Mark Steyn - After America

Nevertheless, the assumption that “a young Pakistani Muslim” in Karachi or Peshawar shares your peculiar preoccupations is the laziest kind of projection even by the standards of progressive navel-gazing.

For a start, the new pan-Islamism notwithstanding, there is an awful lot of racism in the Muslim world. If liberals stopped gazing longingly into “Obama’s face” just for a moment, they might recall that little business of genocide in Darfur. What was that about again? Oh, yeah, Sudanese Muslim Arabs were slaughtering Sudanese Muslim Africans. Sure enough, a week after Obama’s election, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, issued a video denouncing the new president as “abeed al-beit,” which translates literally as “house slave” but which the al-Qaeda subtitles more provocatively rendered as “house Negro.” 68

But, putting aside the racism, there is just a terrible banality underlying assumptions such as Sullivan’s. Those who hate the Great Satan don’t care whether he has a white face, a black face, a female face, or a gay face. In a multicultural age, we suffer from a unicultural parochialism: not simply the inability to imagine the other, but the inability even to imagine there is an other.

Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke of the “known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” 69The old Cold Warrior’s cool detachment is unfashionable in an age of ersatz empathy, but it has a rare humility. In an age of one-worldist fantasy, it helps to know that you don’t know—and that, even in a therapeutic culture, you don’t know how everybody feels .

For four decades America watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while conservatives deluded themselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact, that it could be contained within the precincts of academe, was always foolish. So what happens when the big colored Sharpie words on the vestibule posters—Diversity! Tolerance! Respect!—bust out of the grade school and stalk the land? On September 11, 2007, at the official anniversary observances in Massachusetts, Governor Deval Patrick said 9/11 “was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States.” 70

“Mean and nasty”? He sounds like a kindergarten teacher. Or an over-sensitive waiter complaining that John Kerry’s sent back the aubergine coulis again. But that’s what passes for tough talk in Massachusetts these days—the shot heard round the world and so forth. Anyway, Governor Patrick didn’t want to leave the crowd with all that macho cowboy rhetoric ringing in their ears, so he moved on to the nub of his speech: 9/11, he went on, “was also a failure of human beings to understand each other, to learn to love each other.”

We should beware anyone who seeks to explain 9/11 by using the words “each other.” They posit not just a grubby equivalence between the perpetrator and the victim but also a dangerously delusional “empathy.” The 9/11 killers were treated very well in the United States: they were ushered into the country on the high-speed visa express program the State Department felt was appropriate for young Saudi males. They were treated cordially everywhere they went. The lapdancers at the clubs they frequented in the weeks before the big day gave them a good time—or good enough, considering what lousy tippers they were. September 11 didn’t happen because we were insufficient in our love to Mohammed Atta.

But the lessons of 9/11 were quickly buried under a mountain of relativist mush. Consider the now routine phenomenon by which any, um, unusual event is instantly ascribed to anyone other than the obvious suspects. When a huge car bomb came near to killing hundreds in Times Square, the first reaction of Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, was to announce that the most likely culprit was “someone with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill” 71(that would be me, if his SWAT team’s at a loose end this weekend). When, inevitably, a young man called Faisal Shahzad was arrested a couple days later, Mayor Bloomberg’s next reaction was to hector his subjects that under no circumstances would the city tolerate “any bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.” 72

How many times do the American people have to ace that test? They’ve been doing it for a decade now, and every time the usual suspects try to kill them the ruling class, with barely veiled contempt, insists that its own knuck-ledragging citizenry is the real problem. A couple months later Nanny Bloomberg went to the Statue of Liberty of all places to tell the plebs he has the misfortune to rule over to shut up. The man on whose watch Ground Zero degenerated from a target of war to a victim of bureaucracy was there to lecture dissenters that the site of the 9/11 attacks is a “very appropriate place” 73for a mosque. The people of New York felt differently, but what do they know?

“To cave to popular sentiment,” thundered Nanny, “would be to hand a victory to the terrorists—and we should not stand for that.” 74We used to hear this formulation a lot in the months after 9/11: If we do such-and-such, then the terrorists will have won. But this surely is the very acme of the template: If we don’t build a mosque at Ground Zero, then the terrorists will have won! You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists—and the American people are with the terrorists.

As is the way with the Conformity Enforcers, Nanny Bloomberg pulled out all the abstractions. “It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11.” 75Really? That’s not what Osama bin Laden said. But, if we put away our abstract generalities and listen to what the enemy is actually telling us, then the terrorists will have won! For a fellow so open and accepting, Nanny Bloomberg seems awfully dogmatic and strident. This is the WEIRD syndrome—the determination to hammer the hard square peg of global reality into the hole of multicultural nullity, whatever it takes. Even after Faisal Shahzad’s arrest for the attempted bombing of Times Square, the Associated Press, CNN, the Washington Post , and other grandees of the conformicrat media insisted on attaching huge significance to the problems the young jihadist had had keeping up his mortgage payments in Connecticut. 76Subprime terrorism? Don’t laugh. To the media, it’s a far greater threat to America than anything to do with certain words beginning with I- and ending in -slam.

Incidentally, one way of falling behind with your house payments is to take half a year off to go to Pakistan and train in a terrorist camp. Perhaps Congress could pass some sort of jihadist housing credit?

Poor old Faisal Shahzad. Before heading off to Times Square, he made a pre-detonation video outlining the evils of the Great Satan. 77Nothing about mortgage rates or foreclosure proceedings in there. He couldn’t have been more straightforward, but still Nanny Bloomberg and the media cover their ears and go “La-la-la. Can’t hear you.”

Paul Berman, a lifelong liberal, says that the doctrine of relativism makes “everything the equal of everything else.” 78As a result, our ruling class—political, academic, cultural—have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” This is almost right. In fact, the cult of absolutist relativism is a kind of affirmative action against their own civilization: In any dispute between the boundlessly tolerant West and a highly intolerant Islam, it must be the fault of the former for being insufficiently tolerant of the latter’s intolerance. A society led by men with such a self-destructive urge will get its wish, and very soon, and deservedly so.