Last week I posted on Basic Trust, Tipping Points, & Walls and discussed the growing perception that our war with Islamism is not just limited to the radical fringe of Islam but that Islam itself, embodied in Sharia law, is incompatible with Western freedom and modernism; the case of Abdul Rahman followed a series of increasingly clear points of demarcation:
A series of events have been created and/or high-jacked by the worst in Islam, and the question now is whether or not this is the majority of Islam. Starting with the Iraqi insurgency that seemed to relish inhuman and inhumane behavior, many began to wonder if Iraq, and indeed if the entire Muslim world, was beyond Modernity. The Paris car-burning, the cartoon riots, the torture murder of a French Jew, Ilan Halimi, by Islamic barbarians, the destruction of the Golden Mosque; all these events have pushed more and more Americans to a tipping point.
Yesterday Joe Katzman at Winds of Change, in Tipping Points: Irtidad & Honour Killings, returned to the theme that he has talked about before. He was struck by the awakening of a liberal icon to the danger of Sharia:
Today's post set seems like a good place to revisit the issue of post-tipping point politics. Liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, whose recent works include epistles like "Bushies in a State of Denial" and "Hillary Clinton: Our Favourite Victim" appears to have had a bit of a wake-up call over the threat to execute Christian convert (and hence murtadd charged with irtidad) Abdul Rahman.
When liberals begin to notice and are forced by reality to adjust their perceptions, we know we are getting close to a major tipping point. I would like to take this an exponential leap further.
Daily, the increasingly rapid accretion of evidence is coalescing. David Warren stated it clearly yesterday:
We cannot pretend for long, the way President Bush has been doing (albeit from humane and sound tactical motives to begin with), that the Shariah is compatible with freedom and democracy. The systems of government we advocate, or by necessity impose, must explicitly provide civil protection to non-Muslims and Muslims alike, against Shariah courts and their rulings. I have come to realize there is no alternative to this.
Borders, Waldenbooks and NYU have all surrendered to the threats of Sharia law in the last few days. They are afraid for two reasons. The reaction of Muslims worldwide suggests that anyone, at any time, who offends their hypersensitive sensibilities is liable to be physically assaulted; beyond that is the fear of questioning the forces of our home-grown thought police in the PC community. But "The Times They Are A-Changin'."
It is rare that I can find a silver lining in a traffic jam, but yesterday, on my way home from the city, I was stuck in traffic for over an hour and for most of that time was minimally discomfited. I owe my good humor to, of all things, the Fresh Air Show on National Public Radio, a veritable font of liberal wit and wisdom which is usuallly so doctrinaire that it is hard to listen to with any consistency. The host, Terry Gross, in a show called The Shifting Poles of New Globalization, featured an almost 40 minute long interview with Tom Friedman, liberal icon of the New York Times Op-Ed page. I like Tom Friedman and always enjoyed reading his columns until they were hidden behind the New York Times wall of silence. Although I often found him to be a bit naive about human nature (in typical liberal fashion he tended to put more stock in people's words than in their deeds) and often disagreed with his conclusions, I also appreciated that he was only mildly afflicted with the Multi-Cultural and Politically Correct viruses and his obligatory BDS was of only moderate intensity and did not appear to have a major impact on his ability to write clearly and rationally.
Unfortunately, there is no transcript available of the show (you can listen at the link above) and I will paraphrase rather than quote in most places; however, a few highlights are illustrative.
Gross has Friedman review the scene throughout the Middle East. He starts off with the Israeli elections and suggests that the vast center of the Israeli population has gotten exhausted by their attempts to work out a peace deal with the Palestinians, and the intifada they received in response, and all they want to do now is separate from the entire Arab world and put up a "100 foot high wall." As I pointed out in my tipping point post, this is one of the options that the civilized world is increasingly turning to in order to wall off Islam in the same way a body uses fibrotic tissue to wall off infections. The Israelis, despite their long tradition of left wing politics and liberal ideology have clearly reached their tipping point. This is not surprising considering the Palestinian second intifada which subjected Israel to true terror everyday for an extended period of time; no one would want to tolerate this state of affairs for long.
Of course, Friedman can't stop himself from placing some blame for the Palestinian straits on the Israeli policies of retaliation, though he is clear that the Palestinian Authority was complicit in the terror campaign; he also has trouble seeing Hamas as what they are (he neglects to mention the core of Hamas's charter calling for the annihilation of Israel, but we can't expect miracles) and hopes that the need to govern will transform them into a responsible party. Interestingly, when Terry Gross tries to goad Friedman into suggesting that the US and Israel should continue to offer financial support to the Palestinian victims, he is fairly clear-eyed about this although he suggests Israel should continue transferring tax revenue that Israel collects for the PA as long as Hamas continues their ceasefire. Apparently, Tom doesn't realize that the Palestinians have adhered to a cease fire in word only and have continued their attacks, though on a lower level of intensity, but who am I to quibble?
On the subject of Iraq and Iran, he attacks the Bush administration and Rumsfeld for not having enough troops to occupy Iraq. He also points out that Iran would be threatened by American success in Iraq, but also by the chaos of an American pull-out, which would become unavoidable if things spiral into a true civil war. In one case, Iran, a Persian Shia country, would be faced with chaos that would spill over into Iran and in the other case by a functional democracy on their border. I don't think Iran has quite the fear of Iraqi chaos that Tom Friedman imagines; Ahmadinejad has said he craves chaos and it is always a mistake to not take lunatics at their word.
[I have searched for a decent argument about troop strength going into the war in Iraq; the one thing I have not seen clarified is where the extra 250,000 troops were supposed to have come from after all the military down sizing through the 1990's. If anyone can answer that I'd appreciate it; until then I can't help thinking we were undermanned at least in part because our military was cut so drastically after the Soviet Union fell.]
Approximately 26 minutes into the interview, Tom Friedman, after briefly being diverted by an upsurge of BDS, remarks that Iraq is in the 9th inning of the ball game and the whole enterprise can unravel in the face of the insurgency if the United States doesn't put a stop to the intracommunal violence immediately. (Of note, he calls the insurgents Nihilists, which I think is an accurate depiction of their methodology, nothing is beneath them, but an inaccurate depiction of their ideology, which clearly has a goal.) This is Tom Friedman closing in on a tipping point. After all, he admits that if we fail in our "noble and quixotic experiment in Iraq", the chances of democratization and liberalization in the Middle East vanish. He also knows that the despotism and repression of the Middle East is the soil from which Islamic violence has grown. He also adds that even if we are successful there is no guarantee that the region will join the modern world.
At the end they discuss the cartoon intifada (not using those words, of course) and Tom Friedman points out that because the world has gotten smaller (I am reluctant to describe the world as being flat since he does it repeatedly) the Muslim world is being forced to confront their essential failures every day. Despite being told they are the heirs to the perfect monotheistic faith, chosen of Allah, they can see with their own eyes that the Arab world is stagnant, non-productive, and falling further behin don a daily basis; this is intolerably shameful and humiliating (which is where the rage comes from.) He follows this with a warning to the Arab world. He points out that Hitler discovered that democracies can be very slow to action (and certainly many Americans would like to go back to sleep, as Vanderleun so beautifully described yesterday) but once aroused, their response can be overwhelming.
[I wondered if Friedman's evocation of Hitler was an unconscious recognition of the genocidal anti-Semitism at the core of much of Islam today.]
It is interesting that just as the Bush administration may be rousing itself out of its torpor, the liberal side of the political divide is waking up to the danger from Islam (not just Islamofascism) and questions about the incompatibility between Islam and the West are being voiced from unexpected quarters. Once upon a time, Lyndon Johnson was reported to have said that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he had lost America; I would suggest that if Islam has lost Tom Friedman, they have truly lost America.
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