He Who Must Not Be Named
As you know, I’ve written before about the underlying conservative truths in the most popular pop culture products of recent times: Harry Potter, the Ring Trilogy and Narnia. While listening today to Mark Steyn’s brilliant interview with Hugh Hewitt last Thursday, August 3, I was reminded again of how true these pop culture products are, and how PC mania prevents us from recognizing the core messages they convey.
As always, Steyn was right on the money on myriad points about what’s going on in the Middle East — pointing out, for example, the bizarre world belief system that approaches Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, as an equal partner in peace talks with Israel, a nation. What particularly struck me, though, was Steyn’s pointing out again, something we’ve all noticed: The PC mindset that prevents the press and the police from pointing out the common motivation behind so many of the attacks in the western world lately.
Thus, the media and police scratch their heads about why someone went crazy in Seattle, in Canada, in Baltimore, in Australia, in Arizona, and on and on and on. In each case, they seem perversely oblivious to a common thread — the fact that, in each case, the attackers are Muslim and the attack is always, in the attacker’s own mind, framed in terms of his Muslim identity. Each time, we hear about pathologies — isolation, normalcy, hostility, friendliness, loneliness, voices, whatever. Anything but that common religious thread.
And each time I read these stories, I think of Harry Potter. Harry and Dumbledore are the only ones who have the courage to call evil by its name — Voldemort. Everyone else assiduously avoids that name, referring to “you know who,” or “he who must not be named,” as if by pretending ignorance of the name, they can pretend ignorance of the evil behind it. All of us, when we read the books, recognize both intuitively and intellectually how futile it is to avoid calling things by their true name. We also know that this wilful blindness empowers evil, because it disables us from analyzing and fighting the threat. We admire Harry for his courage in recognizing and naming evil. Why is it, then, that in real life, the same people who admire Harry’s logical and courageous stand because of the inherent truth in his position fall back on PC pathologies that completely undermine their ability to recognize the evil that we, in the Western world, are facing?
UPDATE: Speaking of the brilliant, incomparable Mark Steyn, please don’t miss his article today shredding the proportionality virus that is seeking to tear apart Israel’s ability to defend herself against a terrorist group that Iran heavily supports and that is committed to Israel’s total destruction.
UPDATE II: Laer provides yet another example of the media’s mind-numbing idiocy when it comes to connecting the terrorist dots, this time in Germany.
UPDATE III: For more on the world’s wilful moral blindness and equivalency, if you haven’t already read Victor Davis Hanson’s amazing article you must:
Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians.
It is now nearly five years since jihadists from the Arab world left a crater in Manhattan and ignited the Pentagon. Apart from the frontline in Iraq, the United States and NATO have troops battling the Islamic fascists in Afghanistan. European police scramble daily to avoid another London or Madrid train bombing. The French, Dutch, and Danish governments are worried that a sizable number of Muslim immigrants inside their countries are not assimilating, and, more worrisome, are starting to demand that their hosts alter their liberal values to accommodate radical Islam. It is apparently not safe for Australians in Bali, and a Jew alone in any Arab nation would have to be discreet — and perhaps now in France or Sweden as well. Canadians’ past opposition to the Iraq war, and their empathy for the Palestinians, earned no reprieve, if we can believe that Islamists were caught plotting to behead their prime minister. Russians have been blown up by Muslim Chechnyans from Moscow to Beslan. India is routinely attacked by Islamic terrorists. An elected Lebanese minister must keep in mind that a Hezbollah or Syrian terrorist — not an Israeli bomb — might kill him if he utters a wrong word. The only mystery here in the United States is which target the jihadists want to destroy first: the Holland Tunnel in New York or the Sears Tower in Chicago.
In nearly all these cases there is a certain sameness: The Koran is quoted as the moral authority of the perpetrators; terrorism is the preferred method of violence; Jews are usually blamed; dozens of rambling complaints are aired, and killers are often considered stateless, at least in the sense that the countries in which they seek shelter or conduct business or find support do not accept culpability for their actions.
Yet the present Western apology to all this is often to deal piecemeal with these perceived Muslim grievances: India, after all, is in Kashmir; Russia is in Chechnya; America is in Iraq, Canada is in Afghanistan; Spain was in Iraq (or rather, still is in Al Andalus); or Israel was in Gaza and Lebanon. Therefore we are to believe that “freedom fighters” commit terror for political purposes of “liberation.” At the most extreme, some think there is absolutely no pattern to global terrorism, and the mere suggestion that there is constitutes “Islamaphobia.”
You can also hear Mr. Hanson talking to Hugh Hewitt here.
UPDATE IV: Joel Mowbray takes on the “he who must not be named” syndrome in regards to the Seattle shooting. (Hat tip: Power Line.)
UPDATE V: Jeff Jacoby looks at the same self-imposed blindless by juxtaposing it with the hysteria surrounding Mel Gibson’s drunken maundering.
UPDATE VI: Michelle Malkin has several links on the anti-American, anti-Jewish hatred that our MSM continues to deep six.
