Meanwhile, my gift to Extra Thoughts readers is that I will not give a spiel on where I was and what I was doing when I heard that Muslim terrorists were flying planes into the Twin Towers. It would be boring (let's just say it was a perfectly ordinary morning), and the fact that so many people do it is starting to make it sound like a series of essays from fourth graders on "What I Did On My Summer Vacation." 9/11 was not about me nor about what I was doing that morning.
Please go and read Bill Luse's 9/11 post at W4. Unlike so many other 9/11 posts, perhaps including this one, it doesn't just exist for the sake of the pixels. It has meaning.
For myself, I have nothing particularly original to say this year at the anniversary of 9/11, even though it is the tenth anniversary. My one (somewhat unoriginal) thought is that most people have no idea of how to continue to speak the truth about Muslim terrorism and about what it means to oppose and fight it. Indeed, we have less clarity of speech and thought now than we had ten years ago. Those old enough to have clear memories of the atmosphere before 9/11 will know how much easier it was before that to hear someone on the radio say "Muslim terrorists." It would sound almost naive now--an unthinking ability on the part of someone in the mainstream to speak the truth without hedging it about. We live in a different world now. Even many self-styled conservatives feel that they must speak only of "Muslim extremists," not just of "Muslim terrorists." Somehow the '93 attack on the WTC did not have the muzzling effect that the actual success of Muslim terrorists (in bringing down the WTC) has had. (Apropos of speaking out, perhaps here I should link to a series of posts on Islam and the West that I co-wrote with Jeff Culbreath at W4.)
The ever-controversial Lawrence Auster has said something about 9/11 commemorations so spot-on that I am simply going to quote it for the remainder of my 9/11 anniversary post:
The September 11th attack on America, in which devout Muslim believers carried out the greatest single jihad raid in history, and Muslims around the world cheered and danced in joy over this great blow to the infidel, should have awakened America and the West to the nature of the 1,400 year old warrior religion of Islam. Instead, while triggering a “war against terrorism,” the 9/11 attack inspired liberal America to embrace and approve of Islam much more than it had done before, even as Americans allowed themselves to be placed under permanent and humiliating security measures out of the liberal imperative to avoid the slightest hint of discrimination against Muslims.
These unexpected and devastating outcomes of 9/11 are perhaps the greatest single illustration of Auster’s First Law, which says that the more alien or dangerous a nonwhite or non-Western group reveals itself to be, the more our liberal society approves of it, accommodates itself to it, and forbids any criticism of it. To speak the truth about the unchangeable Islamic command to wage eternal war by violence and stealth against non-Muslims and about Muslims’ 1,400 year long obedience to that command, is to place oneself outside the respectable mainstream. In America you don’t get put in jail for speaking the forbidden truth, you just lose your job and career. This is the reign of fear under which we live.
In sum, the result of 9/11 has not been Western self-defense against Islam, but the prohibition of Western self-defense against Islam. And all the official 9/11 commemorations, notwithstanding their patriotic appearance, will carry that message of American and Western surrender. And that is why they should be avoided.
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the more alien or dangerous a nonwhite or non-Western group reveals itself to be, the more our liberal society approves of it, accommodates itself to it, and forbids any criticism of it.
Discovering the psychological source of this attitude would be an achievement. Is it that there must have been some good reason that they hate us so much? We must have done something wrong. Let us listen so that we might improve ourselves. But when "they" express their disapproval by murdering innocents, self-improvement therapy doesn't somehow seem the appropriate response.
I think there are a lot of sources:
1) Habit and ideology. Self-hatred by Westerners and excuse-making for all mascot groups has become a habit, inculcated from childhood by public schools, TV, etc.
There is a real sense in which a truly committed liberal wouldn't care if his entire society came tumbling down (like the Towers) and perished in dust, ashes, and anarchy so long as he and his "own" continued to prove themselves true, sensitive liberals to the last. It's the most bizarre form of ethical absolutism you can imagine, an ethical absolutism committed to a false set of duties--the duty to be sensitive to and accommodate mascot groups who want to murder us, for example. This attitude was expressed by the high-ranking military official (Casey?) who said that Nidal Hasan's murders were a terrible thing, but it would be _even worse_ if military diversity were a casualty of his crime.
2) A failure and refusal to believe in evil. Rousseau lives. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, people are taught to believe that everyone is basically good; therefore, people who do evil things must have a reason for doing them. (This fits with what you say.) This failure and refusal, however, do not apply to those who don't belong to mascot groups. Hence, they don't apply to, say, Timothy McVeigh, who could be perceived as genuinely evil (which, of course, he was).
so long as he and his "own" continued to prove themselves true, sensitive liberals to the last.
It's like some sort of inversion of the quest for sainthood, a quest for martyrdom conceived in hell.
Your last comment tells me you need to write another post on this pretty soon. Or maybe an article for TCR. :)
Probably too sensitive an un-scholarly a topic for an entire article. In fairness, my realization of all of this has crystallized since I've been reading some of Auster's posts on this subject. He's good at finding examples of this type of thing. I forget if I ever mentioned it myself in a post (I know I mentioned it in a comment at W4), but Auster linked to a blogger who literally said that you should be willing to be blown up on a plane rather than having any sort of anti-Muslim profiling going on. Same idea as the Nidal Hasan comment.
"But when "they" express their disapproval by murdering innocents, self-improvement therapy doesn't somehow seem the appropriate response."
And to make it even worse, the things the liberals think we should do as self-improvement really aren't self-improvement but just the opposite.
I suppose you know that a Muslim demonstration outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square was permitted by the British authorities yesterday? The so-called 'protestors' screamed abuse and burned the American flag during a minute's silence that was intended to be observed as a tribute to the victims of the 9/11 atrocity.
Allowing these barbarians to add insult to injury is yet another instance of the moral cowardice that pervades British life.
(Lydia: I haven't provided a link. I guessed that you might be already informed about the demonstration or be too disgusted to want further information.)
Further to my previous comment, here's a quote from someone attending the remembrance service yesterday at the September 11 Memorial Garden in London:
Tom Clarke, whose 30-year-old sister Suria was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre, said he would have preferred it if the (Muslim) protest hadn't taken place but added: "I would much rather live in a country where people are allowed to do that than one where they aren't. I would defend their right to protest and the right to say what they want."
This attitude is so thoroughly 'liberal' and 'democratic' in the face of monstrous provocation, one hardly knows where to begin refuting a claim that our enemies have an unconditional 'right to say what they want' in the public square.
No, I didn't know, Alex. And isn't it funny how Brits start talking like absolute civil libertarian Americans about people's right to "say whatever they want," while at the same time Britain has restrictive hate-speech laws for non-mascot groups? Had the protestors been non-Muslim and had they been yelling, "God will judge all homosexual sodomites. Those who do not repent will burn in hell," they would _doubtless_ have been stopped by the police.
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