Quote Of The Day #48

“Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now.  And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the Left.  From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Centre, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudo-intellectuals has been willing to represent the work face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed.  How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda?  Suicide murderers in Palestine- disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO- describe as the victims of disperse.  The forces of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for anti-globalisation.  The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people then allow them to vote, pictured prettily as ‘insurgent’, or even by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”

 

This is the second quote I got from Nick Cohen’s book ‘What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.’ The first quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan on some of the strange results of the modern obsession with human rights abuses can be found here.

 

In my first ever post on this blog back in January 2017 I wrote…

 

“…my concern about the general coarsening of debate in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Too many people are too convinced that they know all the answers. Too many issues are black-and-white, good-versus-evil. If you don’t agree with me you are not just wrong or mistaken, you are evil and you deserve to be punished for your errors. Opponents are ‘phobes’ and suffer from ‘isms’ or, if you prefer, they are ‘snowflakes’ or ‘traitors.'”

 

Nothing I have seen or read in the past sixteen months has persuaded me I was wrong when I wrote those words. Politics in the West is becoming dangerously tribal; ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ sometimes remind me of the mad schismatics of the early Christian church or the Reformation. Endless debate over the tiniest different, excommunication of anyone who dares suggest compromise and a view that leaving/staying in the EU is the road to paradise. All nonsense of course but look how quickly any discussion over at the Guardian’s website descends into accusations of racism or even fascism.

 

I am a great admirer of the late Christopher Hitchens. I have used quotes of his before (see here and here). As an ex-Marxist who went on to support George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Hitchens had no time for moral cowardice or intellectual posturing. He wrote a polemic against religion that deliberately (and provocatively) used as its title the negation of the Islamic declaration of faith – God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. He was angry, livid in fact, that people who claimed to be leftists gave unconditional support to people who were misogynists, homophobes and racists. Do a search for Hitchens on either Pinterest or YouTube and you will find numerous examples of his passionate defence of enlightened and secular values.

 

What Christopher Hitchens and the journalist Nick Cohen (whose 2007 book I got this quote and the previous one from) are against is a form of ‘left-wing’ politics that will makes excuses for the worst sort of abuses so long as the perpetrators are anti-American. Practices that would be condemned if they were inflicted on Western (mostly white) people are considered fine for non-Western (mostly non-white) people. There is a name for people who make different rules for people based on the colour of their skin – it’s one of the words most favoured by our moral superiors at Guardian Towers and Jimmy Savile House. Can you guess what it is?