The attack on Charlie Hebdo has had the predictable effect of uniting Western politicians and media personalities from across the political spectrum in an orgy of self-aggrandizement\u2014which is to say an orgy of self-delusion.<\/p>\n
First, Charlie Hebdo is hardly the beacon of liberty that it is being made out to be.\u00a0 Though concerned to insure that its <\/em>speech was \u201cfree,\u201d Charlie Hebdo is a leftist rag that is about as interested in protecting the speech of those to its right<\/em> as is any other leftist socialist organization.<\/p>\n And we need no reminders of just how concerned \u201cprogressives\u201d everywhere are to defend free speech: Courtesy of left-wing \u201cprogressives\u201d in the vein of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, \u201chate speech\u201d laws are legion throughout the \u201cdemocracies\u201d of the contemporary Western world\u2014nowhere more so than in France.<\/p>\n Second, had this attack occurred against a Tea Party rally, a rightist European party, a \u201cwhite nationalist\u201d or an Islamic \u201cwatch\u201d publication, would the whole Western world right now be identifying with the object of the attack?\u00a0 I\u2019d like to think so, but I\u2019m doubtful.<\/p>\n Third, to be sure, we in the West must either hang together or hang separately, to borrow Franklin\u2019s phrase.\u00a0 Still, the truth of the matter is that the Charlie Hebdo massacre was not so much an attack on some abstract principle of free speech as it was an attack against the left\u2019s worldview<\/em>.\u00a0 The symbolism here is rich.<\/p>\n (a)As was mentioned, Charlie Hebdo is a militantly secularist, incorrigibly anti-religious, socialist publication that has regularly mocked, not just all religions, but their rightist rivals who have been sounding the alarm for decades over France\u2019s Islamic-friendly immigration policies and the nation-corroding Political Correctness that these policies both reflect and perpetuate.<\/p>\n Yet it was this expression of leftism, not<\/em> the French Right, on which Islamic murderers set their sights.<\/p>\n (b)Muslims launched this murderous assault in Paris, France\u2014<\/em>a place that, from at least the time of the French Revolution, has been about as eligible a candidate for capital of the \u201cprogressive\u201d world as any, a bastion of \u201cenlightened\u201d\u2014i.e. leftist, \u201csocial-democratic\u201d\u2014thought.<\/p>\n France, at least in the popular imagination, is the embodiment of leftist ideology.\u00a0 And yet pluralistic, multi-cultural, egalitarian France now finds itself under siege by just that subset of its population that is the creation of its own dogma. In a nutshell, here\u2019s how it works: The champions of Equality\u2014which, today, almost invariably assumes the form of \u201canti-racism\u201d\u2014blind themselves to the (not infrequently staggering<\/em>) cultural differences between racial, ethnic, and religious groups in order to justify \u201cinclusionary\u201d national polices that essentially welcome, not <\/em>the world as such, but the non-white, non-European, non-Christian <\/em>world. However, though leftists refuse to recognize it, their ideals are not universal; they are specific to a Western or European civilization to which the immigrants whom they accommodate in the name of these ideals have little to no interest in assimilating.\u00a0 In fact, a not inconsiderable number of these foreign peoples hold Equality, Multiculturalism, and the like in contempt.<\/p>\n To put it another way, the attack on Charlie Hebdo exposed the internal, the fatal, <\/em>contradictions of leftist, \u201cprogressive\u201d ideology.<\/p>\n Finally, those who live in glass houses shouldn\u2019t throw stones: Who is this \u201cwe\u201d <\/em>that is supposed to value freedom of speech?\u00a0 In America, tragically, both<\/em> \u201cliberals\u201d and <\/em>\u201cconservatives,\u201d \u201cthe left\u201d and \u201cthe right,\u201d all too often reveal the extent to which they fear tipping Politically Correct sacred cows.<\/p>\n For instance, how many of our champions of free speech, whether they are on Fox News, \u201cconservative\u201d talk radio, NPR, or at The New York Times <\/em>would be willing to allow satire regarding, say, Martin Luther King<\/em>?\u00a0 Imagine that some brave (or possibly suicidal?) cartoonist ridiculed Dr. <\/em>King for having plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, or for his pathological infidelity?\u00a0 Mainstream \u201cconservatives\u201d no less than \u201cliberals\u201d don\u2019t permit such topics to be addressed in serious<\/em> venues.\u00a0 The outcry from the former would be just as deafening as that of the latter regardless of the genre in which King was critiqued.<\/p>\n There would be a fierce competition to see who could decry \u201cracism\u201d most loudly.\u00a0 And in the event that those in the GOP-friendly press would argue in favor of freedom of speech, you can bet your mortgage that the argument would all but disappear under the mountain of assurances with which the person would qualify it, assurances that he or she finds the controversial material just as \u201creprehensible\u201d or \u201cracist\u201d as everyone <\/em>else.<\/p>\n Immigration is another issue.\u00a0 Because the topic of immigration today is practically synonymous with Hispanic, <\/em>i.e. non-white, <\/em>immigration, even those, like Sean Hannity, who argue against illegal <\/em>immigration are always quick to establish their \u201canti-racist\u201d bona fides by qualifying their position by a gazillion assurances that they are all in favor of legal <\/em>immigration.\u00a0 And it doesn\u2019t matter where the immigrants hail from or how many want to come to America, for as long as they do so legally, <\/em>so goes this line of reasoning, it is just fine.<\/p>\n As some have suggested, the Charlie Hepdo attack is <\/em>a \u201cteachable moment.\u201d\u00a0 Let\u2019s hope that Americans generally, and \u201cthe conservative movement\u201d in particular, have gleaned the right lessons from it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The attack on Charlie Hebdo has had the predictable effect of uniting Western politicians and media personalities from across the political spectrum in an orgy of self-aggrandizement\u2014which is to say an orgy of self-delusion. First, Charlie Hebdo is hardly the beacon of liberty that it is being made out to be.\u00a0 Though concerned to insure…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n