A LEFTIST WISES UP TO THE DANGEROUS REALITY-DENIAL OF HIS FELLOW LEFTISTS

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities. Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals...

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise... To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

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ELSEWHERE

Some amazing logic from "USA Today". They say: "The Iraq war continues to be problematic for Bush. Six in 10 people said he does not have a clear plan for handling Iraq (two-thirds said the same for Democrats), and 56% said Congress is not doing enough to oversee U.S. policy there. So more people (66% versus 60% for the GOP) say it is a problem for the Donks, yet "USA Today" says it is a problem for GWB?? Maybe "USA Today" does not know that two thirds is 66%. If the writer studied under Leftist professors, I wouldn't be surprised.

German economic doldrums: "German economic confidence has plummeted to its lowest level in more than 7« years this month, in what analysts said was a sign that growth is past its peak in Europe's largest economy. The unexpectedly sharp drop in the ZEW business confidence index, its eighth consecutive fall, will chip away at the determination of the European Central Bank (ECB) to raise interest rates. Concern among investors that a predicted slowdown in the United States could damage Germany's huge export sector helped to drive the ZEW index down to minus 22.2 for September, from minus 5.6 last month. It was the lowest level since January 1999. Rising interest rates and a plan to raise VAT by three percentage points to 19 per cent from the start of next year, which has been proposed by the coalition Government led by Angela Merkel, are also expected to damage business."

Archbishop speaks out: "The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to "violent" Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope's "extraordinarily effective and lucid" speech. Lord Carey said that Muslims must address "with great urgency" their religion's association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the "clash of civilisations" endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole. "We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times," he said. "There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths."

Two reasons why I love international trade: "This Friday, after work, we are going to have a beer fest and take lots of photos to send back across the puddle to our new best friends in Austria. So, that is why I love international trade. It gives us the opportunity to see people from across the globe, not as scary and threatening foreigners who are a part of the monolithic 'Chinese' or 'Europeans,' but as fellow humans, individuals, parents, children, businessmen, innovators, friends and drinking buddies."

Duke's Reichstag fire: "More than six years ago, I wrote about contrived campus 'incidents' in which college students falsely report racial (white on black) or sexual attacks as a modern form of the Reichstag Fire. Certainly, the patterns are the same. After the 1933, the German parliament gave the Hitler government carte blanche to do whatever it wanted to 'prevent' future attacks .... Thus, we come to another version of the campus Reichstag Fire, that being the false accusations of rape against three Duke University lacrosse players. As has been documented in a number of previous articles, the charges are transparently false, and if any crimes have been committed, they were carried out by District Attorney Michael Nifong and the Durham police."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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