Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
The Queen ("Through the Looking Glass")
To be human is to be able to believe impossible things, to believe unbelievable and contradictory things. Our intellectual capacities have endowed us with the ability to explain away apparent contradictions when convenient or necessary, and allow us to follow logic chains that lead to supremely illogical conclusions. Our unconscious minds are extraordinarily sophisticated in leading us to the desired conclusions in the absence of evidence. We are experts at convincing ourselves that what we imagine is what exists. Our democracy works primarily because when we sum our unconscious biases we tend to cancel out the most irrational; this is, unfortunately, not invariant and we have many times in our history paid a heavy price for irrationality.
It is always easier to see contradictions in others. In the political arena, it is easier to see the contradictions in the ideology and policies of our political opponents than in ourselves (which is why I always hope for decent and specific critiques from those who disagree with me; I am usually disappointed, unfortunately.) Sometimes, however, the contradictions become so egregious and overt that they become unavoidable. We may well be reaching a point where the left has no choice but to notice their own contradictions and, in the act of observation, their carefully constructed world view will collapse.
The left firmly believes that Republicans are the great enemies of freedom, working feverishly to take away women's rights, gay rights, civil liberties, all in the service of furthering their nefarious schemes to loot the world. The Huffington Post is a place where these views are ubiquitous and often couched in much more reasonable sounding terms than in many of the more radical precincts of the left. As an example, today Marty Kaplan summarizes the state of discourse in President Giuliani. President Romney. President Huckabee. President Just-Shoot-Me.
In America, anyone who wants to can grow up to be president. That's the problem.
There is no guarantee at all that the next occupant of the Oval Office will be as opposed to the Iraq war as the vast majority of the American people have been for several years. There is no reason to assume that the White House will be held in 2009 by someone who believes that what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have done to the Constitution constitutes impeachable high crimes. It is today entirely possible that the next president will leave health care to the pharmaceutical lobby, energy policy to the oil companies, and science to the Scriptures. There is nothing remotely comforting about our current system for selecting presidential candidates, about the way presidential campaigns are conducted and covered, or about the process in which ballots are cast, counted and translated into electoral votes. To think otherwise is denial, wishful thinking -- the magical thinking of children.
Despite all this country has gone through, anything can happen next November. Why should we believe that 2008 will not produce a president as incompetent and lawless as 2004 did, or as unelected as 2000 did?
Kaplan's great fear is that the next President will be a Republican; typical of the Left, the greatest danger comes from the Republicans. Conspicuously absent in his article is any notice that there are significant threats to our country and way of life, not least of which is the march of radical Islam.
[Please note, I am focusing here on the threat from Islamism; this is not the only danger facing the next President but it should at least be on the short list and among the Left, it is rarely to be found.]
The Left has had no trouble aligning itself with radical Islam. Since the time that Edward Said enraptured Academia with his pseudo-scholarship, the marriage of anti-Western and anti-Semitic Islam espousing anti-colonialist and anti-racist idioms has grown strong and nurtured a generation of Academic leftists who have managed to blind themselves to the Islamist world view which sanctions the most illiberal behavior. The most remarkable twist has been the ability of Academia, when not completely ignoring the treatment of women in the Middle East, to convince themselves that wearing the burka represents freedom rather than constriction. Women are truly free in Saudi Arabia because they don't have to suffer the carnivorous glances of men and don't have to drive, own property, or walk outside unaccompanied or with a non-related man; slavery is freedom!
Now, however, the contradictions may well become impossible to elide:
by James Kirchick
The Columbia Professor Who Also Doesn't Think Gay People Exist in the Middle East
Of all the absurd claims expressed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his recent address at Columbia University, his assertion that homosexuality does not exist in his country is the most ridiculous. Ahmadinejad's florid statements regarding Jews ("We are friends with the Jewish people"), prevarications about Holocaust denial ("There are researchers who want to approach the topic from a different perspective"), and hedging about Iranian nuclear ambitions ("they are completely peaceful") paled in comparison to inflammatory statements he has made on those subjects in the past and were clearly tempered for his live American audience. Even on the status of women, Ahmadinejad skirted critical questions, instead effusing, "Women are the best creatures created by God." But when asked about Iran's oppression of homosexuals, Ahmadinejad was uncompromising and unapologetic: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country ... We do not have this phenomenon. I do not know who's told you that we have it."
...
Yet while the audience in the Roone Arledge Auditorium and millions of television viewers laughed and booed at the Islamist rube, there was one man--ensconced at Columbia University, no less--who was likely nodding along in agreement. His name is Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, and he legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.
Massad knows the language of the left and is well versed in the anti-colonialist and minimally veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric beloved of the left. He is looking for tenure at Columbia University.
At the same time, one of the left's most cherished victim groups, a group that represents a core tenet of leftist "scholarship," are GLBTs, ie Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered. Gay civil rights is a passion for the left and anathema to the Islamists.
Phyllis Chesler, Dr. Sanity, and others have documented the failure of Western feminists to note and protest the abusive treatment of women in the world of Islam. It has been remarkably easy for the left to ignore such quaint cultural practices as honor killings, forced marriages, rape as a tool of control, practices that are an intimate part of Islam and Sharia as currently practices. As noted, the intellectual can quite easily convince himself that slavery is freedom or that women area actually well treated and quite free in Islam.
It will not be so easy for the left to ignore Massad's denial of homosexual identity. The left has ignored the abusive, often murderous, treatment of homosexuals throughout the Muslim world. However, identity groups form the core of the leftist dialectic; without identity groups, there is no left.
Not long ago, Che Guevara's daughter was a guest of the Iranians at a conference celebrating the relationship between the left and Islam. Fausta commented at the time:
Things were going along swimmingly until Aleida Guevara, who must have found time to travel to Tehran after trying to get Argentinian citizenship for her Cuban children, demanded the right to speak.
Oopsie.
Not only that, she publicly contradicted the keynote speaker, who claimed that Che was "a truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union."
Ha!
Demanding the right to respond, Aleida Guevara told the conference that Qassemi's claim might be based on a bad translation: "My father never mentioned God," she said as the hall sighed in chagrined disbelief. "He never met God."
The remarks caused a commotion amid which Aleida and her brother were whisked away, led into a car and driven to their hotel under escort.
But the poop didn't hit the fan until later in the evening, by the end of which both Aleida and her brother Camilo "had become nonpersons", in Taheri's words, and the Iranians had forgetten that Che was a Marxist.
The natural dis-affinity between the left and Islamism has been casually and effortlessly ignored by the left, subsumed by their monumental loathing of George Bush and the Republicans. However, now the threat to their operational relationship is more insidious, carried via the highly intellectualized language of anti-colonialism. As the Islamists gain strength, they will have less need of leftist cover; we can expect the core contradictions to become more and more problematic as time goes on. As the conflict within Academia between the "Queer Theorists" and the "Queer Deniers" inevitably heats up, there is a chance that such a wedge could force (parts of) the left back into alliance with those traditional Liberals and Conservatives who correctly believe we need them if we are going to win our ideological struggle.
How ironic to see one salient of this most important ideological battle take place in that bastion of anti-Americanism, Columbia University, where the Islamists and the Gender Theorists join in a clash that cannot be finessed.
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