Government by leftists II: Investigating innocent non-Muslims for ‘balance’

Government by leftists II: Investigating innocent non-Muslims for ‘balance’

I wrote earlier today about how the leftist idea of government is preparing the West for dhimmitude.

That was before I saw a post from Daniel Greenfield in which he quotes a passage from an Observer article by John R. Schindler.

The arresting point of the Greenfield piece?  That defense counterterrorism professionals have been investigating non-Muslim groups they know to be innocent, solely so that they can have an appearance of “balance” with which to appease “Islamophobia” concerns from the political level of the Obama administration.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Here is Schindler:

“[W]ill Obama throw us under the bus again?”

That concern is widespread in American counterterrorism circles, where the Obama administration’s worries about appearing “Islamophobic” are well known. This White House early on warned intelligence personnel about using the term “Islamic terrorism” even in classified reports that would never be released to the public. “Since 2009 we’ve opened investigations of groups we knew to be harmless,” explained a Pentagon counterterrorism official, “they weren’t Muslims, and we needed some ‘balance’ in case the White House asked if we were ‘profiling’ potential terrorists.”

So:  federal agencies are putting the taxpayers’ national security resources into wholly spurious investigations, in order to (as Greenfield puts it) “lay down false trails for the White House Social Justice Warriors, fend off the Islamist CAIR Crybullies and then hope that they’ll be allowed to do their job.”

Just think about that for a moment.

Daniel Greenfield concludes that the Muslim terrorists and their accomplices have won.

Instead of the terrorists being afraid, our counterterrorism people are afraid. Obama and his left-wing media allies, with a hand from Putin, Snowden and his useful idiots on the right and the left, assorted terrorist accomplices, have successfully terrorized our counterterrorism efforts.

And that’s true, as far as it goes.  But if you envision an American renewal beyond the current crisis, as I do, it is absolutely essential to take the larger lesson from it.

Which is this:  we aren’t being governed in America by sharia Islamists.  We’re being governed by Western leftists.  The urge to demand deceptive, affirmative narrative-tending – the active creation of an appearance of counterfactual conditions – comes spontaneously from the mindset of the Western left.

Our vintage-1968 hard-leftists don’t need to have Islamists breathing down their necks, to insist on false narratives.  Demanding zealous, proactive cooperation with great lies is one of the left’s own specialties.

In essence, the Pentagon’s counterterrorism contingent has been forced to maintain a Potemkin profile for its operations — “Potemkin counterterrorism” — in order to conform with the propaganda vision of America’s radical-left leadership.

This, right here, is the 20th century’s very special form of slavery: the slavery that is less about extracting commercial value from subject peoples than about forcing their will.  This form of slavery will not let slaves alone at night, to slump into disengagement or anomie.  It prowls about forcing active manifestations and perverted affirmations from them, as a price of survival.

Authors like Robert Conquest and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote eloquently and with tremendous insight about this characteristic of Communist slavery in the last century.  It seems to be the final paroxysmic gasp of the Western left, to sell out their civilization – or at least try to – with the means and modes of their bloodier totalitarian forebears.

If we want the understanding and wisdom to start again one day, we have to get this.  As a Western civilization, we have already rejected the propositions of Islamism.  The real danger to our thinking – our confidence and vision – comes from the great lies promoted by the West’s own radical left.  No world will ever be safe enough for us to shrug and accept its rule.  Its back has to be broken as a political force.

When the day comes that the hopeless, suicidal death cult of radical Islamism has incinerated itself on the ash heap of history, it’s this lesson about the Western left that we will have to remember.

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval Intelligence officer who lives in Southern California, blogging as The Optimistic Conservative for domestic tranquility and world peace. Her articles have appeared at Hot Air, Commentary’s Contentions, Patheos, The Daily Caller, The Jewish Press, and The Weekly Standard.

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