Why so-called Western spokesmen don’t defend the West

Since I don’t watch tv, I don’t know the answer to this, so maybe readers can help (e-mail me here). I imagine that on tv cable news programs today, there are numerous situations in which a conservative guest says something critical about the Islamic world, and the Muslim guest then complains that this is insulting or racist to Muslims. Or perhaps he complains about anti-Muslim prejudice in the West, such as unfair security measures or the mistreatment at Abu Ghraib or whatever. Here’s my question. When the Muslim spokesman makes such a complaint, does the conservative ever reply like this:

“Ahmed, you are a devout believer in a holy book that commands Muslims to strike the heads off all non-Muslims, that commands them to find the Jew behind the tree and kill him—and you have the audacity to come on this show complaining about the very mild behaviors of non-Muslims toward Muslims? You a member of a religion that places all non-Muslims outside the law, marked for death or dhimmitude, a religion that declares permanent war on all non-Muslims. You therefore have zero standing to complain about the legitimate speech and actions of non-Muslims.”

Has anyone on tv ever made these obvious arguments to a Muslim spokesman? If I know anything about modern society, the answer is no. Why? Why don’t Westerners expose the true Islam and so discredit the double standard that Muslims use against us, in which Muslims, complaining about our behavior toward them, appeal to a principle of universal fairness which the Muslims themselves reject when it comes to their own behavior? I think the answer is that we Westerners, including conservatives, have destroyed within ourselves the ability to say “We.” We can’t think of America or Britain or Europe or the West as a living concrete entity of which we are a part and in which we believe, an entity that is distinct from other entities, particularly Islam. We are, in short, liberals, believing only in a universal rational proceduralism that includes all humans equally. This puts us at a permanent disadvantage with regard to aliens who exploit that proceduralism to advance their own group agenda against us. Having cut out from our souls the concept of “We,” we have become intellectually incapable of identifying an unfair attack on ourselves as an unfair attack, because that would mean speaking on behalf of ourselves, the “We,” as a distinct entity. We are incapable of analyzing the nature of the attack, because that would mean saying that the party making the attack is in violation of some supposed shared standard (a standard which in fact is not recognized by that other party), which in turn would mean that mutually peaceful relations between us and them, on which we falsely imagine that everything depends, are impossible. And thus we are incapable of taking any effective action in defense of ourselves when we are so obviously under threat, as we are from Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2005 03:16 PM | Send