You might suspect that the question answers itself. They kowtow to Islam precisely because it is a real threat, a macroaggression that trumps all of the microaggressions. So you could say that it is simple cowardice. They protest against people they know are extremely unlikely to harm them, and they shut up about the fanatics who might actually follow through on their threats.
But I don't think that's the fundamental cause. After all, most lefties are not being called upon to take any personal risk, because somebody else has already stuck his neck out. Drawing or publishing a cartoon of Mohammed might get you put on an al-Qaeda hit list. Simply saying that you support the cartoonist's defiance of that threat won't get you on anybody's list.
In fact, a running theme of the left's arguments, repeated with a great deal of apparent sincerity, is the notion that it is irrational to fear Islam, that describing the religion as violent and dangerous is "Islamophobia." They seem to have largely talked themselves into believing that they have nothing personally to fear from Islam. Jihadists may throw gays off of buildings in Syria, but it can't happen here.
This is nonsense, of course, but it is revealing of the mindset. They actually talk themselves into believing that "censorship of LGBT artists" is an equal or even greater threat, far more urgent than anything having to do with Islam. For the left, the main source of evil in the world always comes from within America and from within the West, never outside of it....
The point is that the left doesn't kowtow to Islam because they actually love Islam, but rather because they hate our own culture. They have been steeped in a narrative about how American and Western culture is racist and "imperialist," and they've been trained to see anyone with a dark complexion and a non-Western origin as the victim of our crimes. When they see criticism of Islam, or deliberate attempts to defy Islam, they filter it through that narrative. They see it as: there go those bigoted right-wing Christians, demeaning dark-skinned foreigners again. So they reflexively oppose it.
See the rationale offered by the writers who protested the PEN award given to Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine whose staff was murdered by jihadists early this year. If ever anyone was a martyr for free speech, they were. But the PEN writers denounced the award as "cultural intolerance" which showed a "blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population." Leftist icon Garry Trudeau declared that "by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech." So, as one of the writers put it, this is not something for Americans "to be self-righteous about."
This is shallow and condescending. Equating the Charlie Hebdo murderers with a "disenfranchised minority" of French Muslims implies that all Muslims are terrorists, which is precisely what we're told we're not supposed to think. Meanwhile, Bosch Fawstin, the illustrator of the winning cartoon at the Garland event, is an ex-Muslim of Albanian descent. And when leftists validate a Muslim prohibition against offensive cartoons, they think they are denouncing Western provocateurs like Pamela Geller and Geert Wilders; instead, they are selling out people like Atena Farghadani, a young woman imprisoned in Iran for drawing cartoons considered insulting to the Islamist regime.
But anyone who knows the left knows that the narrative, once established, is nearly impossible to kill. It must be preserved because it serves as a source of personal identity and moral authority. In fact, you can pretty much ignore everything and skip right to that last quote from the PEN protest, because it's what everything else is really about: that America should not believe in its own rightness. The left seeks to gain moral authority, not from what they are for, but from what they are against. If you look at the history of the left, you find that they have frequently changed their favorite causes and their vision of the ideal society, often in ways that are wildly contradictory. But the one thing that remains constant is what they oppose.
The left used to present themselves as hyper-industrial and super-technological. In H.G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come, the ideal future society was going to be ruled by a technological elite of airplane pilots, while the Soviets projected a grandiose vision of industrial giantism, with huge hydroelectric dams, steel mills, railroads, and chunky Bakelite telephones. Then the left flipped, and now they're anti-industrial and their central crusades are to shut down power plants and to eat locally grown organic kale. You can frequently catch them making this flip in mid-conversation, as with an acquaintance I was talking to recently who expressed his concern for the plight of the poor under capitalism--and then a few minutes later, after I argued that hundreds of millions of people across the world have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism, he told me that Western affluence is overrated and destroys the environment. Everyone on the right has, at some point, had a conversation exactly like this, and it is maddening.
Or: if you go back and look at early 20th-century Progressivism, you will find it shot through with racism of the pseudo-scientific sort--Progressive icon Woodrow Wilson introduced segregation in the federal government--along with schemes for eugenics and a generally uncomplimentary view of homosexuals. Yet today's Progressives claim the opposite position on these issues as one of their central virtues. Or: the left will champion insults to Christianity as so essential to free speech that they must be funded by the government--then regard insults to Islam as so inflammatory that they must be banned as "fighting words."
So everything changes, but one thing stays the same. Capitalism is bad, the West is bad, America is vicious and corrupt and needs to be fundamentally transformed. Transformed into what? That's always vague and subject to change without notice, and ultimately it doesn't matter.
The left is fundamentally reactionary. It is a reaction against capitalism and against America. The left are defined by what they are against, or more accurately who they hate. So they are drawn to sympathy toward Islam because it is not-us: non-Western, non-American, neither Christian nor a product of the Enlightenment. And I guess that's what the two ideologies have in common: they are both reactions against the supposed evils of the West. Which explains why leftists tend to find themselves uncomfortable and look for excuses to retreat when they are called upon to defend the West against this rival group of reactionaries.
The only corrective is to start over again from a very different starting point. Anyone who wants "progress" ought to start by asking how we achieved any in the first place. That would require some extended meditation on the virtues of the West, an appreciation of its achievements, an understanding of the ideas and values behind them--and a touch of self-righteousness that makes us too proud to kowtow to the enemies of those ideals.
...Read more at The Tracinski Letter
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