The Liberal Crack-up over ISIS
By James Kirchick on 25 February 2015
Usually the MSNBC host has no time for foreign policy interventionists, national security hawks, and the other assorted defense intellectuals crudely classified under the “neocon” label. “There’s always a war that the neocons are looking forward to,” he grumbled in 2012. “Neocons,” he said that same year in a discussion of Mitt Romney’s presidential advisers, are “horrible, dangerous people.”
Just five months ago, Matthews lambasted none other than President Obama, not a man usually accused of falling under the spell of neoconservative influence, for his use of the word “homeland,” a term the towheaded pundit considered “totalitarian,” one “used by the neocons,” whom, Matthews said, “love it.”
And so imagine my surprise to see Matthews closing out a recent Monday evening Hardball broadcast with a robust call for the use of American firepower that would have made former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz swoon. Matthews was moved to make this stirring call to arms by the Islamic State’s latest act of savagery: the beachside beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya. The gruesome video of this atrocity, expertly filmed and edited as usual, ended with the bloody waters of the Mediterranean Sea lapping along the Libyan coastline. “We can’t see people killed like this in our face and simply flip to the sports page or the financial news or what’s at the movies or who’s going to win the Oscars and act like America, our country, is not being morally humiliated,” Matthews intoned, the rising anger in his voice a reflection of wounded national honor; the vow to enact justice positively Churchillian.
“Because it is,” he continued, “with the lives of at least some of these people, who must, in their last minutes, have to be wondering if there’s any chance the people in the United States could be coming to their rescue, because that’s how we were taught that we conduct ourselves. We don’t leave people behind.” Somewhere, John Bolton was twirling his moustache.
Matthews’s tirade was not just the isolated ranting of a cable television host. His frustration reflects the views of a growing swath of liberals and Democrats fed up with the White House’s response—or lack thereof—to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The administration’s tendency to obfuscate the nature of the threat we are facing, refusal to confront the problem of radical Islam by its right and proper name, and inclination to draw spurious moral equivalences are being met with fierce resistance from within its own ranks.
The Matthews tirade was delivered the same night as his famous face-off with State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf, who told an incredulous Matthews that “we cannot kill our way out of this war” and urged that we “go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups.” The following day, Harf went on CNN to defend her remarks, saying that it was “too nuanced an argument for some.”
But if anyone was lacking “nuance” it was Harf. For had she bothered to read the voluminous scholarly literature on terrorism and poverty, she would have discovered that the relationship between the two is reverse. “If there is a link between income level, education, and participation in terrorist activities,” Princeton economist Claude Berrebi wrote in a study of Palestinian terrorists, “it is either very weak or in the opposite direction of what one intuitively might have expected.” Ridiculing the administration’s “nonsense” about terrorism, the liberal New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen—who in 1997 produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden—wrote that the question “‘Who becomes a terrorist?’ turns out, in many cases, to be much like asking, ‘Who owns a Volvo?’”
Take some of the more high-profile terrorists of recent times. Attempted underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab descended from a prominent Nigerian family and lived in a London apartment worth 2 million pounds. Meanwhile, the arch-terrorist bin Laden was himself the son of a billionaire Saudi construction magnate. Poverty, in other words, doesn’t create terrorism. Ideology does.
Which leads to the second conceptual problem that some liberals are beginning to have with this administration: its reluctance to spotlight the ideology we happen to be confronting. Last week, the White House held a summit on “countering violent extremism,” the very name of which presents the threat to the world as some sort of nebulous, ecumenical army of fanatics, when, in fact, the people trying to kill us and destroy our way of life are, almost entirely, followers of one faith tradition.
Ah, but the president and his defenders say: The perpetrators of these crimes are not really “Islamic.” With this deliberate denial of reality, not only do they mask the threat of violent Islamic extremism among other, far less pertinent dangers, they ignore the very Islamic nature of it. Having drifted from their Judeo-Christian moorings (if they ever had them), many Western progressives are poorly equipped to grapple with the religious zeal of Muslims.
In the cover story of the March issue of the Atlantic, Graeme Wood explains how overlooking the Islamic character of the Islamic State backfires, because “pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.” Rather than speak honestly about what we’re dealing with, the White House would rather assuage the sensitivities of people like the Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Salam Al-Marayati, who, according to the Daily Beast, “express[ed] concerns that our government needs to ensure that it doesn’t give ‘legitimacy’ to the claims of ISIS and al Qaeda that they are in fact Islamic.”
As the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading authority on ISIS, told Wood, Muslims who talk like this are understandably “‘embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion’ that neglects ‘what their religion has historically and legally required.’” ISIS leaders have not invented out of whole cloth the various Koranic edicts to wage war on infidels and herd non-Muslim women into chattel slavery; it’s all there in the Muslim holy book. The great struggle of our time will be whether or not Islam, as it is widely practiced and understood, can achieve a reformation in the same manner as the other Abrahamic faiths. It is for this reason that denying the religious element of that struggle is so counterproductive.
Unfortunately, the president ranks among those who make the kind of unqualified claims on behalf of the faith that Haykel abjures. “99.9 percent of Muslims,” Obama said recently, “are looking for the same things we are looking for—order, peace, prosperity” and “don’t even recognize [radical interpretations] as being Islam.” That doesn’t square—at all—with the latest results from the Pew Global Attitudes project, which shows that support for suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism, while having fallen significantly since 9/11, is still popular with a disturbingly high number of Muslims. As Joshua Muravchik observes in Commentary, if even 20 percent of the world’s Islamic population, a conservative estimate, were to support terrorism, that would translate into about 300 million people. This is the pool from which ISIS draws its active, and passive, support.
Thankfully, the sensible majority of Americans do not share the views of the administration and its politically correct enforcers. Only last September did more than 50 percent of Americans finally come around to the realization that Islam is more likely to encourage violence than other faiths. But even then, that violence can easily be written off as “reactive” conduct in response to the provocations of the Western oppressor, not actions undertaken with individual agency and animated by a murderous ideology. “Without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, [the Charlie Hebdo] attacks clearly wouldn’t have taken place,” wrote Seumas Milne in the Guardian.
Arguing that France, and the West in general, are responsible for the terrorist acts committed against them, Milne would allow the Islamists—people who murder Jews because they’re Jews and gays because they’re gays—dictate terms to the rest of us. And by putting Muslims writ large at the top of their victim totem pole, those Western progressives who fashion themselves allies of the umma are in fact doing it great harm. In validating Osama bin Laden’s claims that the relationship between Muslims and the West is one defined by a set of grievances, and that Muslims are therefore partially justified in committing terrorism to address these grievances (whereas no other social group is allowed such dispensation), the Western left demeans and belittles Muslims. Of all the downtrodden and discriminated against, of which there are many in this benighted world, it is only the followers of the Islamic faith whom they excuse as prone to bomb and murder as a means of voicing their collective complaints.
“What happens there ends up happening here too,” Milne says, arguing that continued Western strikes on the Islamic State will only result in more terrorist attacks, or “blowback,” in European and maybe even American cities. Should we veil our women and execute our gays, since that, too, is what the Islamic State desires? There is no negotiating with those who kill people because of who they are. I would argue for bombing these barbarians back to the Stone Age, but that would be redundant.
The last, and perhaps most decisive split to emerge on the left over ISIS regards the urge to draw moral equivalencies. Earlier this month, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president told us all to get off our collective “high horse” about ISIS because some European kings had ordered the Crusades many hundreds of years ago. More pressing today, there are many on the left who refuse to let any discussion of Islamic terrorism persist in which Christian and Jewish terrorism is not subjected to the same analytical rigor.
This is an insult to the intelligence. There is no Christian or Jewish equivalent to the Islamic State, to which tens of thousands of people have ventured from all corners of the earth, heeding its call to live in a land governed by strict sharia law and dedicated to waging war not only on the Western world and non-believers, but on any and all Muslims who do not conform to its obscurantist dictates. And even long before the establishment of the Islamic State, the world was already stuck with some half a dozen or so various Islamic theocracies, of both the Shiite (Iran) and Sunni (Saudi Arabia) variety.
Writing of the president’s impulse to draw a connection between the Christian crusades of yesteryear and ISIS’s current barbarism, Damon Linker of the Week observed that, while the “liberal habit of self-criticism” is important, “this instinct can also blind liberals to real and important differences, and discourage the making of relevant, even essential judgments, as the embrace of humility and call to refrain from judging others becomes, paradoxically, its own source of pride.”
Progressives revel in dredging up our iniquities; it is determining whether or not those old vices should prevent us from doing good today that separates the serious liberals from the morally exhibitionist ones.
James Kirchick is a correspondent for the Daily Beast and a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative.
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/james-kirchick/liberal-crack-over-isis 
