I Want a New Left

Thanks for Your Service, Mom

My mother, Mary Pepple, died a few days ago at the age of 97. In 1943, she volunteered for the Navy as part of the WAVES program. She was never sent overseas, and from what I gather, she was just a clerk here in the States, and she saw her first naval vessel on a trip to California after she was discharged. My father, who served in the Army, was also a volunteer. What about me? I concede I protested against our involvement in Vietnam, something which I wouldn't do today. After 9/11, I was ready to enlist, but a younger friend tried to do that and they turned him down due to his advanced age. In fact, neither my wife nor I were even allowed to give blood since we had spent too much time in England and so might have mad cow disease. Sheesh. What to do to help out? Ok, the one thing I could do was to learn Arabic and help with translating documents. So, I've been working on Arabic for several years now, but no one has asked for any help. Still, it does help me understand what is going on in the Arab world, and that's a plus, I think. Nevertheless, let it be known that if we weren't at war with the Islamofascists, I would not bother with Arabic.

Vindication!

For those of us skeptical of global warming, there is now a peer-reviewed paper arguing that there were flaws in the computer models that predicted the warming, flaws that overstated the effect of CO2 on warming by a factor of three. See here for Powerline’s take on the matter.

So, we’re vindicated, right? Well, I thought we were vindicated with the ClimateGate emails. And I also thought we were vindicated with the “pause.” Yet, the true believers cling to their nonsense, so I don’t really expect them to change their minds about this.

Meanwhile, I agree with this quote at the link:

This is the point I really want to make: the New York Times and other pro-government sources assume that government funding of research is lily-white, while corporate funding is inherently suspect. This is ridiculous.

Both are suspect, the latter because they are beholden to their paymasters, and the former because there are so many environmentalists who are part of the process of government funding and research, and environmentalists can be counted on to favor work that shows that humans are destroying the environment.

This brings up a point which I am sure someone in the skeptic’s camp has already delved into, but if so, I missed the discussion. What exactly did the scientists of the mid-1970s do wrong, as far as today’s scientists are concerned? After all, they thought that global cooling was on the way, but if you’re committed to the theory of global warming, then you ought to believe that those scientists made a terrible error. What was it? And why should the true believers think that science has gotten it right this time?

LIght Blogging Alert

I am dealing with a death in the family and won't be blogging much in the next few days.

Obama’s (and the Entire Left’s) Misguided Approach to Categorizing ISIS

Obama keeps insisting that ISIS isn’t Muslim. Whether they are Muslim or not, this isn’t a question that those who aren’t scholars in religious studies should be bothering with. What difference does it make whether they are Muslim but at the same the Islamic equivalent of the Reverend Jim Jones and his flock, or not Muslim at all? No difference whatsoever. What leftists should be asking is whether they are on the left or the right. The essay by Michael Walzer that I have been referring to (here) quotes Judith Butler as saying that Hamas and Hezbollah are on the left because they are against imperialism. That leaves it open whether or not she would say the same about ISIS, but since ISIS has come out in favor of slavery, leftists need to cautious about accepting them as leftist. And as I have already argued numerous times, the idea that Hamas and Hezbollah are anti-imperialist is mistaken, even naive. They are against American imperialism, but no doubt would have no problem with Islamic imperialism. And that goes double for ISIS. To some extent, they already are imperialist.

Now once a leftist accepts that these groups, as well as the current regime in Iran, are all on the far right, the course of action follows immediately: hit them as hard as you can.

Some Short Items

Girls, Boys, and Math: The Wrong Question

A recent letter to the NY Times expresses concern that fewer girls than boys go into math and how schools encourage boys and are biased against girls, and so on. This was reprinted on Keith Burgess-Jackson’s blog (here), and as I pointed out in a comment, we’ve been hearing about this since the 1970s, and many changes in our schools have been made since then, yet somehow the biases still supposedly exist and girls are still not going to math in the numbers that boys are.

I think people are asking the wrong question. It isn’t why so few girls are going into math, but why so many boys are doing it. I went into math basically because I was a misfit. (Being a misfit also led me into soccer at a time when almost no other Americans were interested.) In a world I found unpredictable and scary, math was something that seemed rational and comforting. Eventually, I felt comfortable enough with society that I could switch over to philosophy, but I felt the switch as a sort of escape.

Do these feminists really think more girls should be misfits?


Democrats and the Elite Schools

This essay by Richard Vedder at the University of Ohio sums up nicely my feelings about the Democrats. Most prominent Democrats are associated with elite schools, which of course favor the rich. He notes:

I would argue that liberal Democratic policies have helped promote the development of an academic caste system. At the top are the Brahmins – the top couple of dozen truly elite schools; below them are the wannabe elite private schools and very best state universities; below them are the poorer private schools and mid-quality state schools; at the bottom are the academic Untouchables: the extraordinarily bad urban state universities and some private schools, along with the community colleges.

The only correction I would make here is that within academia itself, I seemed to be an Unpublishable. Nothing I submitted to a journal ever got accepted, and the only thing I got published was published because I won a contest (for the Rockefeller Prize in philosophy). Needless to say, the fact that the Democrats seem uninterested in attacking this hierarchy hasn’t endeared me to them.


At Last!

I’ve been complaining about the small numbers of people from the West going to help the Kurds and the Yazidis in comparison to the numbers going to help ISIS, but some are going. See here.


Statins, Cholesterol, and Heart Attacks

See here for a report on claims by a couple of researchers who insist that statins do little to prevent heart attacks. We’ve been hearing a lot of skepticism like this lately, about statins and cholesterol, but in fact the first skeptical article I read was in the Atlantic way back in the late 1980s. Immediately after reading it, I went out and bought some eggs to eat.

Leftists, We Have No Idea What You Believe on the Islamists, But We Assume the Worst

This post is inspired by a statement in the musings of an Islamophile, Andrew March, in response to a leftist bothered by the left’s stance on Islamism. I have already devoted two posts (here and here) to their exchange, and this will be the last (maybe). In this post, I want to comment on the following statement from the Islamophile: “Who doubts that we are against these things?” (Here.) The things in question are killing apostates, mutilating genitals, and kidnapping schoolgirls. And earlier, he had insisted that “no one [on the left] thinks that Yazidis and Baha’is should be subjected to persecution or slaughter.” And I say in response to him and all the other Islamophiles, Lots of us doubt that you are against these things. In my last post, I pointed out that whatever leftists think they are saying to us about the Islamists, ISIS, and other groups, it is not getting through. What is getting through is that they don’t care about the average Joe and that they don’t care as much even about their non-Muslim supporters as they do about Muslims.

Consider the following reasons for doubting that they are against Islamic atrocities:

1. Leftists often accept cultural relativism, and cultural relativism will entail that even if leftists themselves condemn these foreign practices, they will still say they are acceptable for those living in other cultures. Strictly speaking, then, though they can say they are against such practices, it comes off as a much weaker expression of disapproval than does the disapproval of those who believe in absolute and universal moral standards.

2. Saying something in obscure places doesn’t count. For example, at the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I felt that no one on the left cared. There may have been a few op-ed pieces slamming the fatwa, but I probably missed them. What I wanted to see was massive demonstrations, but there were none. But to get back to my point, I learned after the death of Susan Sontag that she had supported Rushdie. This was news to me. I had not paid any particular attention to Sontag during her life, but I thought of her as a reliable critic of the West. That was all that was coming through to me about her views. So, saying you hate ISIS in a footnote of the New Left Review, for example, doesn’t really count.

3. If you say it in a prominent place, but if your main point is something else, we are going to miss it. For example, if the main point of an op-ed or a speech is how much you hate the Republicans, and you also say, “Of course, ISIS is evil,” most people will miss it.

4. Even if you say something explicitly, if it is contradicted by other things you have said or done, we won’t really believe you. How many times have we heard “your call is important to us” and how many times do we actually believe it? If you have to wait on the phone for an hour, we aren’t going to believe the outfit saying that they think our call is important because if it were, they would have hired more people to deal with the calls.

Ever since 9/11, the left has shown in a million ways, some big and some little, that they don’t really care what happens to the average Joe and that their real concern is protecting Muslims. After all, it’s all our fault. They don’t even care about their own non-Muslim adherents in comparison to their concern for Muslims. And as far as their own adherents are concerned, their lack of concern goes all the way back to the Iranian revolution. As I have pointed out time and time again, Muslims butchered leftists after the Shah was evicted, but almost no one on the left talks about this, and the Islamophiles never do. Yet, under the circumstances, Iran should be seen as the left’s greatest enemy. The left should be doing everything they can to undermine that regime, but instead they treat it as a sort of ally. But even if they felt reluctant for other reasons to undermine the regime, how about at least talking about those murdered leftists? How about a day of commemoration for them? How about buttons saying “remember the murdered Iranians?” When you act in a way that is so contrary to normal human motivations, we assume that whatever you are saying isn’t to be trusted.

Let me digress and observe that leftists will probably say that the left needs Iran in its fight against American imperialism. Lots of things come to mind in response to this, such as, “With friends like those, who needs enemies?” When your ally butchers members of your own side, it is time to start re-evaluating who your real enemy is. Moreover, this episode shows that the Islamists have a very different reason for attacking American imperialism than leftists do. Leftists attack it because they think imperialism is wrong, while Islamists attack it because they think, as a non-Muslim nation, America has no right to be imperialist, but Muslim nations do. Finally, the episode shows what will happen to the left when American imperialism is destroyed: the left will be next in line for destruction.

To get back to my main point, the left is always blaming the victims for being assaulted by Muslims, saying that it’s all their fault, or anyway it’s all the fault of America. “Why do you think they hate us?” was the question they asked us after 9/11. It has become abundantly clear since then that they hate us because they hate everyone who doesn’t believe exactly the way they do, but leftists still cling to that theory. No one on the left wants to ask, “Why do they hate the Yazidis?” They don’t want to ask it because of course the Yazidis did nothing to deserve their treatment at the hands of ISIS. So, the left’s theory has to be stretched out of shape by saying that it is really the U.S. that is to blame. That’s right, the U.S. bombed Iraq and the Muslims responded by shooting Malala and turning the Yazidis into slaves. No one on the left seems to realize how absurd that sounds. But my larger point is that the left’s desperate clinging to the grievance theory shows how little they care about the rest of us.

The left’s message is also undercut by the massive amounts of denial they engage in. The silly insistence that ISIS isn’t Muslim achieves nothing except that it shows us that the left is more interested in protecting Muslims than it is in doing much of anything about the atrocities that Muslims commit. (And when denying they are Muslim doesn’t work, they can always fall back on the “it’s all the victim’s fault” ploy.) And there is the silly insistence that Islam is a religion of peace, that the primary meaning of “jihad” is an inner struggle, that Islamic Spain was wonderfully enlightened, that there never was any Islamic imperialism, and so on. There are also diversionary campaigns that engage in denial such as the Republican war on women or the rape culture on our campuses when the real war on women is in the Muslim world and a horrific rape culture has emerged in places like Sweden.

Another problem is the lack of commitment that the left has to the West. A leftist quoted in Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt says that “the death of the West will not necessarily be the end of the world” (p. 10), and that statement seems to fit in with much else that the left is saying and doing. What will succeed the West seems to be (as the Islamists keep threatening) shari’a. Obviously, shari’a will mean the death of the left, yet no one on the left seems interested in saying to these people, “No, we are not going to tolerate shari’a here in America.” No one on the left has a button saying, “No to shari’a.” Instead, what you get is what Martha Nussbaum did in her book on Islamphobia, a sort of defense of a limited amount of it, because after all that’s a way of being kind to the Muslims, isn’t it? An absolute condemnation isn’t to be found.

The height of leftist prevaricating is the way they greeted the news that ISIS thinks that slavery is permissible. Forget about whether ISIS is genuinely Muslim or not. After hearing endless pontificating on the “horrible legacy of slavery,” one would expect this news to be greeted with loud shouts of disapproval and large demonstrations in the streets and on our college campuses. Instead, there was silence. Crickets. Demonstrations on our college campuses are the way the rest of us gauge what the left is most concerned with, and when we see no demonstrations against the re-introduction of slavery, the rest of us think the left doesn’t really care.

So, for all of these reasons and countless others, we do doubt that the left is against Muslim atrocities, and even when they say they aren’t, we doubt them. And even if we didn’t doubt them, we think they have higher priorities that mean they aren’t really committed to ending those atrocities. The left’s real commitment is to helping Muslims, and they don’t really care much about the rest of us. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again, the left is like a battered wife who keeps making excuses for the beatings she gets from her husband. It’s just too bad that the rest of us have to live with their domination of our culture.

The Walzer-March Exchange: I Wasn’t Expecting This

Recently, I made comments (here) on Andrew March’s response to a column by Michael Walzer in Dissent Magazine. In addition, Maverick Philosopher has made comments on Michael Walzer’s original column (here). The topic was the left and the Islamists, and Walzer made critical comments on the left’s stance toward the Islamists, while March defended that stance. It has been quite a while since I have actually engaged with an Islamophile because their opinions are always so alarming, repulsive, and (there is no other word for this) reactionary that I gave up ages ago, but I finally decided I had to email a letter to March about what I believe. I pointed out that neither one of them had discussed a very important aspect of the situation between the left and the Islamists, namely those leftists who have been murdered by Islamists. I then listed some of those murdered or living under the threat of murder: the tens of thousands of leftists murdered by Ayatollah Khomeini, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and the recent attacks in France and Denmark. I concluded by observing that the left seemed to be in denial about these murders and that the left’s top priority – and in fact every movement’s top priority – should be protecting its own members. I mentioned priorities for the simple reason that March himself had said that the left’s top priority isn’t going after the Islamists (because he believes there is massive state force already being used against ISIS, for example), but attacking American imperialism.

To my surprise, he wrote back saying, “Very very true.”

Needless to say, protecting leftists – and I am thinking of women, gays, and secularists in particular – from Muslims has not been the left’s top priority for the past few decades. The left’s policy, as I believe Mark Steyn has characterized it, is one-way multiculturalism: we have to be nice to the Muslims, but they can do anything they like to us. To make protecting leftists from Muslims their top priority would mean a massive switch in rhetoric and policies, and I don’t know if March realizes what he has committed himself to in agreeing with me. Let me list some of the big changes that would have to occur, but first let me note that any policy that aims to protect leftists will in fact be a policy that protects everyone. That is, unless we want police protection for every non-Muslim, we are going to have to demand major changes from Muslims if we want to protect leftists.

1. The anti-assimilation policy has got to go. There needs to be pressure to assimilate. I don’t mean Muslims have to give up Islam, but no one on the left should be bothered at pressure on Muslims to treat others with respect. Other people have the right to live in ways they are accustomed to without having to worry about going into hiding, dressing in ways they don’t like, treating Muslims differently than they would treat Christians, or even believing that they must convert in order to survive. The leftist idea of sensitivity training, which so far has been advocated for us non-Muslims but never (it seems) for Muslims, needs to adopted. Such a policy may mean sending some Muslims home if they prove incapable of treating the rest of us with respect, but sending them back is better than having them here being an annoyance or worse.

2. When death threats are made, and even carried out, against harmless cartoonists and authors who have said something that Muslims don’t like, the left needs to say, “Stop that. We aren’t going to support you when you make threats.” And no more comments, please, on how the cartoonists shouldn’t have done that. This is the West, and that is what free speech is about. Muslims need to be told that the best way to deal with them is to get back at them using their pens, so to speak, and not their swords. Of course, any speech that makes actual threats against Muslims will be condemned, but mere ridicule or criticism needs to be allowed.

3. The left here in the West needs to reach out to leftists in the Muslim world, for they have abandoned them. That is the basic message that Karima Bennoune conveys in her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. In fact, not only do leftists here in the West need to reach out to these people, they need to make reaching out to them a greater priority than reaching out to any other person, group, or regime in the Muslim world. It is true that Walzer does see the need for this, but March seems to be more concerned with Muslims in the Third World than their secular opponents.

4. The left needs to stop treating Iran as some kind of ally. It should be regarded as the left’s worst enemy. Make it clear that these negotiations that our president is doing with Iran are the exact opposite of what he should be doing, which is undermining that regime as much as possible.

5. Ayaan Hirsi Ali needs to be accepted. The fact that she hates all of Islam is of no more importance than is the fact that many atheist writers on the left hate all religions.

7. Abandon the “grievance” theory. I abandoned it ages ago after the butchering of those leftists in Iran. What “grievances” were responsible for that? Those leftists were just as anti-American as the Muslims were.

8. Give up the fantasy that anti-imperialist Muslims agree with you. In the original essay by Walzer, he notes that Judith Butler believes that Hamas and Hezbollah are leftist because they are anti-imperialist. Actually, these groups are probably against American imperialism, while being indifferent or even for Islamic imperialism.

9. Finally, there needs to be a great change in the rhetoric that is coming out of the institutions that do their best to shape our opinions (our schools, the media, and Hollywood). The canary in the mine here is the fact that thousands of people from the West have run off to join ISIS. No one in the West should be running off to join ISIS. This isn’t because we need to ensure that these people are stopped by the authorities before they go, but because they should never even think of going in the first place. People who want to join ISIS, after hearing about all the atrocities against innocent people, obviously don’t care about those innocent people. Why would that be? Why would people growing up in the West in the twenty-first century imagine that the rights of innocent people don't matter in some cases? It can only be that what they are hearing from everyone around them is that Muslims are more important than anyone else.

At this point, I don’t care what leftists think they are saying to the world. What is coming through is that they are saying that Muslim lives matter more than anyone else’s lives. This is shown in many, many ways, but it would involve another entire column to discuss it, which I hope to do tomorrow.

These are some of the changes that need to be made in order to help protect leftist (and everyone else's) lives from Muslims.

No, President Obama, It Isn’t about Grievances

Our president has written an op-ed in the LA Times (here) explaining what our government is doing about terrorism. He insists that “groups like al Qaeda and ISIL promote a twisted interpretation of religion that is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims.” It may be rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims, but that doesn’t mean it is twisted. I suggest he read this long essay in the Atlantic that indicates it is not twisted.

More disappointingly, he keeps harping on the left’s view that it’s all about grievances and that “groups like al Qaeda and ISIL exploit the anger that festers when people feel that injustice and corruption leave them with no chance of improving their lives.” Yet, why would people who felt this way shoot Malala? And why would the Islamists who had just taken over Iran after the Shah’s eviction kill tens of thousands of leftists? After all, this was the Islamists best chance they were ever going to get to improve their lives because they had just taken over a whole country. They weren’t powerless, as Obama seems to imply.

Finally, he claims that “we do not yet know why three young people, who were Muslim Americans, were brutally killed in Chapel Hill, N.C.” Actually, we do know. The murderer was an angry guy who hated a lot of different groups, not just Muslims. Plus, he was angry at them for, it seems, breaking the rules of the apartment complex they all lived in. This is one time Obama should address the world’s Muslims and make it clear to them that the victims were not murdered because they were Muslim and that the victims could just as well have been Christians.

To get back to what he says about grievances and injustice and corruption. To talk about all this is worthless since it is attacking “root causes,” and we don’t really have the time to deal with them right now. People are dying and being sold into slavery, so we need to act now. Moreover, the sort of changes that would need to be made are enormous, for they amount to turning the Third World into the First World. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

But we don’t need to worry about root causes since plenty of problems have been dealt with without worrying about them. We dealt with Nazi Germany and militaristic Japan in World War II without worrying about the root causes that led to their rise. We investigated them afterwards, and of course there was not even agreement on them. To consider another example, hooliganism at soccer games emerged in Britain in the 1970s and persisted for more than a decade. All during that time leftists complained that nothing could be done until its root cause (poverty) was dealt with. Finally, the government got sense and instituted ten-year jail sentences for anyone caught misbehaving. That cleared up the problem in no time.

Incidentally, the essay at the Atlantic includes a fascinating account of a group of extremists whom I have no problems with: quietest Salafi Muslims. These are Muslims who are extreme, but who are also non-political. That’s fine with me. If they think that picky little rules about their beards and clothing are what gets you saved, fine. As long as they aren’t bothering the rest of us, they can do what they like.

The article also points out the emergence among ISIS of the idea that slavery is permitted by shari’a, so it should be re-instituted. It is hard to imagine that mere “grievances” would provoke people to such extreme violations of others’ rights.

A Fair Question on Anti-Semitism

At this site, a commenter asks why the owner of the site never talks about right-wing anti-Semitism. I admit I don’t do that, either. Ok, so here goes. As far as I know, the right in America is very pro-Israel, and so is no longer anti-Semitic. The far right (David Duke) is probably still anti-Semitic, but they have no influence on much of anything these days, so it is hardly worth the time to condemn them. One might as well worry about the Freemasons (which some Islamists actually do worry about).

I don’t know about the situation in Western Europe. I know that liberals say that anti-Semitic acts there have the support of both Muslims and of the far right, but they seldom are explicit about whom they mean, so I can’t be sure about this. And maybe this is something from the older generation, as Jean-Marie Le Pen is anti-Semitic, but his daughter isn’t. In any case, the existence of an anti-Semitic far right in Western Europe is again hardly worth talking about since they obviously have no influence on politics or culture (especially in places like Sweden).

Eastern Europe is different. They (or maybe just Hungary) still seem to have the same anti-Semitic right that all of Europe had before World War II, probably because they were separated by the Iron Curtain from the currents of thought in Western Europe and because they haven’t seen the large influx of Muslim immigrants that has changed the focus of the right in Western Europe. So far, though, their existence does not seem as much of a problem as does the left’s support for the anti-Semitism of the Muslims.

There. When they become significant again, I will write more.

An Islamophile Speaks

Yesterday, I learned (thanks to Keith Burgess-Jackson; see here) about an essay in Dissent magazine by Michael Walzer, who is on the left but who shares concerns with us “Islamophobes.” See here. There is also a response to the essay (here) by Andrew March, who is an associate professor of political science at Yale University. Let me point out some of the responses he has made and then comment on those responses.

1. Leftists have priorities, and fighting the Islamists isn’t one of them. Fighting American imperialism is much more important.

2. This is because there is already a lot of fierce criticism against the Islamists, as well as massive state violence against them.

3. Because of this state violence, the war against Islamism is taking care of itself, and there is no need for the liberal left to get involved.

4. Leftists have time and again condemned the actions of the Islamists, despite what Walzer thinks. “Who doubts that we are against these things?” he asks.

5. “For my part, I doubt that future historians will look back at the period between 2001 and 2014 and remember it for its culture of appeasement, excuse, and apology toward Islamist terrorism.”

6. People in the Muslim world struggling for justice, equality, and democracy aren’t looking for the help of Westerners, and instead they want the help of leftists in restraining “non-leftist Western power in their countries.”

7. If leftists have decided to focus on our (i.e., America’s) ongoing crimes rather than those of the Islamists, “how can Walzer be so sure that this judgment is wrong?” It is always easier, he claims, to focus on the crimes against us rather than one’s own crimes.

8. Anyone who gives an explanation for the rise of Islamism other than its being due to colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism is giving a thin explanation.

9. We on the left don’t have power.

Completely missing from March’s response is any recounting of the threats of murder and actual murders of leftists by Islamists. For those new to this blog, let me note that these include (1) the murder of tens of thousands of liberals and leftists in Iran after the Shah was evicted, (2) the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, (3) the murder of Theo van Gogh, (4) the threats against the Danish cartoonists, (5) the murder of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, and (6) the recent attack in Copenhagen. There are also any number of murders in the Muslim world that we seldom hear about. One can only guess at what he would say. That they are nothing but outliers? Anyway, let me respond to his responses in order.

1. If it is true, as I believe, that Islamists will have no hesitation in killing leftists when they have the chance to, then not making them first priority could mean the death of the left in the West. The left underestimated the Nazis, too.

2. There is fierce criticism against the Islamists, but it seems to come from ordinary people and not from our media, schools, or Hollywood. Accordingly, it feels like nothing is being said because they control the national vibes. As for the massive state violence, there are no boots on the ground against ISIS. I know of no Western powers arrayed against Boko Haram in order to get the Nigerian schoolgirls back, and they keep committing outrages.

3. There is no reason to believe that the war against the Islamists is taking care of itself because the groups seem to proliferate. Anyway, both Walzer and March seem to believe that the fight is overseas and not also right here at home.

4. Despite claiming that leftists have denounced the Islamists, he gives no citations. And lots of us doubt that they are against these things. We seldom hear leftists condemn them, there are no demonstrations against them, and the demonstrations that do occur are against other outrages which are minor by comparison. So, it is reasonable to doubt that they are against them.

5. It could very well be that leftist historians will not look back on our era in that way, but that doesn’t mean that others will follow their example. For that matter, there is no guarantee that the left will be here at the end of this century.

6. To begin with, when the Arab Spring hit Syria, the rebels wanted our help, despite March’s belief that what people in the Muslim world want is for us to get out. Secondly, in the book I am frequently praising and referring to, Karima Bennoune’s Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, actual voices from the Muslim world are quoted, and what they don’t like is the way that Western leftists have abandoned them and instead support the Islamists. It is true that these voices are from leftists in the Muslim world and not from Islamists, but why would leftists in the West want to ignore other leftists?

7. When someone doesn’t talk about an important topic – in this case, the killings of leftists by Islamists – one assumes that they are in denial about reality and so it is reasonable in this case to assume that the left is wrong. Of course, it could be that leftists will eventually begin talking about the killings of leftists by Muslims, and they will make it clear why they think those killings are unimportant. But until that happens, I have to conclude that they are in denial and that accordingly they are wrong.

Let me digress and point out that if you are a young person, you might want to think carefully about getting involved with the left since they don’t seem to care about their own.

8. It is true that this response was an ad hominem response to Walzer, who in fact did give no explanation of the rise of Islamism other than that religion is back with a vengeance. So, let me give a stab at it. Every culture has a default mode that is strongly traditional, anti-science, irrational, and of course anti-leftist. This is what human culture was like for tens of thousands of years, and it is only recently that things have changed. However, they can revert back at any moment if one’s guard is let down. And that is what has happened in the Muslim world. They seldom left default mode during their supremacy, and after having been surpassed by the West, have been reluctant to change. Still, change was happening, partly as a result of pressure from us Westerners, but then the pressure vanished when the New Left emerged. No more did we Westerners talk about how Muslims needed to become more Western. Instead, the new message said that there was nothing wrong with the Muslim world and that it was in fact the West that was the problem. We in the West needed to stop being imperialists over you, we said.

With the relaxation of pressure from the West, the reactionaries began clawing their way back. They got a big boost when the Shah of Iran was evicted, and they ruthlessly eliminated their leftist rivals. Then when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was issued, and we in the West did almost nothing, they realized we had no will to fight them. The Islamists smelled blood. They were helped by massive numbers of Muslim immigrants who, thanks to the left, had no pressure put on them to assimilate.

There are now near-constant terrorist incidents and would-be terrorist attacks. It seems that new groups are springing up all the time to fight us, some in the Middle East, but some here. Of course they fight each other, too, but they all say the same thing, that they want to impose shari’a on us, and that they will succeed in doing so.

9. It was the left that has had the power to bring in massive numbers of immigrants and to insist that they will not have any pressure on them to assimilate. For a leftist to bemoan their lack of power means they aren’t looking in the right directions.

I could say a lot more, but this should suffice.