Category: The Dish

My paper, the Sunday Times, has a must-read on how left-liberals in Britain created a world in which violent Jihadists were supported by tax-payers, while the p.c. elites forbade discussion of their aims and methods and the police were told to avoid offending Muslim sensitivities at all cost. Money quote:

"The authorities were wary of offending Muslim sensibilities, even in the case of Hamza. When police did finally raid the Finsbury Park mosque they treated the hotbed of terrorism with utmost respect. ‘Every precaution was taken to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities,’ Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, wrote in his autobiography. ‘All police officers who were to enter the mosque wore overshoes and headgear, and the raiding party included Muslim officers to handle copies of the Koran.’

Hamza had shown no such courtesy in his public rants. Instead he had described Britain as a ‘toilet’ and urged his followers to turn it into an Islamic state. He had urged them to ‘bleed the enemies of Allah’ and to ‘stab them here and there’."

I have no doubt the cops and the government were doing what they sincerely believed was for the best. But tolerance of intolerance soon becomes acquiescence to bullies, and allows extremists to intimidate moderate Muslims – with cover provided by p.c. orthodoxy. This pattern must be broken – sooner rather than later.

The New York Times, meanwhile, did us all a favor by printing the latest post-modern claptrap from Stanley Fish. For post-modernists, liberalism is just another ideology. It has no superior claim to our allegiance than, say, Islamism or scientology or Raelian metaphysics. It is not the product of centuries spent balancing faith and freedom, the achievement of the West that wllows for different beliefs to flourish alongside each other, in a constitutional order designed to protect freedom. Liberalism is just a religion; and its goal is to weaken other religions:

"This is, increasingly, what happens to strongly held faiths in the liberal state. Such beliefs are equally and indifferently authorized as ideas people are perfectly free to believe, but they are equally and indifferently disallowed as ideas that might serve as a basis for action or public policy."

Yes, Fish has read Nietzsche, hence his homage in the sentence: "The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously." But this is a distortion of liberalism, as Nietzsche’s was. The defense of free speech is not a frivoloous exercise, as Fish argues. In the context of a continent where artists and writers have been threatened with death and murdered for their freedoms, it is a deadly serious task. And maintaining support for the difficult restraint that liberalism asks of us – to maintain faith if you want, but to curtail its intolerant and extreme influence in the public square – is, pace Fish, not an easy or platitudinous path. It is the difficult restraint liberty requires in modernity. Fish, however, like many postmoderns, is skeptical of such ideas of liberty and, in a pinch, seems to prefer the Taliban’s authenticity to societies where writers dare to challenge religious taboos:

"[Liberalism] is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors."

What you see here is something very close to the surface among the postmodern left. They deny all truths, but somehow feel excited by being in the presence of true believers. It gives them a thrill, the way so many Western intellectuals once found Hitler’s and Stalin’s purism exciting. When it comes to a choice between fundamentalism and freedom, Fish is on the side of fundamentalism. The thrill of believing in something so much you are prepared to kill innocents for it! The authenticity of Jihad! How much deeper than the pallid Western defense of an insipid thing called freedom. Fish is a useful reminder of how hollowed out many of our intellectuals are. They have learned nothing from the 1930s; and seem eager to repeat them.

Equal opportunity offense. This cartoon is particularly offensive. And I laughed. Call the Sharia police!

"It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required ‚Äì a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" — or, for that matter, a "conservative" — is now no longer a function of one‚Äôs actual political views, but is a function purely of one‚Äôs personal loyalty to George Bush." – Glenn Greenwald, diagnosing the current situation accurately.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if people with HIV can engage in sports, we should all celebrate. It’s a symbol of overcoming illness, staring down stigma and living fully. So I’m delighted to see that the Homeland Security Department has temporarily waived the ban on any non-American with HIV from entering the United States for the Gay Games in Chicago this summer. It’s still stunning to me, however, that the Bush administration, which has done so much to advance treatment for people with HIV and AIDS in the developing world, should still be perpetuating stigma by keeping the (largely unenforceable) ban on all HIV-positive visitors from legal entry into the U.S. Nothing stigmatizes a disease more than a country saying that no-one with HIV can enter its borders or become one of its citizens if he or she is HIV-positive. Being HIV-positive should not bar anyone from becoming an American citizen. But it does. You could remove the worry about people coming to the U.S. for free medical care by adjusting waiver requirements to ensure that immigrants have private health insurance before they get here. The stigma can be ended – if the administration finds a way.

The movie won’t be shown in much of the Arab world. It’s offensive to Muslim values.

A pro-free speech counter-demonstrator in Paris gets warned by the cops.

Here’s a case study in which the complete pessimists seem to be wrong. We’ve just seen a self-run democratic election in Haiti – with most parties accepting the results peacefully. Cultural change takes time. The debate between the neoconservatives and realists might not be so zero-sum. The neocons are right about the long term; the realists have much to contribute in assessing the short term. Why not a fusion?

A Veterans Administration nurse writes an anti-Bush letter to the editor. Next thing she knows she’s being accused of potential "sedition."

How the Western media kowtowed to Muslim intolerance. My latest Sunday Times column is now posted. I’d like to thank my editors for allowing me to vent in their paper: liberalism at its best.