Tuesday, January 12, 2016

The Dangers Of PC Madness


The Wall Street Journal editorial pages are graced every Tuesday with the sublime thoughts of Bret Stephens and William McGurn. Today they were joined by the equally eloquent and outspoken Dorothy Rabinowitz who rails against the risible attempts by the multiculti left to deny any connection between Islam and Islamic terrorism. A case in point - reacting to the attempted murder of a police officer by an Islamist in Philadelphia, the idiot mayor of that city claimed "In no way, shape or form does anybody in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam had anything to do with the attack."

The mayor’s comments, so bizarre in their determined denial of the deluge of facts delivered by top police officials standing next to him, were, nonetheless, familiar enough. Americans have learned to expect, after every Islamist terror attack, lectures instructing them that such assaults should in no way be connected to Islamic faith of any kind.
To hear the mayor of Philadelphia was to grasp, more clearly than ever, the fury that has led to Donald Trump's success in attracting voters—the fury of citizens who know official lies when they hear them, whether about border security, immigration, or the ever-expanding requirements of multiculturalist dogma.

...On no subject has there been more sermonizing than on Muslims and terrorism and on what the real Islam is and is not—no surprise in an administration which has from its outset tended to the apparent view that the American nation is essentially composed of yahoos whose barely controlled instincts to riot require regular monitoring and checks by their enlightened betters.
All this notwithstanding the history that shows that, after the slaughter of 9/11 and through all the bloody assaults since that were committed against them by rampaging soldiers of Islam—Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, San Bernardino—Americans have conducted themselves with exemplary courage and dignity. Neither the president nor other moral instructors who hasten forth after every terror attack to bring light unto the nation appear to have noticed.
Years of effort by this administration to deny, conceal and sermonize the nation out of its awareness of facts clearly evident to them is the sort of thing that doesn’t escape Americans in this election season, shadowed by the threat of terrorism. That is a fact Hillary Clinton might consider as she goes forth to celebrate her identification with the Obama years.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/denying-the-obvious-about-islamist-terror-1452556011

Stephens addresses the same issue, focusing on the co-ordinated attacks against women in Germany and elsewhere in Europe by mobs of men of North African/Middle Eastern origin.

Among the hard lessons of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely one of them is that it’s foolish to expect that backward and often barbaric societies can be transformed into functioning liberal democracies. So why do liberals seem so surprised that so many people from these societies behave in barbaric ways after they’ve shoved their way into the West?

...The World Economic Forum publishes a Global Gender Gap Report, which ranks the status of women in 142 countries. Bottom of the list: Yemen, Pakistan, Chad, Syria, Mali and Iran, all Muslim-majority countries. A 2013 Pew Survey of Muslim views on women’s rights found that only 22% of Egyptians and 14% of Iraqis thought that women should have a right to divorce their husbands, while fully 92% of Moroccans and 87% of Palestinians thought a wife must always obey her husband.
Put bluntly, there is a pronounced tendency among Middle Eastern men to view women either as chattel or as whores.

...Multiculturalism is a liberal fetish that is also the antithesis of liberalism, classical or modern—a simultaneous belief in individual autonomy and cultural equality, irrespective of whether different cultures believe in individual rights or not.
Typically liberals have elided this incoherence by pretending, as President Obama often does, that Western cultures are no better than non-Western cultures in respecting human rights, or by demanding radical liberalism inside the West while supinely accepting violent anti-liberalism outside it.
But the events in Cologne make a nonsense of this. What was outside the West is now inside. In the spirit of Christian charity, Angela Merkel and other European leaders have imported a culture of Muslim misogyny. In the name of humanity, the benefactors are asked to close their eyes to the brutishness of so many of their beneficiaries.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cologne-portent-1452555941

McGurn mocks Obama's upcoming empty chair stunt (to protest the 2nd Amendment) at his upcoming SOTU address and he lists some of Obama's policy failures, domestic and (excerpted below) foreign.

In Iraq, the president inherited a victory thanks to the surge he’d opposed as a senator. His commanders recommended he leave some American forces to cement the victory, but Mr. Obama again was after what he would call “a historic moment in the life of our country”—his December 2011 announcement at Fort Bragg that the last U.S. troops in Iraq would be coming home. We are now reaping the harvest.
As for Iran, the president will no doubt remind us that he came to office seeking a nuclear-arms deal. Once again, the nitty-gritty would be less important than the opportunity to pretend something large had been accomplished. The result? Not even a year after it was announced, American hostages still rot in Iranian jail cells and Tehran is testing ballistic missiles.

...Overseas his insistence on the grand gesture has led the president to pretend that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan means we’re no longer at war. This may be popular in the faculty lounge, but in the real world Islamic State beheads Americans, Afghanistan teeters on chaos and Iraqi cities such as Ramadi, liberated from al Qaeda in the original surge, now have to be re-liberated all over again from Islamic State.

...The gimmick Mr. Obama has now chosen for his final State of the Union, meant to highlight his end run around the Second Amendment, is fully consistent with this past. But seven years in, an empty chair in the first lady’s box only reinforces images of an empty suit at the podium.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-empty-chair-1452556542

Two other views of the SOTU --

Jim Geraghty agrees with McGurn - it's no good.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429625/obamas-state-union-not-strong

And Kevin Williamson wants to dispense with the silly speech-making ceremony altogether.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429629/state-of-the-union-address-obama-ted-cruz-republicanism

Also well worth reading is an essay documenting the left's sordid anti-American reflex written by David Horowitz of Radical Son fame.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429423/left-betrayal-america

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