I have referred to Political Correctness as a thought disorder since it forces one to believe in things that are manifestly untrue. The old commissars of the Soviet Union would be quite comfortable with the ways in which PC damages recognition of reality and enervate a subject population who quickly learn that there are some things that one can not think, let alone speak aloud. Any doubts that free speech suffers when PC obtains should consider the recent travails of Larry Summers, who had the temerity to suggest that the relative dearth of female scientists might be related to intrinsic factors and lost his job because of it.
[For those who accuse me of using Psychiatric terminology to demonize my political opponents, let me assure you I am not using the term "thought disorder" in its formal Psychiatric sense of a disturbance in the form of thought, ie a disorder of the connections or associations between thoughts. I am using the term in a more colloquial way, as an ideology that interferes with the perception of reality.]
The underpinning of Political Correctness is post-Modernism filtered through the Marxist dialectic. In this conceptual structure, reality itself is defined, indeed imposed, by the powerful upon the powerless. The Marxist contribution involves the definition of oppressor as White Male, and derivatives of the White Male, (which is how Condoleeza Rice can be tarred as an oppressor, at least until she fully imbibed the PC template for international affairs once at the State Department.)
The PC ideology ultimately then devolves into a variation of "Might makes Right." Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, an area where, with the notable exception of Israel, all societies are essentially tribal in nature and structured explicitly, and with the religious imprimatur of the Koran, by the Law of the Jungle. The is in contrast to Western societies structured by the Rule of Law. Richard Landes has an excellent outline of the distinctions in Civil Society vs. Prime-Divider Society.
The intersection of PC and the Mob approached the level of farce in the last week.
Erekat: We won't accept Jewish Israel
Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Monday rejected Israel's demand that the Palestinians acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state.
"There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined," Erekat told Radio Palestine.
...
A senior official in the Prime Minister's Office said in response that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insists that the Palestinians recognize Israel's Jewish identity, as a condition for Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state.
...
A Palestinian survey conducted by the Al-Quds Information Center showed that 62 percent of Palestinians believe the Annapolis parley will fail, while 35.3% think it will succeed. The survey also showed that 47% believe the failure of the conference will not have any repercussions while 28% said it will lead to a third intifada.
Also according to the poll, 52.9% believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved if Jerusalem becomes a Muslim city while 26% believe east Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine and west Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
There is no level to which Palestinian and Arab spokesmen are unwilling to stoop to demonize Israel. The Arab media regularly insist that Jews have no special relationship to Jerusalem, Arab regimes regularly destroy Jewish artifacts and ancient temples (the Taliban at Bamyan were not the first, nor will they be the last, Muslim rulers who destroyed another people's religious and cultural heritage), so Erekat's blatant lie should not come as a surprise. The Arab mob denies the legitimacy of Jewish aspirations; a Jewish state in their midst is an unacceptable humiliation.
Where Western PC paralyzes reason and meets Mob Rule is in the pages of the New York Times and in the precincts of cowardly and foolish political parties and governments. A search of the Times fail to show any evidence that Erekat's venom is worth noticing; the evidence that Erekat's position is prevalent among Palestinians, with over 50% defining success as taking over all of Jerusalem, is similarly ignored by those who insist on acceding to a PC fueled blindness.
Robert Avrech commented on the blindness on display in the Democratic debate last night:
You know what the Democrats are not talking about? What they won't dare talk about in any serious manner?
Islamic terror.
They won't even form the words. The Democrats will not discuss the existence of transnational Muslim jihadists who are battering down the walls of Western civilization.
In his post Robert quotes from Jeff Jacoby's article on Erekat's negotiating style:
The refusal of the Palestinian Authority to acknowledge Israel as a legitimate Jewish state isn't a denial of reality; it is a sign of their determination to change that reality. Like Arab leaders going back a century, they seek not to live in peace with the Jewish state, but in place of the Jewish state.
Jeff Jacoby has it exactly right with one small caveat. The Arab's have always valued their fantasies more than reality. The beauty of fantasy is that it allows one to believe in contradictory ideas simultaneously. In their fantasies, their leaders are powerful lions before whom their enemies quiver in fear, not hollow men who can be pushed over by an exercise of minuscule amounts of Western power. In their fantasies Jews are sons of dogs and pigs, unworthy even to be opponents on a battlefield, mere vermin to be exterminated by any means possible, even while the Jews are superhuman oppressors of the poor victimized Palestinians. This is no different from the mob burning witches; if the mob says you are a witch, you are a witch. If the lynch mob says you are a rapist who needs to swing, you are a rapist who will swing.
The Western media and too many Western governments, including unfortunately the government of Israel, their logic tortured by the bonds of PC, do not even express outrage and ridicule at such nonsense. They treat men like Erekat as if they are genuine Diplomats and rational actors rather than giving them the bum's rush they so richly deserve.
I appreciate that diplomacy often involves dealing with unsavory characters and pretending they are princes but this kind of surrender to unreason will guarantee more death and destruction, not less.
For a lynch mob to succeed requires that those who can stand athwart them merely move aside and allow the mob to impose its own reality.
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