Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

[Joseph Tracy]

> On Jan 12, 2016, at 4:38 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
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> 
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> Oooh, touched a nerve, huh?
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> 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),
Krugman is much more of a capitalist reformer and, as you say a crude and absurd Keynesian, than a representative of the best of socialist economic thought.
> 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:
> 
The points below are a war of generalities, overstatements about "the left" with little relation to the actual range of ideas that exist along the political and human spectrum. This person wants to do battle with monsters but ends up conjuring straw men. To my mind the whole thing is an example of bad logic to endorse scapegoating. It poses as an attack on Islam but makes no direct arguments against Islamic teachings. It seeks to equate Islam with terrorism but does not engage in an across the board comparitive discussion of the religious roots for organized violence.  
> > 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. 
1)The denial of evil seems more about agnosticism/atheism/ humanism than leftism. The Nicaraguan revolutionaries were very catholic and believed in evil and there are many political leftists with a moral spiritual base for whom the concept of evil is acceptable. 2) there is no more validity to assume that the crimes of Isis are an expression of Islam than that the bombs inVietnam were an expression of Christianity. 
That said, the kind of  invocation of radical evil the writer calls for  has historically almost always produced its own evil. Bush’s writer , Frum, actually invoked the phrase war on evil as part of the justicicationfor the mass slaughter in Iraq. When Communism was the great evil it allowed many slaughters of political reformists. The Nazis made Jews, communism and homosexuality into great evils. Is this really a helpful concept?
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> 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?
Many leftists detest all religions including Islam, and most leftists make this distinction between Muslims and Islam easily and clearly. Essential to democratic pluralism, and more popular on the left than  the right,  is tolerance for many faiths and political ideas expressed as freedom of expression and freedom of religion and thought.. Tolerance does not mean agreement or changing legal and ethical practices to accomodate religios difference. Tolerance has  to do with privatizing religion to avoid confusing religion and politics. The conservative-right in the US wannts to privatize everything but religion. 
> 
> 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.
Absurd. this is simply crappy thinking. An excuse for the cultivation of hate. I am absolutely certain I am not alone in having known, loved and respected many conservatives. I believe there is inevitably a tension between the libertarian ideals of personal freedom and the social needs for good public decision making. Both sides of this tension need the balance of the other, and the culture war between left and right is a media spectacle that lends to xenophobia, demagoguery, fear and misunderstanding, and rarely allows fruitful dialogue concerning these inherent tensions. 
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> 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.
Again, absurd and rather paranoid oversimplification. Dawkins is an asshole and no favorite of the left.  This confusion about race seems most prevalent on the right and is particularly visible here  with Trump, conservative Christians, and the less educated. 
> 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.”
The question is not whether Isil has a connection to Islam but wheter it represents Islam as a whole. In the US and I suspect elsewhere American muslims  have the lowest rate of vilence and crime of any religion. Very few leftists believe that all religion is good. 
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> 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.
He doesn’t have the guts to actually argue how Islam is worse than Christianity or Buddhism( weird choice, Buddhism, are Buddhists involved in theis struggle?, why not Judaism where the holy text is rife with self righteous  ethnic cleansing.)
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> 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.
This is comical. He was just saying leftists succumb to the Obama fallacy that all religion is good. 
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> 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. 
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> 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.
That is exactly what we theoretically do by applying our laws equally to all. Stoning for adultery is illegal and virtually unknown in western democracies and there is no move among leftists to allow stoning for cultural reasons. Where does he come up with this shit?
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> 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?
This has far more to do with how you define terrorism and terrorist than some obvious statistical reality. In the US the most statistically obvious form of terrorism is abuse of people of color by armed authorities. If terrorism includes dropping bombs on foreign countries that did not attack or threaten you, then the US armed forces have Muslims beat by many miles. What about Drug cartels in Mexico? What about the Egyptian military. I could go on for pages.
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> 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.
There is no such thing as Christian Doctrine. The history of Chritian Doctrines are that many have endorsed terrorism, from the protestant chuches of Germany, to the inquisitions of the Catholics, to the exteme violence against native peoples of the new world.
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> 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.”
Most of the Naziphobes who spoke out were historically from the left. The refutation and dismissal  of those who warned and fought against fascism in its early stages largely came from the right.  

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> 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? <
This is dishonest. Most published commentary from the left that uses this term uses the form Islamaphobic and often refers to Islamaphobic rhetoric. Nevetheless the term including its possible psychological implications certainly applies to Donald Trump, and his insidious equation of Syrian refugees with Isil terrorists.

 Some people earn the name-calling they get and that includes socialists as well as conservative capitalists. 
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> 
> And you should also look at this:
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> http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/09/a-dog-named-muhammad.html 
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> 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:
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>> 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.
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>> 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> 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> 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
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>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
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