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George W. Bush, icon of the multicultural Left

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Nov 24, 2007

On November 23, NBC Nightly News aired a story about women in Iraq becoming the targets of murder by Shiite fanatics. The TV story pointed out that even police are too afraid to investigate these killings.

What a damning indictment of my own belief that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would lead to a better human rights scene in Iraq. I’m embarrassed but honest about how wrong I was.

Here’s one of the reasons I got it so wrong: I assumed the Bush administration would forge ties with Iraq’s most consistent champions of democracy — secularists and feminists. Any serious alliance with them would have ensured that the new Iraqi constitution gives civil law more prominence than religious law. This, in turn, would have put Muslim fanatics on notice that they can’t get away with human rights violations by invoking Islam as cover.

But the exact opposite has happened. Both Iraq and Afghanistan have adopted Sharia supremacy clauses in their constitutions, with the blessing of the Bushies.

Article Two of the new Iraqi constitution makes clear that “no law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed laws of Islam.” Likewise, Article Three of Afghanistan’s constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”

Washington enthusiastically endorses each constitution, indicating that the Islamization of democracy is either harmless or unstoppable. In so doing, neo-cons have succumbed to the logic of the multicultural Left: namely, that’s the way those people do things over there and who are we to tell them otherwise?

Welcome to the essence of cultural relativism, the ideology that insists there is no universal standard of human dignity or decency. Thus, anything goes as long as it doesn’t directly affect me or my kids.How individualistic. How selfish. And how revealing that when it comes to re-building Iraq and Afghanistan, cultural relativism unites the post-modern Left and the neo-conservative Right.

To be sure, it doesn’t stop with Iraq and Afghanistan. You can detect cultural relativism in America’s response to the now-notorious Saudi rape case. The US reaction as reported by Reuters:

“This is a part of a judicial procedure overseas in the court of a sovereign country,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack when asked to comment on the case. “That said, most would find it relatively astonishing that something like this happens,” added McCormack.

The state department’s moral cowardice outraged my American lawyer-friend, Ann. In a personal email, she wrote:

“What’s especially troubling to me is McCormack’s apparent attempt to explain the ‘legitimacy’ of this by noting that it’s part of a judicial procedure in the court of a sovereign country. He went on to say that the US could not ‘get involved in specific court cases in Saudi Arabia dealing with its own citizens.’ So my government can’t criticize human rights violations because another government is committing them?! Hmmm. No question of the legitimacy of their sovereignty, so long as the sovereign’s judicial machinery is chugging along ‘normally.’ Really? How’s that for due process! This is an absurd relativist argument.”

Ann then corrected herself. To say “absurd” in the same breath as “relativist” is redundant, she half-joked.

Frankly, Ann’s onto something. Today’s Left and Right are redundant, mimicking each other in their abandonment of our shared humanity. May they be happy occupying the same bed.