Liberalism: A Facade of Tolerance

Submitted by Avraham (United States), Aug 1, 2003 at 19:27

Dr. Pipes, this article exposes many of the subtle and hidden biases in the State Department, the elite media and on most college campuses.

While liberals (I used to consider myself one until 9/11) claim to be tolerant of Islam and Muslims, they implicitly suggest that militant Islamists like Ibrahim Hooper represent Islamic tradition and thought (an falsehood). Perhaps liberals are unintentionally uninformed about Islam, perhaps they are pro- Islamist, but I believe that their main motivation for tolerating intolerance is that they are afraid of admitting to themselves that the West is not superior to the East, and even more so, that they are afraid of admitting that the West and East are not really at war with each other.

By implying that Islamists do not pose a threat and that the West can mollify Islamists with a few peaceful gestures, liberals maintain their western superiority complex that grants free-agency only to the "civilized" world; everyone else is simply a pawn in their ethnocentric worldview.

This is most apparent if one compares liberal and conservative reactions to 9/11. At my liberal college, most students responded to the attacks with "peace" protests against a potential war with the Taliban, thus avoiding the requisite reassessment of their birds-and-flowers view of America's security; only conservatives (and liberals with common sense) openly expressed the anger that all of us felt towards militant Islam on that day.

True, both conservatives and liberals reacted with racism, but the overt racism of the conservatives is as easy to confront and thus eradicate as it is open. It is only by admitting our biases to ourselves and others that we can overcome them; shacking up in an ivory tower at an elitist university and reading Noam Chomsky are not only non-productive means of advancing tolerance, but they are also anathema to it.

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