“Western Suicide–Liberalism”
Ok, it is not the easiest read. But then defending America has never been an easy job. Take the time and effort to read and understand the following article by Pat Buchanan.
V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D. 8/30/10
Where are the Republican leaders who will reject pandering and prejudice?” wailed The Washington Post in its most recent editorial in support of Cordoba House mosque near Ground Zero.
Like the controversy over the mosque, the Post editorial reveals the two Americas we have become, uncomprehending of and hostile to each other, even as we drift apart.
To the Post, opposition boils down to three arguments, all of them “objectionable.” The first is a wrong-headed belief “that the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center and killed almost 3,000 people there in 2001 really did represent Islam.”
The second is that, as many families of 9/11 victims associate the terrorists with Islam, to build a mosque near the scene of the massacre would be sacrilegious and wounding.
The third is cynical politics. As two-in-three Americans oppose the mosque, siding with them and savaging supporters of Cordoba House is to run unconscionably with the crowd.
None of these arguments is acceptable, says the Post, for they represent misunderstanding, prejudice or “repugnant” politics.
What the Post is saying is that opponents of the mosque are all either bigoted ignoramuses or political panderers.
Quite a statement, when a Time poll finds that 61 percent of Americans oppose the mosque and 70 percent believe that to build it near Ground Zero would defile hallowed ground.
“(T)he right response to misunderstanding and prejudice,” said the Post, “is education, not appeasement.”
In short, rather than yield to ignorance, bigotry and demagoguery, the Post will undertake to tutor us on how to think correctly.
This is a pure extract of liberal ideology. Few better examples of faculty-lounge obtuseness to the feelings of the people among whom they live are to be found. Yet, the editorial has a point.
For, in Webster’s, there are several definitions of “prejudice.”
The most pejorative one is “an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race.” Another definition, however, is simply a “preconceived judgment or opinion.”
It is this idea of prejudice that Edmund Burke endorsed:
“Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it most wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason.”
“Naked reason,” pure rationalism, permeates the Post editorial, which ignores that vast realm of sentiments, such as patriotism and love, that reside in the terrain between thought and feeling.
“The heart has reasons that the mind knows not,” said Pascal.
True conservatives are people of the heart who use the weapons of the mind to defend the things of the heart.
Why would Americans be reflexively skeptical and wary of Islam?
We were born a Christian nation, an extension of Christendom. For most of us, it is part of our DNA. And for a thousand years, our ancestors fought a war of civilizations with Islam.
In the name of Islam, Muslim fanatics massacred 3,000 of us. In our media, the names commonly associated with Islam are al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.
What are sins in Christianity — adultery and homosexuality — are capital crimes in Islamic countries. From the Copts in Egypt to the Chaldeans of Iraq, Christians are persecuted and purged in the Middle East. Few remain in the old Christian towns of Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem. Christian missionaries in Islamic countries risk stonings and beheading. Muslims are attacking Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, the Caucasus, Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Are there scores of thousands of patriotic American Muslims, hundreds of millions of decent, peace-loving Muslims around the world?
Undeniably true.
Yet one would have to be obtuse not to understand that a Western nation that opens its doors to mass migration from the Islamic world is taking a grave risk with its unity and identity.
An apprehension about that is what Burke called the “latent wisdom” of a people.
This is not an argument for war with Islam, but for recognition that “East is East and West is West” and America cannot absorb and assimilate all the creeds of mankind without ceasing to be who we are.
Prejudice is prejudgment. And if prejudgment is rooted in the history and traditions of a people, and what life has taught us, it is a shield that protects. Only a fool would reject the inherited wisdom of his kind because it fails to comport with the ideology of the moment.
“Prejudice,” wrote Burke, “is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved.”
Without prejudice, we are tabula rasa, blank slates, upon which any ideology may be written, including what James Burnham called the ideology of Western suicide — liberalism.
Pat Buchanan
Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, and the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America .
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Tags: Christianity, Islam, Pat Buchanan, V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D., Western suicide--livebalism
Cultural Survival Skills 
May 3, 2016 at 11:53 PM |
It is in reality a nice and helpful piece of info.
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Please keep us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing.
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October 29, 2011 at 7:12 AM |
Furkan Güngör / Blog…
[…]“Western Suicide–Liberalism” «[…]…
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September 4, 2010 at 9:40 PM |
President F.D.Roosevelt during WWII,by executive order,had interned thousands of Japanese families.Did this violate their constitutional rights-yes.Was the President prejudice-yes.
What was the sentiment of the majority of Americans toward Japanese?I would say something close to what the sentiment of the American people is toward the building of a mosque near the site of the Twin Towers.
The polls indicate it is not a sound judgement on the part of citizen Muslims to move forward with such a project.
Lets be honest the constitution,religion,politics in this country are abused on a daily basis as well as our prejudices toward each other.
Common sense,understanding ones love and patriotism for country should prevail and let Mother Time take its course…eventually healing the open wounds that today now exist.
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September 2, 2010 at 10:28 AM |
Frank has precisely expressed several of my thoughts when I read this article. I have a few more.
As an independent, I hold no particular allegiance to either the GOP or Democrats. I weigh each perspective from each side against my own set of ideals and with logic more so than emotion. Certainly, 9/11 and the affairs surrounding ground zero bring about substantial emotional baggage. What I find most deplorable is the blatant use of this emotional baggage for political jousting. At least, I hope it is entirely political jousting, else, we truly are heading down the wrong road.
My independent perspective remembers history. I remember the Nazi party claiming a better way of life during a turbulent time, (just as Islam does as a method of self promotion). I remember how the Nazis first started out well intentioned, and then became more dictatorial – starting with the burning of books which did not live up to their ideals, and eventually, the burning of people who did not have their same “DNA”. I see the hypocrisy of a conservative influenced campaign to get back to the basics of what America was founded on, yet the actions and words are anything but. How eerie the Nazi book banning is to Sarah Palins use of her influence to ban books in a public library that she did not like and then to torpedo the career of the librarian who correctly refused to yield to government censorship, (non-censorship being one of the tenants of our Constitution). How eerie the exclusionary association of Christianity being the DNA of America when our country was founded on the two tenants of freedom of religion and separation of church and state. How hypocritical of conservatives to demand that our government should return to the basics from which our country was founded and then to criticize the current administration for upholding those very principles. How blind of Americans to not recognize how the Patriot Act has done more to shred the very fabric of the tenants of the Constitution than any other congressional act in history, yet the conservative ploy is to attempt to frighten the masses in to believing that health care for all is the greatest destructive implementation.
Is the building of a mosque so close to the former site of the twin towers in poor taste? – absolutely. But if you believe in America, it’s tenants, it’s beliefs, than you should be defending the legal rights of citizens to engage in freedom of religion as one of those tenants.
How hypocritical to state that America can not indulge the inclusion of a particular culture, when that is exactly what America is – the melting pot of the world; the home of those seeking freedoms from a government that would mandate what religion you can practice, (or if), and how. America has proven that all religions can coexist peacefully, yet the hypocrites wish to jeopardize that realization.
And before someone comments that the unconstitutional aspect of the Patriot Act and some other recent government injustices are a necessary evil, I’d like to point out the Nazi party had that precise perspective and that the same logic can be used to cripple other tenants what Americans should be holding so dear – such as the remainder of the Constitution.
Your outrage is incomplete.
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August 31, 2010 at 3:31 PM |
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/30/taliban-using-mosque-controversy-to-recruit.html
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August 31, 2010 at 12:15 AM |
We were born a Christian nation, an extension of Christendom.
False. The declaration of independence does not begin, “All men are endowed by Jesus Christ with inalienable right, such as ….” The constitution of the United States does not begin “We the people, in order to perfect the body of Christ, …” At best, the United States is a monotheistic nation — Thomas Jefferson was a Deist — not a Christian at all, and most of the founding fathers did not bring up the name of Jesus when talking about Government.
> For most of us, it is part of our DNA.
Either false, or hyperbole. There is no such thing as Christian DNA.
> And for a thousand years, our ancestors fought a war of civilizations with Islam.
For every Christian who was killed by a Muslim during those thousand years, hundreds of Christians were killed by other Christians.
> Quite a statement, when a Time poll finds that 61 percent of Americans oppose the mosque and 70 percent believe that to build it near Ground Zero would defile hallowed ground.
Since when is truth determined by a poll? If the ground is holy — the building of a mosque two blocks away does not defile it. The sins of the strip clubs across the street *might* defile it — the selling of 9/11 memorabilia would be a direct defiling of the holy ground, and were Jesus alive today he would chase the vendors away from that holy ground just as he did the money changers at the Temple when he was alive on Earth. If you want to keep ground zero holy, there are many things you can do, but opposing a mosque two blocks away (or a thousand blocks away in Tennessee, or other places) shows that it is xenophobia and not the keeping of holy ground that you are interested in.
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