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The "conservatives" continue their make-believe opposition to the Islam threat
View From the Right ^ | May 5, 2008 | Lawrence Auster

Posted on 05/05/2008 6:35:30 PM PDT by rmlew

I invite the reader to a thought experiment. Imagine that it is the late 1930s, and "conservative" intellectuals in Western Europe and the United States formulate an ideology which says that their countries should be open without discrimination to all people of all political persuasions. Then imagine that large numbers of immigrants of all political persuasions begin entering and settling in those countries, including many Nazi immigrants from Germany and Austria. Then imagine that the Nazi immigrants, following the Nazi ideology as laid out in Hitler's Mein Kampf, begin promoting the spread and institutionalization Nazism in their new countries, while also using verbal intimidation, threats of violence, and actual violence to silence critics of Nazism.

Now further imagine that "leftist" and "liberal" intellectuals in those countries support the Nazis' campaign to suppress all truthful statements about Nazism, and that these "leftists" and "liberals" construct a vast media and government propaganda machine that whitewashes Nazism. Meanwhile the "conservative" intellectuals, who had eagerly let the Nazis into their countries in the first place, begin to attack the "leftist" intellectuals for coddling the Nazis. The "conservatives" write an endless number of articles in munificently endowed "conservative" magazines and deliver an endless number of speeches and panel discussions at "conservative" conferences held in luxury hotels and resorts where they unburden themselves of the profound outrage, alarm, even panic they feel about the growth of the Nazi menace in Western society, foaming at the mouth against the "leftist" intellectuals for promoting the policies of "multiculturalism" and "political correctness" that have made it impossible to do anything about the Nazi menace. Furthermore, imagine that the "conservative" intellectuals never once let on that the Nazis are only present in these countries because of the immigration policies that the "conservatives" supported and still support.

That is the current situation of the "conservative" intellectuals of America and Britain with regard to Islam. For the latest example of this massive intellectual fraud, see Bruce Bawer's article, "An Anatomy of Surrender, "in the Spring 2008 City Journal. In this 4,000 word article Bawer only uses the words "immigrants" or "immigration" twice in passing. The West's Islam problem, Bawer informs us, is due solely to the left, not to the fact that millions of Muslims reside in Western countries, solely as a result of immigration. As he shows through numerous examples (and the article is a useful and disturbing catalogue of the phenomenon), the left has disseminated a wholly positive picture of Islam and suppressed critical speech about Islamic extremism. Here he introduces his argument:

Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology--which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive--people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis--infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly--or not so slowly, in Europe's case--being absorbed into the House of Submission.

In short, the Western leftist elite has taken Islam's side against the West. Any Western resistance to--or even honest speech about--Islamic extremism is attacked as bigotry, while leftist-dominated government agencies, schools, and TV paint Islam in glowing colors.

Furthermore, according to Bawer, it is ONLY the left that is the problem, not conservatives, and certainly not President Bush. Here is the only time in the article that Bawer mentions Bush:

When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims' and multiculturalists' furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term "war on terror."

Painting Bush as a victim of leftist and minority political correctness, Bawer hides the fact that Bush himself from 9/11 onward has been the West's leading promoter of Islam as the "religion of peace," and the West's leading censor of criticism of Islam. For Bawer, only the left--the big, bad, evil left--is the problem, not the "conservatives" who, in the name of non-discrimination, have done just as much as the left in letting Islam into the West and prohibiting any meaningful opposition to it.

The subtitle of Bawer's piece is: "Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia." But could it not be said of Bawer, and of legions of right-liberals and neocons like him: "Motivated by fear and by belief in the non-discriminatory inclusion of all mankind, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping Islamization"?


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Foreign Affairs; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: bds; dhimmitude; larryauster; letsbashbushsomemore; wot
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To: Bloody Sam Roberts
Islam is NOT a political persuasion.

At worst it is a hate cult. At best it is a religion.

Actually it is all three of these.  Islam encompasses everything in a Muslim's life.

Either way, no rational human would want it in their midst....given its adherents predilection for misogyny and violence against anyone who is different.

Spot on agreement.



----

Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com

21 posted on 05/05/2008 8:55:36 PM PDT by JCG
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To: Bloody Sam Roberts; hocndoc
From Mr. Auster.
"The poor fellow doesn't understand that I was constructing a fictional situation as a metaphor of our Islam situation. "
22 posted on 05/05/2008 9:01:46 PM PDT by rmlew (Down with the ersatz immanentization of the eschaton known as Globalism.)
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To: rmlew

Your blog rightly identifies the defeat of conservatism.

The defeat is an intellectual rather than actual defeat.

President Bush has been hugely successful in his global conservative and profoundly American movement.

Your movement is a dead end and you can see it.

The wall will not stop fake IDs. The hijackers were here legally.

The Nazis were nationalists and almost any reading you do on the question points to that answer.

I am comfortable with Neo Con. Paleo Cons are wrong.

The American soldier fighting in Iraq and showing American values is at the forefront of what is necessary for conservatism to prevail. The effort to reinvent American conservatism as necessarily introverted is doomed.

It was inevitable that as President Bush did the patriots work to defend America’s value that “conservatives” would rationalize the excess intellectual workload into the re packaged isolationism that says that Globalization is the real threat and greater introspection will make it all go away.

I do not belleve that. History is proving the President correct despite the desperate efforts by liberal and conservative reactionaries to LOL him into the corner of shame.

I am not ashamed of President Bush. The faux conservatives deserve John McCain and the further selling out of their views. Standing with the President during war time was more important than the nonsense being presently defended.


23 posted on 05/05/2008 9:13:46 PM PDT by lonestar67 (Its time to withdraw from the War on Bush-- your side is hopelessly lost in a quagmire.)
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To: rmlew
My point is that the metaphor doesn't hold water....so to speak.

The nationalistic fervor of Germans under the thrall of the Nazis was one thing.
But under it all there were still fairly rational human beings who would have been horrified if they knew the full extent of Hitler's Final Solution.

It cannot compare to that which is Islam. Underneath that veil there are no humans. There are animals of such vile murderous rage that we would wish we'd never lifted the veil.

I understand what the author was attempting. I say it is a poor metaphor.

24 posted on 05/06/2008 6:14:52 AM PDT by Bloody Sam Roberts (The secret of Life is letting go. The secret of Love is letting it show.)
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