by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n T<\/strong><\/span>here is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking \u2014 such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d or \u201cprogressivism,\u201d the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence.<\/p>\n Democratic leaders are never going to be trusted in matters of foreign policy unless they can convince Americans that they once more believe in American exceptionalism and are the proper co-custodians of values such as freedom and individual liberty. If in the 1950s rightists were criticized as cynical Cold Warriors who never met a right-wing thug they wouldn\u2019t support, as long as he mouthed a few anti-Soviet platitudes, then in the last two decades almost any thug from Latin America to the Middle East who professed concern for \u201cthe people\u201d \u2014 from Castro and the Ortega Brothers to Yasser Arafat and the Iranian mullahs \u2014 was likely to earn a pass from the American and European cultural elite and media. To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right. Here are a few places to start.<\/p>\n 1. There really isn\u2019t a phenomenon like \u201cIslamophobia\u201d \u2014 at least no more than there was a \u201cGermanophobia\u201d in hating Hitler or \u201cRussophobia\u201d in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the \u201csecurity profiling\u201d of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves \u2014 here in the U.S., in the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel \u2014 to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile \u201callies\u201d in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.<\/p>\n So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians \u2014 that we are not supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts; or that we are to think beheading, suicide murdering, and car bombing moral equivalents to the sexual humiliation and roguery of Abu Ghraib \u2014 apparently because the former involves post-colonial victims and the latter privileged, exploitive Americans. Most sane people, however, privately disagree, and distinguish between a civilian\u2019s head rolling on the ground and a snap shot of an American guard pointing at the genitalia of her terrorist ward.<\/p>\n Moreover, few of any note in the Arab Middle East speak out against the racial hatred of Jews. Almost no major Islamic religious figure castigates extreme Muslim clerics for their Dark-age misogyny, anti-Semitism, and venom against the West; and no Arab government admonishes its citizenry to look to itself for solutions rather than falling prey to conspiracy theories and ago-old superstitions. It would be as if the state-subsidized Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi party were to be tolerated for purportedly voicing the frustrations of poor working-class whites who \u201csuffered\u201d under a number of supposed grievances.<\/p>\n What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred.\u00a0What has changed<\/em>, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it. In one of the strangest political transformations of our age, the fascist Islamic Right has grafted its cause onto that of the Left\u2019s boutique \u201cmulticulturalism,\u201d hoping to earn a pass for its hate by posing as the \u201cother\u201d and reaping the benefits of liberal guilt due to purported victimization. By any empirical standard, what various Palestinian cliques have done on the West Bank \u2014 suicide murdering, lynching without trial of their own people, teaching small children to hate and kill Jews \u2014 should have earned them all Hitlerian sobriquets rather than U.N. praise.<\/p>\n 2. \u201cImperialism\u201d and \u201chegemony\u201d explain\u00a0nothing<\/em>\u00a0about recent American intervention abroad \u2014 not when dictators such as Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein were taken out by the U.S. military. There are no shahs and\u00a0Your Excellencies<\/em>\u00a0in their places, but rather consensual governments whose only sin was that they came on the heels of American arms rather than U.N. collective snoozing. There really was no secret Afghan pipeline behind toppling the Taliban, nor a French-like oil concession to be had for the United States from the new Iraqi interim government. Many of Michael Moore\u2019s heroic \u201cMinutemen\u201d of the Sunni Triangle are hired killers \u2014 hooded fascists in the pay of ex-Baathists and Saddamites, along with Islamic terrorists and jihadists who hate the very idea of democracy in the heart of the Arab world. The collective\u00a0cursus honorum<\/em>\u00a0of these Saddamite holdovers during the last two decades \u2014 gassing the Kurds, committing atrocities against the Iranians, looting and pillaging in Kuwait, launching missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, slaughtering Shiites and again Kurds, and assassinating Western and U.N. aid workers \u2014 rank right up there with the work of the SS and KGB.<\/p>\n Reformers like Allawi and Yawar of Iraq are not \u201cpuppets\u201d but far better advocates of democratic reform than anyone else in the Arab world. Nor does \u201cno blood for oil\u201d mean anything when an increasingly small percentage of American-imported petroleum comes from the Gulf, and when an oil-hungry China \u2014 without much deference to liberal sensibilities \u2014 is driving up the world price, eyeing every well it can for future exploitation without regard for political or environmental niceties.<\/p>\n 3. It won\u2019t do any longer to attribute American outrage over the U.N. to a vast right-wing conspiracy led by red-state senators and Fox News. All the standing ovations for Kofi Annan cannot hide the truth that the Oil-for-Food scandal exceeds Enron. Indeed, Ken Lay\u2019s malfeasance never involved the deaths of thousands, while cronies siphoned off food and supplies from a starving populace. The U.S. military does not tolerate mass rape and plunder among its troops, as is true of the U.N. peacekeepers throughout Africa. There can be no serious U.N. moral sense as long as illiberal regimes \u2014 a Syria, Iran, or Cuba \u2014 vote in the General Assembly and the Security Council stymies solutions out of concern for an autocratic China that swallowed Tibet. Millions were slaughtered in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur while New York bureaucrats either condemned Israel or damned anyone who censured their own inaction and corruption. Rather than faulting those who fault the U.N., leftists should lament the betrayal of the spirit of the liberal U.N. Charter by regimes that are neither democratic nor liberal but who seek legitimacy solely on their ability to win concessions and sympathy from guilt-ridden Westerners.<\/p>\n 4. So it is also time to take a hard look at the heroes and villains of Hollywood, liberal Democrats, and the Euro elites. Many are as obsessed with damning the senile dictator of Chile as they are with excusing the unelected President for Life Fidel Castro. But let us be frank. A murderous Pinochet probably killed fewer of his own than did a mass-murdering Castro, and left Chile in better shape than contemporary Cuba is in. And the former is long gone, while the latter is still long in power.<\/p>\n Similarly, Nobel Prizes increasingly go to either unsavory or unhinged characters. Yasser Arafat was a known killer and terrorist, not a global peacemaker. Wangari Maathai\u2019s public statements about AIDS are puerile and ipso facto would have eliminated any Westerner from consideration for anything. Rigoberta Menchu Tum herself was a half-truth, her story mostly a creation of a westernized academic publishing elite. Jimmy Carter\u2019s 2002 award was not predicated on his past work on housing for the poor, but his critically timed and calculated opposition to George W. Bush\u2019s effort to topple Saddam Hussein \u2014 as was confirmed by the receptive Nobel Committee itself. Recent winners Kofi Annan and Kim Dae-jung are now better known for having their own sons involved in influence-peddling and bribery while they oversaw bureaucrats who trafficked in millions with unsavory murderers like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. In short, such an august prize has come a long way from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. \u2014 and precisely because it has privileged leftist rhetoric over real morality.<\/p>\n If the moralizing Left wants to be taken seriously, it is going to have to become serious about its own moral issues, since that is the professed currency of contemporary liberalism. Otherwise, the spiritual leaders who lecture us all on social justice, poverty, and truth will remain the money-speculator George Soros, the Reverend Jesse Jackson of dubious personal and professional ethics, and the mythographer Michael Moore. And we all know where that leads\u2026<\/p>\n \u00a92004 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[795],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1b0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12905,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-illustrious-stanford-left-turns-against-three-of-its-own-not-on-the-left-vdhanson\/","url_meta":{"origin":4526,"position":0},"title":"The illustrious Stanford Left turns against three of its own not on the Left. @VDHanson","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 2, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12854,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-progressive-left-doesnt-think-its-censorship\/","url_meta":{"origin":4526,"position":1},"title":"The Progressive Left Doesn’t Think It’s Censorship","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 9, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11571,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-rise-of-the-new-old-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":4526,"position":2},"title":"The Rise Of The New Old Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 10, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Hoover Institution In the 1960s, campus radicals were branded the New Left. The media saw the m\u00e9lange of radicals like Bill Ayers, David Delinger, Jane Fonda, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Herbert Marcuse, Jerry Rubin\u2014as well as hippies, the Black Panthers, the gay liberation movement, La Raza,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Left"","block_context":{"text":"The Left","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-left\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13446,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-traditionalist-why-does-the-left-hate-israel\/","url_meta":{"origin":4526,"position":3},"title":"The Traditionalist: Why Does the Left Hate Israel?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 24, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Private Papers","rel":"","context":"With 6 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 6 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-traditionalist-why-does-the-left-hate-israel\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12438,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/victor-davis-hanson-says-the-left-has-used-george-floyds-death-to-stage-cultural-revolution\/","url_meta":{"origin":4526,"position":4},"title":"Victor Davis Hanson says ‘the left has used’ George Floyd’s death to stage cultural revolution","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 22, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Author and Hoover Institution senior fellow\u00a0Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0told \u201cThe Brian Kilmeade Show\u201d on Wednesday that the left has \u201chijacked\u201d the protests over the death of\u00a0George Floyd\u00a0in order to stage a cultural revolution. Watch the video here","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13846,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/traditionalist-the-left-talks-the-talk\/","url_meta":{"origin":4526,"position":5},"title":"Traditionalist: The Left Talks the Talk","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 3, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Art19 and Just the News https:\/\/art19.com\/shows\/the-victor-davis-hanson-show\/episodes\/56a995ba-41e7-4226-a0f3-d79a28f53469","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4526"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4527,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4526\/revisions\/4527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}