McCarthy to Republicans on the Eve of Their Convention: Get a Clue Re Your Enemies and "Outreach" Be Damned
Andrew McCarthy writes:
[S]omething happened to the GOP in the Bush years. For all the welcome understanding that Bill Clinton was wrong — that the jihad could not be indicted into submission — the Bush administration never learned a fundamental truth that Reagan knew only too well: You cannot defeat your enemies unless you understand them, and you cannot even begin to understand them if you are too craven to name them.
As they gather in Tampa for their quadrennial showcase, Republicans, but for the 1 percent, remain timorous on the subject of America’s enemies. Oh, they’ll tell you that we must confront “terrorism” and crack down on the “terrorists.” But that’s not much different from claiming to be against “burglary” and “burglars.” Terrorism is a vicious crime, but it becomes a national-security threat only when it is an instrument of an ideology that aims to destroy our country. What made the terrorist organizations armed and trained by the Soviets in the Sixties and Seventies a threat was the Soviets, not the terrorism.
America’s enemies are Islamic supremacists: Muslims adherent to a totalitarian interpretation of Islam who, like Soviet Communists, seek to impose their ideology throughout the world, very much including the United States. Terrorism is an offensive strategy they use, but it is only one arrow in the quiver. Its chief utility, moreover, is not that it will coerce surrender on its own; it is the atmosphere of intimidation it creates. That dramatically increases the effectiveness of the enemy’s several other offensive strategies — legal demands for concessions, media campaigns, infiltration of society’s major institutions, and influence operations against government.
The most disheartening thing about the modern Republican party’s dereliction — about its accommodation and empowerment of our enemies under the delusional guise of “Muslim outreach” — is that it flies in the face of the Bush Justice Department’s signal counterterrorism achievement...
I dunno. Wasn't it Bush who called it a "War on Terrorism"--which it most decidedly was/is not? (It was/is like calling the U.S. war in the Pacific circa WW2 a "War on Kamikazism.") The most disheartening thing about the modern Republican party is that not even the guy who was president when the jihadis attacked the U.S. on 9/11 was willing to name the real enemy (i.e. "Islamic supremacists").
2 comments:
I share Mr. McCarthy's and Scaramouche's frustration with our inability to face reality in the West's existential struggle (against multiple enemies, of which the Islamic Jihadis are but the most overt). The root of the problem, IMHO, is that the prevailing sociopolitical "narrative" among the Western intelligentsia--and among those, like the Republican political leadership, who wish to be well thought of by same--is that "racism" (conceptually stretched well beyond any rational association with actual racial traits, so that Elizabeth Warren, the whitest white woman in North America, can successfully claim privileged status as a racial minority) is the Very Worst Thing in creation.
The fear of being tagged a racist so overwhelms almost everyone in the American political and opinion-molding leadership classes that they simply _cannot_ make themselves utter the reality that the War Against Terror is actually a War Against Islamic Jihad. The Islamofascists who threatened the West have, of course, learned to take full advantage, as by rebranding a geopolitical struggle between Israelis and Arabs in the Middle East as a fight for racial liberation by the (nonwhite by definition) Moslems contra the (privileged honkies by definition) Jews. Ridiculous? Sure . . . but it is working for them.
Not only have they rebranded themselves as the "new Jews," they've also succeeded (in some quarters, at least) in rebranding the Jews as the "new Nazis."
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