|
|
|
|
Liberal in Chief
 My
crystal ball told me the Global War on Terror
(GWOT) would bring us a lot of trouble, but it failed to foresee that one of
the flashpoints would be cartoons in Denmark. Muslims are currently upset
about a particular cartoon, published last September,  ridiculing the prophet
Mohammed. Scandinavian humor can be unexpectedly volatile, when it exists
at all.
I could have told the publishers
that the Muslims might not chuckle good-naturedly about this, had anyone
asked me, which they didn’t. By comparison, Abe Foxman was a pretty
good sport about Mel Gibson’s last movie.
Religion has been a factor in
turmoil for most of human history, and though liberals have hoped tolerance
would solve the problem for good, it has merely taken a new form as two
great liberal principles have collided: freedom of expression (represented by
the cartoonists) and organized touchiness (represented by world Islam, now
moving into Europe).
Liberals always expect their
principles to harmonize with each other, and then are surprised when it
doesn’t work out that way. In their zeal for sexual equality, they
oppose sex discrimination and favor abortion on demand, only to find that
some people abort babies upon discovering that they are female. Since this
happens most often in cultures where being female is regarded as a sort of
birth defect and the decision to abort is made by the father, yet another
sacred liberal principle takes it on the chin: multiculturalism.
Not all cultures are ready for
multiculturalism, at least not this year. And some of those cultures, in what
liberals reverently dubbed the Third World (back when the phrase seemed to
make sense), are pretty old. They may take a while catching up with the
progressive West — or, as liberals say, “evolving.”
Evolution is another sacred liberal principle, but it doesn’t always
follow the progressive script.
In some of those cultures, where
sex-selection infanticide has long been a father’s prerogative (as it
was back in pagan Greece and Rome), sex-selection abortion, now that
it’s feasible, just seems the natural way to go (or evolve). I guess it
falls under the heading of traditional family values. Dad still decides.
That’s “choice,” you know — one more lofty liberal
principle, as refracted through multiculturalism.
![[Breaker quote for Liberal in Chief: Yet again, Danish humor flops in Islam.]](2006breakers/060207.gif) Many
cultures are all for choice —
as long as it isn’t exercised by women, of course. This is the proviso
that tends to take liberals by surprise. We won’t make any headway
toward world peace until we recognize that liberalism, despite its universalist
rhetoric, is just a local, recent, delicate, and perishable Western subculture.
It probably has no hope of radically transforming other cultures, especially
those that acknowledge the existence of two sexes.
Many primitive peoples believe not
only that two sexes exist, but that they are somewhat different from one
another. Such beliefs, seemingly simple and arbitrary, can make it difficult
for liberalism to take root. The barbarians who hold them may be willing to
try certain liberal enthusiasms on for size — elections or freedom of
the press, maybe — as long as basic cultural preconditions are
respected: two sexes, no cartoons of the Prophet, things like that.
At risk of provoking liberals to riot
by insulting their most cherished beliefs, I should point out that in many
respects President Bush himself is a liberal. He assumes that if he offers
the world’s Muslims democracy — an offer they can’t
refuse, as it were — they will eagerly grab it, women’s rights
and all. This is another case where I might have counseled otherwise, but
again, I wasn’t asked.
Like most of his breed, our liberal
in chief seems to regard religion as a mere opinion, an edifying individual
option rather than a necessary social cohesive. This is why he seems ill
prepared to deal with the Muslim world, where they take a different view of
it. Unlike the liberal Washington Post, for example, the Muslim
press doesn’t bury religious news in the back sections of the weekend
editions. It takes the view, so baffling to enlightened Westerners, that if the
Almighty exists, he is probably pretty important.
Only modern Western culture
— liberalism — could have conceived so incoherent a concept as
multiculturalism. This strange idea hasn’t caught on in the Islamic
world. You might as well expect to find a nudist colony in Mecca. (Just a joke,
Mr. President.)
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |