stand against?
... Islam is a fighting creed, in the sense that it knows what it believes and it's prepared to stand up for it. But it doesn't need to be much of a fighter up against a creed so turned on by self-flagellation. To cite Bruce Bawer again on what he calls "the anatomy of surrender":
"The key question for Westerners is: do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they're incapable of defending it when it's imperiled — or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled."
Indeed. As I always say, my book isn't about "them," it's about "us."
Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !
This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You can see the list of articles I pinged to lately on my page.
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