The liberal is either at your throat or at your feet….

My post caption is mangled version of an English expression popular in the years leading up to and during WWI:  “The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet.”  It was a reference to the fact that Germany was a deeply hierarchical, undemocratic nation, with only the haziest notions of equality. England wasn’t that democratic either back around 1910, but it was still light years ahead of Germany.

What these “advanced” English realized was that the German nature, because it was so hierarchical, could never just relax into equality.  People were either above, in which case they required deference (even if grudgingly given), or below, in which case they were to be treated with the utmost contempt.  This contempt, of course, was not successfully purged from the German character, despite the rigors of WWI.  It came to full flower with the Nazis, who turned their contempt into genocide and slavery for those in the below position, whether Jews, gypsies, gays, the mentally ill, slavs, or whatever other group the German psychology needed to pigeonhole.

It occurred to me that, although the dynamic arises from a different psychology, liberals have precisely the same habit of classifying people and then, depending on the classification,treating them with abject respect or blood-chilling contempt (a contempt, fortunately, that is still limited to words).  With liberals, though, the categories aren’t above and below.  Instead, they are I dislike you or I dislike and fear you.

What sparked this thought was two news stories.  The first was an update on a story out of San Francisco, one about which I already blogged.  Briefly, a war is brewing over a gun store in the upper Mission District, a neighborhood that is part working class, part yuppie.  The gun store has been there for a long time but the former owner let the license lapse while he considered reconfiguring the store.  Now that the new owner is trying to reinstate the license, neighbors and San Francisco citizens are objecting vociferously.

In my earlier post, I posited (based on nothing more than intuition), that the same people protesting the gun store are probably completely in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque.  That is, they almost certainly support a mosque connected to a man who espouses sharia (wife beating, wife stoning, gay hanging, hand cutting, infidel killing sharia), while vocally opposing a store that is consistent with one of the oldest and most clearly stated constitutional rights in America.

The second story was the report from Hartford, Connecticut, an overwhelmingly Democratic city, announcing that the next City Council meeting would open with a Muslim invocation.  My bet is that Hartford’s Muslim population is small (I can’t find numbers on it), so this invocation is intended to be symbolic and is, no doubt, a way for the government to show its support for the Ground Zero Mosque.

Think about it, which required putting myself in the liberal brain for a minute, I can appreciate that liberals hate guns, which they see as symbols of violence and, worse, as equalizers.  However, I am incapable of imagining that these same liberals actually like sharia law.  After all, as I noted above, many of sharia’s principles are deeply inconsistent with liberals’ self-identification as the party of love, peace and harmony.

The difference, I believe, is fear.  Even though liberals fear guns, they know that gun owners are fundamentally law abiding people.  Equally well, they know that a significant percentage of committed Muslims are sharia-abiding people, who are not averse to using extreme violence against opponents.

You can, of course, always find the lone wacko in any group.  However, I challenge you to find a situation in which Jews or Christians or Hindus or Sikhs or Buddhists or any other clearly defined religious group) has recently risen up en masse to attack Americans for perceived insults against their faith.  Muslims, however, have done that.  Not all Muslims, of course, but enough Muslims.  Anywhere in the world, it is Muslims who grab the gun, sword and bomb when they perceive an insult.  The Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Atheists, and any other group I can think of refrain from the gun, the sword and the bomb when insulted.

This willingness to respond to criticism with violence is pretty much a Muslim thing.  Not all Muslims, of course, but enough.  And certainly enough to make us fearful of the group as a whole.  After all, it’s usually not until after the bomb explodes that we can separate the Muslims who embrace violence from the ones who didn’t — and, worse, most of the ones who don’t embrace it, rather than speaking out, are passive to the point of acquiescence.

But liberals, rather than being driven by principles, which would have them looking down their noses at Muslims until the day comes when world Muslim leaders explicitly disavow terrorism, tend to be driven by fear.  If you’re a liberal and you both dislike and fear someone, you’re at their feet, as with the liberal response to Islam’s ceaseless attacks on America’s sensibilities and constitutional liberties.  Of course, if you merely dislike them, then you’re at their throats, at least rhetorically.

Right now, liberals don’t like Jews, Christians, Israel and conservatives, and their rhetorical contempt is unbounded.  And right now, while they probably don’t like Muslims very much, they do fear them, and their abject groveling is equally unbounded.

I’ll going on a limb here and say that liberals have exactly the same relationship with blacks as they do with Muslims.  Liberals don’t want to live in black neighborhoods or attend black schools (and, as their hostility to vouchers shows, they don’t want blacks attending their schools).  But blacks have shown themselves to be a volatile population, more than willing to out-rhetoric the liberals, and to stand around with bully clubs, so liberals grovel there too.

Whether the liberals are groveling before Muslims or militant blacks, it’s not a very healthy situation, either for the groveler or the grovelee.  The situation, indeed, is precisely analogous to a parent who spoils a child:  The child, rather than feeling loved, feels resentful and, worse, the child’s pathologies rage uncontrolled.

And that’s what happens when liberals are either at your throat or at your feet.