Multi-Culturalism and Appeasement

Victor Hanson argues today in the Wall Street Journal that our inability or unwillingness to confront Islamofascism stems directly from the "post-modern", multicultural arguments of our intellectual class.

"So at precisely the time of these increasingly frequent terrorist attacks, the silly gospel of multiculturalism insisted that Westerners have neither earned the right to censure others, nor do they possess the intellectual tools to make judgments about the relative value of different cultures. And if the initial wave of multiculturalist relativism among the elites--coupled with the age-old romantic forbearance for Third World roguery--explained tolerance for early unpunished attacks on Americans, its spread to our popular culture only encouraged more.

This nonjudgmentalism--essentially a form of nihilism--deemed everything from Sudanese female circumcision to honor killings on the West Bank merely "different" rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a state university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: Most come to us prepped in high schools not to make "value judgments" about "other" peoples who are often "victims" of American "oppression." Thus, before female-hating psychopath Mohamed Atta piloted a jet into the World Trade Center, neither Western intellectuals nor their students would have taken him to task for what he said or condemned him as hypocritical for his parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with plenty of romance, they would more likely have excused him as a victim of globalization or of the biases of American foreign policy. They would have deconstructed Atta's promotion of anti-Semitic, misogynist, Western-hating thought, as well as his conspiracies with Third World criminals, as anything but a danger and a pathology to be remedied by deportation or incarceration."

The academic establishment promoted these ideas and convinced the public that we can not and should not judge the behaviour of others to create a paralysis in the Western world. We are afraid to condemn, to judge the terrorists and their supporters, because then we ourselves will be condemned by these fellow-travelers of the new totalitarianism.

The left hates Bush precisely because he does not subscribe to this non-judgementalism. Unlike Carter or Clinton, he has stated who he believes is evil and he has gone about trying to do something about them. "As Jimmy Carter also proved in November 1979, one man really can make a difference."