Tracinski Is Half Correct

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by Smitty

Why Does the Left Kowtow to Islam? is an important read. The rub is

The point is that the left doesn’t kowtow to Islam because they actually love Islam, but rather because they hate our own culture. They have been steeped in a narrative about how American and Western culture is racist and “imperialist,” and they’ve been trained to see anyone with a dark complexion and a non-Western origin as the victim of our crimes. When they see criticism of Islam, or deliberate attempts to defy Islam, they filter it through that narrative. They see it as: there go those bigoted right-wing Christians, demeaning dark-skinned foreigners again. So they reflexively oppose it.

Specifically, the Left hates the Enlightenment; the idea that individual liberty is the unit of analysis; that Locke was correct about natural rights; that anything other than the State should be seen as authoritative.

Islam, then, is a useful tool of conquest and subjugation, from the Left’s vantage.

via Ed Driscoll

89 comments

  1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

    …Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

    It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

    We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections. [A World Split Apart]

    Too often, we on the Right unquestioningly accept the thinking of the Enlightenment as the be-all and end-all of Wisdom. Though we may not want to admit it, we have made the crafters of it into Demi-gods, people who we say and declare possessed some kind of Knowledge that was unique in History and the most Enlightened in insight, profundity, and sagacity.

    Too many of us are ever-ready to tout our allegiance at the Court of these Demi-gods. We have let our Pride in this reflected Glory blind us to the hard-won Wisdom that had accumulated before the Enlightenment. So many of us, if we are honest enough to admit it, believe that the World started anew in the 17th Century.

    While the Scottish Enlightenment [and the Renaissance, too] were great steps forward in the real progress of Mankind, there was a downside, as Mr. Solzhenitsyn described so well in 1979, one that has led to The Present Crisis, which threatens to consume Western Civilization in the Flames of Barbarity.

    The disease is Leftism and it has produced an overweening Vanity and Presumption, one that is deadly to the Soul of Man — especially the Man who seeks to Preserve and Restore the Good, for he makes his task much harder by his refusal to fight the disease that is tearing and gnawing at his Soul, seeking to devour it.

    And he reduces himself to being the kin of Totalitarians who, like him, let their arrogant presumptions rule them. And that is Moral Treason — a Mortal Sin.

    Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. —Proverbs, 16:18

  2. Very eloquently put, Bob.

    Although some of the Founders may not have had much need of organized religion, I would posit that they saw the benefits of it being the foundation of the Western Moral Code. And their articulation of Religious Liberty was probably their most important statement.

    There is also nothing enlightening about leftist progressivism. Unless you consider the fires of Hell “enlightening”.

  3. I would say that Leftists like Tom Paine were influenced by both the French and Scottish Enlightenments, as was T. Jefferson to a somewhat lesser extent.

    In the writings of The Founders I’ve been reading these past several years [Samuel Adams, John Adams, Richard Henry Lee] and Edmund Burke, their insistence on never forgetting ‘the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity’ and that He must be present in all deliberations vindicate them pretty much from A. Solzhenitsyn’s Indictment.

  5. Islam is a perceived minority. They even falsely brand Islamophobia as “racism” (Tsarnaev anyone?) Liberals have a block in their mind that says that you must agree with a minority, no matter how wrong or stupid or evil they are, or you’re a racist. And there’s no crime worse in a liberal’s mind, not murder, not violation of individual liberty, than being a “racist” (quotes intentional.)

  6. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other
    -John Adams

  7. Moreover, if governance does not come from within (the Western Moral Code aka Christianity), it will necessarily come from without (oppressive government).

  8. If some secular progressive-feminist white woman claimed she was a born-again Christian, her secular progressive-feminist circle would probably consider that to be some freakish regression. And if she were to follow Paul’s admonition to cover her head in church, they would probably condemn that as brainwashed surrender to ecclesiastical misogyny, or whatever terms they use.

    Yet if the same progressive-feminist white woman converts to Islam and covers her head at all times in public, there are actually secular progressive types who would laud this as some kind of enlightened change of lifestyle. Progressives and feminists constantly denounce Christianity as being some sexist and regressive religion, yet they will fawn and gush over Islam. What explains this one of many progressive dissonances?

    Well, I think it is because progressive have a formula:

    Christianity = White People Religion
    Islam = Brown People Religion

    Of course both of these formulations are false, but when has that ever stopped leftists?

    Since Islam has been designated as the “Brown People Religion,” it must be lionized as some unqualified good, and any criticism of it must be “racism” or “Islamophobia.”

    When otherwise Western secular progressive people convert to Islam, they are really trying to shout “Look at me! I’m not white! I reject Western Civilization! I’m an honorary brown person!”

  9. The left does not hate ‘the Enlightenment’. The left despises common sense. Common sense is common, and since it is abroad in the population, subscribing to it is not a distinction. If you seek to understand yourself as superior to your surroundings, agreeing with ordinary people is an impediment. So, the left defends Near Eastern militants, contemporary art, slum criminals, sexual perverts, and con artists in academe.
    An observation by the disreputable Mr. Sailer: much of the haut bourgeois in this country manifests ‘leapfrogging loyalties’, wherein you declare for the interests of foreigners against proximate sorts you despise. (The people who do this are some of his own commenters, but he never points that out). See also Thomas Sowell on ‘the one-uppers’.

  10. Exactly. They are allied against the same foe. And those that will tell you the Left and/or the Mohammedans are not the enemy (which is just about every DCGOPer) are part of the problem.

  11. I’ve started to cover my head at Mass this year. The only ones who ever gave me the side-eye about it are the more “progressive” female members of the flock.

    (They are usually way too chicken to say anything to your face when they disagree with you, anyway.)

  12. I agree with the first, not the second. The Left is a hodgepodge of flotsam and jetsam – failure’s shelter. They’re just feral enough to be racist bigots and nasal supremacists, and that’s about it.

  13. Disgust at organized religion has always been an over-compensation.

    The trouble is not that it is organized. The trouble is that it gets too worldly and needs a spring cleaning now and then. Jesus threw the money-changers out of the Temple, he didn’t say, “Everybody stop going to the Temple.”

    We’ve been taught to flinch at the phrase “organized religion” by people who fear religion and don’t want it organized.

    How did the left take over education, journalism, most of science and all of entertainment? Organization. They know how powerful organization is.

    An organized religion is like a gun or a lawyer: you may not like having one, but you need one because the other guy has one.

  14. I suspect the left likes Islam because it actually is what they only imagine Christianity to be: violent, hateful, boastful, exclusive, misogynistic.

    They want Islam to be the dominant religion so they can say, “See how horrible religion is!”

    (This was the purpose behind the guerrilla street theater project known as the Westboro Baptist Church – headed by a democrat under the fake name of Fred Phelps. It was like those people who carry racists signs to TEA Party events to “show” how racist TEA Party people are. In their minds, it makes sense somehow.)

    It’s tough to say religion is horrible when your Christian neighbors give more to charity in one year than you ever will in your lifetime.

    They want Christianity gone. It doesn’t fit their tall tales of “hate.”

  17. We already saw that lunacy in the execrable “V for Vendetta” film when Stephen Fry “reveals” his flaming homosexuality but then says how he loves reading the Quran because of its “beautiful poetry.”

    Don Feder sensibly asked, “Does he also appreciate the perspective of the religion-of-peace on the love-that-dare-not speak-its-name?”

    http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=5144

  19. Little known fact: If you are really nice to your ISIS executioner, he might let you choose which roof you get tossed off of for being gay.

  23. Paul told us that a woman’s long hair is her head covering. Covering your head is unnecessary, and could be considered Biblically as a distraction. Nothing personal. Just sayin’.

  24. TakuanSoho in the comments:

    It’s Oikophobia: hatred of the familiar and embrace of the other. That has been the guiding principle of the left since the late 70’s (though its roots can be traced all the way back to the Romantics and the “Age of Enlightenment). It’s what drive multiculturalism, the free border movement, the environmental movement, and the idea that criminals are the true victims.

    The embrace of Oikophobia was the natural result of the fall of the USSR. With Communism such an obvious failure, with the Black Book of Communism demonstrating that the left were actually on the side of devils, rather than reflect on their errors, these same people focused on the one good myth of Communism, that it was anti-colonial and anti-racist, and doubled down their bets on that legacy (though there is some truth to this, it is far more a myth than areality). So all things West bad, all things not-West good.

    So of course the left is now tripling down on Islam. They have no choice. To do otherwise would require them to realize that their current philosophy that “culture doesn’t matter” is as wrong as their previous one, and nothing in the 150 years of Progressivism suggests that they have the capacity to be humble enough to admit that they were wrong. People who believe they are on “the right side of history” do not possess humility. And like some religious zealot, what is mere death compared to being proved wrong? Particularly when it is other people who have to die for their pride?

    That is all this is about, there are lots of permutations, but the thing about the left is that, despite their claims to intelligence, their “intelligence” is spent coming up with with theories that obscure the simplicity of their motivations (Marxism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Deconstructionism, the list is endless), in this they are like the Scholastics without the logic.

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  27. Protip: request the tallest building you can see. If the stop at the end of the fall doesn’t kill you, they’ll finish the job with stoning.

  33. Good observation. Another thing is that organized religion has a creed, and states its case, and they are also full of fallible people who can directly be identified with it, so any organized religion that has been around a little while can easily be cherry-picked apart. It provides an easy, big fat target, because if it has a moral creed worth anything, most people will obviously fall short of it.

    “Private” religions, on the other hand, easily and readily conform to the believers, so there’s much less chance of “hypocrisy,” and every other person’s private religion can readily distance THEIR beliefs from THOSE beliefs.

  34. Good on ya. It’s simply an old-school sign of respect, just as men removing their hats in church, or when singing the star-spangled banner, is.

  35. Yes, this has been pretty obvious to all attentive observers; the only philosophical thing uniting militant Islam with the left is their hatred of the West. Other than that, they are polar opposite ideologies with nothing in common.

    Nothing, that is, except their intolerance and desire for complete unchallenged supremacy. That, and their operational parameters:

    Islamist: totalitarian, demands total subservience to the state.
    Leftist: totalitarian as illustrated by every leftist government of the last and this century.

    Islamist: Anti-Christian, tries to impose Islam
    Leftist: Anti-Christian, tries to force Atheism

    Islamist: Anti-Western, blames the West for all of Islam’s problems
    Leftist: Anti-Western, blames the West for all of the worlds problems.

    Islamist: tries to impose his own system of laws: Sharia.
    Leftist: tries to impose his own system of laws: Political Correctness.

    Islamist: Absolutist in his beliefs, allows no dissent
    Leftist: Absolutist in his beliefs, allows no dissent

    Islamist: willing and eager to spill his own blood to advance his cause
    Leftist: willing and eager to spill other peoples’ blood to advance his cause

    Islamist: believes in a Utopia on earth, once he takes over.
    Leftist: believes in a Utopia on earth once he takes over.

    Islamist: believes man can be perfected through Islam
    Leftist: believes man can be perfected though socialism

    Islamist: believes that Muslims are superior to all other people and belief systems
    Leftist: Believes that Leftists are enlightened and are superior to all other belief systems

    Islamist: enraged that superior Muslims are not ruling the world.
    Leftist: enraged that superior Leftists are not ruling the world.

    Islamist: humiliated that every Islamic nation is an oppressive, squalid backwater.
    Leftist: humiliated that every socialist nation has been an abject failure.

    And most of all:

    Islamist: Has rock-solid, unshakable faith in his politics, even though there are countless examples of its’ complete failure.
    Leftist: Has rock-solid, unshakable faith in his politics, even though there are countless examples of how it always fails.

  42. All I know is that until recently (1960’s), the Church didn’t see long hair as a sufficient covering. Head covering was tossed out more to satisfy the women’s rights warriors than for any real theological reason.

    It’s coming back, little by little. Better be prepared to get more distracted, DM. 😉

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  48. When people create their own spirituality, (because “Why should I follow what Moses or St. Paul says, when my own viewpoint is just as valid – if not more so?”) it’s very convenient for them, as everything they already think and do is approved! Yay!

    Everyone in the Bible who heard the voice of God was told “This is going to mess up your plans, make you change your ways, make you unpopular and probably get you killed, but I want you to do it.”

    Just think of Jonah!

    I’ve never met anyone who followed his own invented spirituality who had made a major change in themselves because of doing so.

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