Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam

Wed Jan 13 02:12:56 CST 2016

Don't know if this is the right place to post this:
http://newsletterversand.zeit.de/ov?mailing=1J95A4TG-1BJWV6D&m2u=1J9VWSGA-1J95A4TG-IE915XI
but anyway.

2016-01-13 8:26 GMT+01:00 David Casseres <david.casseres at gmail.com>:

> "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
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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