Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Tucker Carlson fights the good fight against "sensitivity"



I have noticed that certain words are used as proxies for awful political logic; anyone who uses them in political discussion get marked down in my book.

The first word I noticed this working for was "people". "People's" armies commit war crimes and oppress actual people at a far greater rate than your average army. "The people" is used as a shorthand for an abstraction of the state's interest separate from that of individuals and families.

Second was "justice". In a brilliant article Dalrymple points out that justice is the last thing we want in healthcare. Historical notions of justice are used to justify refusals to face the reality of the present in situations like Israel-Palestine where the Israelis see a reclaiming of land lost thousands of years ago and the Palestinians see theft of land lost 50 years ago. "Justice" is used in both cases as a justification for a refusal to face up to difficult questions in preference for angry, simplistic, rhetoric.

Finally "sensitivity" is increasingly shorthand for not treading on the toes of a Muslim community that should get used to the implication of living in a free society; you will be insulted. Another case of such hyper-sensitivity has emerged from Germany just this week. In the debate shown above the CAIR spokesperson attempts to make this about a mocking of Islam but is successfully shot down by Mr. Carlson who points out how this misses the point.

She also argues that it makes fun of a serious situation with serious consequences in terms of the struggle against radical Islam. Mocking and being insensitive to our enemies is a great way of making great conflict more bearable. The following verse did not insult or make fun of those killed in the Blitz (the logic used by the CAIR spokesperson when she argues that the ads mocks the victims of jihadists) and played its small part in creating the spirit which saw Britain through:

Hitler has only got one ball,
The other is in the Albert Hall
His mother, the dirty bugger,
Cut it off when he was small.

No comments: