Posted by
Philip Mella on Monday, December 01, 2008 3:10:54 PM
As the world mourns the barbaric attacks in Mumbai, the political forensics teams are amassing to perform their dark duties of assigning blame. For the vast majority of Americans, this was yet another example of radical religious and political elements externalizing their apparently endless list of global grievances against the West, in particular the U.S.
However, if you're part of the victim elitist club, you see this through a dramatically different prism, one which indiscriminately indicts American foreign policy, which is a kind of cabal for the intellectual adolescents among us. For the best example of this we turn to Deepak Chopra, the enlightened one who is something of a cult hero among the advanced wing of the human race. Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz provides an entertaining, if manifestly disturbing portrayal of Dr. Chopra's recent appearances on CNN and Larry King.
The reflex to blame America for empirically unprovoked violence is now hard-wired into the liberal sensibility, and the artful ignorance they bring to the challenge never fails to astonish those of us who still cling to a modicum of common sense. We can only ponder the special loathing the likes of Chopra must have for America, which is most certainly predicated on a faithfully misguided understanding of its history, principles, and, dare we say, its exceptionalism.
But since idle speculation is not our charge, we are inclined to conclude that his motivation rests on a thoroughly misconstrued theory of both America and the nature of evil. In the case of the former, Chopra and his ilk must cull from American history both its founding documents and its conduct on the global stage. Those documents reflect an unprecedented respect for individual and property rights, a tripartite system of government which provides an exquisite balance of power to check hegemonic designs. As for America's conduct as the world's premier moral exemplar, we need only look to last century's two world wars, in which it selflessly sacrificed thousands of its citizens to aid allies in desperate need.
But now we're faced with a new and unique challenge. During the past three decades a quiescent lethality called radical Islam began growing, expressing itself in grotesque ways, from the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut to last week's massacre in Mumbai, with numerous examples of savagery in between, including, of course, 9/11. In any world which featured a nominal consensus concerning good and evil, there would be a universal and unequivocal condemnation of this demonic group, but since distorted notions of imperialism and twisted conceptions about victimhood have been bred in our post-modern culture, a small but vociferous part of the world blames America for these heinous acts.
There are two ignoble legacies that will one day be documented in our the history books, both of which are irrefutable charges against modern liberalism: The first, abortion, is a profound moral crime, an ethical lapse of monstrous proportions--about 52 million and counting. The second is its utter failure to recognize evil in our midst, to conflate the perpetrators of unprovoked horrors with those who have legitimate grievances.
It takes a remarkable leap of ignorance to reach the conclusion that America is to blame for the despicable attacks in Mumbai, but liberals such as Chopra seem to excel in this regard, as it requires that special sense of enlightenment which is apparently their birthright.