Hypothetical historical questions

Even as bland a mainstream liberal knucklehead as Richard Cohen of the Washington Post could write last week that the creation of Israel was a “historical mistake,” blaming it for “a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hizbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.”

Wouldn’t it be a more interesting question to ask--if we are going to ask sweeping counterfactual and hypothetical historical questions--whether Islam was a mistake? Seriously, imagine what the world would be like if only Islam didn’t exist. Would it be a better or worse place? I'm just asking, Abdul, so keep those damn thoughts of yours out of my head. But what would happen if Cohen had asked this question in his column? Perhaps he would learn a valuable personal lesson in the moral gulf between Israel and her enemies.

If America only sides with Israel because it is controlled by the Jews, how does one account for the fact that conservatives in other parts of the world see the situation as clearly as we do, e.g., John Howard in Australia or Stephen Harper in Canada?...

People typically think that the Right represents the party of sanctimonious, judgmental morality police, while the Left is the hang-loose, live-and-let-live crowd. Not so. In fact, this is an exact reversal of the situation. The philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out that what distinguishes leftist thought in all its forms is the dangerous combination of a ruthless contempt for traditional moral values with an unbounded moral passion for utopian perfection. (This is all explained very clearly in a nice introduction to Polanyi’s thought, entitled Everyman Revived.) posted by Gagdad Bob at 8:27 AM 27 comments