Posted by
Dawnsblood on Monday, January 22, 2007 5:36:12 PM
Chris Hitchens reviews Mark Steyn's remarkable book 'America Alone'. I like Hitchens, he is one of the few liberals that I think earn the right to say they live in a 'reality based community'. I don't always agree with him, but he always makes me think. He also has a habit of showing us a glimpse of the workings of the liberal mind. This was particularly insightful for me.
Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of
this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal
identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth:
the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third
World.” You can see this identification in the way that the
Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their
numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the
amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic
secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long
before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid
neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to
the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns
numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and
non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of
eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the
liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family
size to (at most) two children. It was all very well, from this
fatuously self-satisfied perspective, for Paul Ehrlich to warn about
the human “population bomb” as a whole, just as it is all very well for
some “Green” forces to take a neo-Malthusian attitude toward human
reproduction in general. But in the liberal mind, to concentrate on the
fertility of any one group is to flirt with Nuremberg laws. The same
goes for “racial profiling,” even when it’s directed at the adherents
of an often ideological religion rather than an ethnic group. The
Islamists, meanwhile, have staked everything on fecundity.