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2010-09-16 Home Front: Culture Wars
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"[T]he liberal left is losing its confidence in its own moral authority."
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James Taranto, "Best of the Web" @ Wall Street Journal
Discussing the Ground Zero mosque and a couple of related events (explanatory linkage added), he observes:
It seems clear that in both Maine and Connecticut, as in the case of the Ground Zero mosque, what offended people was the combination of solicitude for Muslims and proximity to 9/11. In the case of the Ramadan story, the temporal proximity was but a coincidence; this year the Muslim month happened to end just before Sept. 11. The proposed mosque's geographic proximity to the site of the atrocity, by contrast, was deliberately chosen to make a point, and the Hartford prayer plan was an outgrowth of the mosque mess.
The real problem here is that the liberal elite has responded to 9/11 in a totally inappropriate way. When the only tool you have is a hammer, the cliché goes, every problem looks like a nail. To American liberals, every problem looks like the civil rights struggle, the original one of which was their last real moral, cultural and governmental success.
That is why the liberal elite sees 9/11 less as a national security challenge than as an imperative for a kind of affirmative action aimed at ensuring that "inclusiveness" extends to Muslims. That's what the Maine readers saw, perhaps mistakenly, in the Press Herald's Ramadan story. It's what the Hartford constituents correctly saw in the plan to open council sessions with a Muslim prayer. And of course it is what Americans everywhere see in the obnoxious plan to build a fancy 15-story mosque adjacent to the site of an Islamic supremacist atrocity.
But whereas white Americans collectively had a great deal to atone for in their historical treatment of blacks, it is perverse and offensive to suggest that 9/11 leaves Americans with an obligation to atone to Muslims. The anger in New York, Portland and Hartford is a healthy response to this false imputation of guilt, even if, especially in the Portland case, it is somewhat misplaced.
The groveling by the Portland publisher--in the manner of a university president facing a militant minority sit-in--isn't pleasant to watch, but it does suggest that the liberal left is losing its confidence in its own moral authority. When the New York Times and Time magazine feel obliged to take account of ordinary Americans' sensibilities, the process will be complete. 
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Posted by Mike 2010-09-16 15:44||
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Posted by JosephMendiola 2010-09-16 23:55||
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