RUTHFULLY YOURS

There’s outrage when there’s even a rumor that a Koran was harmed. Here’s a full blown machete attack on a Jewish teacher carrying a Torah.

A Jewish teacher who went to work was attacked by a Turkish 15-year-old shouting, “Allahu Akbar” with a machete.

The teacher fell to the ground. The teenager attacked him with the machete, striking the Torah.

“I saw hatred in his eyes,” the teacher later described. “I told him to stop, but he continued to attack me.”

During his arrest, the Muslim teenager said he was acting in the name of Allah and ISIS.

But, as you’ve probably already guessed, he must have misunderstood Islam.

Big Feminism, fresh from fighting pitched battles against swimsuit posters in European subways and other phantoms of “rape culture”, failed the women who were attacked by violent Muslim migrant mobs in Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg who were the products of an actual rape culture dating back to Mohammed’s injunction to his men that Muslim women must wear burqas to avoid being “molested” while non-Muslim women captured in the House of War could be raped by Muslim Jihadis at will.

Big Feminism has a great deal of interest in rape as an abstract idea that can be unpacked to represent everything the left hates from Valentine’s Day to environmental degradation to the college frat, but it has little interest in rape as a crime or rape victims as people. Eve Ensler exploited the idea of rape to build up her brand while her PR was being handled by Trevor FitzGibbon, a progressive sexual predator who was also representing Julian Assange, another progressive rapist. Eve Ensler had a great deal of interest in rape as an ideological tool, but none in the women who were raped by her allies.

Feminism is only another of the many manipulative masks that the left wears. Its acolytes cannot see rape as a personal crime, only as an ideological one. To the left, rape, like racism, is a form of institutional oppression practiced by the stronger white male against everyone else. Sexual assaults that don’t fit this structural template won’t be acknowledged and when they become so public that they must be acknowledged, it will be only to change the conversation.

Many years ago I read a thought-provoking science-fiction short story about a sociologist who specialized in the important field of bureaucratic expansionism. I can’t recall the story’s title, and I haven’t found the story on the Web, but a colleague better schooled in sci-fi can probably identify it.

Through my hazy memories, however, it goes something like this. The sociologist is excited because he thinks he has gone farther than anyone else in discovering the sociological laws of organizational success. But how can he be sure? Inspired by a blend of scientific curiosity and a sense of fun, he makes friends with his mother’s sewing circle and persuades its members to reorganize it along his scientific lines.

At the close of the story the sewing circle has got three Senate seats, 55 House seats, and a credible contender for the presidency.

Which brings me not to Donald Trump but to the New Year’s riots in Cologne and two other German cities, in which one woman was raped, about 90 others grossly assaulted sexually, and New Year revelers of both sexes jostled, attacked, robbed, and threatened by an estimated 1,000 men of North African and Middle Eastern appearance in “organized” criminal gangs.

Whatever Mohammed’s virtues or defects as a prophet, he was one helluva practical sociologist.

When cultural relativism flowed from university campuses to the broader society and venturing unpopular or unfashionable opinions began to incur a certain risk, many found it easier to shrug, scoff and do nothing. That was a huge mistake, perhaps a fatal one
Western civilization is adrift in the world of ideas. Uncoupled from religion for over a century, the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition which endured—albeit, once it had been absorbed into a secular, modernist rationale—is under existential threat from within. The Twitter-lynching of Chris Gayle, the asylum seeker crisis in Europe and connected sexual violence in Cologne and other cities on New Year’s Eve, and the increasing frequency of attacks by Islam-inspired jihadists are all in their own and disparate ways symptoms of the same ailment.

Although perhaps well intentioned, the groupthink of Left orthodoxy is accelerating the demise of liberal values on which Western culture was built. While the Left may be more purposeful in severing the links that tie the West to its philosophical and religious past, the ‘right’ is not without fault. Its silence as liberal values become corrupted and discredited implies complicity; its retreat to behind the walls of neoliberal economics concedes defeat as fiscal short-termism is prioritised at the expense of reflecting on the the power and importance of ideas.

The dilution of Western values can be seen most prominently in the mainstream media and its role as a censor, rather than facilitator, of public debate. Pick any contentious topic — from gay-marriage and abortion to the role of Islam in terrorism or issues of race or gender — and you will hear only one side of the story, the politically correct angle. Dissenters beware, presenting an alternative view, or even questioning why the dominant view is dominant, will result in outrage and judgement. There is no such thing as truly free speech under such circumstances — no dialogue, no alternatives to the impulsive and dogmatic Left’s cause du jour, whatever its promoted crusade of the month might happen to be.