A Vegan World - Why Liberals Won't Believe in the Islamic Threat

A liberal minded fellow I once knew owned a dog. He had stolen it from an ex-girlfriend and decided that like him it would be a Vegan dog. So he refused to feed it meat, fish or chicken and believed that he was making a moral statement. He had created a Vegan dog.

The dog of course knew nothing about moral statements, it only knew that it was being denied the foods it wanted the most and so it grew hungrier and meaner. When it smelled meat or chicken anywhere it quickly ran there and began alternately begging and growling for some. At which point the fellow himself would sidle over and berate whoever it was for trying to corrupt his dog. As far as he was concerned it was meant to be a vegan world and the rest of us just weren't getting with the program. But of course saying that a vegan world is a moral world doesn't actually remove an appetite for meat, not in dogs nor in people.

As far as the liberals worldview is concerned we are meant to be living in a Vegan world, a world where no one has to kill to eat, where no one has to kill for any reason at all-- where the lion can lie down with the lamb and the American suburbanite with the hardened Islamist, where junkies can be released near schools and no one should ever contemplate owning a gun.

But of course we don't live in that world and the more that those who subscribe to naive pacifist ideologies insist that we do, the more dangerous the real world becomes. Multilateral disarmament or the Vegan world is a delusion. Unilateral disarmament is suicide, yet it is the form of suicide that liberals seem most devoted to.

It is a fundamental principle of life than nothing can survive that is not willing to fight to protect its own existence. While liberals insist on embracing a Vegan world, the reality of the world is a quite different one-- we live in a world of predators and prey.

When liberalism condemns the West for the legacy of its former predations and insists that it abstain from defending itself, internationally or domestically, it practices a suicidal unilateralism. Take out a lion's teeth, cut away his claws, do his hair in a pink bow tie and you haven't created a safer world for the lion, only a world in which he is now also prey. To some liberals that sort of world is a good world, a "chickens coming home to roost" sort of the world in the immortal words of a Ward Churchill or a Reverend Jeremiah Wright. To the more well intentioned liberals, it is a baffling event, a sort of growing pains, as we advance toward a progressive utopia that can never be.

When liberalism imagines a multilaterally disarmed world, one in which Islam can co-exist with the West, it is trying to create a Vegan dog-- and there is no such thing as a Vegan dog, only a dog that hasn't been fed. And given a chance at raw meat, that dog will feed.

Morality can control appetite only in those advanced enough to practice it. But liberalism's most arrogant presumption is that everyone shares their basic moral nexus, that murder is wrong, that conquest is abhorrent and that war is an evil to be avoided.

And so liberals laugh and mock when anyone mentions the threat of Islam. How absurd it is to think that everyone doesn't think exactly like them. How absurd to believe that just because people live in a different country, a different culture and follow a set of completely different beliefs that they might genuinely want to chop their heads off-- out of opposition to who they are rather than opposition to Republican foreign policy.

After all they live in an imaginary Vegan world in which they think most people think "just like them". And if they doubt that world for a moment, there are no shortage of books to reinforce that impression of a watered down Islam which respects women, embraces diversity and respects knowledge. A fictional liberal Islam created by authors such as Karen Armstrong in their own image.

In this liberals are no different than most people are who project their own beliefs onto others. Liberals so commonly blame terrorism on Republican foreign policy because that is what they can best relate to. When liberals try to think like Muslim terrorists, they instead think like American liberals.

When Michael Moore wondered after 9/11 why terrorists attacked New York City instead of a state that voted for Bush, he was expressing the genuine bafflement of the liberal who honestly doesn't understand why people are trying to kill him. The premise at the heart of his question is the steady assumption that the terrorists must hate Bush rather than liberal democrats like him.

This liberal assumption quickly devolves into a Stockholm Syndrome which assumes that if terrorist hate America, it's only because like liberals, hate American warmongering conservatives. And so liberals go out and march and protest. They paint vampire fangs and Hitler mustaches on Bush and wave Hizbollah flags, drape Keffiyahs around their necks, apologize to the world for Bush's presidency-- hoping that this time out the oppressed terrorists of the world will get the message, we liberals hate America too and we are in solidarity with you.

Obama is the greatest act of atonement by American liberals to date, the political sacrifice meant to build bridges with people who only want to blow them up. Obama after all is a graduate of the Wright school of rhetoric which knows that if you put your hatred for America in a context which makes white liberal Americans feel guilty, then you have successfully legitimized your hatred. Liberalism's acceptance and even embrace of hatred for America, whether it be from domestic black Muslim militants like Wright or the sheer mass of hate spewed from the mosques and minarets of Pakistan, Cairo and Gaza, has brought us no closer to the Vegan world liberals fantasize about, only to a world in which they themselves are the prey.

Most successful terrorist groups have long ago learned how to play this game, rather than talk to liberals, they simply parrot the liberal message back to them having learned by now that it's all that liberals hear anyway. And so the Taliban representative explained to a San Francisco audience that the Taliban had only blown up the Buddha statues to make a statement about poverty and Bin Laden incorporates ideas from Michael Moore in his videos. In doing so Islamist terrorists show a greater ability to communicate across cultures than the self-proclaimed multicultural liberals do, even if it is only the communication of the duck hunter making a duck call while loading his shotgun.

The irony is that liberals have failed to understand that their best attempts to bring peace have only sharpened the enemy's hunger, just as trying to turn a dog Vegan, only makes for a dog that is hungrier than ever for meat. The nobility of their disarmament has not brought peace closer, only war.

When Vegetius said, "He who wishes peace, should prepare for war", he was expressing a fundamental maxim of the human condition. In a world of predators and prey, peace is best achieved by the ability to defend oneself. It is not through a non-threatening posture or through appeasement that a people can live in peace, but through a strong military and forceful deterrence.

We do not live in a Vegan world. We live among meat eaters and if the lion of Europe and the eagle of America have decided that they should henceforth be vegetarians and invited that old dinosaur of Islam to dwell peacefully among them, they should not forget that predators who decided to turn to grass are now prey and that even extinct predators from bygone ages can grow teeth and learn to hunt in this brave new world.