Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Obama's tentativeness must surely be proof of our guilt (in the eyes of Muslims)

Victor Davis Hanson notes that
Every time Obama “contextualizes,” Putin and ISIS grow bolder.
After detailing how Germans came to support Hitler, and how Russians have come to support Putin, Hanson looks at how Muslims have come to support Islamism:
By all accounts, only a tiny minority, perhaps no more than 2 or 3 percent, of Muslims in the Middle East actively supports ISIS and violent Islamic ideology. But various international polls also show a much higher level of approval for what Westerners would call Islamism or Islamic terrorism — as expressed by support for the tactic of suicide bombing or agreement with the late Osama bin Laden. Approval from this larger minority polls anywhere from 15 to 20 percent, depending on the country in question and the wording of the question. In other words, 60 to 80 million Muslims in the Middle East may, at least silently, condone almost any tactic felt necessary to further the cause of a purer Islam at the expense of the West in general and of what they would see as secularized or Westernized Muslim sellouts in their midst.

This minority of many millions of Muslims in the Middle East and in Europe resents the West. From the time in the morning when they get up and flip on their television sets to the instant they go to bed checking text messages on their smartphones, the West and Western technology are ubiquitous. But — radical Muslims demand, and the Muslim Street itself often wonders — why must this be so?

In terms of culture, the West, with its pornography, open and accepted homosexuality, radical feminism, atheism and agnosticism, lavish and unsustainable entitlements, declining birth rates, and fragmented families, surely does not deserve such global clout. What gives Europe and the United States — our generation’s version of a shrinking and rotting 15th-century Constantinople, whose riches properly belong to the stronger and more pious who can take them — such undeserved sway?

Islamism offers an easy answer, a ready exegesis far more comforting than the difficult-to-stomach but accurate assessment that the West embraces consensual government, free-market economics, capitalism, property rights, meritocracy, equality between the sexes, inclusiveness for minorities, and religious tolerance — and that such values in the end result in greater material wealth, more innovation, better technology, and in general more personal freedom.

...In this supposedly perverted climate, Islamism appeals to a large minority of the Middle East. It will bring back lost pride and assertiveness — a purposefulness, if you will — that transcends both the daily depression of the Middle East and the haughtiness of a spiritually lost West. If most disapprove publicly of ISIS’s more violent reckonings, privately they remain mostly silent, because there are things about such payback that are not always unwelcome. Certainly, for now, ISIS seems to be an ascendant movement where most others are descendant.

...Two other factors empower ISIS. Western diffidence and appeasement are interpreted as proof not just that the West is weak, but that its weakness arises from guilt and a tacit admission that Islamism is spot-on in its charges of Western culpability. Barack Obama reifies that message when he offers his confessional Al Arabiya interview, his platitudinous Cairo speech, his apology tour, and his euphemistic campaign to excise words such as “terrorism,” “Islamism,” and “radical Islam,” or when he admonishes Christians and Westerners generally about getting on their moral high horses despite having a cultural tradition of slavery, apartheid, inquisition, and crusading. If touchy and solicitous Western leaders are loath to challenge radical Islam’s charges against the West and instead seek any mechanism possible to avoid being offensive, such tentativeness must be proof of their guilt.

...Millions may not like ISIS, just as millions once were somewhat bothered by Hitler. They may prefer that its beheadings remain untelevised, or may frown on burning someone alive when the firing squad would do. But they most certainly will like the power, territory, and fear that ISIS commands — and the utter helplessness that follows in the once haughty West.

Appeasers like Obama do not like their enemies. They certainly do not feel that an Islamic Middle East is superior to America. But they do dwell on the faults rather than the achievements of their own culture. In their vanity they believe that their own estrangement from their culture is a result of their superiority, and thus they alone possess the wisdom and charisma to unlock the enigma of a Hitler or of radical Islam and to convince it of its own self-defeating aberrations. What is dangerous about a Chamberlain or an Obama is not just that they empower enemies of their country, but that by their own desperate attempts at magnanimity they earn from their enemies utter contempt, to the point that they encourage rather than deter aggression.

The more Obama contorts history and language to contextualize ISIS and its radical Islamic supporters, the more ISIS is likely to want to humiliate Obama — and the more Middle East Muslims will recalculate who is ascendant and powerful and who is not, and then make the necessary adjustments.
Read more here.

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