The Unreality Principle in Action
A reader who goes by the fruitful name of Watermelonyo takes me to task for daring to say that the modern Left supports the Jihad. He expresses astonishment, and doubts my sincerity and even my sanity for saying such a thing.
Time does not permit me to post a complete list of the outrageous statements and actions by the Left who have defended the Jihadist enemy. I assume we all remember the human shields who volunteered, with their bodies and their lives, to defend Saddam against the West.
However, time does allow me to post a partial list, compiled by another man, of supporters and support for various aspects of Jihadist terror. I have not clicked through all the links, for there are too many. I have not reproduced his whole list, for it is too long.
The list below is from one Mark Humphrys, an Irish Atheist who ‘self-identifies’ as a Liberal-Right, because the Left support for Islamic Fascism drives him away from the Left.
I reprint his list in part, and his comments, without his permission, in the hope that he would approve that his work in lighting his torch will shine a light on this dark issue.
My point in posting this list is not to convince my honorable opposition that the Left does indeed support Jihad. My point is that it is not insane, nor even unreasonable, for an honest man to see what Leftwing figures have said and done and come to the conclusion that a collusion of sentiment exists.
I am proposing that I am that one figure whom Leftists steadfastly say does not and cannot exist: a reasonable man whose conclusions do not match Leftwing conclusions.
The part of the list I find saddest is the one placed at the top. These were Mr Humpheys’ heroes, the thinkers he trusted and admired,who betrayed their trust in him. If you click through no other links, click that one. It makes for interesting reading.
The words below are Mr Humphrys’.
The left’s reaction to 9/11
- Chew on This by Christopher Hitchens – “Ever since that morning, the United States has been at war with the forces of reaction.” – and the left supports the reactionaries.
- People who let me down after Sept 11th
- Jean Baudrillard
- Baudrillard’s decadent applause for 9/11: “That we have dreamed of this event, that everyone without exception has dreamed of it, because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any given power that has become hegemonic to such a point, is unacceptable for the Western moral conscience but it is still a fact which is measured precisely by all the pathetic violence of all the words that would erase it. Ultimately, they did it but we asked for it.”
- Baudrillard on the WTC: “The horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them – the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.”
- Damien Hirst
- The fabulously wealthy multi-millionaire Damien Hirst‘s decadent applause for 9/11: “The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. … Of course, it’s visually stunning and you’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible – especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”
- Norman Mailer
- Norman Mailer on 9/11: “The WTC was not just an architectural monstrosity, but also terrible for people who didn’t work there, for it said to all those people: ‘If you can’t work up here, boy, you’re out of it.’ … Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. … Americans can’t admit that you need courage to do such a thing. For that might be misunderstood. The key thing is that we in America are convinced that it was blind, mad fanatics who didn’t know what they were doing. But what if those perpetrators were right and we were not?”
- Mary Beard (Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge)
- Mary Beard’s depraved reaction to 9/11, London Review of Books, 4 October 2001: “when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price. But there is also the feeling that all the ‘civilised world’ (a phrase which Western leaders seem able to use without a trace of irony) is paying the price for its glib definitions of ‘terrorism’ and its refusal to listen to what the ‘terrorists’ have to say.”
- Of course, Mary Beard hasn’t a clue what the terrorists have to say. She simply projects western values onto them, that they do not share. The people who actually listen to what the terrorists have to say want the terrorists destroyed.
- She attacks the use of words like “‘fanaticism’, a term regularly applied to extraordinary acts of bravery when we abhor their ends and means. The silliest description of the onslaught on the World Trade Center was the often repeated slogan that it was a ‘cowardly’ attack.”
- List of celebrity reactions to Sept 11th and Islamofascism contains a huge list of morally-sick responses from:
- Baudrilliard
- Damien Hirst
- Norman Mailer
- Dario Fo
- Nelson Mandela
- Harold Pinter
- Arundhati Roy
- The Nobel laureate Jose Saramago
- Susan Sontag
- Karlheinz Stockhausen
- Oliver Stone
- Hunter S. Thompson
- Ted Turner
- Desmond Tutu
- Peter Ustinov
- Gore Vidal
I think people show their true colours at a time like this.
- John Pilger’s stupid reaction to 9/11, September 13, 2001, viewing it as some kind of response to “oppression”.
- He says: “Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims – principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.”
- “The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire” [Oh how sad – every leftist should regret the collapse of an unelected tyranny that carried out the genocide of the Armenians.]
- Bush’s Secularist Triumph: The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights them. – article by Christopher Hitchens an atheist for Bush.
- “Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed.”
- “George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he – and the U.S. armed forces – have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled.”
- The Transformation of “Jihad Jack” and John Walker Lindh by Christian Beenfeldt – How can you go from trendy western liberal-left godlessness to Islamic religious fascism? You can if your trendy, non-judgemental godlessness is based on feelings rather than on reason:
- “Consider the typical “progressive” leftist, with his non-judgmental relativism. He is the embodiment of subjectivism: he holds that there are no absolute principles, that truth is “in the eye of the beholder,” and that “what’s right for you might not be right for me.” … the subjectivist makes clear that his choices are ruled by blind feelings.”
- “This is precisely also the basic policy of the religious dogmatist. There are an infinite number of opposing religious sects. How does the religionist decide which faith to embrace, which revelations to follow and which authority to obey? Does he scientifically gather the evidence, carefully weigh it, and then adopt the conclusion to which reason and logic point? Obviously not. He feels it. He feels that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, astrology or whatever, is the right faith for him.”
- “So while the religionist may claim to uphold absolute truths, his beliefs are as arbitrary and baseless as those of the subjectivist. Thus, the paradoxical conversions of Jack Thomas and Walker Lindh – from subjectivist to religious dogmatist – aren’t so paradoxical after all; in both cases, the switch was merely from one form of emotionalism to another.”
- Australian Taliban Feted Again – Via the Medium of Dance – Scott Burgess is hilarious on Australian leftists’ mad support for the Australian Islamic convert and jihadist David Hicks. If he was a Christian violent fundamentalist nutcase the leftists wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole.
- Pimp my Soviet ride, Tim Blair, January 05, 2008 – On Australian leftists’ support for David Hicks.
- Open Letter from an Arab-American Student by Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar – A Syrian disgusted with the western left. – “They have never known the humiliation of living under the iron rule of an Islamic despotism. I have.”
- The left-wing solicitor Gareth Peirce‘s bland whitewashing of the women-hating, gay-hating, atheist-hating, mass-murdering religious savages, the Taliban.
- Afghans and the Guardian by Matthew Leeming – Afghan women, who suffered under the Taliban, listen to how left-wing writers in the west defended the Taliban, and get angry.
- Zachary Roth, May 22, 2009, at the left-wing Talking Points Memo, illustrates the double standards. On jihadis who planned to slaughter Jews at American synagogues: “It’s easy to laugh at this gang of goons — and we’ve done our share of that. But, frankly, it’s also hard not to feel some compassion for what looks like a group of struggling, credulous, under-educated men, existing on the fringes of society, who lacked the intelligence or willpower to avoid getting taken in by a government informant anxious to mitigate his own situation, and by their own vague understanding of radical Islam and the hole it might fill in their lives.” Can you imagine, just for one second, him saying that if these were white right-wing skinheads who planned to slaughter Jews at American synagogues?
- The Huffington Post runs Islamic religious apologetics:
- Because it’s a “religion their parents don’t belong to”, the left-wing Huffington Post runs endless reactionary Islamic religious apologetics. It would never do this for right-wing Christianity.
- Defence of shariah law, Huffington Post, 4 Nov 2011. It’s so edgy and transgressive to support right-wing medieval religious oppression.
- Defence of the wife-beating verse of the Koran, Huffington Post, 5 Mar 2012.
- Defence of the historical origins of Islam, Huffington Post, 31 Aug 2012.
- This moral sickness on the left has been building for a long time: