[CrackMonkey] Orthodox Union Action Alert

[Bob Bernstein]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 10:45:11PM -0600, Elite Dark Clown wrote:

> Looks like America had slipped your mind.  You know, baptist church bombers,
> abortion clinic sharp shooters and government agency modifiers.  Well they
> are prolly not technically terrorists since they do not wear a turban.

WSJ.com

October 4, 2001    

   The Agony of the Left    
   by Andrew Sullivan
  
   One of the most telling things I have seen since the Sept. 11 massacre
   was  an  early "peace movement" e-mail. It listed three major demands:
   stop  the war; stop racism; stop ethnic scapegoating. A liberal friend
   had  appended  a  sardonic comment to the bottom. "Any chance we could
   come out against terrorism as well?"
  
   One  of  the  overlooked aspects of the war we are now fighting is the
   awakening it has spawned on the left. In one atrocity, Osama bin Laden
   may  have  accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have
   failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism
   of  the  powerful  postmodern  left. For the first time in a very long
   while,  many  liberals are reassessing -- quietly for the most part --
   their  alliance  with  the  anti-American, anti-capitalist forces they
   have long appeased, ignored or supported.
  
   Collective Knee
  
   Of  course the initial response of left-wing intellectuals to Sept. 11
   was one jerking of the collective knee. This was America's fault. From
   Susan Sontag to Michael Moore, from Noam Chomsky to Edward Said, there
   was  no  question  that,  however  awful the attack on the World Trade
   Center,  it was vital to keep attention fixed on the real culprit: the
   United  States.  Of  the  massacre,  a Rutgers professor summed up the
   consensus  by  informing  her  students that "We should be aware that,
   whatever  its  proximate  cause,  its ultimate cause is the fascism of
   U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades." Or as a poster at the
   demonstrations  in  Washington  last  weekend  put it, "Amerika, Get A
   Clue."
  
   Less  noticed  was  the  reasoned  stance  of  liberal groups like the
   National  Organization for Women. President Kim Candy stated that "The
   Taliban  government  of  Afghanistan, believed to be harboring suspect
   Osama  bin Laden, subjugates women and girls, and deprives them of the
   most basic human rights -- including education, medicine and jobs. The
   smoldering remains of the World Trade Center are a stark reminder that
   when such extremism is allowed to flourish anywhere in the world, none
   of  us  is  safe."  The  NAACP  issued an equally forceful "message of
   resolve,"  declaring, "These tragedies and these acts of evil must not
   go unpunished. Justice must be served."
  
   Left-wing  dissident  Christopher  Hitchens,  meanwhile,  assailed his
   comrades  as  "soft  on  crime  and soft on fascism." After an initial
   spasm  of  equivocation,  the  American Prospect magazine ran a column
   this  week  accusing  the  pre-emptive peace movement of "a truly vile
   form of moral equivalency" in equating President Bush with terrorists.
   Not  a  hard  call,  but  daring for a magazine that rarely has even a
   civil word for the right.
  
   Most  moving  was Salman Rushdie's early call in the New York Times to
   "be  clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such
   appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time,
   it  was  mass  murder.  To  excuse  such  an  atrocity by blaming U.S.
   government  policies  is  to deny the basic idea of all morality: that
   individuals are responsible for their actions." Whatever else is going
   on,  the  liberal-left  alliance  has  taken  as  big  a  hit  as  the
   conservative-fundamentalist  alliance  after the blame-America remarks
   of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
  
   It's  not  hard to see why. Unlike previous Cold War battles, this one
   is  against  an  enemy  with  no  pretense  at  any universal, secular
   ideology that could appeal to Western liberals. However repulsive, the
   communist  arguments  of,  say,  Ho  Chi  Minh  or  Fidel Castro still
   appealed  to  a  secular,  Western  ideology.  American leftists could
   delude themselves that they shared the same struggle.
  
   But  with  Osama  bin Laden, and the Islamo-fascism of the Taliban, no
   such  delusions  are  possible.  The  American  liberal  mind has long
   believed that their prime enemy in America is the religious right. But
   if  Jerry  Falwell  is  the  religious  right, what does that make the
   Taliban? They subjugate women with a brutality rare even in the Muslim
   world;  they  despise  Jews; they execute homosexuals by throwing them
   from  very  high  buildings  or  crushing them underneath stone walls.
   There  is  literally  nothing  that  the left can credibly cling to in
   rationalizing support for these hate-filled fanatics.
  
   This   is   therefore  an  excruciating  moment  for  the  postmodern,
   post-colonial  left.  They may actually have come across an enemy that
   even  they  cannot argue is morally superior to the West. You see this
   discomfort  in the silence of the protestors in Washington, who simply
   never  raised the issue of bin Laden's ideology. You see it in Barbara
   Ehrenreich's  sad plea in the Village Voice: "What is so heartbreaking
   to  me  as  a  feminist  is  that  the strongest response to corporate
   globalization  and U.S. military domination is based on such a violent
   and misogynist ideology."
  
   You see it in the words of Fredric Jameson, a revered postmodernist at
   Duke  University, arguing in the London Review of Books that the roots
   of  the  conflict  are  to be found "in the wholesale massacres of the
   Left  systematically  encouraged  and  directed by the Americans in an
   even  earlier period . . . . It is, however, only now that the results
   are working their way out into actuality, for the resultant absence of
   any  Left  alternative means that popular revolt and resistance in the
   Third World have nowhere to go but into religious and 'fundamentalist'
   forms."  The  only adequate description of this argument is desperate.
   And,  of course, it ducks the hard question. What does the left do now
   that these forces are indeed fundamentalist?
  
   The  other  rhetorical  trope  that  is  fast  disintegrating  is  the
   anti-racist  argument.  The  doctrine  of "post-colonialism" which now
   dominates  many  American humanities departments invariably sides with
   Third  World  regimes against the accumulated evil of the West. So the
   emergence  of  the Taliban is a body-blow. If dark-skinned peoples are
   inherently   better  than  light-skinned  peoples,  then  how  does  a
   dark-skinned  culture  come  up  with  an  ideology  that is clearly a
   function of bigotry, misogyny and homophobia?
  
   One  immediate response is to argue that the U.S. itself created Osama
   bin  Laden in its war against Soviet communism. This isn't true -- but
   even  if  it  were,  doesn't  this  fact,  as Mr. Hitchens has argued,
   actually increase the West's responsibility to retaliate against him?
  
   What Suppression?
  
   It  may  be,  in  fact,  that one of the silver linings of these awful
   times  is  that  the  far  left's  bluff  has been finally called. War
   focuses issues in ways peace cannot.
  
   Leftists  would  like  to  pretend  that  any criticism of their views
   raises  the  spectre  of  domestic repression. But in a country with a
   First  Amendment, no suppression from government is likely, and in the
   citadels of the media and the academy, the far left is actually vastly
   over-represented.  The  real  issue,  as  pointed  out  this  week  by
   Britain's  Labour  prime  minister,  is  that  some  on  the left have
   expressed "a hatred of America that shames those that feel it."
  
   The  left's  howls  of  anguish are therefore essentially phony -- and
   they  stem  from  a  growing  realization that this crisis has largely
   destroyed  the  credibility  of the far left. Forced to choose between
   the West and the Taliban, the hard left simply cannot decide. Far from
   concealing  this  ideological  bankruptcy,  we  need  to expose it and
   condemn  it  as widely and as irrevocably as we can. Many liberals are
   already  listening and watching -- and the tectonic plates of politics
   are shifting as they do. 

-- 
Bob Bernstein
at
Esmond, R.I., USA