SecretAgentMan's Dossier

Conservative Confusion

Oh, but Ms. Coulter was simply exercising her Western rights to free speech. As such remarks go, hers was merely banal and boring -- not the kind of thing that's really offensive. Besides, once a couple of imams publish a pamphlet juxtaposing Coulter's remarks with manufactured quotes about ‘sand n*ggers' and ‘goat b*ggerers," the blame will be on them for any outrage among Muslims. The important thing is to resist the craven tide of dhimmitude that's washing over that font of moral cowardice, The American Spectator, and the dhimmis at CPAC -- all of whom are, at present, falling over themselves in their anti-American haste to placate the Jihadis and hasten the suicide of the West.

The point being that, to appropriate Goldwater, "barbaric vulgarity in the pursuit of virtue is a vice." Hat tip to Kathy Schaidle, whose blog also quotes Midwest Conservative Journal's opinion that people who want to inculcate "‘new rules of civic behavior respectful of other cultures and religions'" among Muslims are "‘Idiots.'"[**]

Which is it? Is Ann Coulter's "quip" to be despised, or is Western civilization wasted on rag-heads? The Left doesn't care. They're happy enough just hating the West and using whatever knife is handy. The conservatives don't know. On one side of their mouths they wax lyrical about the value of Western civilization and the moral necessity of its victory over Islam, and on the other side of their mouths they talk about "rag-heads" and write off the prospect of inculcating Western civilization among Muslims as something for "idiots." Sometimes it seems to me that the only conservative debate about the Islamic world is whether we're too good for them or they're too depraved for us.

Giving conservatives the benefit of the doubt, I think it's worthwhile to remind them that they're supposed to be championing a civilization and not merely defending the approved membership of an elite social club from hooligans and gate-crashers. Or, to quote someone who must have been a conservative, the best defense is a good offense.

Suppose, just for a minute, that you're a "rag-head." All your life you've heard nothing about God except what's been filtered through a man-made religion that combines some of the worst aspects of pharisaism with a moral code culled from crib notes about the Bible and some 7th-century folk wisdom. You've also been taught that Westerners are liars who hate you, and that the reason Westerners hate you is that they hate God. At about the same time, the biggest, baddest, most powerful Western nation starts kicking ass and taking names in your country (or next door) on behalf of a civilization whose literati call you a "rag-head" and are pretty frank about how stupid and barbaric you are. What do you do?

You do what any ordinarily-reasonable person would do -- change the channel to Al-Jazeera. This will, of course, be seized upon by said Westerners as "proof" that you're an ignorant "rag-head." But why should you care? You've caught them in a lie about their own civilization -- they say it's for everyone, but they mean only to vaunt themselves over the Prophet and his Dar al Islam. Just like the Imam said they would. And so the ignorant armies take another step toward their darkling plain.

Folks, a billion people aren't going to go away and leave us alone just because we call them names and drop bombs on some of their countries. And just as I admit that many of them are pretty scary folks, and that they have more than their fair share of ignorant, malevolent, and/or lying sons-of-bitches, I believe that we can do better than this. A good place to start would be to figure out whether they're "rag-heads" or victims of one of history's greatest tragedies, and whether doing anything about it is something that should only interest "idiots."

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[**] Which is not the same thing as saying that people who commend or attempt to conduct said dialogue can't actually be idiots. I can think of plenty of people (like the first ten patrons who show up for happy hour at Hooter's) who could do it better than the National Council of Churches, the "Parliament of the World's Religions," or the United Nations. But that wasn't MCJ's point, either; MCJ's sneering at the goal, not only the boobs who are, at present, the only ones interested in pursuing it. That's another problem with the confused conservatives; they're letting the Booberati steal a march on them in this area.