Forward to the Past

A common complaint about the Democratic Presidential campaign this year is that Kerry didn't take terrorism seriously and had a "pre-September 11" mindset. Indeed, the campaign was a referendum on the war against the Islamofascists. Kerry, as a pacifist, advocated a return to the U.N. and negotiations rather than arguing for bolder action than Bush has been taking (which would have gotten my attention and possibly my vote). As a result, the referendum was not on how we should fight the barbarians, but whether we should fight them at all. As I have discussed here at length, the post-election "soul-searching" that the Democrats desperately need to do -- successfully -- to maintain political viability has been mostly absent. Rather, excuses for the Republican victory have been the order of the day. Only for a brief period after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, when even many Hollywood actors voiced support for our President, has the Left as a whole seemed to take the threat posed by terrorism to our civilization seriously. The main exceptions have been the "9-11 Democrats" (e.g., Ron Silver, Ed Koch, and Zell Miller).

But this pre-September 11 mindset has hardly been confined to pacifism or a failure to understand why we should be waging war against the Islamofascist barbarians. With the news focused on the war for good and obvious reasons (It's a huge story.) and possibly for wrong reasons in some outlets (To turn the war into Vietnam for Kerry's benefit.), many formerly prominent left-wing causes have been out of the spotlight. To take just one example, I remember a sharp decline in news coverage of the animal "rights" movement and of ecoterrorism after the mass executions that took place that terrible day. (As a note: I don't do "September 11" or "9-11," except in compound phrases like the two above: it allows us to too easily forget what was done that day.)

The news coverage stopped, but the animal "rights" activists have not. They continue their attack on Western civilization via their assault on the concept of individual rights, which is its basis. PETA has recently resurfaced in the news with fresh lunacy: The Fish Empathy Project. For once in my life, let me thank PETA and the Old Media for this and only this: for bringing this problem back to my attention. While the Islamofacists pose a greater immediate threat to my life, animal "rights" advocates pose a more long-range threat: by their attacks on the very concept of "rights," they trivialize the valid and indispensable idea that man has inalienable rights. I don't have time today to elaborate on the concept of rights, but it should tell you something that during a fight for our survival as a civilization, we have a group peddling such nonsense as the following. "'No one would ever put a hook through a dog's or cat's mouth,' said Bruce Friedrich, PETA's director of vegan outreach. 'Once people start to understand that fish, although they come in different packaging, are just as intelligent, they'll stop eating them.'" Human beings are at risk of being murdered by fanatics and PETA's whining about fish? Thanks for telling me what your priorities are.

And the ecoterrorists have hardly stopped. In a recent conversation with some liberals at work, I was hearing the usual attacks against our domestic antiterrorism policy and got the old "domestic terrorist" canard from one of them, as if I, having voted for Bush as I did, am obviously in full agreement with Timothy McVeigh's bombing in OKC. I shot back that yes, for the most part, I support our President in his antiterrorism policy, and that yes, it should be applied to people like Timothy McVeigh as well as to ecoterrorists. That stopped him cold! So that and PETA reminded me that I should do some quick research into what has been going on in the world of domestic ecoterrorism. I found a site on the subject that I recommend. (Though I don't care for their definition of "ecoterrorism."). From the site, I learned that since September 11, 2001, there have been quite a few serious ecoterrorist attacks in America. Some, like SUV bombings, I have heard of, but remember that the news coverage was almost nonexistent. Again, the war would seem, prima facie, to trump coverage of an SUV bombing -- to those of us who have been desensitized to the idea that those loony radical environmentalists blow restaurants up, or attack research facilities, or vandalize property from time to time. But the threat from environmentalism is no less serious than that posed by Islamofascists and should not be ignored or worse, treated like an ordinary part of life.

But the same news media that heaped praise on Yasser Arafat after his death and that refuse to call a terrorist a terrorist abroad have long been similarly sympathetic to environmentalist causes. Why else would they not call the Unabomber an ecoterrorist? Indeed, as Robert Tracinski points out, "According to one of the defense lawyers in the World Trade Center bombing case, the mass media 'presented [Kaczynski] as a pop hero, a rebel who was protesting the encroaching oppression of technology.' Given the premise that technology is oppressive, he is a 'pop hero.' The Unabomber embraces the essential tenet of environmentalism--the tenet that the man-made is abhorrent, that the 'natural' is noble, and thus that man must be sacrificed to nature."

The fact that Old Media sympathizes with, or at least fails to call a spade a spade when Islamofascism and environmentalism are concerned is alarming enough, but consider the following. Both of these ideological movements share a common antipathy for Western civilization. They are natural allies and we ignore either at our own peril. Our nation was changed by the atrocities of September 11, 2001, but our enemies have not. We woke up that day to realize that the peace ended; they merely continue to fight. To have a "pre-9/11 mindset" is in fact to be on the wrong side of this war.

-- CAV