PC to the nth power

There are things that are so sick that a human mind should not have to deal with them, not have to think about them. But they are there and we have no choice. Britain’s Home Secretary, who has the confidence-producing name Jacqui Smith, is now officially describing Islamic terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” The Daily Mail reports:

In her first major speech on radicalisation, Miss Smith repeatedly used the phrase “anti-Islamic.”

In one passage she said: “As so many Muslims in the UK and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorise, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief.

“Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic.”

Another section referred to enlisting the Muslim community against “anti-Islamic activity.”

Her words were chosen to reflect new Government strategy on labelling the terrorists and their recruiting agents.

The shift follows a decision taken last year to stop using the phrase “war on terror,” first adopted by U.S. President Bush.

In other words, Bush’s pathetically inadequate and euphemistic phrase “war on terror” is too blunt and harsh for the mighty Brits. Even as a handful of realists about Islam have been struggling to get our media and politicians to drop such evasive terms as “terror” and “Islamo-fascism” and to recognize that the problem is Islam itself, the British are heading in the opposite direction, farther away from reality—from opposing the euphemism “terrorism” to opposing “anti-Islamic” terrorism. And yet this is not shocking, is it? Hasn’t the entire Western leadership, starting with our own Dear Leader, been saying from the start that the extremists are not real Muslims, but people who pervert and exploit Islam for non-Islamic purposes and violate Islam’s true peaceful nature? Describing Islamic warriors as “anti-Islamic” activists is simply the logical next step.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

You know, there’s a sort of geometric symmetry to PC; that has to be part of its power to distort. People can grasp its labyrinthine rules, strictures, and mandates by mere intuition. The British government’s latest absurdity, to which you allude in your most recent post, is a good illustration. There has been a squirming kind of desperation on the part of the liberal Western establishment to turn Muslims into the real victims of Islamic terrorism. (Right liberals have their own version of this perverse ritual genuflection to the Other, namely their entirely pointless rehearsal of the fact that “most victims of Islamic terrorists have been Muslim, as if that is supposed to suddenly shock us into action.) This outrageous and offensive lie has been peddled in a hundred ways, but sometimes one such incident sticks in your mind.

I can remember the last time I ever sat through any part of an episode of Law and Order. A police investigator/profiler was working to track down some Islamic terrorist cell. Outrageously, the would-be suicide bomber he had taken into custody was a white American convert. Now on the trail of his compatriots, the investigator stops in to what I think was a halal butcher to talk to its Muslim proprietor. Ostentatiously displayed behind the counter was an American flag, and the cop purred sympathetically, “I know this has been a really difficult time for your community,” to which the butcher answered with a pained sigh. Not only was the principal perpetrator a white suburban American kid, but the real victims in all of this were the red-blooded American Muslim so put upon by irrational and bigoted Americans. It had been such a tough year for Muslims, don’t you know, and the implication was that it was all our fault.

Expect this to keep on keeping on. At bottom we’re dealing with Auster’s First Law, aren’t we? Liberals are so terrified that the Muslim minority is going to get a bad rap that the Muslims’ own repugnant behavior is now labeled anti-Islamic. There are no Muslim perpetrators, only Muslim victims—even the ones wearing the bomb vests are victims in their way. It is especially nauseating to watch Western leadrs hold forth as authorities on what constitutes “real” Islam, declaring this or that activity “un-Islamic” as if they were trained imams, while 98 percent of the real Islamic religious authorities either disagree or say nothing. These men know less about Islam than they do their own dimly-remembered Christianity but we’re supposed to believe their ignorant pronouncements over our own lying eyes and the weight of history itself. It is, quite literally, a sick spectacle.

Jim Kalb’s description of PC as “institutionalized insanity” has not, as far as I’m aware, been improved on.

Stephen T. writes:

I’m searching transcripts of Churchill’s stirring wartime speeches during the London Blitz to see if he ever informed the populace that Hitler’s Luftwaffe was *actually* engaging in “anti-German” activities.

So far, nothing.

Ken Hechtman writes:

Blame the Army’s press office. They coined the similar term “anti-Iraqi forces”

Allan Wall writes:

It reminds me of when I was in Iraq, the Army’s PC term for insurgents was “anti-Iraqi forces.”

Sage McLaughlin writes:

I have to follow up with this—are we heading down the Orwellian tracks at such speed that some day soon we’ll begin hearing about black crime in America as “anti-black?” Will we soon be ordered to accept that black gangsterism and thuggery are merely a perversion of real urban black culture of which blacks are the real victims, one introduced into their pure original culture by white degeneracy? I think we may be.

That is, after all, an approximation of the thesis of Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Thomas Sowell’s most recent foray into ethno-cultural history. Sowell basically makes the claim that the savagery of contemporary black “culture” is a sort of behavioral virus American blacks managed to contract from their contact with southern white trash. How different is this from the notion that Muslims learned violent jihad at the knees of evil European fascists? Both ideas seem to me to be facially implausible, and both are being propounded by widely respected right liberals. There’s more here, I think.

LA replies:

“Will we soon be ordered to accept that black gangsterism and thuggery are merely a perversion of real urban black culture of which blacks are the real victims, one introduced into their pure original culture by white degeneracy?”

That’s been an argument all along. Blacks commit lots of murder, and it’s because whites are selling guns to blacks. Blacks receive enormous benefits from racial preferences, and we’re told by mainstream conservatives that racial preferences are really hurting blacks—even though the blacks would kill anyone who tried to take the preferences away. Standards are lowered to make it easy for blacks to rise, something done for blacks and at the behest of blacks, and it’s called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” It goes on and on. Whatever blacks do that is negative, it is turned around to portray blacks as the victim of what someone else is doing to them.

I’m disappointed to hear what you said about what Sowell, author of the highly recommended Ethnic America.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 18, 2008 09:35 AM | Send