Rod Liddle, in the Sunday London Times, reads the eulogy at the funeral service for multiculturalism in Britain.

Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: “Racist!” Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left.

It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. At any rate, British citizens, black and white, can move onwards together — towards a sunlit upland of monoculturalism, or maybe zeroculturalism, whatever takes your fancy…

Some 22 years ago Ray Honeyford, the previously obscure headmaster of Drummond middle school in Bradford, suggested, in the low-circulation right-wing periodical The Salisbury Review, that his Asian pupils should really be better integrated into British society.

They should learn English, for a start, and a bit of British history and a sense of what the country is about; further, Asian (Muslim) girls should be allowed to learn to swim despite the objections of their parents (who did not like them stripping down even in front of each other). Muslim kids should be treated like every other pupil, in other words.

For these mild contentions, Honeyford was investigated by the government, vilified as a racist by the press, ridiculed every day by leftie demonstrators outside his office and was eventually hounded from his job. He has not worked since.

Perhaps it will be a consolation to him, as he sits idly in his neat, small, semi-detached house in Bury, Lancashire, that he has now been comprehensively outflanked on the far right by a whole bunch of Labour politicians, including at least one minister, and indeed the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality. Then again, perhaps it won’t.

It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of this shift. To give you an example of the lunacy that prevailed back in Honeyford’s time: then, the Commission for Racial Equality was happy to instruct Britain’s journalists that Chinese people were henceforth to be described as “black” because that, objectively, was their subjective political experience at the hands of the oppressive white hegemony.

I don’t suppose they asked the Chinese if they minded this appellation or derogation — the question would not even have occurred.

By definition, people who were “not-white” — from Beijing to Barbados — were banded together in their oppression and implacable opposition to the prevailing white culture and thus united in their political aspirations. People from Baluchistan, Tobago and Bangladesh were defined solely by their lack of whiteness.

This was, when you think about it, a quintessentially racist assumption, as well as being authoritarian and — as the writer Kenan Malik puts it — “anti-human”.

We are not born with a gene that insists we become Muslim or Christian or Rastafarian. We are born, all of us, with a tabula rasa; we are not defined by the nationality or religion or cultural assumptions of our parents. But that was the mindset which, at that time, prevailed.

This is how far we have come in the past year or so. When an ICM poll of Britain’s Muslims in February this year revealed that some 40% (that is, about 800,000 people) wished to see Islamic law introduced in parts of Britain, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality responded by saying that they should therefore pack their bags and clear off. Sir Trevor Phillips’s exact words were these: “If you want to have laws decided in another way, you have to live somewhere else.”

My guess is this: if such a statement had been made by a member of the Tory party’s Monday Club in 1984 — or, for that matter, 1994 — he would have been excoriated and quite probably would have been kicked out of the party. “If you don’t like it here then go somewhere else” was once considered the apogee of “racism”. People who did not like it here were exhorted to exert their political muscle and change the status quo…

It has transpired that this was the final triumph of multiculturalism — to create within British society a sizeable body of people who have been assured that it is absolutely fine not to integrate because, if we’re honest, the prevailing culture is worthless: oppressive and decadent. People who are, as a result, perhaps terminally estranged and who have been relentlessly encouraged in their sense of alienation.

The news that the bombers of July 7 last year and those who allegedly plotted to blow up a whole bunch of aeroplanes were British born apparently came as a shock to the government. Well, it did not come as a shock to those of us who viewed multiculturalism as both dangerous and inherently racist.

It seemed, to people like Honeyford, a simple case of cause and effect. In the end, it is not the mad mullahs at whom we should direct our wrath, but the white liberals who enabled them to prosper. That the creed has now been binned should be a cause for celebration; but don’t for a moment expect an admission that they got it wrong in the first place.

The spectacular scenery, a typically booming economy, and a climate which permits you to grow lemons and avocados in your backyard makes Californians seem rather spoiled to the rest of us. Californians typically express their appreciation for all their good fortune by the cultivation as a local art form of cloaking an unlimited sense of entitlement in the rhetoric of idealism.

How do you keep the other fellow (who actually owns the land) from doing anything with it that might deprive you of the pleasure of looking at it undeveloped? You just come up with an appropriate worthy cause: protecting some purportedly endangered amphibian, rodent or weed; avoiding sprawl; maintaining open space; and voila! You get to keep out the riff raff, and be spiritually enlightened too.

Today’s Wall Street Journal describes the plight of the Mexican immigrant worker in Monterey County renting out a room in the 1000 sq. ft. house that cost him half a million dollars, and still spending 70% of his income on his mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, Reuters describes the accelerating middle class exodus from idyllic coastal California to the baking hot interior Central Valley (renowned for its 110 degree temperatures) in search of affordable housing.

OAKLAND, California – Father Mark Wiesner has grown accustomed to wishing parishioners bon voyage as they flee the San Francisco area’s high housing costs for California’s Central Valley, where developers are increasingly transforming farms and ranches into a new suburbia.

“So many young couples I marry have to go to Modesto or Tracy to start their married lives,” said Wiesner, a Catholic priest in Oakland on the San Francisco Bay. “They simply can’t afford to stay here in the Bay area and to buy a single-family dwelling.”

Tracy and Modesto are 50 and 80 miles east of Oakland respectively. Both have seen blistering growth in recent years amid a middle-class exodus from California’s famed coastal urban centers in search of affordable housing.

Analysts say the middle-class flight will press on even if coastal home prices sag amid a national housing slowdown. Home prices near the state’s coastline would need to collapse to make buying a home there possible for many households.

Barring a collapse, ever more Californians will call the state’s Central Valley home because homes there are relatively affordable. July’s median home price in San Francisco was $771,000, compared with $438,000 in San Joaquin County roughly 60 miles to the east, according to real estate information service DataQuick Information Systems.

Southern California is seeing a similar exodus to Riverside and San Bernardino counties, known as the region’s Inland Empire, from Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

“Having been in the house market in Los Angeles, I can tell you a house with little bit of privacy and space to call your own is pretty hard to come by,” said economist Christopher Thornberg of the consulting firm Beacon Economics. “For many people getting out to that Inland Empire is the only way to really have a backyard for the kids.”

James Lileks has some sardonic reflections on the contemporary art scene in the Age of Islamic Terror. Read the whole thing.

Sign of the times: Type “naked woman cuddling dead pig” into Google, and your first result is not one of those horrid pervy sites whose pictures make you want to bleach your eyeballs.

No, you get a review of a British performance artist. For four hours she hugged a porker while spectators filed past and thought: “There’s something you don’t see every day, a fact that might be conclusive evidence of a benevolent God.”

Naturally, she got a grant for the project; public pounds paid for the dead pig, which she stabbed with a knife in order to bond with the corpse. Bring the kids! And the next time you’re in the grocery store holding some bacon, consider taking off your clothes and selling tickets. You might make enough money to make bail…

It’s hard to convince Britain’s radicalized immigrants to assimilate if it means they must pay for some naked lady getting jiggy with piggy. These are the values of the West? We must pay for this, and you call it freedom?

Good question. What is Western culture all about these days, anyway? Little but narcissism, lassitude, sneers and muted despair, it seems. No, correct that; it’s European/U.S. elite culture that seems unmoored. Standard lowbrow American culture is quite clear about what it likes: snakes on planes, loud cars going around in circles with the occasional airborne detour into the stands, high-quality TV shows, mediocre pop music, naked people without the whole arty pig thing.

It’s generally confident and not particularly self-reflective, which leaves the “elite” stratum of the arts worlds to face the true hard issues of our times. Like pig-hugging and the threat to democracy posed by Joe McCarthy.

How much force does it take to intimidate the American left into screaming for withdrawal and surrender?

General John Abizaid tells Hugh Hewitt the strength of the forces in Iraq confronting 133,000 American, 17,000 Coalition (source: Global Security, and (as General Abazid notes) an additional 275,000 lraqi troops amounts to “less than 20,000 active, and the Shiia militias that are actively confronting the coalition forces are less than about 5,000.”

That’s right, folks. Our side’s 425,000 cannot possibly hope to defeat under 25,000 insurgents, the liberals conclude fearfully. It’s hopeless. Better withdraw.

Hell, that’s 17 to 1. Even General Bernard Law Montgomery would have been willing to fight with 17 to 1 odds in his favor.

Ann Althouse, law professor and often acerbic blogger (who notoriously does not tolerate fools gladly), lowers the boom on Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in the Times.

As long as we’re appreciating irony, let’s consider the irony of emphasizing the importance of holding one branch of the federal government, the executive, to the strict limits of the rule of law while sitting in another branch of the federal government, the judiciary, and blithely ignoring your own obligations.

So often, we’ve heard complaints about “activist” judges. They’re suspected of deciding what outcome they want, based on their own personal or ideological preferences, and then writing a legalistic, neutral-sounding opinion to cover up what they’ve done. That carefully composed legal opinion makes it somewhat hard for a judge’s critics to convince people — especially anyone who likes the outcome — that the judge did not decide the case according to an unbiased legal method of analysis.

So perhaps the oddest thing about Judge Taylor’s opinion in the eavesdropping case is that she didn’t bother to come up with the verbiage that normally cushions us from these suspicions. Although the first half of the opinion, dealing with the state secrets doctrine and the first part of the standing doctrine, has the usual detail and structure one expects in a judicial opinion, the remainder of her text dispenses with the formalities.

Immensely difficult matters of First and Fourth Amendment law, separation of powers, and the relationship between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force are disposed of in short sections that jump from assorted quotations of old cases to conclusory assertions of illegality. Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington, told The Times that the section on the Fourth Amendment is “just a few pages of general ruminations … much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect.”

For those who approve of the outcome , the judge’s opinion is counterproductive. It will be harder to defend upon appeal than a more careful decision. It suggests that there are no good legal arguments against the program, just petulance and outrage and antipathy toward President Bush. It helps those who have been arguing for years about result-oriented, activist judges.

Laypeople consuming early news reports may well have thought, “What a courageous judge!” and “It’s a good thing someone finally said that the president is not above the law.” Look at that juicy quotation from Judge Taylor’s ruling: “There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”

But this is sheer sophistry. The potential for the president to abuse his power has nothing to do with kings and heredity. (How much power do hereditary kings have these days, anyway?) And, indeed, the president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law.

It is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously. If they do not, we ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president. After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

This, of course, is the most basic question in constitutional law, the one addressed in Marbury v. Madison. The public may have become so used to the notion that a judge’s word is what counts that it forgets why this is true. The judges have this constitutional power only because they operate by a judicial method that restricts them to resolving concrete controversies and requires them to interpret the relevant constitutional and statutory texts and to reason within the tradition of the case law.

This system works only if the judges suppress their personal and political willfulness and take on the momentous responsibility to embody the rule of law. They should not reach out for opportunities to make announcements of law, but handle the real cases that have been filed.

This means that the judge has a constitutional duty, under the doctrine of standing, to respond only to concretely injured plaintiffs who are suing the entity that caused their injury and for the purpose of remedying that injury. We trust the judge to say what the law is because the judge “must of necessity expound and interpret” in order to decide cases, as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury. But Judge Taylor breezed through two of the three elements of standing doctrine — this constitutional limit on her power — in what looks like a headlong rush through a whole series of difficult legal questions to get to an outcome in her heart she knew was right.

If the words of the written opinion reveal that the judge did not follow the discipline of the judicial process, what sense does it make to take the judge’s word about what the law means over the word of the president? If the judge’s own writing does not support a belief that the rule of law has substance and depth, that law is something apart from political will, the significance of saying the president has gone beyond the limits of the law evaporates.

There’s irony for you.

Michael Barone discusses the reflexive treason of the American intellectual clerisy.

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism.

At the center of their thinking is a notion of moral relativism. No idea is morally superior to another. Hitler had his way, we have ours — who’s to say who is right? No ideas should be “privileged,” especially those that have been the guiding forces in the development and improvement of Western civilization. Rich white men have imposed their ideas because of their wealth and through the use of force. Rich white nations imposed their rule on benighted people of color around the world. For this sin of imperialism they must forever be regarded as morally stained and presumptively wrong. Our covert enemies go quickly from the notion that all societies are morally equal to the notion that all societies are morally equal except ours, which is worse.

These are the ideas that have been transmitted over a long generation by the elites who run our universities and our schools, and who dominate our mainstream media. They teach an American history with the good parts left out and the bad parts emphasized. We are taught that some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders — and are left ignorant of their proclamations of universal liberties and human rights. We are taught that Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II — and not that American military forces liberated millions from tyranny. To be sure, the great mass of Americans tend to resist these teachings. By the millions they buy and read serious biographies of the Founders and accounts of the Greatest Generation. But the teachings of our covert enemies have their effect.

Of course, this distorts history. We are taught that American slavery was the most evil institution in human history. But every society in history has had slavery. Only one society set out to and did abolish it. The movement to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery was not started by the reason-guided philosophies of 18th century France. It was started, as Adam Hochschild documents in his admirable book “Bury the Chains,” by Quakers and Evangelical Christians in Britain, followed in time by similar men and women in America. The slave trade was ended not by Africans, but by the Royal Navy, with aid from the U.S. Navy even before the Civil War.

Nevertheless, the default assumption of our covert enemies is that in any conflict between the West and the Rest, the West is wrong. That assumption can be rebutted by overwhelming fact: Few argued for the Taliban after Sept. 11. But in our continuing struggles, our covert enemies portray our work in Iraq through the lens of Abu Ghraib and consider Israel’s self-defense against Hezbollah as the oppression of virtuous victims by evil men. In World War II, our elites understood that we were the forces of good and that victory was essential. Today, many of our elites subject our military and intelligence actions to fine-tooth-comb analysis and find that they are morally repugnant.

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don’t want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

Reuters reports that some grand-scale Stalinesque historical airbrushing is about to take place on Turner Broadcasting.

Turner Broadcasting is scouring more than 1,500 classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including old favorites Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, to edit out scenes that glamorize smoking.

The review was triggered by a complaint to British media regulator Ofcom by one viewer who took offence to two episodes of Tom and Jerry shown on the Boomerang channel, part of Turner Broadcasting which itself belongs to Time Warner Inc.

“We are going through the entire catalogue,” Yinka Akindele, spokeswoman for Turner in Europe, said on Monday.

“This is a voluntary step we’ve taken in light of the changing times,” she said, adding the painstaking review had been prompted by the Ofcom complaint.

The regulator’s latest news bulletin stated that a viewer, who was not identified, had complained about two smoking scenes on Tom and Jerry, saying they “were not appropriate in a cartoon aimed at children.”

In the first, “Texas Tom”, the hapless cat Tom tries to impress a feline female by rolling a cigarette, lighting it and smoking it with one hand. In the second, “Tennis Chumps”, Tom’s opponent in a match smokes a large cigar.

“The licensee has … proposed editing any scenes or references in the series where smoking appeared to be condoned, acceptable, glamorized or where it might encourage imitation,” Ofcom said, adding that “Texas Tom” was one such example.

Akindele said cartoons would only be modified “where smoking could be deemed to be cool or glamorized”, and that scenes where a villain was featured with a cigarette or cigar would not necessarily be cut.

There must be a special place in hell for the kind of lickspittle corporate cowards who come up with this sort of disgraceful policy.

Barry Dauphin understands them perfectly.

Why do they hate us?” is a question that undergoes a subtle transformation in the minds of many anti-American, anti-West folks. It becomes: well nobody could really hate me, because I’m wonderful, so they must really hate you (Bushmacchimphitler & Halliburton & anyone else I don’t agree with and didn’t vote for. Since anyone who disagrees with me must hate me, I am within my rights to hate them…and that means you). Since I hate you and the Islamists hate you, they must be onto something, so I’ll give them some more time to calm down a bit, so they don’t accidentally hurt me. Accidentally, because they aren’t responsible for this, you know.

Jerry Jackson, the Chicago Sun Times’ Wednesday conservative editorialist, responds to Lanny Davis’ recent Wall Street Journal editorial which expressed surprise at finding so much “scary hatred” (aimed at Joe Lieberman) emanating from the left. (Lanny is a red-diaper baby, named after Upton Sinclair’s “progressive” agent Lanny Budd.) Scary hatred, in Lanny Davis’s view is a natural monopoly of the political right.

When I discuss Rush (Limbaugh) and others with some of my liberal friends, they all repeat the same worn out phrases. He (Rush) is full of hate, cuts people off if they disagree and in general spews vitriol against liberals. I then ask them if they ever listen to Rush, and to a person they always answer “of course not, but I know all these things because I read about him and hear these comments from my friends”.

Rush maintains an audience of somewhere between 20-25 million people because he delivers a quality program with lots of good humor and bases his comments on considerable research. He encourages calls from those that disagree and some days takes calls only from those who have a different philosophy.

Does Rush make fun of the liberals and make their immature ideas sound ridiculous? Absolutely. Does he do research to prove their talking points are without logic? You bet! Does he use vulgar phrases and emit hate in every word? Never.

For years now the progressives have tried to offset Rush with their own left leaning performers, and they went through a number of lefties that bombed on the air. Those have included Mario Como, Hightower, Al Gore and many others.

A few years ago the lefties thought they had the answer, and with enormous financial backing from such stalwarts as George Soros, created a whole network to feature the left and called it Air America. This network is 24 hours a day of Bush bashing, hate, vulgarity and out and out stupidity. Since I criticize the Limbaugh bashers who have never heard his program, I felt it was my duty to listen to Air America. I have done so over a period of about three months and here are some comments from just two 90- minute sessions:

1) “The entire Bush crime family should be executed.”

2) “George Bush is a g.d. lying s.o.b.” (by the host) There was no use of initials in this quote.

3) “Bush and Cheney are gleefully causing gas prices to go sky high to benefit their big oil friends.”

4) “Why didn’t Cheney turn the shotgun on himself after he wounded his friend?” (by the host)

5) “The Bush Administration planned and executed 9-11.”

6) “Rumsfeld should be hung by his thumbs and subjected to all the torture that was given to the alleged insurgents.”

7) “The Bush government purposely did not capture bin Laden because they wanted an excuse to go to war.” (by the host)

8) “We can hope that the insurgents will get information on Bush’s travel plans so they can shoot down his airplane.”

9) “Bush and the government planted explosives in the World Trade Center and that’s why the Twin Towers collapsed.”

On this latter point one of the hosts asked how this could be so since we all saw the airplanes fly into both towers. The answer to this was simple. One of the listeners explained that this was a conspiracy between Bush and the major TV networks. Through trick technology they transposed these airplanes onto the TV screens to fool all America – and on and on and on.

So these are all the peace loving, tolerant, well educated and so informed progressives and liberals that are trying to redirect America. If the subject wasn’t so serious, it could be great comedy. If you want something to keep you up at night, these patriots with their brilliance and liberal elite-ness vote in all the local and national elections.

The good news is that Air America is having a very tough time staying afloat. They have lost their radio outlets in New York and several other major markets. This network cannot raise enough advertising dollars to promote this brand of vicious propaganda. Eventually George Soros and other sponsors will no doubt tire of funding such trash and they will be required to compete in the free market.

Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy, responds to the left’s most dishonest blogger‘s rantings over criticisms of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor’s NSA opinion by the Washington Post (and others), observing:

the Administration is giving the program only a very partial defense in its public documents, so there is a lot more that we don’t know. (For example, I teach and write in the area of the Fourth Amendment, and my view is that I don’t know enough of the facts to know if the program violates the Fourth Amendment.

Professor Kerr has identified the most interesting feature of the NSA flap. The December 16, 2005 New York Times leaked NSA story accused the Bush administration of “monitoring,” a term subsequently rhetorically upgraded to “spying,” and ultimately to “eavesdropping,” on international phone calls and email messages “within the United States” without warrants.

The Bush Administration’s accusers knew that they were taking a very serious step by divulging the existence of one or more top secret National Security programs, and they not surprisingly chose merely to apply partisan and inflammatory characterizations without ever specifically describing what it was that they were pointing to with feigned outrage.

Since all this is secret, no one outside certain intelligence agencies and the upper reaches of the US Government really knows who is doing what, when, or to whom. It is really as if all it required was for Messrs. Risen and Lichtblau to write a story saying “the Bush Administration is secretly violating the law,” some unidentified persons said “by doing bad things,” and the left faithfully falls into zombified lockstep, and begins shouting cries of pain and outrage in chorus.

A key problem is no one has ever been identified anyone who has ever experienced a known wrong, or a perceived consequence of any kind, from whatever it is that NSA might, or might not, be doing.

Can the Constitution really be violated, or the law be broken, by persons unknown secretly peforming unknown acts devoid of discernible effect?

The left obviously thinks that George W. Bush is just intrinsically unconstitutional, and that he breaks the law just by being in office, and their grasp of so much of the MSM allows them to create an echo-chamber alternative reality in which the liberal articles of faith -which everybody knows- seem very real, however tenuous their relationship to mere diurnal reality.

Oh, sure.

The ACLU, a little jurisdiction shopping, and a Jimmy Carter-appointed ultra-liberal ideologue judge with a record of partisan political judicial conduct, a cooperative MSM, and voila! you have headlines shouting U.S. Judge Finds Wiretapping Plan Violates the Law.

In reality, Anna Diggs Taylor’s ruling will simply go on to the Circuit Court of Appeals and on to the Supreme Court, where the arguments will be evaluated by more serious and responsible judges.

———————
MaggieCarta on Free Republic provides the song of the hour.

My Law School Told Me You Better Shop Around.
(Tune: My Momma Told Me You Better Shop Around)

Just because you’ve briefed a big case now
There’s still some things that you must understand now
Before you step into court with demands now
Make your choice nonrandom as you can now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

There’s some knowledge I want to bestow now
Know which way that the wind’s gonna blow now
Judgments come and judgments are gonna go now
The more you look, you’ll find one apropos, now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

You must use your all best jargon, son
Don’t stay stuck with the very first one
Hard working judges come a dime a dozen
Try to find you one with a verdict you’re lovin’
Presume you got no standing to sue, now
Find one who’s in bed with ACLU now
My law school taught me:
You better shop around

R.R. Reno suggests that there are Western reasons for British-born Muslims becoming part of violent movements.

The British have arrested Muslim terrorists, and once again, soul-searching is very much in evidence. “Why,” I hear asked, “are those born among us turning against us?”

High unemployment, social isolation, anti-Muslim prejudice—the standard explanations are canvassed. They boil down to a general analysis of homegrown terrorism as stemming from isolation from Western culture and ideals.

But is that right? Is the Muslim terrorist really such a strange, marginal, and alien figure in our own cultural history and mythology? Or is he not a rather familiar figure, perhaps all-too-well socialized into certain aspects of the modern and postmodern West?

The philosopher Charles Taylor has observed that a “politics of recognition” plays a significant role in the political psychology of modern liberal culture. People do not just have a right to speak their minds—they have a right to be heard! Protest, burning draft cards, street violence, the Black Panthers: Public aggression and assertion have long been legitimated by our dominant, progressive mentality. “Silenced voices must be heard!”

Step back for a moment and think about it. We wonder why Muslims in Europe won’t contain their grievances and settle down to live within the ordinary routines of European society. I imagine that the tacit motto of most British politicians is “Just give assimilation a chance.” And yet that same society supports and idealizes an entire class of perpetual protestors (Greenpeace, anti-globalization groups, animal rights activists, and so on) whose waking lives are spent hurtling themselves against society. May I be forgiven for thinking that mode of modern European existence has been well assimilated by the arrested terrorists?

Moreover, the linkage of supposedly idealistic protest with violence and aggression is also very much a part our modern Western political aesthetic. The French Revolution sanctified mob violence and ritualized public executions as noble expressions of liberty. The revolutionary remains a heroic type with a gun slung across his shoulder. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote about gratuitous crimes as acts of existential purity. Norman Mailer romanticized murderers, and the Marquis de Sade ascends to canonical status in our universities.

———————

Hat tip to truepeers.