When will liberals shed their dhimmi masks?

Savage has an interesting entry up where he post's an excerpt from Zippy Catholic's recent entry over at What's Wrong With the World.

I commented on an assertion attributed to Zippy wherein he basically says that as long as liberal perceptions are that their acting submissive to Islam is producing net gains to their ideology, then they'll continue to act dhimmi, but not a moment longer...

In my comment to the post I was really just being facetious. I think that if what we have to rely on from liberals in joining the fight with us against Islam is their perceptions to convince them that liberalism is incurring net losses due to their feigned dhimmitude, which is more or less what Zippy is suggesting, then we may as well write them off right here, right now. With friends like leftists, who needs enemies?

Zippy may be right when he asserts that there's nothing inherent to liberalism which would have them allying themselves with Islam, but has he considered well the implications of his very thoughts on the matter, i.e., that liberals are willing to shed the specious mask of dhimmitude not a moment sooner than their perceptions inform them that they've made all the advances for liberalism that their donning of the dhimmi mask is capable of allowing.

In other words, we're to trust that liberals (who aren't particularly rational, by the way) are going to finally wake up and smell the coffee, realizing (or perceiving) at that moment that Islam is all of a sudden more of a danger to their ideology and all the advances they've made with it, than traditional conservative Americanism is. Comforting thought.

P.S. I see that Auster has posted a lengthy comment to Savage's entry at the bottom of which he provides a couple of links to VFR articles on the subject. I would also recommend this VFR entry from a few days ago where Auster explains at length two likely scenarios which relate to this topic.

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The Case Against Torture

(Note: See my comments posted at VFR on this topic where I mention another aspect of that particular torture conversation which came to mind after I put up this entry. Thanks to Mr. Auster for posting them.)

With all the conversation going on over at VFR concerning a certain form of gnosticism emanating from a certain group espousing a pacifist sort of Christianity that would, among other things, allegedly prefer the allowance of a hijacked airliner, with innocent passengers on board, to crash into the Sears Tower, as an example, rather than downing the fateful aircraft thereby saving untold thousands, I've been reminded time and again of a similar conversation I was involved in some time back.

In my conversation the question about the use of torture to extract information from 'enemy combatants' was the central issue. My contention was that I supported the use of torture when it was necessary to save American lives. My opponent's position was that torture is immoral, and that he could never support the use of it under any circumstances. So I put this question to him:

Suppose your family is captured by terrorists. Suppose that you get information from a reliable source that someone in your neighborhood friendly to the captors has knowledge of your family's whereabouts. Would you, if necessary, use torture to extract information about your family's whereabouts in an attempt to save their lives. His answer, which may or may not surprise some of you, was: “No!, I would never use torture under any circumstances.” And that's putting it mildly.

Of course, I did not hesitate to tell this individual what a piece of scum I thought he was to prefer to protect his own sensibilities over the saving of the very lives of his family members. But when push came to shove, I wondered, is this truly the way he would react, in spite of all his self-righteous invectives?

I often wonder about that to this very day. I suppose some folks have lost all sense of a moral obligation to protect innocent lives even at the mere hazard of crushing their own sensibilities. But I wonder if part of my opponent's unwavoring adherence to this goofy notion of his was not really based in the knowledge that if he answered “yes; I would use torture in that case,” that his whole case against using torture, which he had very carefully laid out, would at once break down?

-DW

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