Our leaders apply the liberal template to the embassy attacks

I shouldn’t be stunned by this, but, being human and therefore not always consistent, I am. President Obama and Hillary Cllnton have both described the attacks on our diplomats in Egypt and Libya as “senseless violence”:

The president asserted we have to oppose “the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”

Clinton reinforced his analysis when she said, “We condemn in the strongest terms this senseless act of violence.”

Meaning, these were not intentional acts of violence by people who oppose the United States and want to hurt it, but just the “acting out” of whacked-out individuals, the equivalent of a drunken man firing a gun aimlessly on a street. Meaning, the murders of the American diplomats have no meaning. They must not have meaning, because if they do, their meaning is that at least a significant number of Muslims are our enemies. And if Muslims are our enemies, then we must think in terms of “us” and “them.” We must be for ourselves and against them. We must negatively judge them, discriminate against them, defend ourselves from them, and even fight them. But if we did those horrible things, modern liberalism would be kaput. We’d all be Nazis. And it’s better to let ourselves all be killed by senseless violence than to be Nazis.

If President Roosevelt had seen the world the way Obama and Hillary do, he would have said: “December 7, 1941: a day which will live in the annals of senseless violence.”

Contemporary reality has become a school to teach people the nature of the consistent, extreme liberalism that now rules our society and that was expressed in the statements of our President and Secretary of State. But there’s a little problem with this school—the quality of the students. In order to learn the lesson that reality is teaching them, people must be rational. But most people in advanced liberal society are not rational, so they don’t learn anything. They remain in the liberal fog.

Newt Gingrich writing at Politico takes Obama and Hillary apart .

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Daniel S. writes:

The response of Obama and the rest of the American government to the attacks on American embassies in Muslim countries (which was similar to Bush’s response to similar attacks) reminded me of something the German political theorist Carl Schmitt once said. He remarked that if you fail to name your enemy then your enemy will name you. The elites of both parties engage in every sort of intellectual gymnastic so as to avoid naming Islam as the enemy, instead settling for such vague concepts as terrorism, extremism, senseless violence, etc. The Muslim masses on the other hand know very well who they consider their eternal enemies: America, the West, Christianity, and the Jews. They say this clearly and repeatedly, without shame or hesitation.

To demonstrate what I mean about the intellectual cowardice and willful blindness of American intellectuals, Max Boot at Commentary tells us that the embassy attackers do not represent Islam and that to call Islam a “cancer” is hate speech. It goes without saying that Boot strongly supported the American and NATO military intervention that deposed Qaddafi and enthroned his radical Islamic opponents, the same people that murdered the ambassador. (It would seem that being a neocon means never having to say your sorry.)

Richard B. writes:

Have you noticed that when politicians “condemn in the strongest terms” they never use those terms? What is the English language for if you don’t use it?

I’m sure those being condemned have no idea what they are talking about.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 14, 2012 08:03 PM | Send