V.D. HANSON: BIN LADEN IS THE SANE ONE

"Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West. Its supposedly crackpot vision is actually a petrol-rich Middle East free of Jews, Christians, and Westerners, free to rekindle spiritual purity under Sharia. Bin Laden's al Reich is a vast pan-Arabic, Taliban-like caliphate run out of Mecca by new prophets like him, metering out oil to a greedy West in order to purchase the weapons of its destruction; there is, after all, an Israel to be nuked, a Europe to be out-peopled and cowered, and an America to be bombed and terrorized into isolation. This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply....

It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West, given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism. But they sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite, a perennial search for victims of racism, economic oppression, colonialism, and Christianity. Bin Laden's followers weren't white; they were sometimes poor; they inhabited of former British and French colonies; and they weren't exactly followers of the no-nonsense Pope or Jerry Falwell. If anyone doubts the nexus between right-wing Middle Eastern fascism and left-wing academic faddishness, go to booths in the Free Speech area at Berkeley or see what European elites have said and done for Hamas. Middle Eastern fascist killers enshrined as victims alongside our own oppressed? That has been gospel in our universities for the last three decades....

While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it - let alone defending it - is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party....

No, bin Laden is quite sane - but lately I have grown more worried that we are not." More here.

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LEFTIST NON-THINKING

"The gymnastics of mind and imagination required to be a liberal should be enough to keep even the most corpulent among them trim... Perhaps the most amazing of liberal axiomatic thought is the notion that it is safer to surrender and do nothing when confronted by a roaring lion. To be liberal, one must believe that the lion, hungry and violent, will do nothing to such an attractive meal as a cowering, simpering and obviously defenseless man-steak.... This is the attitude, however, of the liberal mind when it comes to terrorism. It is at once required, and an article of faith, for the liberal to believe that the woes of the civilized world befall it because of its insufferable bad manners and excess. Consequently, when confronted by a culture bent on the demise of the civilized world, liberals are bound to find no fault in the attacker, and only failing and turpitude in the civilized world... in the liberal mind, the pagan can do no wrong. Why is it necessary for modern, sophisticated, and intelligent society to wait for the barbarian to be literally at the door to recognize that this is not a war of persecution, as Radical Islam proclaims, but a war of expansion waged by radical Islam itself against modern civilization?

How to stop people working: "It all goes back to liberal first principles. Nobody, to the liberal, has a valid claim on anything, even his or her talents. Those who produce or acquire wealth do so not because of effort, initiative, creativity, or sacrifice. They're just lucky. They were born healthy and into loving families. Others are unlucky. They were born unhealthy or into indifferent families. Since none of us is entitled to what we have at birth, none of us is entitled to anything we produce thereafter. We might call this, to borrow a term from the criminal law, the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine. Wealth, to the liberal, belongs to all of us in common, not to any of us in particular. There are possessions, but not property."

Dalrymple: Why Leftists condone terrorism: "The idea that if someone is prepared to do something truly horrible, he must have a worthy cause remains attractive to liberal intellectuals, who perhaps envy those who take up arms against the sea of troubles that is human existence".

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ELSEWHERE

"Gun control has not worked in Canada. Since the new gun registration program started in 1998, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen, but the Canadian rate has increased. The net cost of Canada's gun registry has surged beyond $1-billion -- more than 500 times the amount originally estimated. Despite this, the Canadian government recently admitted it could not identify a single violent crime that had been solved through registration. Public confidence in the government's ability to fight crime has also eroded, with one recent survey showing only 17% of voters support the registration program."

Welfare state unfair: "Two academics - Dr Alan Tapper of Perth's Edith Cowan University and Dr David Thomson of New Zealand's Massey University - have confirmed that, across much of the Western world, the 60-year-old welfare state is in crisis. The welfare state has come to be not so much a straight-out redistribution from the haves to the have-nots, as was originally intended. Rather it has been, in Tapper's words, "one generation imposing costs on its successor".... Dr David Thomson's study, Selfish Generations? How Welfare States Grow Old (Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1996), has produced evidence from Britain, Europe and the USA, that the welfare state is increasingly unable to satisfy the conflicting demands for "intergenerational justice". Australia's young generation is burdened, not only by heavy taxation and reduced welfare entitlements, but also soaring property prices and poor job prospects... The plight of Generation X caused the ANZ's chief economist Saul Eslake recently to exclaim that he could not understand why the young were not rising up".

Peg Kaplan is appalled at the half-hearted reaction of the Leftist media to the recent beheading in Saudi Arabia. The Abu Ghraib harassment can be shown endlessly but not the terminal brutality of Muslims.

Reagan and the "homeless" "In 1987, Reagan signed into law the Stewart B. McKinney act, a collection of programs that provided health care, shelter and transitional housing for homeless people, and saved many lives"

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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