If militant Islam ends up taking over Australia and the West; if freedom and democracy give way to sharia law and dhimmitude; and if America ceases to be the world leader in the fight against terrorism, we will only have ourselves to blame.
Or more specifically, we will in large measure have certain segments of Australian and Western society to blame. That is, while Islamic terrorism and the war against a free West is a major concern, perhaps of even more concern are those in the West who are effectively taking their side, blaming the West in general and the US in particular for all the world’s ills, while excusing the terrorists.
This has been described in various ways: appeasement, moral myopia, the plague of anti-Americanism, the great liberal death wish, Western self-loathing, and so on. It is a repellent and ultimately dead-end mindset. But unfortunately it characterises way too much of the leftwing intelligentsia.
There was a great – or appalling – example of this in today’s Melbourne Age. This is arguably one of the nation’s most leftist newspapers. (Mind you, if the Age were in a competition with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times as to which was the worst of the leftist rags, it would be hard to pick a clear-cut winner.)
Its selection of news coverage, the way it covers stories, and its editorial policies, are all decidedly left of centre, pro-Labor and anti-American. And so too are the bulk of its letter writers. It is an unpleasant task to have to wade through these left-wing rants each day.
In order not to make my breakfast experience too unpleasant, I tend to gloss over the Age letters’ page. Yet I risked spilling my corn flakes this morning by checking out today’s selection. It was a big mistake. A pleasant morning became an occasion of rage, bewilderment and disappointment.
There leading the way were five letters on the issue of the recent confession of terrorist mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He has said in US detention that he was the architect of the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombings, and numerous other atrocities committed by Islamic extremists.
Yet what did these five letter writers have to say about it? Well, they basically made jokes about it. They said that he must be responsible for all the other ills in the world as well, such as, the Titanic. Ha Ha.
They simply made light of his claims, and suggested instead that the real moral atrocity was that the US probably tortured him, and that is why he said such things. And almost all of them brought up the subject of David Hicks.
On and on it went. It was as appalling as it was disappointing. Here were five Australians who seem to think they are experts in geopolitics and international affairs, all snidely attacking the US, and siding with the terrorists. America is the real enemy, in their darkened minds, and a terrorist mastermind is somehow to be excused, exonerated or turned into a martyr.
The Age was quite happy to give these moral pygmies pride of place in the letters’ page. And of course it did not print one countervailing viewpoint. This is so typical of the Age. Simply run with one side of an issue, and censure out the other side. (Of course this is the same paper that also today featured a story about Donald Trump calling George W. Bush the “worst president ever”. Why am I not surprised to see this story there?)
Now to be honest, I don’t know all the exact details of the Khalid story. I am not an authority on this particular issue. I do not know how the confessions came about, and how much of what he said is true and how much isn’t. But neither do these letter writers. Yet they act as if they were there, and have first-hand experience. They are so smug in their anti-Americanism, that they simply assume that if America said something or did something, it has to be wrong.
And worse, they simply presume that the terrorists are somehow the good guys in this situation. They are happy to give amoral mass-murderers the benefit of the doubt, while putting the worst possible spin on anything the American government has to say.
Such intellectually juvenile and morally distorted views tell us just how far down the tubes we as a nation have gone. If this is the view of the average Australian intellectualoid, then we are much further out to sea than I had feared. And of course this is all aided and abetted by the Melbourne Age. Its letter pages have become a gathering point for every discontented lefty, secularist and America-hater.
Every day it prints dozens of such foolish and vacuous letters. And unfortunately, those for whom the Age is the main source of news and opinion end up being fed this steady diet of leftist distortion, without any balance.
Thus my breakfast has been well and truly ruined. Obviously the mainstream media has long ago lost the plot. But I will keep writing posts for the alternative media. I will keep letting those who are interested know that there are other viewpoints around than what one finds in a morally moribund and logically lax MSM.
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