Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Everyone can take a lead from Stephen Harper

I have the last couple of months been somewhat more active blogging at Covenant Zone than here at Flares, feeling a need to help build up the world of blogging on themes Canadian. But there are a number of posts at CZ that might interest Flares readers. Here is my latest: "Why Stephen Harper is my hero". It is fairly typical of my longer posts here; it is an exploration of the victimary or "white guilt" religion of today's western liberalism and claims that Stephen Harper is taking a leadership role among western leaders in rejecting this victimary religion:
You have likely already heard the latest trendy political term - "proportionate response" - in countless news reports (see here, for example): one or another representative of some liberal western government or institution calls on Israel to show a "proportionate response" to, e.g., the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, implying that a large assault against the presence of Hezbollah gangster-state terrorists in Lebanon is somehow disproportionate to the kidnapping act that supposedly (but only if you are ahistorical in thought) started the present conflict in Lebanon. Anything more than what our opinion-leaders deem a "proportionate response" and Israel is to be accused of victimizing a whole group of blameless innocents - in the present case, the Lebanese people - simply because of the unfortunate presence of terrorists in their midst.

But the kidnapping last week of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah was of course merely the excuse for which Israel has been waiting, as it seeks to ensure its very existence against an illegitimate non-state army armed to the teeth with rockets and allied with Iran, a state whose leaders deny the Holocaust and yet call for another one, for wiping Israel from the face of the earth. What, pray tell, is a "proportionate" response to people who are carrying on a fifteen-centuries old Jihad in whose name they hope to destroy Israel and turn any and all non-Muslims into either dust or Dhimmis?

While their enemy may deserve no mercy, in this nuclear age Israel cannot throw its full might at its enemy without truly becoming a pariah state. Consequently, whatever the level of Israel's response, the choice will be somewhat arbitrary and as such open to criticism for being too disproportionate, too intent on victimizing. (And alternatively, in being restrained, in departing from the traditional pre-nuclear assumption that a threatened people should do whatever they can to defend themselves, Israel also expose itself to mocking from Islamic warriors who take a less than total response as a sign of Israel's inherent weakness - they can kill a few more of us than we kill of them, but there will always be more of us than of them.)

And in an age when only visible victims really count in the media's making of "the news", when the rightness of a nation's cause is secondary to its power and ability to make its enemies, and associated civilians, suffer, Israel is open to much attack because it happens to be much more militarily effective than the cult of resentment it presently faces; even as the cult presently demonstrates some capability to kill Israelis with its rockets, its only truly great military advantage is its vast superiority in the numbers of its real or potential supporters, an advantage that only encourages its leaders to sacrifice as many of its people in the cause as needs be, as the Islamic cult of suicide bombing against Israel and other western and non-Muslim nations demonstrates.

So why the obsession among the western liberal-left with a "proportionate response"?
Continue reading here.

4 comments:

Barry Dauphin said...

Richard Cohen, meet Stephen Harper, eh.

truepeers said...

Yes David, but not only are they not supposed to defeat any one, they are no longer supposed to have the idea of right and wrong, good and evil; and so a proportionate response is a refusal to choose sides, except in obvious cases of victimization (victimization being the arbitrary assertion by someone of his side, of his good or evil). Consequently, the desire to make inequalities or asymmetries into evidence of obvious victimization - on the model of the victimization of the Jews by the Nazis - comes to dominate the mind of the left.

gumshoe said...

some rhetorical questions:

will somebody explain how,
with the vast amount of oil money
controlled by the Islamic world,
the Kahn ring's proliferation of the "Islamic Bomb" and related technologies,and the growth
curve of the Islamic birth rate
and it'spact on Eropes demographics,and the petro-dollar funding of Islamic front groups in US and Canada like CAIR and Mid-Eat studies university chairs,
that Muslims are somehow ..."victims"?

other than ,of course,
their ongoing struggles with their pride and sense of cultural inferiority,of which we are all victims...

BTW: the excerpt that captures Harper's take on "proportionate response" is another great example of the phenomena of "soft language"...

the idea that one behaves "proportionately" towards killers that hide in civilian populations and murder other "enemy" civilians randomly is the product of minds that have ceased to use language effectively in the process of thinking.

great link,truepeers.

buddy larsen said...

Authoritarians again--"If you don't agree with utopianism, you must be ill" (USSR sent 'em to "psychiatric hospitals").