tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post2005024460597952515..comments2024-03-28T10:00:45.108-04:00Comments on Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org : Friday Afternoon Roundup - All Around Death to AmericaDaniel Greenfieldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13575285186581875356noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-42928604071668656922012-09-15T13:06:04.611-04:002012-09-15T13:06:04.611-04:00I shouldn’t be stunned by this, but, being human a...I shouldn’t be stunned by this, but, being human and therefore not always consistent, I am. President Obama and Hillary Cllnton have both described the attacks on our diplomats in Egypt and Libya as “senseless violence”:<br /><br />The president asserted we have to oppose “the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.”<br />Clinton reinforced his analysis when she said, “We condemn in the strongest terms this senseless act of violence.”<br /><br />Meaning, these were not intentional acts of violence by people who oppose the United States and want to hurt it, but just the “acting out” of whacked-out individuals, the equivalent of a drunken man firing a gun aimlessly on a street. Meaning, the murders of the American diplomats have no meaning. They must not have meaning, because if they do, their meaning is that at least a significant number of Muslims are our enemies. And if Muslims are our enemies, then we must think in terms of “us” and “them.” We must be for ourselves and against them. We must negatively judge them, discriminate against them, defend ourselves from them, and even fight them. But if we did those horrible things, modern liberalism would be kaput. We’d all be Nazis. And it’s better to let ourselves all be killed by senseless violence than to be Nazis.<br />If President Roosevelt had seen the world the way Obama and Hillary do, he would have said: “December 7, 1941: a day which will live in the annals of senseless violence.”<br /><br />Contemporary reality has become a school to teach people the nature of the consistent, extreme liberalism that now rules our society and that was expressed in the statements of our President and Secretary of State. But there’s a little problem with this school—the quality of the students. In order to learn the lesson that reality is teaching them, people must be rational. But most people in advanced liberal society are not rational, so they don’t learn anything. They remain in the liberal fog.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11368628.post-51506608282917204522012-09-15T08:04:37.923-04:002012-09-15T08:04:37.923-04:00Daniel: Re your comments beneath "Christopher...Daniel: Re your comments beneath "Christopher Stevens Feeds the Crocodile," I gave this explanation to a correspondent in answer to a query about the U.S.'s responsibility for all the protests against the "Innocence of Muslim" film that Muslims are going psychotic about:<br /><br />…In a sense, yes, it is our government's fault that the jihadists are attacking us every which way they can dream up, but that is because they grasp in a very feral sense that the U.S. especially has lost confidence in its own value. Yes, we've "angered" the savages because of our past and invariably botched interventions. But what was the nature of those interventions? It was the altruist policy to bring "democracy" to the savages. To "do good." To prove our "moral worth" by sacrificing lives and treasure. This kind of policy began with Wilson. It continued with FDR when he chose to help the Soviets fight the Nazis. <br /><br />But the savages are not altruists. They are killers. They do not wish to "give back," a la a craven altruist such as Bill Gates. They wish to take, and kill, and maim, and see their betters as mangled, blood-splattered corpses in the dust, raped, hacked into pieces, and extinguished with as much screaming pain as they can inflict. That is their notion of efficacy. I could call it many things. The Lara Logan effect. The Daniel Pearl effect. The Nick Berg effect. They believe in selflessness, too, as long as you, the Westerner, no longer exist. <br /><br />In every instance when we've acted out of selflessness, it has backfired on us, because the beneficiaries have always turned on us. The Soviets turned on us. The Taliban turned on us as repayment for helping them fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Iraqis have turned on us, as have the Pakistanis. The Egyptians. The Tunisians. Whatever. Altruism requires that we do not judge our beneficiaries. That is against the rules of the "giving back" game. And altruism has been adopted as the pragmatic way of conducting foreign policy. Altruism is the default morality. <br /><br />But altruism is a guarantor of death for the giver. Altruism can graft itself onto any other creed and accomplish the same death: Judaism, Christianity, Shinto. Every other creed but Islam. Islam is at root a code and means of nihilism. There isn't a benevolent bone in its body. And that is what our pragmatic foreign policymakers refuse to or are unable to understand. It is only occasionally that such policymakers, such as Chris Stevens in Benghazi, see first-hand what it gets them. But the rest of us must pay the price every day, and not just in tax dollars. <br /><br />Edward Clinehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12160209827969614964noreply@blogger.com