Phobias and Other Things

 

A phobia is an intense and unreasonable fear of something. In our time the word is used incorrectly and misleadingly to denote something else altogether. “Homophobia” has always been a silly term. The problem wasn’t that people were afraid of lesbians and gay men. Almost no one was. The problem was persecution of and discrimination against lesbians and gay men. The same thing is true of “transphobia”. The issue is not one of fear but rather one of discrimination.

Things are different with “Islamophobia”. It is also a misleading term but for a different reason. It is quite reasonable and not phobic at all for anyone to be at least a little worried about a religion with millions of its followers believing and much of its clergy teaching that it is not only acceptable but desirable to kill non-believers. A non-believer living in a Muslim domain would have reason to be more than a little fearful. Such sensible concerns do not justify Islamophobia as the term is used vulgarly – discrimination against Muslims for being Muslims. There are plenty of Muslims who have no interest in murdering non-believers and a good number who are liberally minded. Individuals deserve to be judged as individuals, whether they are embracing liberal values or revealing themselves to be savages by cheerleading for Hamas savages.

The Attacks in Paris and California

The attacks by Muslims in Paris and California have had strong effects  on politics and public opinion. Perhaps the most beneficial effect is that more people realize the absurdity of the claim that Islam is no different from any other present day  religion in terms of violent aggression toward nonbelievers  and are willing to say so and to question the desirability of admitting large numbers of lower class,  un-Westernized, fundamentalist Muslims into this country.   Liberal, civilized societies are better off without large, cohesive, anti-assimilationist   minorities of people who reject liberal and civilized values on principle.  It may be that enough Americans are starting to accept that fact to cause  changes in the policies and activities of the  government.

The worst effect of the attacks is the overreaction  to them, particularly among politicians. The actions of Muslim fanatics in this country are often brutal and terrible, but, except for the attacks on September 11, 2001, they are also statistically insignificant in relation to the totality of violent crimes or the routine risks of life.  It is often  unclear whether foreign Islamic groups or governments had anything to do with causing or organizing the attacks. Yet people are scared and jumpy, and some politicians are calling for an invasion of Syria and a third invasion of Iraq.

Besides the issue  of whether what happened in California is sufficient reason to go to war even if we could find some foreign enemy to pin it on, there are the practical questions of whether such a war would do much or anything to make such attacks less likely and of whether it would have beneficial or harmful geopolitical results for the United States.   The last such venture was a disaster. It seems to me we should not risk a repetition without better reasons than we have seen so far. 

Korans and Craziness

Sensible people get used to absurdity in the world and come to expect it, particularly from the politicians and the so-called pop culture. Sometimes, however, something comes along that is so utterly goofy that even the jaded have to shake their heads. The present flap about some crackpot preacher in Florida planning to burn a Koran is one of those things.

That someone is planning to burn a Koran on September 11th is not surprising. In a country of three hundred million people, it was fairly likely that someone would hit on that as a way, albeit a vulgar and inappropriate way, of remembering the attacks and defying those who committed them. In fact it is a fairly sure bet that, whatever happens with this particular preacher, there will be a few Korans burned in protest on that day somewhere by somebody, and anyone who stops to think knows that.

No, what makes the whole thing so bizarre is the reactions to the preacher’s plans. First Eric Holder or someone literally makes a federal case out it by siccing the FBI on the preacher. Then President Obama weighs in as the President of the United States against a legal protest by a private citizen as though the poor guy were planning to blow up Miami - with the predictable effect of helping make a trivial bit of late summer nonsense national news. Various political and media characters around the country join in, and pretty soon it is big national news. Even General Petreaus, who should have more sense, forgets that part of his training about active duty officers not taking part in domestic political controversies, and pipes up that this is bad juju.

Meanwhile, assorted fanatics in the Moslem world start rioting and threatening dire vengeance against the entire United States if this insult goes down. This leads to the State department warning Americans to be careful abroad and Interpol going on alert. It also leads our president and his administration to quake in their boots and get all atwitter over possible reprisals by the Moslems, whom they simultaneously praise as exemplars of peacefulness.

No, you literally could not make this stuff up. Unfortunately it has its serious side. Its treatment in the press illustrates once again a part of the American left’s dangerous infatuation with Islam, an infatuation that, given Islam’s positions on a number things these same lefties claim to care about, seems best explained by the hypothesis that some leftists will go gaga over just anybody who claims to be an enemy of the United States. It also makes the Obama administration look even weaker and more timid to America's enemies in Moslem countries. Finally the whole mess offers yet more evidence that our president needs to acquire both a sense of proportion and a better understanding of the rights of our citizens.