The Left has a lot in common with Islam. Progressives and Muslims have different traditions and a different vision of their desired future. The point of the comparison is not to prove they are the same. It is simply to explain by comparison. Multiculturalism has made comparison a taboo, but it is a useful way to understand things. It used to be the main way we studied cultures, but that was a long time ago in another country.
Anyway, consider this story the other day from the heart of Islam:
ISIS fighters have destroyed two ancient Muslim shrines in the oasis city of Palmyra, the Syrian government confirmed Wednesday, the latest act of cultural vandalism by the Sunni extremists.
ISIS seized control of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site dating back 2,000 years, last month, prompting fears for the site’s survival.
An email sent on behalf of Syria’s antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, said the body had heard four days ago from people in Palmyra of the shrines’ destruction.
“ISIS has blown up two ancient Muslim shrines in Palmyra, and has published photos of this awful crime against the Syrian cultural heritage on Facebook,” the statement said.
One of the tombs destroyed is that of Mohammed bin Ali, a descendent of Ali bin Abi Taleb, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin, the website DGAM said. It’s in a hilly area 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) north of Palmyra.
Now, consider this story from the heart of Liberalism:
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, which has stood near the banks of the Potomac River in Washington for more than 70 years, is a classical tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president.
This week, the Jefferson Memorial was drawn into the national debate about race following the shooting deaths of nine people in a predominantly black church in South Carolina last week. It joins other public statues depicting Southern or Confederate figures, including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, that some are arguing represent the country’s racist past and should be removed.
CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield this week questioned whether the Jefferson Memorial should be taken down because Jefferson owned slaves. “There is a monument to him in the capital city of the United States. No one ever asks for that to come down,” Banfield said.
Fellow anchor Don Lemon responded by saying Jefferson represented “the entire United States, not just the South.” But he added: “There may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson. I don’t know if we should do that.”
Now, it is easy to dismiss the chattering skulls on CNN because no one watches CNN and these are two idiots with the IQ of goldfish. They are not demanding we blow up the Jefferson Memorial because it is blasphemy.
I’ll just point out that twenty years ago fringe idiots on TV were talking about men marrying men. It sounded absurd then, but now you can have your property taken if you laugh at gay marriage. Twenty years from ululating liberals could very well be blowing up the Jefferson Memorial because it offends the one true faith.
I don’t think that this thing that the West is undergoing is the birth of a new civilization. It’s like saying the cancer growing in your lung is transforming you into a new organism. In a sense it is, but we all know that the cancer is a parasitic growth, and won’t survive its “victory” over the host. These are death throes, not birth pangs. Multicultural, perversion-obsessed modernism is staging a loud, histrionic death scene. If a tougher culture doesn’t finish it off first, it will starve to death on its own.
Islam and the Cult will together ultimately destroy Christianity. At that point Islam and the Cult will go to war, a war that Islam will win because they are are not afraid to kill, while the Cult is allergic to violence.
The Cult is by no means adverse to violence. They are merely adverse to participating, not directing. Drones are best, but humans will do.
You might bright, but I can’t see the Cult winning at anything that takes actual courage, moral or physical.
Yes. The West is transforming into a new civilization. The old believers, old ways, old symbols will be abolished, annihilated, or redefined. Much already has been.
They always go after the symbols. The destroyers of civilisation and progress have to dismantle the visible because while they can’t really take apart what people feel in themselves, they can remove that which is obvious.
Statues, shrines, flags, even here in the UK shrieking about a nurse wearing a small crucifix to work (though cheerfully employing women who must wear a large piece of cloth over their hair because their violent god tells them to, apparently)… they are all good targets for the hatred of the left and their imagined friends, the muslims.
I’m of a mind to say that Islam and the New Religion are both reactions to Christianity. And by that I mean the much larger sense of Christianity as encompassing Western Civilization. The Near and Middle east have always viewed the people north and west as their natural enemy. Once Christianity conquered Europe and came back south as a European religion, Islam was born and flourished as a reaction and an alternative. The Progressive faith has always been at ear with Christianity, but it was also always at odds with technological and material progress. The defining characteristic of the West… Read more »
Are they the new gnostics? Maybe you’ve drawn this connection in the past, but I missed it. Everybody seems to think there are only two sides–secularism versus Christianity–but traditionally there is a third. Here’s a good quote from John C. Wright, currently one of my favorite fiction authors, on this topic: “Clarke could not help but give a Gnostic answer to the Christian challenge because, within the framework of Western assumptions about man and life and afterlife, there is no other answer. There is nothing new under the sun (so says Solomon in Ecclesiastes). Logic allows only for minor variations… Read more »
Good comparison: The Left and Islam, both culture annihilators.