Monday, March 27, 2017

Blind and Adrift: The Brits' Crazy Candidian World View

If you start out with the premise (the comforting fiction) that violent jihad is an aberration of an otherwise entirely peaceful faith, you won't be able to distinguish reality from fantasy, and you'll end up sounding like a crazy person. The always wised-up Bruce Bawer takes a look at how this disturbing phenomenon is currently playing out in the UK:
In the Guardian, Jon Henley and Amber Jamiesen sneered at Marine Le Pen for “linking the London attack to migrant policy, despite the attacker being British.” (My emphasis.) They smeared as “xenophobic” Nigel Farage's argument “that the London attacks proved Donald Trump’s hardline immigration and anti-Muslim policies were correct.” The Independent's Maya Oppenheimer censured Farage's comments, too, countering his critique of multiculturalism by saying he'd “failed to mention the fact many of the victims of the attack were in fact foreigners themselves.” (My emphasis again.) Needless to say, the issue wasn't Britishness vs. foreignness; it was Islam. But to say so was verboten. As Theresa May said (in what already seems destined to become an immortal statement), “Islamist terror” has nothing do with Islam.  
Islam is a religion of hate. But when that hate manifests itself in jihadist terror, the proper leftist move is to turn away from the reality of that hate – which last Wednesday sent several innocent people to a hospital or a morgue – to the purported “hate” of decent, law-abiding individuals who have had quite enough of murderous jihadist hate. Instead of acknowledging that a large minority (if not an outright majority) of British Muslims support sharia law in the U.K. (and that more than a few privately applaud terrorism), you're supposed to invoke the fantasy of a Britain in which all citizens, infidel and Muslim, share the same values and live together in harmony – except, of course, for the horrid Islamophobes, who, simply by mentioning the Islamic roots of Islamic terror, are exploiting terrorism, dishonoring its victims, and subverting social harmony.
Yes, if only those horrid Islamophobes could be silenced, all would be for the best in this, the best of all multicultural worlds (that's me referencing Voltaire's Candide and channeling the blind and adrift).

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