Aging is an asset to the political observer since it reminds that the arguments we hear today, even those spouted with all the certainty in the world, are anything but permanent. Take the progressive left's assured explanations for the root causes of Islamic extremism. This has been one of the most consistently changing tunes of my own short lifetime.
I was in my final year of high school when 9-11 happened, and I vividly recall liberal teachers asserting confidently that what we had witnessed in New York was a perfectly rational — not defensible, of course, but rational — response from the beleaguered third world to decades of abusive US foreign policy. I remember that phrase almost becoming a single word in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: yooessfornpolcy, spouted endlessly by progressives the world over. It may have single-handedly revived the stale career of Noam Chomsky, who suddenly found his sermonic books on the historic evils of yooessfornpolcy leaping back up the bestseller lists.
Then the Iraq war happened, which was great news for proponents of this thesis because it gave them a big, shiny, new yooessfornpolcy to designate as the root cause of any subsequent Islamic violence, such as the 2005 London subway bombings or the 2004 attack on the trains in Madrid. But then the war ended, and the killings kept coming. Often in countries that had not only opposed major yooessfornpolcy initiatives of the last few decades, but made doing so a central pillar of their national identity.
Progressives were unperturbed. When jihadists shot up the offices of the French comic magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015 they decided it was time for a national conversation about whether the French sense of humor was too Islamophobic. When they proceeded to shoot up the streets of Paris a few months later, we were told it was time for some hard talk about making Europe's Muslim immigrants feel more welcome. When Brussels was blown up — a city that has done just about everything humanly possible to make Muslims feel welcome — the response was, uh, well, maybe they could try harder.
And now we have the left's response to the slaughter of 49 innocent members of the Orlando LGBT community by a self-proclaimed ally of the Islamic State, a spectacle of obfuscation and self-denial that has truly crossed the line from tragedy to farce. Absent even the slightest pretext for victim blaming — gays and lesbians are sanctified progressive allies, after all — what's ensued has been a non sequitur thrashing of favorite punching bags: Republican politicians, evangelical Christians — mocking prayer has become standard practice — the NRA, Donald Trump, "toxic masculinity," and so on.
In this country, the CBC's Neil Macdonald wrote a much-shared piece on Orlando that spent more time talking about a 2008 anti-gay marriage ballot measure in California than radical Islam (though this was still better than the offering of the New York Times editorial board, which didn't contain the word "Islam" at all). Thomas Mulcair made a gratuitous fuss over the fact that a Tory MP, Robert Zimmer, had recently presented a petition to parliament requesting the AR-15 rifle be declassified from the federal government's forbidden weapons list, a fact intended to spatter Orlando blood on the Conservative Party's hands given the killer had used the same make of weapon. The fact that the killer was, objectively speaking, a fool for doing so, given AR-15s are not particularly powerful but simply designed to look that way — a "fantasy gun," in the words of National Review's Charles Cooke — hardly troubled those who elected long ago to rally against guns without learning the slightest thing about them.
The more senseless, savage, and unsophisticated Islamic violence becomes the more it seems to challenge the progressive worldview, and its various calcified assumptions about the benefits of non-judgmental multiculturalism. To concede that the defining civilizational clash of our age may in fact be civilizational, which is to say rooted in culture and religion rather than left/right politics is to begin an exercise with unsettling ramifications for everything from immigration policy to foreign aid. So basically they've refused, and instead turned to preexisting partisan debates regarding matters ever more tangential to the topic at hand. I assume it's only a matter of time before a terrorist attack is considered appropriate pretext to begin beating the drum for campaign finance reform or legalized marijuana.
The things we want to talk about are not always what we should. Eventually reality denies us the choice.
Photo Credit: al-monitor.com
Written by J.J McCullough
