Baying Down Alarms Against The "Apocalyptically-Inspired Enemy": The Illiberal Liberals of the West

In Front Page magazine David Solway has written a perceptive and timely article entitled "Islamophilia and Judeophobia," examining the Western liberal establishment's "venereal attachment to Islam and its tandem resilement of Israel and Jews," its "schmoozing with terrorists," and its "demonization of Israel" which, as he puts it,

"is a sign not only of collective bad faith, international hypocrisy, millennial prejudice and pure malevolence, but quite simply of massive intellectual derangement. It is facilitated by a refusal to sift the historical facts from the welter of lies and disinformation that deliberately cloud the historical and political context, the dismissal of the provisions of international law and, once again, the abandonment of reason."

Having pointed to the manifestations of this phenomenon in Norway, he concludes:

'What we are really witnessing in Europe, the U.S., and its outriders in Canada and Australia—the synoptic West—is the doleful spectacle of a civilization in denial, a myopic civilization that in most of its cultural and political centers will not recognize it is under attack and that seems haplessly incapable of mounting meaningful resistance, let alone launching a counter-attack against an apocalyptically-inspired enemy to ensure its own preservation—what Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism designates as “the self-absorbed delusions of the Eurocentric imagination” refusing to understand that “a liberal society must be, when challenged, a warlike society; or it will not endure.” The turn against Israel is merely another expression of the West’s complicity in its own demise, for Israel is not only the ancient home of the Jewish people to which it is legally and historically entitled, it is the fount of the West’s moral and cultural inheritance, and a tributary source of the West’s civilizing imperative.

Between Islamophilia and Judeophobia falls the shadow.' [My emphasis]  http://frontpagemag.com/2011/08/02/islamophilia-and-judeophobia/

One "liberal" of the type identified by Solway is former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland, Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.  He features in my recent blogpost on the toxic amount of antisemitism in Norway, much of it driven by the political left. http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/07/sad-song-of-norway-its-antisemitic.html

Immediately after Breivik's atrocities, the pro-Palestinian Jagland (whose own nation cares little about Jews' rights amid the multicultural mix that it's become, and who decried a Jew's appointment as Obama's chief of staff) told a British newspaper, The Observer, Sunday stable-mate to the odious anti-Israel Guardian (itself a classic exemplar of left-liberal Islamophilia) that is incumbent on western political leaders to beware of stoking far-right, anti-Muslim sentiment.  This is obviously a rebuke to David Cameron, who recently made an uncharacteristically tough speech regarding multiculturalism and the limits of tolerance: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/02/requiem-for-islamic-wolves-in-sheeps.html

Jagland added:

'We also need to stop using 'Islamic terrorism', which indicates that terrorism is about Islam. We should be saying that terrorism is terrorism and not linked to religion.' http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/30/david-cameron-far-right-nobel-warning

So presumably if Jagland (who wants to rebrand multiculturalism "diversity"), would have political leaders and all the rest of us turn a deaf ear to speeches such as this one, or at least a blind eye to who is doing the talking:

It's high time Jagland and his compatriots, especially the ruling leftist elite, took some advice themselves.  They could do no better than to heed Alan Dershowitz, who knows partly from firsthand experience what a rancid antisemitic country theirs is:

"The time is long overdue for Norwegians to do some deep soul searching about their sordid history of complicity with all forms of bigotry ranging from the anti-Semitic Nazis to the anti-Semitic Hamas. There seems to be a common thread"  http://www.hudson-ny.org/2310/terrorism-norway-israel

Inevitably, it's being claimed in some quarters, including Norwegian ones, that Breivik was in the pay of Mossad:

And almost as soon as Breivik's "Manifesto" became known, individuals whose writings he's mentioned were being blamed as if they'd somehow egged him on.

A post on a leftwing site in the United States typifies the depths to which a number of anti-conservatives will go to impugn their opponents and cajole them into silence.  It begins:

'As a writer, it sure sucks when someone murders a bunch of people based on your ideas. (I mean, I assume that sucks. Weirdly, it's never happened to me.) So you can understand why right-wing anti-Islam bloggers are all being kind of defensive, these days.

Anders Breivik, the anti-Islam terrorist who killed 77 people in Norway on July 22, read a lot of American anti-Islam bloggers, many of whom he cited in his lengthy manifesto. Breivik's favorites included Robert Spencer, a self-proclaimed expert on Islam whose "Jihad Watch" blog was quoted and cited in Breivik's manifesto, and Spencer's ally and collaborator Pam Geller, whose "Atlas Shrugs" was similarly recommended by the killer.' http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/08/01/pamela_geller_norway

Others at whom the finger has been pointed include the prominent British columnist Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post, and Australian Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant magazine:
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2011/07/breivik-and-totalitarian-democ.php
http://melaniephillips.com/hatred-smears-and-liberals-bullying-us-into-silence
http://melaniephillips.com/a-weird-obsession

Writes Windschuttle:

".... Even though the stakes in the present conflict over multiculturalism in the West are very high -- with the concepts of free speech, the rule of law, equality of women and freedom of religion all open to debate -- most conservatives have respected the rules of evidence and the avoidance of ad hominem abuse.

Their left-wing opponents, however, as the Norwegian tragedy has demonstrated yet again, will resort to the lowest tactics to shut down debate they do not like and to kill off arguments they cannot refute by any other means." http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/07/charge-of-deadly-provocation-is-false

See also: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2011/08/the-myth-of-right-wing-terrorism

As one of the annotations to an edited video on the Vlad Tepes blog of a press conference by British Islamists notes, it's not certain that those featured will succeed in their stated aims, but it's not certain they'll fail, either.http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=36208