the West

All You Need is Love

The prevailing ethos in today's Western world is the liberal mindset (paraphrased from Lawrence Auster below):

... the liberal view of man as basically good, and evil arising only from external corrupting influences, and the view that everyone in the world wants to live in peace, love, and harmony, and the view that modern liberal secular democracy is the best way of life ever to exist anywhere, and that this fact is self-evident to everyone in the world, so that no one, having been exposed to this way of life, could possibly have any desire to live any other way ...

And so the relentless pursuit to eliminate those "corrupting influences" from the Muslims proceeds at breakneck pace. But is the end in sight for the liberals? It appears not ...

Western and Muslim concepts of honor:
an unbridgeable cultural divide

In addition to honor and shame ... comes the Muslim sense of manhood or manliness, which involves being capable of great violence and mayhem in defense of the family name or his religion. Our own concepts of tolerance seem hopelessly weak and pathetic to a culture such as this, and in no way makes us palatable to the Muslim male, who sees only weakness -- probably the weakness of a woman in our attempts to be compassionate and tolerant. So much for winning hearts and minds! ...

We would be wise to take into account these cultural characteristics, and not make the mistake that the compassionate liberal makes -- which is that given enough understanding and tolerance, the other fellow will see your point of view, and come in the end, to be as tolerant as you. In a sense, this is the illogic of tolerance, it assumes that tolerance is the logical endpoint of all understanding and culture. It is not.

Looking for love in all the wrong places

Anyway, Gov. Patrick didn't want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he continued, "was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other." ...

Why do radical imams seek to convert young Canadian, British and even American men and women in their late teens and twenties? Because they understand that when you raise a generation in the great wobbling blancmange of Deval Patrick-style cultural relativism – nothing is any better or any worse than anything else; if people are "mean and nasty" to us, it's only because we didn't sing enough Barney the Dinosaur songs at them – in such a world a certain percentage of its youth will have a great gaping hole where their sense of identity should be. And into that hole you can pour something fierce and primal and implacable ...

Al-Qaida's ad hoc air force left a huge crater of Massachusetts corpses in the middle of Manhattan, and Gov. Patrick goes looking for love in all the wrong places.

How many people in any society think like Deval Patrick? That's the calculation to make if you want to figure out its long-term survival prospects.

Liberalism v Islamism

At the same time, we have the innate weakness of liberalism in spades. We see everything through the prism of the profound liberal delusion that the world is governed by reason and that all people have goodwill. This means that liberals cannot grasp that some of the things that divide people are insuperable barriers and are not susceptible to reason. They cannot acknowledge the transcendent and irreducible nature of religious fanaticism. They think instead that everything is subject to negotiation and compromise. So their instinct is to reach out to Islamists to reason with them, to draw the poison of this extremism by giving it rewards and inducements that will play to the fanatic’s self-interest and turn him into a pillar of western society. That is why liberals do appeasement; and Britain, the cradle of liberalism, does it better than anyone else.

Liberals also think they are superior in intelligence to everyone else. So they don’t understand that the Islamists are actually playing them for suckers, exploiting the intrinsic weakness of a liberal society they correctly assess as decadent: no longer prepared to fight for its values because it no longer even knows what they are.

Of course, everyone in Australia will come to love one another if given enough tolerance and understanding. Or will they? ...

Understanding traditional social structures of the Lebanese would go a long way toward avoiding the racial clashes seen at Cronulla this week, writes Paul Sheehan ...

"We got north Lebanese, disproportionately Shiite, mostly peasants, mostly uneducated, who didn't want to be here in the first place," Kennedy says. "They come from a very patriarchal culture. They don't go in for the greater good. Their families have survived a brutal civil war. They are tribal. They are aggressive. They are in your face. And they are not grateful.

"Historically, they have always been shafted, and so they are used to looking after themselves. When the Turks ran Lebanon, the minority Sunnis controlled government contracts. When the French took over, the Maronites got the contracts. The Sunnis and the Maronites developed a healthy business relationship. The Shiites were left out, they did the lowest jobs, and they were lower than working class." ...

Though the Lebanese Muslim community is about 40,000 - just 1 per cent of Sydney's 4 million population - Kennedy believes the social gulf has drifted to the point of social danger: "The mismanagement of this situation by politicians, lawyers and police has taken us to the point where we could see violent civil disorder on a scale we have not seen before. The minute you talk tough, and these Lebanese guys lose face, they only know one thing to do. Retaliate. You saw it immediately after the Cronulla riot.

"They react with emotion. Violent emotion. You've seen the funerals in the Middle East where people are tearing their hair out. There is also the mentality you see in prison, where any failure to retaliate, immediately, and with violence, will mark you as weak, and therefore vulnerable. This is the logic of the street, not society, and they have completely insulated themselves from society." ...

[Add examples of "peaceful" Oz Muslims who just need a bit of love ...]


References

A Wise Man's Heart
Lawrence Auster
Mark Steyn
Ultima Thule
Paul Sheehan
Liberalism v Islamism - Melanie Philips

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