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Thornton on the Newsweek riots, Western tolerance, and Islam
Though he writes at the website of Victor “Gotta-keep-on-pumping-ourselves-full-of-adrenalin-as-we-fight-to-bring-liberal-tolerance-to-the-whole-world” Hanson, Bruce Thornton seems to understand the key traditionalist point that it is our religion of liberal tolerance that dooms us. In this article he puts it all together: the Newsweek Riots (which our leaders apologize for, acting as though Moslems should respond to any misstep on our part with murderous riots), coinciding with the super-Hitlerian speeches coming from the Palestinian Authority (which our leaders not only ignore, not only tolerate, but subsidize). Striking VFR-like themes, Thornton says Westerners are “Eloi” who have become “suicidal” in their inability to resist their mortal enemies, and that they must become more like their ancestors who successfully fought back the Musulman. The piece came to me by an interesting route. Earlier in the day I had written to my friend the jihad expert Andy Bostom criticizing an article of his in which he described our jihadist enemies as “medieval.” I pointed out that the word “medieval” refers to the earlier and formative period of our own civilization, which, whatever its flaws, we should honor, not equate with humanity-destroying jihadism. In return he sent me the Thornton article, which in its closing passage has a litany praising the great medieval Christian heroes who rescued the West from Islam, so that we today live in Europe and America, not in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
If a Victor Hanson contributor can understand that unconstrained liberal tolerance is itself the problem, and if a secular Jew like Andy Bostom can understand that Christendom, whatever its historic sins against the Jews, is not the enemy, we’re making progress toward a renewed Western solidarity that could make the difference between survival and extinction. Email entry |