Why The Left Doesn't Blame Muslims For Muslim Violence (Dennis Prager On PC Victim Alert)

There's a certain consistent pattern regarding the worldwide Left's assessment of culpability for Muslim terror. It is the fault of the murdered. The most recent example is the blaming of Denmark, or at least the Danish newspaper, for publishing cartoons of Muhammad. From Kofi Annan to The New York Times -- and the other American newspapers that declared respect for religious symbols a new journalistic virtue -- liberal and leftist opinion always condemns violent Muslim demonstrations, but always with a "but." The "but" is that in the final analysis, it was the Danish and other European papers' faults for insulting the Muslim prophet.

This is only the latest example of finding the victims of Islamic violence responsible for that violence.

For a decade or more, it has been a given on the Left that Israel is to blame for terror committed against Israelis by Palestinian Muslims (Palestinian Christians don't engage in suicide terror). What else are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they had Apache helicopters, the argument goes, they would use them. But they don't, so they use the poor man's nuclear weapon -- suicide terror.

The same argument is given to explain 9-11. Three thousand innocent Americans were incinerated by Islamic terrorists because America has been meddling in the Middle East so long. This was bound to happen. And, anyway, don't we support Israel?

And when Muslim terrorists blew up Madrid trains, killing 191 people and injuring 1,500 others, the Left in Spain and elsewhere blamed Spanish foreign policy. After all, the Spanish government had sent troops into Iraq.

When largely Muslim rioters burned and looted for a month in France, who was blamed? France, of course -- France doesn't know how to assimilate immigrants, and, as the BBC reported on Nov. 5, 2005, "[Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy's much-quoted description of urban vandals as 'rabble' a few days before the riots began is said by many to have already created tension." Calling rabble "rabble" causes them to act like to rabble.

If you wish to test the thesis that the Left blames those blown up for being blown up by Muslim terrorists, have your son or daughter at college ask some liberal arts professors who is to blame for 9-11 or Muslim suicide bombers in Israel, etc.

In fact, one way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and liberals is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and liberals blame either the victims' group or the circumstances.

We Americans are used to this. For decades, liberals have blamed violent crime in America on racism and poverty, i.e., on American society far more than on the murderers, rapists, arsonists and muggers themselves. Conservatives blame the criminals.

During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, black mobs murdered innocent Korean shopkeepers and burned sections of the city. The liberal response in America was virtually universal: We must understand the anger of these people at American racism. The daily special section on the riots in the major local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, was titled, "Understanding the Rage."

Though Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs correspondent, has been among the few prominent liberals to support the Iraq War, he regularly blames Islamic terror on unemployment in the Arab world.

Since examples of liberals refusing to blame criminals and terrorists for their behavior are legion, let's try to figure out why this moral inversion is so common.

One is that liberals tend to blame outside forces for evil. This emanates from the secular humanistic view of people as basically good -- and therefore human evil must come not from the bad choices and bad values of the evildoer, but from the unfortunate socioeconomic and other circumstances of the person's life.

The second explanation is that as you go further left on the political spectrum, it becomes increasingly difficult to blame the "weak" for any atrocities they commit. The Left does not divide the world between good and evil nearly as much as it does between rich and poor, and between strong and weak. Israel is stronger and richer, so Palestinian terror is excused. White America is stronger and richer than black America, so black violence is excused. The West is stronger and richer than the Muslim world, so Muslim violence is explained accordingly.

And third, liberals tend to be afraid of the truly evil. That's why the liberal newspapers of America refused to publish the Danish cartoons, probably the most newsworthy cartoons ever drawn, but have never had any hesitance about showing cartoons and photos that mock Jewish and Christian symbols. Christians and Jews don't kill editors.

We don't know who will be the next target of Islamic or other murderers from poor or non-Western or non-white groups. All we can know is that liberal and leftist thought will find reasons to hold the targeted group largely responsible.

Jack Wheeler has their number:

Are We All Liberals Now?
Jack Wheeler
Monday, May 10, 2004

Playwright and socialism advocate George Bernard Shaw famously declared a century ago that “We’re all socialists now” – meaning that socialist ideas had so permeated English society they were advocated however disguised even by their opponents.

The current hysteria over the “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners is evidence that American society has become so infected with envy-appeasing liberalism that “We’re all liberals now.”

The defining essence of liberalism is a psychological compulsion to appease the envious. Liberalism is not a political ideology. It is an atavism, a regression to the primitive fear of the Evil Eye of Envy.

Susceptibility to envy is what causes someone to be a liberal. The fear of being envied – the fear of the Evil Eye – is what makes a liberal. Liberalism is a psychological strategy to avoid being envied. It is the fear of being envied that is the source of "liberal guilt."

I discussed this in my Aug. 1, 2003 article, Beyond Treason, which discussed Ann Coulter’s accusation of treason regarding liberals. I explained that:

“The passions of Limousine or Hollywood Liberals are not traitorous. They are frenzies of masochism. The more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy-appeasement. Traitors are folks who go over to the other side for the money or some other self-interested reason. Liberals root for the other side precisely because they believe it is against their self-interests.

“What, for example, could be more idiotic and masochistic than to oppose missile defense? This opposition cannot be understood unless one dispenses with its rhetoric and rationales and realizes that these folks at their emotional core do not want their country defended. The lunacy of the "global warming" hoax cannot be comprehended other than its masochistic advocates do not want their civilization to prosper. Culture-destroying illegal immigration policies are defended by those who do not want their culture to survive.

“The lethality of Liberal Envy-Appeasement is that personally-felt guilt is projected onto the various social or tribal collectives to which the liberal belongs and are a part of his self-identity. Self-loathing is transformed into a loathing for one's society or race.

“White liberals become auto-racist, male liberals auto-sexist: racists towards their own race, sexists towards their own sex. Dimestore demagogues like eco-fascist environmentalists, feminazis, PETA animal rights loonies, NAMBLA pederasts, race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, all get their strength from the liberal's fear of their envious Evil Eyes.”

Now to this list must be added Arabs in Iraq.

The American liberation of Iraq from the hideous tyranny of Saddam Hussein is the single greatest humanitarian achievement of modern times. That this achievement has not been without moral failures in no way diminishes it, for these failures have been minor and rare. Such is the case of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

It is to be expected that the liberal media would do their best to whip up a guilt-mongering frenzy over the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. What is saddeningly surprising is how quickly so many conservatives joined the frenzy.

A case in point is the Washington Times. I got so steamed at this that I wrote a letter that was published in the May 7 edition:

Letters to the Editor
Washington Times

Dear Sirs –

I could not be more revolted by your Editorial Page cartoon of May 5, 2004, depicting Uncle Sam looking at an American Flag besmirched with a “US Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners” splotch and thinking, “It’ll take more than a strong detergent to get this stain out…”

What is the difference between this cartoon and that of the now-infamous Ted Rall cartoon calling Pat Tillman an idiot?

Let me explain reality to your cartoonist. This “abuse” was not conducted by America nor by the American military but by a tiny group of military personnel who are in no way whatsoever representative of either. If your cartoonist had any brains or patriotism he would have depicted this abuse as such an exception it highlights by contrast the overwhelming humanity and heroism of our troops serving in Iraq.

I subscribe to the Washington Times as an alternative to the liberal media embarrassed by their country. I expect an apology from you and an explanation of what now differentiates you from left-wing capitulation to the envy of America-haters. It will take a strong detergent, indeed, to remove the stain of this vile cartoon from your journalistic integrity.

Jack Wheeler

Far more revolting, however, than a cartoon in a newspaper is that the majority of senators and congressmen on Capitol Hill have expressed more outrage over the humiliation of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib than the torture and murder of Americans by Iraqis in Fallujah.

Making men wear women’s underwear and laughing at them is mistreatment for which the perpetrators deserve dishonorable discharge or similar punishment. It is not in the same moral universe as torturing people to death who are trying to bring you food (that’s what the convoy in Fallujah was doing), then burning, mutilating and hanging the charred bodies on public display. The perpetrators of the Fallujah Atrocity deserve to be shot on sight as one would a mad dog.

Yet Johnny McCain, Dick Lugar and others of their ilk are in greater moral dudgeon over the former than the latter.

Unless a sufficient number of folks on Capitol Hill and throughout the conservative media have the gumption to denounce the Abuse Frenzy as a blatant liberal attempt to smear every American soldier risking his or her life in Iraq, then we’re all liberals now.

Then we retreat and capitulate – we retreat from Iraq, retreat from the world and let the terrorists dictate their terms of surrender to us. The Abuse Frenzy is make-or-break time, the fork in the road to either winning or losing the War on Terrorism.

Thus the key to victory in this war: Reject envy! Only by rejecting the envy of Arabs, of Moslems, of all those who hate America, can this war be won. Only by announcing we just don’t care if you hate us and are envious of us, do we have any chance of prevailing over the evil of terrorism – and over the desperate attempts of envy-appeasers to make liberals of us all.

Jack Wheeler is the Publisher of To The Point
© 2004, To The Point, Inc.
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To The Point™ is an online geopolitical analysis service. To subscribe, call 703-531-1897 or go online: http://www.tothepointnews.com/lib/pgsv.php?pg=user/subscribe.html

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/5/10/124917.shtml

It is important to recognize that many on the left do not think in cogent arguments, but in an intellectual shorthand where everything is symbolic and nothing concrete. The model is a simple one - (1) the world consists of oppressing classes and oppressed classes, and (2) any inequity in the distribution of material goods is a result of oppression.

That's it - leftism in an easily-digested model that Marx would be ashamed of, but it saves an awful lot of thought on the part of those for whom thought is a chore and emotional commitment more satisfying. This model can be overlaid upon any social or political scenario whatever. You measure which fellow has the most marbles, and he's the bad guy, and the one with fewer is the good.

There is a corollary - that within this model of oppression absolutely anything is morally acceptable that is claimed to rectify it - for the oppressed nothing is condemned, for the oppressor, everything. This is not an intellectual model, it is an emotional model masquerading as one. Because of this it is immune from logical analysis - indeed, logic itself is twisted to accommodate it. To a dedicated postmodernist logic itself is an artifact of class oppression - I swear I am not making this up. This is religion, and its adherents believers.

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