The Redhunter

A Nearly Extinct Species

In the US, as in Europe, you used to be able to find a species known as the "liberal hawk". Leaders such as Harry Truman, LBJ, and Henry "Scoop" Jackson, were once common. Ditto for Europe. Frum describes Blair's thinking:

Tony Blair was the original liberal hawk, albeit one endowed with rather more staying power than most of the breed. Still, you can catch a continuing echo of the Old Labour way of thinking in his July 16 speech to the Labour-party conference: They believe in the global caliphate; we believe in . . . diversity, which is to say, in everything, which is again to say, in nothing. That’s why Blair refers to “our common values” without dropping any hint as to what those values might be. To name them would be to exclude others, and to exclude things is to acknowledge limits to our diversity.

Ah, "diversity", that new god to whom the left prays, and the rest of us are force to acknowledge, lest our HR department find out our true opinions.

The Paradox of "Diversity"

To believe in "diversity", and it's twin "multiculturalism", is to believe that all cultures are worthy of respect. Fine if you're dealing with Episcopalians vs Catholics vs Jews vs aethists, but what happens when you throw radical Islam into the mix?

Chaos, thats what.

As Frum relates, Britons today face an insane situation whereby in the name of "diversity"

...imported brutalities have begun to occur under the jurisdiction of Western police and Western courts: “honor killings,” forced marriages, and the below-the-horizon pressure for the tacit legal recognition of polygamy. Britain’s Inland Revenue acknowledged in December 2004 that it was considering legal changes that would permit a husband to divide his estate tax-free among more than one wife. In at least one U.K. case (A-M v. A-M, 2001), British courts have held that polygamous marriages contracted outside Britain could be recognized as valid by British authorities. Although it remains a crime in Britain to enter into a second marriage before the first is dissolved, senior Muslim officials estimate that up to 4,000 British Muslim men have multiple wives. And one British Muslim group plans to launch a challenge to British marriage laws before the European Court of Human Rights.

What's a good multiculturalist to do? On the one hand, multiculturalism dicates "...that immigrants, and others, should preserve their cultures with the different cultures interacting peacefully within one nation." (Wikopedia) On the other, Islamic culture is in many instances directly contradicts western values.

Lets take a minute to define matters. "Tolerance", if one means by it a societal agreement not to persecute others because of their race, sex, religion, excetera, then I'm all for it. Tolerance is then one of the hallmarks of western civilization. But that's not what we're talking about here.

We are talking about whether we have the desire to defend ourselves. Do we have what it takes to say to Muslim immigrants "sorry, but that's not acceptable here. Change or move back to where you came from."

Do We have What it Takes?

George W Bush does. Most Americans do, too. Many Democrats get it, although those on the left certainy don't

And unfortunately, Tony Blair probably doesn't either. As John O'Sullivan observes in the Aug 29 edition of NR (digital subscription only), "One senses that Blair, underneath his public mask of self-confident leadership, is baffled by the scope and nature of the problems of domestic and imported radical Islamism facing him."

Blair understands WMD, and the necessity of a strong relationship with the US, I'll give him that. But he can't understand how anyone cannot but fail to love his new "multicultural" UK.

Frum tells of what happens when we refuse to defend ourselves:

The Islamic extremists accuse the West of lacking any sexual morality. Indeed, the alleged immorality of the West — the indecent liberty of women, the lewd explicitness of entertainment — is one of the principal grievances of Islamic radicals in the West. (One of the perpetrators of the second London bombing, Somali-born Yasin Hassan Omar, was also offended that alcohol was sold in Western cities in violation of Islamic law.) They think: The West believes in nothing but personal whim. Anything goes! And those Westerners who draw comparisons between Islamic extremists and defenders of traditional marriage — don’t they think just the same thing? Yes! We believe in nothing but personal — well, not whim, that sounds . . . whimsical — but choice. Anything goes!

Far too many in the west simply have not recognized that there is a significant number of Muslim immigrants who see "diversity" as a sin. While only a small number become terrorists, it is the number who turn their eyes from the radicals, or who even shield them, that should be our concern.

Frum summarizes the situation in Europe:

National survival in the age of terror is not just a matter of intelligence operations and security measures. It’s not just a job for armies and police. National survival depends on the willingness and ability of the targets of terrorism to assert and defend a national identity: an identity that is more than a catalogue of self-doubts and self-criticisms, an identity that is more than a statement of disagreements and diversities — an identity that can say, in English, in French, in German, on behalf of the nations of the Atlantic community on both sides of the ocean, This is who we are — and we are prepared to fight for it

NEXT: Our Shared Western Values