https://afsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Outpost_2007_02.pdf
Bruce S. Thornton, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is an emeritus professor of classics and humanities at the California State University, Fresno. He is the author of several books on a variety of topics.
“This supremely bad idea—that the modern West and its defining cultural cargo of free market
capitalism, individualism, rationalism and liberal democracy are the engines of global evil, and that Jews
and Israel are the most dangerous embodiments of this evil—continues to fuel the jihadists rage and to
weaken the West’s resolve. The stakes are too high for this suicidal notion to arouse in us anything but disgust.”
There’s an Elvis Costello lyric that goes, “I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused.” Before
9/11 that was pretty much my philosophy. Working in the university, I was daily treated to the postmodern mumbo-jumbo, multicultural noble-savage fantasies, and left-over leftist delusions that are all so transparently incoherent and severed from reality that disgust seemed a waste of energy. The detached amusement of a Victorian explorer studying some bizarre cargo-cult seemed more appropriate and was less stressful.
Then came 9/11, and the bloody truth of Rich- and Weaver’s dictum that “ideas have consequences”
made amusement reprehensible. That disaster was the fruit of years of bad ideas, particularly the West’s
institutionalized self-loathing that demonizes its own ideals and values and culture while idealizing those of the “other” no matter how dysfunctional. Our intellectuals, academics, and artists for decades had been telling the world that the West, particularly America, is the villain of history, its crimes of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, resource depletion, and pollution responsible for all the world’s ills.
Was it any wonder, then, that one of the West’s fiercest historical enemies, Islam, should take our self-flagellation seriously and conclude that we deserved to die for the crimes which we our-selves keep admitting we are guilty of? And given that even after 9/11 those same bad ideas continue to addle our thinking and compromise our attempts to defend our civilization against a smart, committed enemy, disgust is the only legitimate reaction to the behavior generated by such stale received wisdom.
Evidence of this cultural disease crams the daily media, but the West’s response to Israel’s sixty-year struggle against annihilation remains exhibit number one. Israel has always been and remains the key to
understanding the war against Islamic jihad.
