Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

Wed Jan 13 01:26:16 CST 2016

"The denial of the reality of evil is perhaps the deepest error of the
Left." That's the kernel, the nucleus, right there, innit?

How about: the obsession with the "reality" of evil is what drives the
Right, inevitably, in the direction of genocide.

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 1:38 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> 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>
> 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
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160112/c6042a89/attachment.html>