Preemptive Surrender

On the plane back from Germany, I finished a book I had started some time ago and then set aside, Bruce Bawer‘s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. It’s a pretty upsetting book, mainly because of quote after quote after quote from European intellectuals and politicians whose policy toward the assault on their lives and freedoms by radical Islamists is preemptive surrender.

As I read the book, I got an unexpected sample of the preemptive surrender mentality from the couple next to me. They were two of those typically middle American travelers who insist on introducing themselves to you and starting up a conversation. Such people usually don’t annoy me and sometimes the conversation even turns out to be worthwhile. Not in this case. When they noticed that I had several books on Islamic and Middle Eastern thought and history (I’m not counting Bawer’s book), they asked me why I was reading them. I told them a little about my colleagues and our work in Arabic to promote individual rights, religious freedom, freedom of trade, and other classical liberal principles in the Middle East. I gave the example of what we had published on the Danish cartoon controversy and how my friend Zainab al-Suwaij explained the idea and practice of freedom of the press. “Well,” commented the woman, “one lesson we all have to learn from that event is to be more sensitive.” I was astonished. People who live in free societies have to be more “sensitive” about what may or may not be printed, because others are offended and will try to kill them! I told her that she had it exactly backward, that it was the offended who had to learn to be less sensitive and not to use violence against those who express opinions they don’t like. Her husband piped in that “we don’t really have a free press, anyway,” an inane remark that was followed by an inane story of a trip he’d taken as a teenager through Communist-ruled Eastern Europe, which he had seen wasn’t so bad. The western press, after all, had printed nothing but propaganda with all those stories about “oppression” under communism. I asked if he had been taken on his government-supervised tour to visit any of the slave labor camps in the Gulag, or to visit the deportees in remote parts of Siberia or Kazakhstan, or the people whose parents were taken out and shot under Stalin, or those who had been shot trying to get over the Wall, or the professors of literature or mathematics who were imprisoned for dangerous views and then reassigned to work as boiler-room operators.

I would not have been surprised to hear such stupidity from a couple of leftist college professors, but usually middle Americans are, if not all that bookishly interesting, at least wiser than the professional intellectuals who are ashamed to live in free societies. Unfortunately, Michael Mooreism has seeped through to some of middle America, as well. I was astonished to find the preemptive surrender mentality sitting on the plane next to me, flying back to the U.S.