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Is It Liberal, Or Merely Anti-western?

Paul Berman in today’s New York Times admits [1] he’s under-estimated Radical Islam… which of course is as we’ve pointed out here before, not quite the case.

…each new calamity for Iraq has, like manure, lent new fertility to the various extremist organizations. The entire sequence of events may suggest that America is uniquely destined to do the wrong thing. All too likely! But it may also suggest that America is not the fulcrum of the universe, and extremist ideologies have prospered because of their own ability to adapt and survive – their strength, in a word.

I notice a little gloomily that I may have underestimated the extremist ideologies in still another respect. Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases – liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein – the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

It interests me that this admission comes so late… for what this is really is an admission that intellectualism, per se’, is not going to overcome radical Islam, and in fact has willingly aided it’s progress against the west.

The reason for this is rather simple, in it’s structure, and breathtaking in it’s implication: In their efforts to tilt left, the leftists who are pleased to call themselves “Intellectuals”, have misidentified Radicalized Islam as being liberal in the western sense, when it was in fact merely anti-western, Including it’s intellectuals.

While it certainly shares the hate of the lefist intelectual for western values, particularly those as expressed by western conservatives… Radical Islam not liberal at all, in the sense the intellectuals think of it, merely anti-Western… including anti western intellectualism. The only thing, in fact, that they share is a hatred for traditional western values. Now they suddenly find that the groups they’;ve alligned themslves with so freely, are about killing THEM off as well, the American left is having second thoughts.

And that, he cannot bring himself to deal with. So, Berman also misidentifies the change of his original perception as ‘adaptability’, when in fact the only thing that’s changed is the American Liberal realizing that his wet dreams of solidarity with the Islamist have crashed against the rocks of reality.

This is not, as Berman is pleased to suggest, …”one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises”, but merely one more case that the western conservatives… particularly cultural conservatives, have been warning the left of all along.

If there’s anything that is surprising about this, it’s that the left still can’t bring themselves to admit it. [2]If there’s one thing that is under-estimated, it’s the abject, willful idiocy [3] of the American left.

BBCT: Memeorandum

Commentary worth noting at American Power Blog [4]