Welp, it looks like my hometown birdcage liner struck again. The Washington Post, in its latest attempt to get readers to ignore common sense – to say nothing of what’s staring them in the face – now insists that all the West should do to defeat Islamic terrorists is to basically give in to it. Basically, just be nice to them. This is the newspaper that, along with the New York Times, claims to be America’s most trusted new source. Most sanctimonious, maybe.
The article, co-written by a Stanford cultural psychologist named Sarah Lyons-Padilla, enraptures us with such irrefutable logic like, “Our data suggest that policies that pressure immigrants to conform to their adopted culture, like France’s… “burqa ban,” are likely to backfire, because such policies are disrespectful of [Islamic] heritage,” and “Such displays of intolerance can make Muslims feel like they don’t belong in Europe or the United States.”
Yeah, lady, that’s kind of the point.
This may shock the so-called cultural expert but is she aware that Europe and America are actually based on a different culture, with different values and mores? Is she aware that our Western culture is one that that Muslims themselves reject as offensive to Mohammed? Muslims, according to their own beliefs, don’t belong in Europe or the United States as they exist today. That’s kind of the point of their invasion.
Ms. Lyons-Padilla handily overlooks that small point but doesn’t hesitate to declare that it is the responsibility of the culturally invaded to contort our society in order to avoid making these poor Muslims feel “disrespected”. If we just do that, you know give them everything they’re demanding when they open fire on a café or blow up a building, then there won’t be any more terrorists. I guess in that sense Ms. Lyons-Padilla is right. The Muslim terrorists will have achieved their goal of enforcing subjectivity to Islam. This nut bag argues we should just smile while we’re grabbing our ankles.
Ms. Lyons-Padilla does admit that “there are a lot of practical and ethical barriers to studying what makes someone a terrorist”. Gee, it’s nice of her recognize that small hitch in her scientific method. I’m going to go out on a limb and offer that one barrier might be that it’s damn tricky to find actual terrorists to participate in her “research”. I wonder if it even occurred to her that, even if she did meet some Islamic real deals, they might not feel compelled to tell her the whole truth and nothing but the truth since they’re, you know, murdering savages? Oh, that’s right, it’s our fault for being mean to them and we only need to be nicer.
Before putting her study on the bottom of your birdcage liner, consider this one additional minuscule blind spot in the Leftist narrative: Liberalism assumes that the only worthwhile achievement of any disagreement should be peace at whatever cost. If the most direct path to pacifism is submission then we should celebrate it because we’ve avoided conflict. There is simply no room in the liberal brain (such as it is) for the idea that maybe what’s best is to acknowledge Islam as the enemy it actually is and not overpay hippie professors to whine about being nice to the enemy.
