Mick Hartley

Liel Leibovitz, in the Tablet, on the new defeatist chic in the wake of Nice:

What is to be done about the wave of terror that washes over the world every damn day? If you ask The New Yorker’s George Packer, nothing much: “No revelations come from the massacre in Nice,” Packer wrote shortly after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel propelled a 21-ton truck down a crowded promenade, killing 84 and wounding hundreds more. “There is nothing to be learned. This is what we live with, what we are getting used to living with. None of it is surprising—that’s the most frightening thing of all.”

Here in the UK practically the same article was penned by – of course – Simon Jenkins. Sympathy for the victims, but beyond that…nothing. Anything we do beyond shrugging our shoulders will only make matters worse.

What we're all dreading apparently – what we're constantly being warned about – is this right-wing "Islamophobic" backlash.

To hear the guardians of the good-willed galaxy tell it, the universe we live in is a see-saw. On the one end, beastly terrorists, like zombies, mindlessly perpetrate their gruesome attacks; on the other, the brutes of the far right, just as mindless, react to the bloodshed with their own brand of bigotry, which would inevitably lead to more bloodshed and more madness. In the middle, keeping the balance and the peace, are the nuanced and mature adults on the center and the left, wise souls who believe that globalism’s hope will defeat terrorism’s fear.

This worldview has brought about a host of startling alignments. In France, Germany, Austria, America, and you-name-it, center and left political outfits are looking at the world and surmising that the chief threat to its stability and prosperity are the restless hordes of the far right. Through some absent-minded fit, the same scholastically minded folks all too ready to dismiss the new jihad as nothing more than a feeling believe, when it comes to their own backyard fascists, that the right-wing goons are well-organized, thoroughly disciplined, and dearly committed to disturbing the democratic order. Why Mark would obey a doctrine while Mohamed is merely capable of a whim is anybody’s guess, but the left’s tendency to see The Other as not entirely capable of possessing agency and therefore in constant need of the mindful white person’s protection is nothing new. With this dogma beating strong, the wise souls embrace immigrants even as they refuse to contemplate any safe and sane immigration policy, and court soft Islamists while demanding absolutely no denunciations of benighted beliefs. If you’re a Republican congressman, say, and you call homosexuals a small and extremely powerful group of transgressors who should be punished, the wise souls will rightly condemn you and call for your head; but be a Baltimore imam and say the exact same things, and the Democratic president of the United States may just come knocking for a friendly visit.

Such a double standard is not only morally revolting, it’s politically disastrous as well. Because any attempt to reform Muslim societies from the outside—using either soft power or the harder, militarized variety—reeks of American imperialism and calls to mind the ghost of George W. Bush, the political left has committed itself to a radically nonconfrontational posture toward anything pertaining to Islam. Terrorism strikes in Nice, Medina, or San Bernardino? Depend on stern pundits first urging you not to jump to conclusions and then, when the perpetrator is revealed to be another ISIS drone, writing off the attack to some external and more manageable force like mental illness, homophobia, or petty criminality. This is not a coincidence: Having resolved not to use force against Muslim states, even the ones openly and giddily sponsoring terrorism, and having committed to repenting for what they see as the Original Sin of American imperialism, those on the political left have very few options but to retreat further into their own narrative, into the hope that reason and temperance will somehow triumph over savagery. Like the world’s worst poker players, they’ve resolved not to check, bet, raise, or call—all they can do, all they do time and again, is fold….