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Our Men in Havanna

From the Financial Times of London:

Relations between Cuba and the US are being pushed to breaking point by a bizarre spat that began with an electronic sign fixed to the side of the US mission in Havana.

…

“This would truly be hilarious if the consequences were not potentially so serious,” said a European diplomat. “One gets the sense neither side is thinking where all this might end.”

But what if he or she is wrong? What if someone has thought about where this all might end?

George Bush is probably responsible for freeing more people than any president since F.D.R. Wouldn’t it be something if he’s developed a taste for liberating oppressed people? And wouldn’t it be something if he turned his gaze to Cuba, thought “this liberating thing really isn’t so hard,” and decided to do something about it?

Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be great?

So we begin a policy of gently but persistently annoying Castro, hoping to provoke a response that will justify our engaging him in a less gentle way, of deposing him (and his brother), and of freeing the Cuban people.

Liberals

I used to believe that liberals felt a greater passion and conviction for their causes than conservatives did for theirs. I thought the environmentalists simply cared more passionately about the environment, the anti-trade liberals were more concerned about preserving the endangered economies of marginalized cultures, the anti-war liberals honestly worried about collateral damage, and the pro-choice liberals really cared about women.

I no longer think this. I’ve come to the conclusion that, by and large, liberals care little about the specific causes they espouse, but rather are motivated by a powerful antipathy towards accepted value systems—in other words, toward tradition. I think this better explains the behaviors and contradictions that characterize liberals.

Consider the self-contradictory goals of the environmentalists. They want to reduce pollution, yet are unyielding in their resistance to nuclear power—perhaps the only technology that holds promise for dramatically reducing our consumption of fossil fuels in the near term. They’re opposed to genetically modified crops, even though the higher performance and greater resistance of these products offer environmental benefits in the form of better land utilization and reduced fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide use.

In their reckless pursuit of carbon emission controls under the now defunct Kyoto agreement, environmentalists would have crippled the industrialized world, delaying the development of third-world economies. Only by approaching the affluence of the first world will the developing nations be able to afford the expensive pollution controls necessary for them to have clean air and water. These are luxuries they can’t afford today.

Then there is the peculiar liberal response to the Iraq war. How is it possible to discuss the morality and cost of the war without at least acknowledging the suffering of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein? Mustn’t that be part of any humanitarian equation? The left’s silence on this subject is inexplicable, unless you accept the possibility that the Iraq war protesters really don’t care about Iraqis at all, and that their anti-war position is not rooted in humanitarianism but rather in something else.

We can go on. Liberals support teachers’ unions while claiming to care about education. They’re outraged at the merest hint of racial discrimination, but demand race-based quotas and race-sensitive hiring schemes, and emphasize racial distinctions at every opportunity. They demand a living wage for every worker, while saddling companies with crushing obligations that limit their ability to hire, train, and promote employees.

Another characteristic of liberals is evident to anyone who has spent more than a few hours exploring the blogosphere and has noticed the not so subtle difference between the way liberals and conservatives choose their words. Liberals use colorful language. They swear a lot. For all their condemnation of hate crimes and their vaunted multi-cultural sensitivity, they’re willing enough to offend those who find coarse language distasteful. Similarly, Hollywood, that bastion of liberalism, mocks and ridicules Christianity with monotonous regularity.

In short, liberals have an amazing capacity for hypocrisy.

Liberals hate tradition, and opposition to tradition—to established, widely-shared values—is the force that drives them. In general, liberals are motivated more by this negative force than they are by any of the ostensibly positive values they claim to embrace.

This fact explains another peculiar thing about liberals, their tendency to jump from one radical cause to another, from anti-war to anti-global-warming to anti-globalism to anti-you name it. Hence that peculiar creature of modern liberalism, the serial activist, ready to show solidarity with any cause so long as there’s a chant to shout, a sign to wave, and rage to share.

And the rage.

Perhaps it’s just that they know the tide isn’t moving in their favor just now, but the rage in the liberal community is amazing. It isn’t the frustration of someone who sees a cherished cause slipping away, a frustration that might move them to change tactics, become creative, or even seek compromise. Rather, it’s the outrage of one who must watch a hated enemy prosper.

Liberals are destroyers. They have a nihilistic need to subvert tradition, to reflexively oppose whatever is accepted in the broader community.

This describes most liberals, but not all of them. We need the occasional liberal and his discontent. Without challenges, tradition preserves indiscriminately the good and the bad. But when challenged, tradition examines itself and, gradually and imperfectly, and often reluctantly, gives up those ways that are found unworthy of preservation.

So some liberalism is a good thing. But, for reasons which I’ll go into in another post, we are awash in liberalism, to a degree that is unprecedented, unhealthy, and perhaps ultimately incompatible with civilization.

Kudos for Hugh

No one sticks to his guns better than Mr. Hewitt, and I respect that. Regarding the cartoon issue, I think he’s wrong. I think Claudia Rosett thinks so too, but she was very kind about it in her interview with him.

Enough about cartoons. Time to move on to other things.

And a sincere thanks, Hugh, for being willing so consistently to take a stand for what you think is right.

– s.t.

Cartoons

About whether or not the Danish cartoons should have been published, and whether or not the Islamic response to the cartoons is appropriate, reasonable people may differ. One thing is irrefutable: the Muslim response is different in character from the responses of Christians and Jews when faced with similar or even greater affronts. It may be accurate to call this hypocrisy, but that explains nothing.
 
That Christians and Jews suffer greater indignities than those inflicted by the cartoonists is irrefutable, the examples so common and readily available that it is redundant to enumerate them. Yet it is simply not possible to identify an instance of Christian or Jewish protest that even begins to approach the outrage evinced by the Islamic community.

This seems important.
 
What is different about Muslims, that they should take such offense and express it so violently? What is different about Christians and Jews that they don’t? Is this something that we must come to understand if Muslims, Christians, and Jews are to peacefully coexist?

And if we do not try to understand this difference, is it because we are privately reconciled to the idea that peaceful coexistence is not an option?

The Best Defense…

…may be to be offensive. 

If I read Hugh Hewitt right, he’s of the opinion that publishing the cartoons is counter-productive because it will drive otherwise moderate Muslims to the radical fringe, and make it harder for those Muslim leaders and states that are or could become our allies to support us in the GWOT.

As much as I respect Hugh for trying to pour oil on these troubled waters, I think it’s too little, too late, and probably a bad idea anyway.

First, it seems inevitable that we will continue to offend Muslims, whether we want to or not, either because the Muslim street really is as volatile as it appears to be or because powerful voices in their world are opportunistically fomenting and focusing outrage. So the outcome of the war against terror won’t be—mustn’t be, can’t be—predicated on our ability to live up to their impossibly high standards.

Second, there’s the little matter of Israel. It isn’t a very big country, but I’m fond of it, and it’s one of the chips on the table. Its very existence is an affront to about half of the Islamic world, and the only ones making serious progress toward solving that problem work for the Iranian military. What this means is that we’re going to have to offend someone, eventually, to prevent genocide. There we go again….

Third, and sadly, and most practically, seeing the true face of radical Islam is productive. It probably can’t stop Europe’s slouch toward sharia, but it gives the half of America inclined toward appeasement something to think about. This offense has strategic value.

Finally, there’s a point of principle.

“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.” — Mae West

I disagree. This is the kind of convenient justification invoked by people who take delight in causing offense, an attempt to wrap juvenile self-indulgence in the mantel of righteousness. It was cute when Mae said it, but it was never right in principle.

All other things being equal, it is wrong to offend people.

Having said that, we’ve reached the point where the asymmetry between the offense and the response is so great that we risk falling into a moral trap. If cartoon pictures of Mohammed motivated Muslims to sulk and write letters to their editors, we would be right to chastise the papers for their disrespect. That isn’t the case. The Muslim response has been so vile, so over the top, so irresponsible, that it must be unconditionally rejected. Sharing the blame is appropriate when the offenses are comparable. These aren’t.

NEA Decapitates Artist

Well, not quite. But the National Endowment for the Arts almost decapitated an artist. Or, they almost did something comparable to decapitating an artist.

georgia10 at KosKids writes: 

What we should remember as this story unfolds is that the tensions between religious sensitivities and free speech is not limited to the borders of Europe and the Muslim world. Within our own borders, we have repeatedly witnessed the protesting of art by religious groups who perceive the works to be blasphemy. Perhaps the starkest example of this occurred in the late 1990s with Chris Ofili’s “The Virgin Mary”.  Ofili’s painting depicted the Virgin Mary surrounded by elephant dung.  Ofili’s painting was so controversial, the gallery that exhibited it almost lost its funding. [emphasis mine]

My goodness! They almost lost their funding? For depicting the mother of the Christian savior in a pile of animal excrement?

And this is the starkest example the kids could find?

It might be worth noting, just in passing, that what is limited to the “Muslim world” is the threat to cut off the heads of people who cause offense, however minor. Whereas we occasionally threaten (unsuccessfully, apparently) to withhold taxpayer funding for work that offends the vast majority of taxpayers.

Cutting funding, cutting necks, it’s all the same to the Kos kids. Which explains, maybe, why the left doesn’t seem to know who the real bad guys are.

Insensitivity

It’s nice to be sensitive to the feelings of others, but sometimes that isn’t appropriate. It’s particularly inappropriate when the others in question are hateful, vicious savages bent on your destruction.

There are tens of thousands of Islamists out there who would like to cut off your head, your wife’s head, and the heads of your children, because of a dozen mediocre cartoons that offend their delicate sensibilities. There are millions more who would dance in the streets as they watch the video of your head being cut off.

There are two ways that we can look at this. On the one hand, we can pretend that this is not an obscene demonstration of the most indefensible excesses of primitive human nature. On the other, we can acknowledge that such behavior is wrong and damnable, and condemn it without reservation.

Should the press run cartoons that are offensive to Muslims? Should Muslims cut the heads off of people who offend them?

The two questions are not remotely comparable. The two acts, one perhaps tactless, the other unquestionably barbarous, are on moral planes so vastly separated as to make idiotic any suggestion of their equivalence.

It is time to stop pretending that this is a conflict between two great traditions. Radical Islam is a vicious farce, a depraved cult with lunatic followers. Its adherents are unspeakably cruel to their own family members, routinely mutilating and murdering their own wives and daughters. They are bent on conquest and violent conversion, and the ruthless extermination of anyone who refuses to yield to their theocratic tyranny. The public face of radical Islam is that of a murderous savage.

If there is another face to Islam, it chooses to hide in the shadows. That is unfortunate.

Update: As usual, Mark Steyn gets it.

Tipping Point

At the risk of sounding bellicose, I pose the following thought. If Denmark’s embassy in Syria is indeed sovereign Danish territory, and if Denmark is a member of NATO (and it is), then Syria has attacked a treaty partner with whom we have a mutual defense agreement. (This assumes, of course, that the attacks can credibly be shown to be initiated by or sanctioned by the Syrian government.)

If we have not reached the tipping point, displays such as these surely bring us to the brink. The burden is clearly on Islam to positively demonstrate that it is not a religion of hate, intolerance, and destruction. Time grows short.

Radical Islam is igniting a conflagration that must ultimately bring the greatest suffering to the poorest and most oppressed people on Earth, innocent Muslims and their children. This is as obvious as is the fact that Islam can not triumph in a direct confrontation with Western civilization.

If peaceful Muslims are not willing to acknowledge this truth, to respond to the evil being done in their name, and to do so soon, that will demonstrate that the Islam of peace is the exception, not the rule, and that Islam is in fact the enemy of civilization.

That will be a tragedy for Muslims everywhere, made more tragic because it was in their power to prevent it by espousing the love and tolerance many claim is the true Islam.

Peaceful Muslims, for the love of God, and for your children, raise your voices now, before the din of war makes it impossible for us to hear you.

Decline

Having recently read the late Senator Patrick Moynihan’s essay Defining Deviancy Down, I find the contrast between that thoughtful man and the current senior senator from Massachusetts, Senator Edward Kennedy, depressing. Were I to plot the trajectory of the Democratic Party from those two data points alone, the directed graph would resemble a vertical line, pointing down.