Left and “right” band together against reality

It seems that the left and the mainstream “right” have been jumping all over Glenn Beck, calling him “delusional,” for warning that the popular uprisings in the Muslim world could lead to a restored caliphate based on sharia law. But, counters Diana West writing at Big Peace, isn’t Beck correct? According to polls, three quarters of Egyptians want to live under a regime of strict sharia. Two million of them gathered in Tahrir Square cheering Muslim Brotherhood theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s call for the conquest of Jerusalem.

West concludes her column thus:

But even if “Arab spring” should fail, [William] Kristol writes, “there would be still be a case, for reasons of honor and duty … to stand with the opponents of tyranny.” Doing so, he continues, would not only “vindicate American principles and mean a gain for American interests but because we claim those American principles to be universal principles.”

Here is what is “delusional”: the belief that American principles—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equality before the law—have a natural place as “universal principles” in a culture grounded in Shariah principles. This is the pure fantasy that has driven our foreign policy through a decade of “nation-building” wars. Meanwhile, the only way I know how to get to anything you might call “universal principles” into the Islamic world is through the establishment of … a caliphate.

Exactly right. The Muslims have an imperial vision of a single world under the universal rule of Islam. But liberal and “conservative” Westerners, intoxicated by their own imperial vision a single world under the universal rule of liberalism, are incapable of recognizing the existence of an opposing universalism. Which means that they are incapable of defending the West from it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2011 03:28 PM | Send