Doubleplus Fascistic

“President Bush said the arrests are a ‘stark reminder’ that the U.S. is ‘at war with Islamic fascists’.” – CNN, via LGF

“It’s an interesting strategy to characterize the enemy as doing exactly what you’re doing […]” – vlwc2005 on Daily Kos

The “reality-based community” has lately shown its true colors for all to see: the purge of the party after Lamont’s first victory, the conspiracy theories regarding the foiled airline plots, and now (quoted in the paragraph right above) the Orwellian inversion. The actual terrorists and fascists are considered freedom fighters, while the USA government, Tony Blair and Israel are held to be agents of fascism, colonialism and imperialism. Minitrue is working overtime.

A while back ago, I clicked on a link to a hard-hitting page: “There is no 9/11 conspiracy, you morons”. The most damning point that Maddox makes there about Dylan Avery and his 9/11 conspiracy is that, if it were really true and he were the exposer of the conspiracy, the conspiring Bush government wouldn’t have left Avery alive for more than a few seconds afterwards. I think this is the crux of the matter when dealing with those “reality-based” left-wingnuts who talk about Fascist Bush and Totalitarian Israel.

If there is anything the Reuters Fauxtography Scandal has taught us, it’s mistrust, skepticism, doubt and mistrust toward narrators everywhere, at all times. They may be telling hearsay themselves, or if they’re first-hand sources they may be tainted by having their own ax to grind. Of the people who depict Israel as an apartheid state, a military-focused dictatorship and a hellhole of fascism where poisonous thinking supposedly permeates all levels of academia, how many have actually lived in Israel? And of those who have, how many are now writing not through the predetermined glasses of the Leftist, anti-Western narrative?

In the years 1948–50, an Egyptian student named Sayyid Qutb went to the United States on a scholarship. He returned from that stay to write about the corruption of Western society, its racism, its segregation of the sexes. It all sounds pretty convincing, until you compare those writings to those of Christian Arab visitors or immigrants to the USA of the same time and find none of Qutb’s vitriol. It’s often said Qutb’s stay started him on the way to “radical Islamism”. The truth is he was already well on that way when he set out in 1948; the stay just systematized it. Qutb’s writings on “corruption of Western society” teach almost nothing about the reality of the USA of then, and everything about the view of the USA through Islamic glasses.

Similary, an academic like Ilan Pappe or Tanya Reinhart can regale you with stories of “the oppressive atmosphere and quashing of dissent at Israeli universities”, and the fact of them being professors at such universities would seem to lend credibility to their claims (and therefore full coverage on Jew-hating magazines and websites the world over), but in reality the situation is the same as for Sayyid Qutb: Pappe and Reinhart are avowed, doctrinaire Leftists; they already were so when they came to hold positions at their universities, and were given opportunity to voice them (hmmm, nice going for a fascistic state…); and acted surprised when their colleagues merely shunned them when they advocated a boycott of their own universities (in Pappe’s case) or sided with the enemy when rockets came raining down upon their own country (in Reinhart’s case).

If Israeli academia were truly totalitarian, Pappe and Reinhart would never have gotten positions there. If Israel were truly an apartheid state, there wouldn’t be any non-Jewish members of Knesset, let alone permitted to continue sitting there after a visit to an enemy state (Bishara’s visit to Syria). If Israel were as militarily ruthless as made out to be in Muslimedia and their Western lapdogs, Lebanon would have been leveled just as surely as the Chechen capital of Grozny was by Putin (who dares to preach “proportionality” to Israel). If Israel were a fascistic state, Leftist sympathizers with the enemy would not be allowed to speak. If the USA were a fascistic state, Leftist sympathizers with the enemy would not be allowed to speak.

What is a fascistic state? It’s one where a website owner is harassed for operating a website offering a politically-incorrect point of view. What’s an apartheid state? It’s one where a Christian is beaten up for drinking from a public water-fountain and the authorities lend a supportive silence. A totalitarian state is one where at the absence of the ruler, power is automatically transferred to one of his relatives.

One of our prophets (truly so, not an impostor like the one who spawned the RoPMA) said: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that change darkness into light, and light into darkness; that change bitter into sweet, and sweet into bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20). Words for our age more than any other.