Mon, Nov 29/04
No one sides with radical Islam

"After 9/11," wrote Robert Fulford in Saturday's National Post, "when the Americans began fighting the Taliban, leftist demonstrators declared the war in Afghanistan 'racist'. As [David] Horowitz says, 'Within weeks of the most heinous attack on America in its history, radicals had turned their own country into villains'."

Fulford's article was entitled and premised on the idea that "Leftists have sided with radical Islam." I imagine an orgy of balloons and swanee whistles erupting upon its publication — congratulations, Mr Fulford, on the one millionth permutation of this article!

Please, this has to stop. To quote Jon Stewart in his finest hour: it's "hurting America." The problem in Fulford's argument is obvious enough, to me anyway:  these "leftist demonstrators" and "radicals" are morons. They might consider themselves ambassadors of leftism, the Democratic Party, liberalism, or a planet not far away. They are free to define themselves however they like. But to consider their ideas indicative of an entire movement — "the left" — or of any of that movement's subsets — the Democratic Party, liberalism — is either stupid, dishonest or both (and profitable, of course; don't forget profitable).

Too many people who view politics as a team sport think otherwise, but in reality there is no such thing as "the left", and there is no such thing as "the right". Those with nothing to gain from exploiting and/or believing in this artificially precise dichotomy live their lives accordingly, tuning out the bullshit as best they can. And yet even in the most intelligent media organs, milder forms of this thinking are inescapable: in Canada, the Post has Fulford, when he is allowed to stray from the art criticism pages, along with Barbara Kay, Terence Corcoran and Lorne Gunter (who today writes that "Terrorism isn't born of poverty" — congratulations, Mr Gunter, on the one millionth permutation of this article!); the Globe has Heather Mallick and Ken Wiwa, and to a lesser extent Margaret Wente; the Star has too many to name.

This is the moderate arm of "wingism", the school of thought based on the left/right lie. Hardline wingists have been known to lump reasonable people who opposed the Iraq war based on its overly optimistic planning and questionable intelligence in with the nutters who think that Bush masterminded 9/11, and in many cases with Saddam himself. Some hardline wingists of the opposite temperament lump Bush in with Bin Laden and Hitler. It's an –ism that's as easily discredited as Islamofascism and National Socialism, and yet it colours a majority of the comment and pseudo-debate that occurs in the mass media.

Wingists share ideas voraciously. Right up there with the "The Left likes terrorists" article is the "Why aren't Muslims showing appropriate contrition for 9/11?" article, which is classic wingist thinking. Why should peaceable, Westernized Muslims apologize for Mohammed Atta? No, really — why? I don't see secular Canadian Christians apologizing for bombings at abortion clinics, and nor should they. It's nothing to do with them. Islam has a serious image problem, it's true, but so does the United States, and think about how right-leaning American wingists responded to the disgust over the abuses at Abu Ghraib: "well, Saddam did much worse." This is the same moral relativism that supposedly renders "the left" unable to call evil by its true name. It's not leftism or rightism that causes people to think this way, but wingism.

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