Tuesday, February 21, 2006

The American Thinker on Dubai Port "Storm"

I don't know how they do it, but The American Thinker has another interesting article, this one about the Dubai port sale controversy:
Some wonder how an idea such as this could even find a place at Uncle Sam’s table. After all, Dubai is an state that recognized the Taliban and, as pointed out by Congressman Mark Foley of Florida, seeks “to be Iran’s free trade partner and has been linked to the funding and planning of 9-11.” In other words, this is somewhat akin to having given a Japanese or German company control over our seaports in the late 1930s.

Of course, such an action would have been unthinkable to the World War II generation, as it would have offended their sense of patriotism, a quality that is now sorely lacking. Moreover, their main concern wasn’t offending others; they didn’t feel compelled to pepper every condemnation of their enemy with qualifiers such as “Fascism is an ideology of peace” and “The real menace is the radical fascists.”

What has changed? Well, political-correctness was absent in those days, meaning, people had a grasp of reality. Thus, they knew it was logical to assume that foreign peoples who shared an ethnic and/or religious identity with your sworn enemies will be more likely to be partial to them than to you. This may not be a pretty truth, but a fact doesn’t cease to be a fact simply because it’s out of fashion.

Some will say I’m painting everybody with the same brush, but perish the thought. I understand that we should judge everyone as an individual, but I also grasp something that people shackled by political-correctness cannot: yes, there is variation within groups, but there is also variation between groups. And, yes, you have to judge everyone as an individual, but, you also have to judge every group as an individual group. One of the ironies of modern man is that while he will adamantly stand against the painting of every person with the same brush, he just as adamantly stands for the painting of every group with the same brush. Thus, this isn’t about denying individual uniqueness; it’s about acknowledging collective uniqueness.

But blinded to this truth we are. In our ideological frenzy to embrace multiculturalism at all costs, a bizarre and tendentious “tolerance” at all costs, and internationalism at all costs, we have imbibed all the lies upon which these schemes rest, rendering ourselves a credulous lot and sheep among wolves. And that is the problem, for, generally speaking, it’s not that those who rubber-stamp these harebrained schemes have corrupt hearts. It’s that they have corrupted judgement.