Hopeless folly

The Daily Mail reports:

Brown: I’ll get Muslims to take pride in Britain

Gordon Brown today signalled that his first task as Prime Minister would be to get Muslims to rally around a “Churchillian” pride in Britain.

Right, he’s going to social-engineer the Muslims in Britain—something like 30 percent of whom support terrorism and something like 70 percent of whom say they dislike Britain because they feel it’s anti-Muslim—into liking Britain. But in order to carry out this “outreach,” he will have to appeal to the Muslims’ sensitivities. And how will he do that? By acknowledging the justice of their complaints against Britain.

This is the hopeless trap of liberalism/leftism which imagines it can make the Other get along with us and be like us. The logic of Brown’s proposed outreach is exactly like that of Bush’s War for Democracy. The “war,” since it’s based on the premise that the other side are basically just like us and not our enemies, embraces them as they are, and ends up yielding to the other side instead of getting them to yield to us.

So long as Western leaders cannot say “We” and “They,” so long as they do not think of their own countries and of the West as concrete entities distinct from the non-West, everything they do, every ameliorative step they take to “solve the Muslim problem,” to “defeat terrorism,” to “achieve peace,” only leads to the further undoing of the West.

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Peter H. writes:

I appreciate this insight and agree with your conclusion. I say this as a long-time “conservative” that has been changed by the war in Iraq. I supported the war fully (and naively, liberally) believing that the Other was just like me. To see that country, to which we’ve devoted so many lives and so much treasure, turn around and enshrine sharia in their constitution and to see the determined hatred with which we’ve been fought every step of the way by so-called “insurgents” and “Baathist remnants” who can only succeed, truth be told, with the concurrence of the Iraqi people, although an epiphany, has been a rude awakening for me as well, and has transformed the way in which I view the world, particularly the threat of Islam. With Muhammed as the model, how can it ever be otherwise.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 19, 2007 01:04 PM | Send