Prof. Paul Eidelberg:
British recognition of Palestinian statehood corresponds to British appeasement of Nazi Germany, which recalls the adage, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: The more it changes, the more it’s the same. British appeasement of despotism led to World War II. It may very well lead to World War III.
George Orwell attributed British appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s to the pervasive doctrine of moral relativism then and still propagated by English universities. The same relativism underlies British recognition of Palestinian statehood. Melanie Phillips excoriates this relativism in her book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power (2010). So does Theodore Dalrymple in Our Culture, What’s Left of It (2005).
During World War II, American-born William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, became a Nazi propaganda broadcaster to England. His job was to undermine English morale. He had unwitting if not witting allies among England’s Left. Prominent among England’s anti-war protesters were intellectuals who hated Churchill. Haw-Haw was eventually captured and executed for treason by the British as a result of his wartime activities.
More recently, in September 2010, an American convert to Islam, Adam Gadahn, who became an English-language spokesman for al-Qaeda in the United States, was indicted in absentia by a federal grand jury for treason, “Aiding and Abetting al-Qaeda” (18 U.S.C. § 2339B). We have here a paradoxical phenomenon: Leftists, usually atheists, allied with Muslims.
To understand this phenomenon, we can hardly do better than study the letters and journalism of George Orwell. Although Orwell was, in sentiment, a socialist, he deplored England’s leftwing intelligentsia – especially its academics. He scorned the “emotional shallowness” of intellectuals who live in the world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. He saw that many intellectuals of the Left were severed from the common culture of their country. “England,” said Orwell, “is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality” – precisely the feeling of many leftwing American professors.
India-born Dinesh D’Souza cites numerous examples of this attitude among American academics, journalists, movie stars, and other opinion-makers. “One American professor, Robert Jensen, said on the day after 9/11: “We must say goodbye to patriotism because the world cannot survive indefinitely the patriotism of Americans.” Political scientist Richard Berthold said, “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon would get my vote.” Comedian Janeane Garofalo recently said, “When I see … a gay parade … in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, ‘We’re here, we’re queer!’ that’s what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride.”
Returning to England, the Left persistently chipped away at English morale and regarded patriotism as an “atavistic emotion.” During the 1920s and 30s, the main object of the cultural left was to break down the feeling of patriotism. This encouraged self-indulgence and hedonism. Nazi Germany deemed England soft and decadent: hence, that it was safe to plunge into war.
The American cultural left is no less hedonistic. Neo-paganism is rampant in America, only now this neo-paganism, disseminated throughout the world by American pop culture, threatens tradition based-cultures like Islam and therefore provokes Islam’s jihadic attacks against the United States. While Islam exalts war at any price, the cultural left exalts peace at any price.
Liberals live to impress other liberals. For liberals, denigrating cultural pillars and anything that smacks of patriotic dedication. Insulting religion, marriage, our flag, our military or our country scores big points among other liberals and the more insulting and vulgar the insult, the further into the bonus round a liberal gets to proceed.
These are supposed to be people of independent thought, yet those truly independent of thought appear to be those who will, against the liberal onslaught of attacks on whatever they sense a person may hold dear and cherished. At this point, liberals are looking more for things to denigrate than they are spending time developing any independent thought and original ideas. If I say tomato, they say “F**k tomatoes!”… and that’s pretty much the width and breadth of their wellspring of ideas.
So, naturally, they make excuses for why radical Islamists want to kill us while, as the essay says, it is the personal preferences of liberals and how they spread them that Islamists use as an example of why America should be wiped out. Despite giving the (false) impression that they stand up for gay and women’s rights, they excuse away a group’s murder and subjugation of the same. Obviously, what is important is to denigrate our security concerns about a religious ideology that wants to destroy us (and THEM first) than have any kind of tenet to stand for. Striving to me as worthless as possible is hardly a worthy tenet.
Islam and the Left share several things, but one of the most important is their mutual hate of the nation-state. For one group, the caliphate is thwarted by it, for the other, the (inevitable, in Marx-gab) materialistic world utopia is likewise hampered by the prosperous bourgeois state.
They also are both triumphalists, and in that faith, they believe they can use the other to gain their ends, and that other then will be, in turn, subsumed to Mohammadism on one side, or secular humanism/socialism on the other.
Mutually Assured Destruction in a new phase.