Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam
Kai Frederik Lorentzen
lorentzen at hotmail.de
Tue Jan 12 03:48:15 CST 2016
[Correction: Not the "second part of the Faust quote" was left out, but
what Mephisto said immediately before ("Ein Teil von jener Kraft,/ Die
stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft".)]
On 12.01.2016 10:38, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
>
>
> 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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