Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

Kai Frederik Lorentzen lorentzen at hotmail.de
Tue Jan 12 03:38:42 CST 2016



Oooh, touched a nerve, huh?

The last point, the one you quote, suffers from the fact that the second 
part of the Faust quote is left out which - look it up, if interested - 
is misleading and thus damages the argument. And of course I'm not 
American, I'm not fighting your political conflicts but ours here in 
Germany and Europe. Bill Vallicella's thoughts, however, helped me 
enormously to get to clear terms with Islam. Here in Germany where 
thanatoid leftists want to dissolve the nation into global 
multiculturalism, things are rarely formulated with such sober clarity. 
And yes, me I'm not a leftist anymore. Neither economically (the crude 
Keynesianism of Krugman and others appears absurd to me), nor 
culturally. There are issues on my personal political agenda which could 
still be described as "left" - for example the legalization of cannabis 
-, but I would prefer the word "libertarian" here. The points three till 
nine of Vallicella's argument sound especially plausible to me:

/> 3. Leftists typically deny that there is radical evil/; the bad 
behavior of Muslims can be explained socially, politically, and 
economically.  The denial of the reality of evil is perhaps the deepest 
error of the Left.  And so the beheadings, crucifixions, and other 
atrocities committed by ISIS and other Muslim savages are not 
expressions of radical evil, but reflective of contingent and 
ameliorable states of affairs such as a lack of jobs.

/4. Leftists tend to think any critique of Islam is an attack on Muslims 
and as such is sheer bigotry./  But this is pure confusion.  To point 
out the obvious, Islam is a religion, but no Muslim is a religion. 
Muslims are people who adhere to the religion, Islam. /Capiche?/

When a leftist looks at a conservative he 'sees' a racist, a xenophobe, 
a nativist, a flag-waving, my-country-right-or-wrong jingoist, a rube 
who knows nothing of foreign cultures and who reflexively hates the 
Other simply as Other.  In a word, he 'sees' a bigot. So he thinks that 
any critique of Islam or Islamism -- if you care to distinguish them -- 
is motivated solely by bigotry directed at certain people.  In doing 
this, however, the leftist confuses the worldview with its adherents.  
The target of conservative animus is the destructive political-religious 
ideology, not the people who have been brainwashed into accepting it and 
who know no better.

/5. Some leftists think that to criticize Islam is racist./  But this 
too is hopeless confusion.  Islam is a religion, not a race.  There is 
no race of Muslims. You might think that no liberal-leftist is so stupid 
as not to know that Islam is not a race.  You would be wrong.  See 
Richard Dawkins on Muslims.

/6. Many leftists succumb to the Obama Fallacy:/ Religion is good; Islam 
is a religion; ergo, Islam is good; ISIS is bad; ergo, ISIS -- the 
premier instantiation of Islamist terror at the moment -- is not 
Islamic.  See Obama: "ISIL is not Islamic."
<http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2014/09/obama-isil-is-not-islamic.html>

/7. Leftists tend to be cultural relativists./  This is part of what 
drives the Obama Fallacy.  If all cultures are equally good, then the 
same holds for religions: they are all equally good, and no religion can 
be said to be superior to any other either in terms of truth value or 
contribution to human flourishing. Islam is not worse that Christianity 
or Buddhism; it is just different, and only a bigot thinks otherwise.

But of course most leftists think that all religions are bad, equally 
bad.  But if so, then again one cannot maintain that one is superior or 
inferior to another.

/8. Leftists tend to be moral equivalentists./  And so we witness the 
amazing spectacle of leftists who maintain that Christianity is just as 
much, or a worse, source of terrorism as Islam. See Juan Cole, 
Terrorism, and Leftist Moral Equivalency.
<http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2014/08/juan-cole-terrorism-and-leftist-moral-equivalency.html>

Leftists are also, many of them, moral relativists, though 
inconsistently so.  They think that it is morally /wrong/ (absolutely!) 
to criticize or condemn the practices of another culture (stoning of 
adulterers, e.g.) because each culture has its own morality that is 
valid for it and thus only relatively valid.  The incoherence of this 
ought to be obvious.  If morality is relative, then we in our culture 
have all the justification we need and could have to condemn and indeed 
suppress and eliminate the barbaric practices of radical Muslims.

/9. Leftists tend to deny reality./ The reality of terrorism and its 
source is there for all to see: not all Muslims are terrorists, but 
almost all terrorists at the present time are Muslims.  Deny that, and 
you deny reality.  But why do leftists deny reality?

A good part of the answer is that they deny it because reality does not 
fit their scheme.  Leftists confuse the world with their view of the 
world. In their view of the world, people are all equal and religions 
are all equal --  equally good or equally bad depending on the stripe of 
the leftist.  They want it to be that way and so they fool themselves 
into thinking that it is that way.  Moral equivalency reigns.  If you 
point out that Muhammad Atta was an Islamic terrorist, they shoot back 
that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian terrorist -- willfully  ignoring 
the crucial difference that the murderous actions of the former derive 
from Islamic/Islamist doctrine whereas the actions of the latter do not 
derive from Christian doctrine.

And then these leftists like Juan Cole compound their willful ignorance 
of reality by denouncing those who speak the truth as 'Islamophobes.' 
That would have been like hurling the epithet 'Naziphobe' at a person 
who, in 1938, warned of the National Socialist threat to civilized 
values.  "You, sir, are suffering from a phobia, an irrational fear; you 
need treatment, not refutation."

When a leftist hurls the 'Islamophobe!' epithet that is his way of 
evading rational discussion by reducing his interlocutor to someone 
subrational, someone suffering from cognitive dysfunction.  Now how 
liberal and tolerant and respectful of persons is that? <


And you should also look at this:

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/09/a-dog-named-muhammad.html 



On 11.01.2016 20:18, Robert Mahnke wrote:
> This business about the how the left is reactionary was my favorite bit:
>
>     /Leftists are fundamentally negative and oppositional./ 
>     In/ Faust/, Goethe refers to Mephistopheles as /Der Geist der
>     stets verneint/, the spirit that always negates. That is the
>     spirit of the Left: destructive, nay-saying, reactionary.   So
>     leftists take the side of Islamists because the latter oppose
>     traditional American values despite the deadly threat Islamists
>     pose to their own values.  Compare Robert Tracinski
>     <http://thefederalist.com/2015/05/19/why-does-the-left-kowtow-to-islam/>:
>
>         The left is fundamentally reactionary. It is a reaction
>         against capitalism and against America. The left are defined
>         by what they are against, or more accurately who they hate. So
>         they are drawn to sympathy toward Islam because it is not-us:
>         non-Western, non-American, neither Christian nor a product of
>         the Enlightenment. And I guess that’s what the two ideologies
>         have in common: they are both reactions against the supposed
>         evils of the West. Which explains why leftists tend to find
>         themselves uncomfortable and look for excuses to retreat when
>         they are called upon to defend the West against this rival
>         group of reactionaries.
>
> If that resonates with you in some way, I guess maybe the rest of it 
> will make sense too.
>
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Mark Thibodeau 
> <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com <mailto:jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Pfff... this is ludicrous, asinine, sputtering cant.
>
>     Zero philosophical or even political value.
>
>     J
>
>     On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 4:17 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
>     <lorentzen at hotmail.de <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>> wrote:
>     >
>     >
>     http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2015/05/why-the-left-will-not-admit-the-threat-of-radical-islam-revised-and-expanded.html
>     >
>     > -
>     > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>     -
>     Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>

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