The same political correctness that necessitated ignoring Hasan's hatefilled ravings toward the United States as another uncomfortable incident, would have snapped its jaws shut in an instant on any straight talk about terrorism
By Daniel Greenfield Sunday, January 3, 2010
The most common form of denial in the free world today is terrorism denial. Terrorism denial can range from its most extreme manifestations which claim that America, Israel, etc are the “real terrorists” or 9/11 Trutherism, which is a more conspiracy minded variation on the same theme, to more moderate forms of terrorism denial, that believe Islam is a religion of peace, think terrorism only means a few extremists hiding in a cave somewhere, and lone terrorist attacks are the product of mental illness.
While the range of people who hold such ideas differ widely, they comprise a loose minority of the general public and a solid majority of the political leadership in the free world. The former is no surprise and neither is the latter.
The general public in nearly every First World country is bombarded by a steady stream of cultural propaganda indoctrinating them to believe that Islam is a peaceful religion with only a few ne’erdowells spoiling the soup with the occasional suicide bombing and that holding any opinion to the contrary is no better than burning crosses on a lawn while wearing white sheets. Specific terrorist incidents are watered down in news coverage, which attributes group terrorist attacks to the repressive policies of First World nations, and lone attacks to mental illness, as much as possible.
Despite this constant bombardment of brainwashing, common sense generally guides the majority toward the truth, even if they are unlikely to speak it in public or be heard if they do. In some parts of the world such as Europe and Israel saying it is illegal. In the United States it is not yet illegal, but risky, particularly in some contexts. While Nidal Malik Hasan, while working for the US military felt free to express his sympathy for the terrorists, had any of his American colleagues stated that Islam itself is a terrorist ideology, they would have been shown the door, no matter how desperate for medical staff the army might be. The same political correctness that necessitated ignoring Hasan’s hatefilled ravings toward the United States as another uncomfortable incident, would have snapped its jaws shut in an instant on any straight talk about terrorism.
And that political and cultural correctness comes to us courtesy of the political and cultural establishments, which to various degrees all traffic in terrorism denial, and whose influence shifts down to silence any dissent and enforce what they consider to be normative opinions about Islam. There is no mystery as to why the cultural establishment aggressively promotes and distributes terrorism denial memes through every organ of its influence from the movie theater to the novel, from the evening news broadcast to the standup comedy routine, from the university classroom to the music video.
The cultural establishments throughout the First World tend to lean to the left, a development that is hardly new considering that academia and the theater proved to be refuges for radicals going back centuries before the establishment of the United States, let alone the existence of Hollywood or the east coast’s ivy league institutions. The difference is that the university and the theater have never wielded as much influence as they do now, there is no measuring the gap in power between the 17th century playhouse and the 21st century movie theater and television set combo. So too there is no comparison between the influence of a 17th century university and a 21st century college. While the blooms of the present were sown with the seeds of the past, in the present they have become the gardeners, pruning and snipping the public consciousness by virtue of their universality, sooner or later just about everybody passes through one of their classrooms or sits down before their screens.
So while it is no surprise that the cultural establishments swing to the left, it is the accompanying political culture which traffics in terrorism denial, constantly reassuring the public that everything is alright, tightening and loosening security measures according to the whims of their political fortunes, but without ever actually addressing or acknowledging the real problem. Islam.
But from another standpoint it is also perfectly inevitable. The ideological left view Islamic terrorism as a misguided protest movement against global poverty and imperialism that they can accompany as fellow travelers on the red brick road to a socialist utopia. Accordingly the ideological left is one of the most fervent traffickers in terrorism denial, insisting that the real fault lies with the imperialist countries that the terrorists have targeted. This sort of reasoning is not particularly new to the left, which in the early days of WW2 supported both Hitler and Tojo on the grounds that they were victims of Allied Imperialism. When German tanks invaded the USSR, the left suddenly switched sides, and the anti-war protests became pro-war protests, but the stench left behind of the willingness of the red and yellow to collaborate with the red and black, should be adequate reminder that the left will ally even with the most unlikely of bedfellows in the hopes of fulfilling their revolutionary fantasies of a Marxist world order.
The modern day left sees Islam as a wedge to upend the Free World through immigration at home and insurrection abroad. The end result is supposed to shatter free countries and allow the left to remake them in their image, as they did to Russia and nearly did to Germany, and so many others. Their common mistake though is that the very forces they rely on to do the shattering, Nazism and Islamism, are quite difficult to put back in the box. Nazism might have had socialism in its name, and Islamist groups may run social services centers, but their only real common ground with the left is that they want absolute power on their terms. And so the lefty politicians who rely on Mohammed to take care of Pierre, Bob and Avishai, so the men with the red flags can safely nationalize everything and rule over a nation of unprotesting serfs have a surprise coming.
While terrorism denial is not nearly as prevalent on the right, it is not only the left that deludes itself into believing that it can make common cause with Islamic terrorism, because they imagine that “Abdul the Throat Ripper” and “Ahmed the Head Chopper” share their concerns over global warming and factory farming. Some anti-federalists on the loony fringes, such as Ron Paul or Le Pen have embraced terrorism denial wholesale, imagining that the terrorists share their resentment of their federalist systems. Often isolationists, such politicians imagine that “If we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone”, foolishly refusing to realize that they don’t want to “leave us alone”.
But such “enemy of my enemy is my friend” attitudes on the left and even the right in regards to terrorism are not unusual by politicians who assume that if their country’s government is the enemy, than the terrorists must be the enemy of their enemy, and therefore their friends. This viewpoint has widely insinuated itself in the left, which has always been opportunistic enough to champion rebels of any kind, believing that any revolution against the established order can only clear the way for their own ascension. And with the aid of a cultural establishment that adores “rebels” because its members fancy themselves as rebels too, despite their generally privileged lives, terrorism denial has become painfully ubiquitous.
Most politicians in the free world, even if they don’t share the full breadth of this extreme agenda, have still been indoctrinated with some degree of terrorism denial, and due to the rising Muslim domestic population begin to consider the potential for some hope, change and taquia at the ballot box. Additionally the influence of gulf oil money and trade with the Muslim world, particularly at the upper levels of national government helps insure that political leaders embrace a tame position toward Islam.
For the average politician, raised not on leadership, but on delivering pork and staying on the safe side of the polls, the prospect of fighting a billion people is a scary one. It is very tempting to simplify the problem and to minimize it. To treat lone wolf attackers as mentally ill and large scale operations as the product of a few bad Muslim boys living in a cave somewhere like renegade suicide bombing peter pans who refuse to grow up, become globalized and participate in UN sessions on the plight in indigenous peoples.
Western politicians have long ago embraced the notion that evil is banal, the result of bad orders from a broken political system. And that conversely most disputes can be worked out across a negotiating table, thus paradoxically deriving the exact moral from WW2 that helped cause WW2 in the first place. Of course anyone can negotiate. It takes a great leader or a great fool to stop negotiating and take action, and most politicians suspect rightly that they are in the latter category, not the former. And so it becomes all too easy to try and find a middle ground, to embrace conservative solutions, to hug your CAIR approved Imam and praise his Koran, while directing drones to bomb the “extremists”, without comprehending that the two are one and the same.
And so the cultural of terrorism denial, like a bacillus given free reign in a household of sloppy housekeepers, thrive and grows. Its moisture is the wet and weak vacillations of a political class more used to divvying up stolen tax revenues than to riding a charger into battle outside the walls of a burning city. The blessings of democracy are also its curses, having allowed the public to marinate in its own cultural indulgences while giving over the management of their affairs to a class of lawyers and hucksters who promised them endless social safety nets, and delivered endless bureaucracy, mismanagement and debt. In that sordid sweating mess, terrorism denial, a fever dream of a world without anxiety, with easy solutions and no evil, glows whitely like the plague symptom that it is. And either we will be cured of terrorism denial, or it will no longer be possible to deny it because it will be too late.
Daniel Greenfield Most recent columns
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and freelance commentator. “Daniel comments on political affairs with a special focus on the War on Terror and the rising threat to Western Civilization. He maintains a blog at Sultanknish.blogspot.com.
Daniel can be reached at: sultanknish@yahoo.com
