Monday, October 18, 2010

Obama is not a Kenyan. He is a Counter-Tribalist.

John O'Sullivan wrote an article in National Review just four weeks after the events of 9/11.  He coined the phrase counter-tribalism.  This is a portion of what he said:


This is a form of intellectual snobbery. A person in its grip has imbibed the notion that the patriotism of ordinary people is something simplistic, vulgar, and shameful, and thus to be avoided. He has been told that a genuinely sophisticated person — a university professor, say — has thrown off patriotic prejudice to become a citizen of the world. Now, of course, genuine cosmopolitanism is an admirable thing, drawing upon wide cultural sympathies but perfectly compatible with a simple love of country, as the work of any number of poets demonstrates. It is accordingly very rare. So what the counter-tribalist mistakes for cosmopolitanism is an inverted jingoism — an instinctive preference for other nations and a marked prejudice that in any conflict the enemy of America is in the right.


Sound like anyone you know?  This mindset could go a long way towards explaining Obama's international "Whose Butt Can I Kiss Next?" tour.  This is what Salman Rushdie had to say about counter-tribalism as it relates to terrorism in the world view of Islamic Fundamentalists:

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. These are tyrants, not Muslims....
The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.

Let's be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions. Furthermore, terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate complaints by illegitimate means. The terrorist wraps himself in the world's grievances to cloak his true motives. Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better world was part of it. 


Isn't it ironic that most of what fundamentalist muslims oppose is exactly what Progressives claim to support?  Are they really that ignorant of the true aims of muslim's dream of global Sharia law?  Or, do they believe they will use Islamofacism until they've reached their goals and then tell radical Islam to leave?

Maybe they should study recent history.  The "Progressive" movement in Iran were allied with the radical Islamists in their collective efforts to overthrow the Shah.  Today progressives there are just as extinct as the Shah, and the country (along with much of the Middle East) are ruled or threatened by a theocracy headed by a madman.

  
 

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