for the record

(edited and expanded since I wrote this late last night)

“No one likes a Cassandra,” I noted pompously about the heavy-handed sales techniques of Save-the-Earth maven Laurie David. That was back in April, when I was feeling more light-hearted—an eternity ago in the Feiler Faster-paced mediathon we’re on, to borrow the useful concepts of Mickey Kaus and Frank Rich, respectively.

But things are different now. The defeatism about Iraq (that it’s a disaster has become the conventional “wisdom”; that it was all a terrible mistake has, likewise, become the conventional “wisdom” in the MSM—the ideas behind the mission having been intertwined and conflated with the wretched execution of the mission), the rats abandoning the ship—and in many cases even declaring that there was no ship—has got me down. Way down.

Today, as I watch the bitter partisanship in the run-up to the midterms, I find myself turning off the television. At a time when we need to encourage, recruit, and enlist more boys and girls for the mission of defending the things we hold dearest, the relentless message of the irresponsible and ignorant (when not agenda-laden) press is: Bring the Boys Home.

This is the same America, watching out for its own and eager to get on with its own business and endeavors, that wasn’t paying attention on September 10, 2001. Only, we’re even more isolationist than before. (We certainly don’t hear a word about liberal interventionism a la Bill Clinton from the Democrats.) Apparently, there is no stomach in America, or in the West, for this confrontation. We will hunker down, gather in. I see a cautious, realist, accommodationist foreign policy on the horizon into the forseeable future, and even more stringent political correctness at home. On the surface, it seems to work so well for us—for the time being. We don’t yet have a problem with homegrown Islamists.

In these conditions, it’s tempting to stop worrying, to stop looking for trouble, to stop writing about it, to leave it behind, to stop blogging, to just live my life, which is full enough without my obsessively following the news and thinking and commenting about it. After all, “[t]he best thing about the future,” as Abraham Lincoln said, “is that it comes one day at a time.” It was interesting to read the August issue of New York magazine in which various writers speculated wistfully about what if 9/11 had never happened. I understood the impulse that motivated people to write about it, though I wouldn’t have wasted my brain cells on the endeavor. I am constitutionally incapable of saying “Wake me when it’s over.”

Still, it would be so easy to go back to living with, if not love, the threat of an Islamist bomb (figurative and literal) that’s off in some distant future. We have it so good here at home. Despite everything, life is good. To deny it would be a lie. Indeed, that’s America: we are still isolated from the hard realities facing, say, Europe by many, many, many layers. As I said, there is no serious homegrown Islamist threat here in America.

But as Emanuele Ottolenghi explains, some Americans seem to be drawing it nearer, simply because of their “natural” sympathies: [emphasis mine]:

For the hard left, Islamism is not just fighting a common enemy. It is a new revolutionary ideology that can give new vitality to its cause after its natural pool of supporters, European workers, became “bourgeois.” Besides, it offers a vast pool of voters: Muslim immigrants are by and large viewed as the new proletariat. Foreign policy issues unite the hard left and the Islamists in their hatred for America and Israel; and the romanticized reading of Islamist terrorism as the new wave of freedom fighters against imperialism offers a new redemptive narrative, the likes of which the hard left has not had since Che Guevara. For their part, Islamists recognize the potency of the human rights narrative and the seductive power of anti-colonialist rhetoric. Cloaking the mantle of the oppressed serves them well, turning their cause into a liberal cause. This is why these two strange bedfellows are forging political alliances across the continent. But their political relevance would be close to nil, were it not for a widespread embrace of multiculturalism and the worst kind of politically correct mentality.

And then he goes on to explain the danger we face as a result of political correctness, aka soft totalitarianism:

Left-wing liberals who justifiably denounce human rights abuses of the West against Muslims (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Intifada, etc.) are often silent when the abuses come from the other side. And I am not talking about genocide in Darfur or the oppression of religious and national minorities across the Arab Middle East. I am not even referring to the frequently mentioned double standard that Israel gets on such scores. It’s much closer to home: it’s the willingness of many liberals to endorse self-censorship when freedom of speech is seen as offensive to Muslims. Just look at how the issue of the Danish cartoons was treated by many a liberal in Europe. A recent leak from internal BBC debates indicates that the well respected news giant would not lose sleep over satirical programs where the Bible is derided but would censor a show where the Koran gets similar treatment. Making fun of Jesus is OK –if Christians get offended, the banner of free speech is always within easy hand reach of the self-righteous politically correct crowd. Making fun of Mohammad is not OK–we cannot hurt the sensitivities of Muslims.

Why not?

Boris Johnson, a Tory MP and former editor of the Spectator, gave the most candid of answers, during the Danish cartoons? crisis. Explaining to his readers why his magazine did not republish them, Johnson said, “the real reason, gentle readers, was nothing to do with taste. We weren’t being responsible. We weren’t respectful. At least I wasn’t. The truth is we were just a little bit frightened and so is everyone else now.”

Moral relativism is the fear of believing that your values are somehow better than others. The minute that you find it distasteful to defend those values because you are not sure they are worth defending or because someone else might get offended, the door is open for freedom to be trampled upon.

That the first ones to be trampled upon may be the Jews is immaterial to the broader picture. For sooner or later, everyone, not just the Jews, will be afraid.

These are stark words of warning.

People won’t listen. They never do.

(visit the Georgetown Book Shop site to order posters—and spread the word)