Thursday, June 16, 2016

With the Left in Crippling Denial About Omar Mateen's Jihadi Motivations, It's Like 1963 All Over Again

There was a horrible--and horribly ignorant--editorial in the New York Times the other day that blamed the atmosphere of bigotry--specifically, the bigotry of right wing Americans--for the carnage unleashed at that Orlando night club (my bolds). Here's the money paragraph:   
While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.
A tragic event perpetrated by someone/something the Left, being the Left, refuses to acknowledge: now, why does that sound so familiar?

Then it hit me. In its basic outlines, it is exactly what occurred following JFK's assassination. Neither Jacqueline Kennedy nor all the president's men, who worshipped him, nor all the others on/of the Left, could wrap their heads around the fact that their idol, their hero, was murdered by some pissant little Commie and that his idol was smelly old Fidel Castro.

That truth was simply unacceptable. As such, something and someone else that had no connection to the Cold War had to be blamed. Here's James Pierson, author of a book on the subject, laying it all out for us in a 2011 Real Clear Politics piece (my bolds):
The central myth of the JFK assassination was that a climate of hate inspired by the far right created the conditions for President Kennedy's murder. A single assassin may have pulled the trigger, but he was put up to it by an undercurrent of hatred and bigotry that President Kennedy tried but failed to subdue. On this view President Kennedy was a martyr, somewhat like Abraham Lincoln, to the causes of civil rights, racial justice, and an elevated liberalism. JFK's assassination was a tragic but richly symbolic event for many Americans who saw it as a vivid expression of an ongoing battle in American life between the forces of light and darkness. 
This explanation for the assassination did not drop out of thin air but was circulated immediately after the event by influential leaders, journalists, and journalistic outlets, including Mrs. Kennedy, President Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, James Reston, Russell Baker, and the editorial page of the New York Times, columnist Drew Pearson, and any number of other liberal spokesmen. Mrs. Kennedy took the lead in insisting that her husband was martyred by agents of hatred and bigotry...
And there you have it. In 1963, a tragic event perpetrated by a man of the left was blamed on the "climate of hate" engendered by right-wing bigots. (They also blamed the city where the killing took place, as if there was something singularly evil in/about Dallas itself) In 2016, a horrific event is perpetrated by a gunman pledging allegiance to the leader of ISIS, and to make his motivations doubly clear, he screams the traditional jihadi war cry, "Allahu Akbar!" as he goes about his bloody business. And yet the geniuses over at the New York Times are even now scratching their collective empty noggins as they strive to understand what could have driven him to act out in such an extraordinarily bloody way. And, donning their tin foil beanies and cogitating extra hard on the subject, this is what they come up with: it must be because of all those right-wing "bigots" who "vilify" minorities and who tend to cavil about transgender bathrooms.

Why, what else could it be?

Yup. It's the "climate of fear" all over again. And the Leftists of today are as in just as much denial as they were back then.

No, I take that back. Their state of denial--their blindness to the reality that is staring them square in the face--is worse.

Much worse.

And the terrifying thing is that, considering what's at stake (i.e. nothing less than the survival of Western civilization), this time the denial could lead us to a very dark place, indeed.

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