None so Blind as Those who Refuse to See Peter Smith
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/12/none-so-blind-as-those-who-refuse-to-see/
Swerving, deflecting and distracting are symptomatic of our current malaise in the West. No better examples are those which come via commentaries on the plight of Israel and on the persona of Donald Trump. I’ll give a couple of illustrations from The Weekend Australian. It wouldn’t be hard to find a legion more.
Gemma Tognini (“Progressives in lockstep with Hamas ideology”) writes, “This isn’t a conversation about Islam versus Christianity, or Judaism.”
Don’t get me wrong, Tognini is one of the good guys and her article is fine for the most part. But what is this ideology of which she speaks? It isn’t owned by Hamas. It’s called Islam. And while Tognini might not be having a conversation about competing religions. Islamic clerics are, and constantly. They make no bones about it. They want the ummah to predominate in every country. They make no secret of it; apropos.
Hitler made no secret of it. He wanted German hegemony in Eastern Europe. He laid it out clearly in Mein Kampf in 1925-26. Somehow or other, most commentators manage to swerve around the obvious, which would be to take would-be conquerors at face value and instead put issues into a transactional Western Judaeo-Christian framework. It doesn’t work.
Alfred Pennyworth in the movie The Dark Knight (2008) comes to mind: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical … They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Well, one religion wants to ride roughshod over all others. It can’t be bargained with. You can’t bargain with Allah. And the problem Israel has with its neighbours is Islam. Islam can’t abide Jews and, only to a little less extent, Christians and other non-believers; as I expanded on here. Yet we pretend it isn’t so.
While Islam prevails, and it is growing in adherents and power, Israel will need to keep its powder dry and lots of it. It doesn’t even have the European option of a gradual “strange death” (as Douglas Murray puts it); only an annihilating, bloody and savage one. Ergo, the only conversation worth having is, in fact, one about Islam versus Christianity and Judaism, all the rest is deflection.
Tom Switzer (“Instead of facing up to moral decline. We lower our standards”) writes tellingly, among other things, of children being increasingly born out of wedlock, of gangsterism, guns and drugs, of rising anti-Semitism, of racial, gender and identity politics, of cancel culture. All good stuff, except he avers that “the sort of serious political debate that might lead to such problems being tackled is increasingly prevented by the coarsening of political discourse.” Cue ‘Trump the Despicable’, of course.
One only has to think of his shameless lying…his disgraceful behaviour after the 2020 election… and his attempt to belittle and degrade his political opponents to see how drastically this [coarsening of debate] has evolved.
Switzer has to be kidding. First political debate has always thrown up coarse language. Trump didn’t invent it. He is just better at it than his opponents. Second, the idea that more refined debate will turn around the cultural Marxism which has now taken over all Western institutions is a distraction beyond parody. Third, Trump’s shameless lying is a beat-up. It would be nice if the critics who spew out this line were ever to cite just one or two consequential examples. And, personally, I don’t count his exaggeration of adoring crowds as a consequential lie. Also, if I were to call a person a liar in print, I would feel obliged to give numbers of serious examples; else I might be charged with coarsening public debate.
As to Trump’s “disgraceful behaviour” after the 2020 election, what to say? He could have graciously accepted the outcome, I suppose. But that simply ain’t the Trump who managed, against the odds, to bring about so much positive and substantive policy changes on both the domestic and foreign fronts. And, anyway, how in the world did Joe Biden get over 81 million genuine votes in 2020 when Barack Obama got under 66 million in 2012 — population up 6 per cent during the intervening years and voting for Joe up 23 per cent? Hmm? Just a thought, which no doubt passed across Trump’s fevered (at the time) mind.
My principal purpose is not to criticise either of the two articles which I reference. They are a lot better than most. At the same time, they dance on the surface. Tognini refers to the Hamas charter as the script guiding the carnage of October 7. But the most egregious passage in the original charter, since sanitised, is a canonical hadith:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews. (As related by al-Bukhari and Moslem.)
It’s Islam. Pure and simple. Nothing special; nothing untoward in the Muslim mind. The Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hizballah, Hamas, etc., might all fade away. Others will arise; fruits of Islam. To repeat, Islam is the intractable problem.
Switzer provides an observer’s commentary on the moral problems of the day – though, strangely, he misses abortion at scale – without offering a solution. That’s fine, who knows what the solution is? But why even hint that less coarse political debate would solve anything. Would it get Chris Bowen to be less fanatical about renewable energy? Make Penny Wong more fair-minded about Israel? Bring back objectivity into the federal and state public services. Give us back universities of integrity and stature? Reacquaint mainstream Anglican churches with Christianity? It seems to me that the only reason this non-solution rates a mention is to provide a pretext to dump on Trump. It’s a distraction which takes us away from a serious inquiry about the failings which have led to the pernicious cultural decay at the heart of our civilisation.
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