Sunday, September 11, 2011

'Hope' 'n' 'Compassion' 'n' 'Community' 'n' Other Marshmallow Fluff That Has Nothing to do With Jihadi Terrorism

This NYT editorial is very disappointed in post-9/11 America because it has failed to ignore jihad  pretend everything was okey-dokey  hug enough Muslims live up to the community spirit it manifested on that fateful day:
It seemed, in the days after 9/11, as though we stood at the juncture of many possible futures. There was as much hope as grief, as much love as anger, and a powerful sense of resilience. We still stand at the juncture of many possible futures. They are occasioned not by what terrorists in four airliners did to us, but by what we have done in the decade since. As a nation, we have done a better job of living with our fears, sadly, than nurturing the expansive spirit of community that arose in those early days.       
We are still learning about the events of 9/11, and in truth, 10 years is a short window to assess the consequences of those attacks. Perhaps in time we will realize that the full meaning of what happened on 9/11 resides in the surge of compassion and hope that accompanied the shock and mourning of that September day.
One can only shake one's head in sheer wonderment at such sappiness. Rather than nurturing the expansive spirit of community, one would have hoped that, a decade on, the NYT, the bible of the American left, could have nurtured a clue or two (about Islamic holy war, about the the jihad imperative embedded in Islam's core texts, about, well, the world as it is and not as a Hallmark card might envision it).

Update: Bruce Bawer writes:
The divisions that ensued after 9/11 weren’t any one person’s, or party’s, fault. If we’d had a president who had dared to speak the truth about our enemies and about the ideology (which is to say theology) that motivates them, and had done so eloquently and stirringly and repeatedly, à la Churchill — instead of pretending that all religions are by definition good and that the hijackers had “betrayed” their faith (as if it were the job of any American president to judge who was or was not a “good” Muslim) — it might have made a huge difference. Such an assertive, informed response might have helped to overcome the ideological depredations of Michael Moore, Gore Vidal, Oliver Stone, and others, which did such appalling damage. But perhaps not. Perhaps the poison of multiculturalism — the fear of acknowledging that our enemies were, in fact, our enemies — was simply too potent. In the years after 9/11, politicians, journalists, professors, and schoolteachers alike cowed millions of Americans into being scared of even saying, flat out, why those people had piloted those planes into those buildings. In doing so, they crippled our ability to respond in a strong, unified, and self-assured way to a threat that did not end that day but that is ongoing.
I wonder if Bawer took a look-see at what Bush said to the American people on that day. In retrospect, it was everything it should have been--calm yet impassioned, eloquent even if he doesn't quite manage to rise to the level of a Churchill, and, most crucially perhaps, unafraid to mention that this is a fight between good and evil. What's been lost since then, it seems to me, is that clarity.


I felt guilty that I didn't know who had attacked my country. And when I found out, I felt guilty that I didn't know why they attacked my country, my identity, my family. I spent the ensuing years studying Islam, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye'or, Robert Spencer, etc. The media was absent on jihad and increasingly I found myself on the net ......... the rest is history.

3 comments:

Carlos Perera said...

I agree with both Scaramouche and Bruce Bawer on this. President Bush's initial response to the 9/11 terror attacks was indeed "everything it should have been," as the former wrote. However, soon thereafter President Bush undeniably began to lapse into multicultural fluff ("Islam is a religion of peace") and guns-and-butter political calculations ("go shopping").

To apply the Churchill analogy, the equivalent would have been if the great British war leader had lapsed shortly from his initial "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" oration to reminding the British that Germany was the country of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Gauss, followed by an exhortation to go watch soccer and let the professionals handle the war thing.

The Allies won WWII against immeasurably more formidable opposition than any of the lot out in the Middle East and "South Asia," because our war leaders back then adhered to Mark Steyn's apt dictum that, "Armies win battles, but nations win wars." Bush started out with the American people solidly backing the war effort against Moslem terrorism, but, ignoring the lessons of the Johnson Administration's mishandling of the Vietnam War home front, he let short-sighted political operative types--like Karl Rove--guide his interaction with the American people (and even the conduct of the war itself . . . but that is a separate topic).

scaramouche said...

If we had to fight WWII today, we'd lose for sure.

Carlos Perera said...

Yeah, I sadly agree with your estimation. . . . You know, we might just live to see the experiment carried out (though I fervently pray that we are spared the experience). Hitler famously told his inner circle in 1942 that he wished Charles Martel had not defeated the Moors at Tours, because, had this alternative historical line developed, Germany would probably have been conquered as well as France, and would have developed along Islamic rather than Christian lines. Instead of undermining the Germanic warrior ethos, as Hitler felt Christianity had done, Islam would have reinforced it with its doctrine of _jihad_, thus turning Germany into a nation of implacable, fanatical warriors.

Well, let's fast-forward to the present: Hitler's fantasy of an Islamized Germany might just come to pass, should the present demographic momentum and proselytizing zeal of the Germano-Islamic population hold. Somehow, I doubt that an Islamized Germany would feel the same pacifist scruples, grounded on Christian guilt about the horrors of the _Nazizeit_, and especially the Holocaust, that post-War Germany did. _Mein Kampf_, after all, is a perennial best-seller in Islamic countries, where it seems to be regarded as something of a "how-to" manual.

Luckily, nothing is inevitable until after it has already happened!