Quote of the week

“Perfect ignorance of Islam,” writes Diana West,

is a jewel of a career asset these days. If you know absolutely nothing about Islam, you, too, are qualified to run two, three simultaneous wars in Islamic countries. Why, Gen. David Petraeus, a man who couldn’t find Islam in the umma if you paid him (and we did), has actually been tapped to head the CIA!

In the same entry, West gives her response to the media’s coverage of Obama’s decision to release his birth certificate after concealing it for three years.

- end of initial entry -

Alan Roebuck writes:

In the post you linked at VFR, Diana West quoted an account of a jihadist being sentenced:

A defiant Shahzad said “Allahu Akbar”—Arabic for “God is great”—after the judge sentenced him to the mandatory life imprisonment.

“Brace yourself because the war with the Muslims has only just begun,” he told the judge before he was sentenced during the 30-minute hearing. “The defeat of the US is imminent and will happen in the near future.”

How should a Western patriot respond? How about this: “You and your Moslem crew only appear to be winning because traitors control America and the West. Once we defeat them, we’ll defeat you, as we have before.”

Know that I’m not endorsing the “We-gotta-defeat-liberalism-first” theory. We can’t afford to wait until liberalism is defeated before effectively engaging our non-liberal enemies. I’m just looking for a rhetorically effective response.

James P. writes:

Alan Roebuck says we can’t wait until we defeat liberalism before we “engage our other enemies effectively”. But liberalism will not allow us to defeat our enemies, because liberals know full well that doing so would strengthen conservatism in domestic politics. Thus Roebuck is searching for a contradiction in terms; there is no way to defeat external enemies without defeating domestic liberals who are their de facto political allies.

LA replies:

I’d say that we have to do both at the same time. One of the key ways of defeating liberalism is to put in place policies that liberals oppose. We don’t defeat liberalism solely by attacking it as an empty container or a general ideology, though, obviously, fighting the liberal ideology is of central importance, as Mr. Roebuck has argued in his important essays.. We also defeat liberalism by defeating the specific things liberalism stands for. Both appreoaches are necessary.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 28, 2011 09:12 AM | Send