The Wall of Indifference

Michael Lumish

{Cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

Those of us who care about Israel, and who are concerned about the rise of Political Islam face a brick wall.

Those of us who prefer western forms of jurisprudence to the Sharia courts popping up all over Europe face it, as well.

Those of us who care about the maintenance of traditional liberal values, such as freedom of speech, as they erode in the West due to the encroachment of al-Sharia, also face it.

The great irony, of course, is that we often come out of the western-left, yet it is within the Left that the wall of indifference is the most reinforced and most well-guarded.

The progressive-left and the Democratic Party view concerns over Political Islam as a largely racist, right-wing issue to be ignored. Obama, and his people, pay a bare minimum of lip-service to some vague, unknowable curiosity which they call "violent extremism" and that they tell us has nothing whatsoever to do with formal Islamic doctrine.

They seem not the least bit appalled at the burying of Yazidis alive in mass graves by the Islamic State (or New Caliphate), nor are they particularly disturbed by the destruction of the ancient Roman city of Palmyra, Syria, nor the Stabbing and Car-Ramming Intifada in Israel, nor the daily calls for the murder of Infidels blaring from the mosques and taught to children in the Middle East, if not Europe.

{Video starts at the 13 second mark - ML.}


Nor does the Obama administration, the Democratic Party, or the progressive-left care about the well-being of Gay people who are hanged from cranes in Iran, Christians who are ethnically-cleansed from the Middle East and North Africa, Jews with their backs to the wall in Fortress Israel, or women throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds who are forced to go out in public dressed from head-to-toe in that most liberating of female apparel, the burka.

The fact that they cannot even bring themselves to name the source of this "violent extremism" screams volumes about their true intentions to do anything about it. If you breathe the word "Islam" in their presence they will tell you that the "violent extremists" within Islam are a tiny minority within a much larger peaceful population and that this is true for all religions and all peoples during all periods of history.

We are told that Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians and Mahayana Buddhists and Gardnerian Wiccans all have devotees of the "violent extremist" variety, so why should this be any different among Muslims?

As a primarily right-wing issue, we are told, these are the concerns of bigoted cretins, unreconstructed Klansmen, White Supremacist Skin-Heads, as well as a brand-spanking new group conjured up by the Democratic Party which they are calling "alt-conservatives."

No one is really quite certain what an "alt-conservative" is, but he, she, or it has arrived just in time for the pre-election ballroom dance.

Thus on the Left, and within the Democratic Party, the rise of Political Islam is of virtually no concern, which is also why mass Muslim immigration into the West is likewise of no concern. Immigration is immigration is immigration and this most current wave is not fundamentally different from, say, the second wave of immigration into the United States featuring nineteenth-century eastern and southern Europeans, including Jews.

Despite all the bloodshed and rapes and riots and general chaos in Europe - as conjured up by people like Angela Merkel sitting around the big table in Brussels - we are told that it is only the European equivalents of Alabaman pig-farmers who disapprove of EU immigration policies. It is only the uneducated, xenophobic, working-class who care about such things.

As for the well-being of Israel, why should a non-Jew care any more about Israel than, say, the Czech Republic? I do not have an answer to that question, do you? Besides, large numbers of progressives and Democrats view Israel as an apartheid state, beneath our consideration for their well-being.

As for traditional liberal values, western-progressives simply do not see them as under threat from Political Islam. Jihadis might put a death fatwa on the head of author Salmon Rushdie or shoot the Charlie Hebdo people dead in Paris, but these are supposedly isolated incidents that have no real influence over liberal western political sensibilities. We may be in a rough patch of global integration, but things will smooth themselves over within a reasonable period of time.

Or so we are sometimes told.

In any case, if you find yourselves a bit galled at your left-leaning friends when they stand behind the wall of indifference, this goes some way toward explaining why it exists.

How to get around it is the important question and I wish to G-d that I had that answer... but I don't.