In his latest Newhouse column, James Lileks looks at the fuzzy logic that powers Europe’s equivalent to America’s Class of ’72, and allows Iran’s nuclear program to sail ahead with nary a protest:
In the good old days, one could count on the progressive elements to side with a pluralistic, tolerant, secular democracy against a theocratic regime made up of glowering, Jew-hating misogynists. But that was before the permanent adolescents of the ’60s hijacked the left with their fragrant blend of anti-Americanism and loathing of the very culture that guarantees their freedoms. To them, Iran is a problem only inasmuch as it provides the Zionist Oil-Cabal Neocons with an “enemy.” And if the mullahs respond to a successful revolution by nuking Israel on the way out? Well, how many Jews does the world really need, anyway? Europe’s been asking that question for centuries. An answer might be nice.
When suicide bombers start going after something the European left truly cares about, the “activists” might wake up, but it’s hard to tell what they think is worthy of defending.
The churches are empty vestiges of an abandoned past; the art museums are bourgeois temples for the dead hand of the artistic patriarchy. The European left prizes naught but thin, windy bromides about justice and tolerance, ideas the enemies of the West (how quaint a phrase!) use to enable their own agenda. One day the hash houses will be closed down because they offend religious sensibilities; then the naughty districts will be shuttered.
As the saying goes: They came for the pot-smoking hookers, and I said nothing, because I was not a pot-smoking hooker. (Recently.)
As Lileks writes, “in the name of multiculturalism, Europe will lose the culture that made such an idea possible.”
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