Over at National Review Online Andrew McCarthy has a piece titled "Terror in France and the Annals of Willful Blindness." In it he restates criticisms of the Obama administration's approach to Islamic terrorism that have been raised many times before - chiefly its reflexive rush to cleanse every blatantly obvious act of Islamic terror of any connection to Islam. He identifies the source of this compulsion as, not just an urge to placate the supposedly moderate Muslims around the world, but an inability, a blind spot, that prevents progressives from understanding what motivates people like Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel to attack innocent people. The idea that people could be motivated by religious obligation is incomprehensible to them. As McCarthy says, "Contrary to White House blather, people do not commit mass-murder attacks because of economic privation or over trifling slights. They commit it because they are seized by commands that they take to be divine injunctions rooted in scripture, their devotion to which will determine whether paradise or eternal damnation awaits."
Read the whole column. It's worth it. Particularly because he also takes on a rhetorical tic common to politicians and pundits of the left and right in the aftermath of each new terror attack:
I had to fight of the urge to throw my television out the window Thursday evening. Images of bodies strewn across the promenade along the Côte d’Azur were interrupted by one vapid pol after another, brought on set to condemn the “cowardly” jihadist. Cowardly? Do you think you could drive a truck through a mass of humanity and then shoot it out with trained security personnel, knowing all the while that you were going to die? Our enemies are barbaric savages, but cowards? To do what our enemies do requires nerve, fervor — a cause they believe is worthy of the raging passion Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna called “the art of death.”I remember reacting negatively to this tendency as far back as September 11 when it was Bush administration officials falling over themselves to condemn the attacks as cowardly. I wasn't sure they understood what that word means. Willingly sacrificing one's life to a cause, no matter how repugnant, is not cowardly. To pretend it is just makes it harder to understand the enemy.
Also on NRO today is a column by Kevin Williamson titled simply "I Told You So." In it he explores why the oft-predicted "libertarian moment" never manifested itself. The error is in the belief that most people are fundamentally in favor of freedom, that all those people living under despotic regimes around the world are ripe markets for liberal republics if only the oppressive dictatorships that govern their countries were removed.
But the fact is that people's desire for freedom, to the extent that it exists, is more often than not subjective. That is, people want the freedom to live in accordance with their values and their desires but they are not willing to extend that freedom to others who hold different values. As Williamson says, "Most people do not want their values to be tolerated — they want their values to prevail."
This mistaken notion about people's commitment to liberty has consequences. A critical assumption underlying George W. Bush's middle-east strategy was that the populations of Muslim nations would embrace freedom if it were offered to them. The record on this is spotty at best.
Closer to home this intolerance manifests itself in the persecution of Christian florists, bakers, photographers, etc. who erroneously thought that "live and let live" was a workable solution to differences of opinion over same-sex marriage.
Finally, over at Townhall, Stephen Chapman writes about "Mike Pence's Towering Hypocrisy." Chapman recalls a speech the Republican vice-presidential nominee gave to the Federalist Society in 2010. In that lecture, Pence held forth on the character traits essential in a president of a constitutional republic such as ours. Among these traits are humility, self-discipline and "an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic but life itself." Having laid down that marker, it's hard to fathom how he could have signed on as Donald Trump's second banana. If nothing else, it's example #34,856,923 of why you should never take anything a politician says at face value.
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