“We’re liberals! We’re liberals. We’re not crazy tea-baggers,” Bill Maher protested after his televised argument with Ben Affleck about Islam.
“We are not bigoted people. On the contrary, we’re trying to stand up for the principles of liberalism!” Maher added. “I think we’re just saying we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group] people perceive as a minority.”
But despite Maher’s protests, the majority of liberals would agree with Affleck that criticizing Islam is racist. Liberals claim that the Islamic State is Un-Islamic. It would be more accurate to state that liberals are illiberal. Liberalism, even the form that was in common usage not too long ago, is as dead as Lenin.
Ben Affleck isn’t a liberal. He’s an enthusiast of revisionist Communist historian Howard Zinn. The modern liberal of today is uninterested in identifying “illiberalism” since he is an illiberal man of the left. The most significant difference between the two is not simply political, but psychological. Liberals used to think about issues. Leftists respond to ideological cues while operating on a purely tribal wavelength.
Affleck’s assertion that criticizing Islam is racist is impossible to argue with. It’s completely wrong on multiple levels, but it’s not an argument. It’s a denunciation. It doesn’t advance an argument; it rejects the argument and the arguer as illegitimate. And it’s an ideological cue telling everyone else to follow.
Leftists don’t debate issues. That would be a liberal thing to do. Instead they seek to affirm a consensus. The consensus is reinforced by in-group flattery which convinces members that they are empathetic and enlightened people, while those outside the consensus are subjected to constant contempt and abuse. The denunciation places the target outside the consensus. Calling Maher a “racist” makes him a Tea Party member no matter how much he clings to a liberal identification. It makes him an outsider.
The USSR was every bit as “illiberal” as ISIS, but critics of it were damned as “red-baiters” and McCarthyists. Now critics of Islam are denounced as racists even though Islam is not a race.
Why are Stalin and Mohammed part of the consensus, but their liberal critics weren’t? The answer tells us a good deal about what the consensus really is and what it isn’t.
The things that Maher and Harris criticize Islam for, a lack of freedom, sexism and homophobia are not part of the consensus. Not when the flagship party of liberalism was also the party of segregation, the leading members of the golden family of liberalism were serial abusers of women and Bill, Hillary and Obama were against gay marriage before they were for it. Islam is sexist, bigoted and totalitarian, but so was the Soviet Union. Their liberal defenders are utterly unconcerned, no matter how much they run their mouths about Republican racism and sexism.
Nearly every Muslim country locks up gay men, but so did nearly every Communist country.
Do you think that Ben Affleck is bothered by the fact that Doha and Dubai, whose film industries he has become entangled with, are built and run by slave labor? Or that homosexuality is criminalized? The same Hollywood leftists who put on their indignant faces over Proposition 8 shut up when they’re partying in one of the pleasure cities of the Gulf Muslims who do a lot more than refuse to recognize gay marriage. They’re not just hypocrites; they were never committed to gay rights.
Gays, feminists and Muslims are a means to the left. They are not the reason why the left does things.
The left builds coalitions of disruption with interest groups. It doesn’t care about those groups. It’s just using them to get what it really wants which is a totalitarian state in which the consensus can implement all of its horrible ideas without any interference. Muslims are the newest coalition member and their disruption skills are impressive. Just look at how they managed to turn the Bush Administration around.
That doesn’t mean that the left cares about Muslims. It would toss them under the bus before they could shout “Allah Akhbar” if it suited the consensus. The liberal defenders of Islam have chosen not to read the Koran. They know next to nothing about Islam except that it’s a minority group. And that’s how they like it. That way they can shout down any criticism with cries of “Racism” because they’re too lazy to even bother stringing enough letters together to shout “Islamophobe”. That’s how little they care.
All of this has as much to do with liberalism as Obama has to do with Andrew Jackson. There’s nothing liberal about the honor killing and the hijab, but there’s also nothing liberal about trying to turn America into a totalitarian state. Maher, who has been known to identify as a libertarian, doesn’t seem to have grasped that the liberals who defend Islam do so because they share its totalitarian mindset.
Lenin wasn’t fighting so that the peasants would have land, bread and peace. Today’s liberals aren’t fighting for equality of income, gender, race or any other kind. They are fighting to suppress any and all opposition to their policies by disrupting and destroying the existing American system at every level.
That’s exactly what Islam is doing.
Leftists don’t value equality, they value disruption. If they can disrupt by promoting equality, they will do it. If they can disrupt by promoting inequality, they will do that. If they can disrupt by promoting gay marriage, promoting Islamists, promoting the environment, promoting unregulated industry, promoting freedom of speech or promoting hate speech laws, they will do those things in order of opportunism.
Their underlying goal is to replace existing ideas and systems with their own. Anything that serves that purpose is good. Anything that maintains the existing order is bad.
The very concept of universal standards that Maher is appealing to is foreign to the modern liberal. He doesn’t believe that there is a universal standard. He views the world as tribally as a Taliban. He can’t see behaviors as good or evil in isolation, but only in relation to ideological cues. He derives his heroes and villains from the tribal affinities of the left, not from the things that they actually do.
That’s why he wears a Che t-shirt while calling Rush Limbaugh unpatriotic for opposing Obama. Or why he thinks that liberal billionaires underwriting political campaigns is a good thing, but conservative billionaires doing it is bad for democracy. He has no concept of standards. He only understands power.
This isn’t liberalism. It’s a leftist Jihad that has displaced and hijacked liberalism. The modern liberal has nothing to do with liberalism and it’s useless to expect him to be upset by Islamic illiberalism. – See more at: http://sultanknish.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/liberal-islamophiles.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews+(from+NY+to+Israel+Sultan+Reveals+The+Stories+Behind+the+News)#sthash.QYpGILU2.dpuf
@ yamit82:
Irrelevant and off-point. You [and Chana bar Acha] had said that God [regretted having] created the Evil Impulse, yetser ha-ra. Whether evil is necessary for good is irrelevant. God didn’t create it.
We’ve been over this half-a-dozen times, or more. God creates things — not behavior.
How ’bout it came from the mind of a ding-a-ling who flunked third-grade Reading?
What Breisheet actually says is if you eat from the Tree of the KNOWLEDGE of Good & Evil, you’ll surely die. Funny, how a single word can make all the difference in the world.
(Another instance is the popular expression, ‘Money is the root of all evil’ — but that’s not what it says; what’s actually written is, “The LOVE of money is the root of all evil.” Without that single word, the meaning is lost, and mischief is afoot. But back on-point:)
There was nothing evil about the tree; it was one of the things God was alluding to when He beheld everything He had made, and He pronouned it all “very good.”
Nu, so they’re still alive, ken ayin hara? Have you notified the Guinness people? there’s sure to be a handsome reward in it for you (at least a keg of stout).
Not meaningless. They obviously knew something serious had changed, or they wouldn’t have hid themselves or noticed that they were naked. Their discovery of fear is the EVIDENCE that they had lost their immortality. All mortal creatures fear annihilation.
The text disagrees with you.
It SAYS that since man had become as God, “knowing Good and Evil,” that it was necessary to prevent him from eating ALSO of the Tree of Life: which would have allowed him to live FOREVER, notwithstanding his disobedience.
The Tree of Life had not been forbidden to them originally; only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil. NOW, however, because of their disobedience with the latter, they lost access to the former.
Read chapter three for yourself, pancho; I didn’t make it up. . . .
You’re spinning it. If your take on this were true, then Eve wouldn’t have been exiled with him.
Evasiveness & deceit entered the picture only because the initial disobedience opened the door to yetser ha-ra
— and, thru it, to evasiveness & deceit and — with time — to every other character flaw.
@ yamit82:
They GOT it from brain-lively Jews, so they couldn’t be THAT ‘stupid’ or ‘demented.’
What ignorant rot. Marketing isn’t necessary for faith.
Marketing IS, however, necessary for getting an AUDIENCE among strangers, regardless of what you have to say to them. You gotta first make ’em wanna check you out. (After that, you’re on your own.)
OTOH, if your audience are all your own extended family members, then marketing becomes a whole lot less of a need — and less of an issue.
dweller Said:
Without evil there can be no good two sides of the same coin.
G-d created everything including “evil” Isiah….
God also said that whoever eats from the tree of good and evil will surely die. Tree of good and evil???? Where did that come from idiot?
Oh and by the way they ate and didn’t die and since there was no frame of reference for death why should they have given a shit? It was for them a meaningless concept. Just as you are.
They were exiled from the garden not because of disobedience but because Adam tried to evade his culpability and lied.
@ dweller:
dweller Said:
Only in the stupid demented minds of brain dead christians… The marketing faith…”Doctrinal Voodoo!!!”
@ yamit82:
All this goes to show is that rabbis are not above yielding to anthropopathism — “man feeling” — attributing to the Sovereign of the universe all the feelings of His finite creation, man.
An infinite, all-knowing being (one who knows all the past, all the present & all the future) neither regrets nor has REASON to regret anything — because He doesn’t make mistakes.
He may be saddened by all sorts of things perpetrated by His human creation, but human regret is no part of Him.
B’midbar 23:
19 God is not a man, that He should lie; nor the son of man, that He should repent . [Num 23:19]
That was NOT God’s creation — all of which is identified in Gen 1, whose final verse begins with the words, “And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
Yetzer Ha-ra was the traumatic consequence (one of many) of man’s first disobedience.
Only one women has ever seen them. She would have to be mighty special. Lot’s of SASS!
@ yamit82:
“Seeing is believing” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
@ honeybee:
Got horns too! 😛
yamit82 Said:
gasp!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
honeybee Said:
Yeah forget about that. Worked construction too, Drove a Combine and cotton picker for two years. how’s that for rough! Once had a girlfriend who said she loved my hands, they are strong and rough, still I’d never make a surgeon. I learned the art of massage in Korea and it produced unexpected benefits later on in life.
what I do with a women’s feet . Never mind,
@ yamit82:
yamit82 Said:
Ya missed your calling. You did roughneck.
@ honeybee:
I ain’t no cowboy or truck driver but I sure do like em with sass. Ass too!!!
@ honeybee:
Good happy to hear that.
@ yamit82:
Don’t worry I am OK, TX agreed with you, he was already very carefully invested. His like has been one of financial discipline. When ever I want to tease I ask for a new frig and a Ram truck. I am a vicious little woman.
@ honeybee:
I’m sorry but I told you to get out months ago. I did. As I recall you and TX agreed with me then.
Might find a bottom and come back soon but the Global economic news is not good especially in China and EU.
Just hope it’s not a stampede. The market works like a herd.
The Fed migh pump more money into the system and the market to stem the tide or it could let it go. A crap shoot right now.
It could affect 401K’s…
@ yamit82:
Dow is 400 points, there goes my hopes of a new frig.. TX is going to climb the Mesa and jump off, if his knee permit it.
yamit82 Said:
Wicked!!!!!!!!!! But I was not allowed, he liked simpering gentile girls. Remind you of anyone. I have found I at track “rough” types cowboys, truck driver etc, they like girls with sass.
@ honeybee:
honeybee Said:
Did your dad have one????
All Jews must have, part of our DNA.
@ honeybee:
Need to walk, last time the Doc said I had the blood pressure of a 15 yr old., and I told him the intelligence too. My Mother use to get so angry with me “Swedes”, she would say ” do not have a sense of humor”.
@ honeybee:
🙂
@ yamit82:
Tomorrow morning. Then carpet cleaners.
@ honeybee:
When is your appointment?
honeybee Said:
Almost-never what we have today is about as good as it’s ever been, probably in most cases Better.
yamit82 Said:
You mean there was harmony between Jews, ” Once upon a time”.
the phoenix Said:
” The more things change the more they remain the same.” ” Those who do not know history are bond to repeat it”
@ dove:
@ the phoenix:
R. Chana bar Acha said: There are four things God regrets having created:
Exile,
the Chaldeans (Casdim),
Ishmaelites (Yishmaelim/ARABS),
and the Evil Inclination Yetzer Ha-ra). (Sukka 52b)