David Solway in his latest article 9/11 Betrayal says that public intellectuals are “ideological termites tunneling away at the very structure and foundations of Western civilization.” You have to be a poet, which he is, to write something so good.
One knows by now that the overwhelming majority of public intellectuals and tenured and untenured academics long ago sold out to the enemies of the democratic West—indeed, have themselves become the enemies of the democratic West, ideological termites tunneling away at the very structure and foundations of Western civilization. As far back as 1927, in his The Treason of the Intellectuals [2] (La Trahison des Clercs) Julian Benda warned us about the subversive agenda of an intellectual consistory that could not be expected to think straight, to feel loyalty to their mentoring traditions or to hasten to the defense of the civilization which nurtured them. They came of age in a culture which gave them the freedom to think, speak and write as they wished and furnished them with the opportunity to chart their own freely chosen direction in life. Yet, instead of honoring these nearly unprecedented historical gifts, they sought the reduction and sometimes even the destruction of their alma mater.
We have observed this scandalous moral and intellectual betrayal in action since the publication of Benda’s book: the vigorous support of fascism, the prolonged and intimate love affair with Soviet communism, and today the sordid embrace of Islamic totalitarianism. As Richard Posner suggests in Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline [3], intellectuals and academics who abuse their privileges “by writing or speaking irresponsibly in the public arena, should be hauled before the bar of academic and public opinion.” But the chances of this happening are approximately nil. The fact that these pundits are wrong or disingenuous on almost every count does not have the slightest inhibitory effect on left-wing marathon thinking.
Open battle
We should do open battle with this threat – live out loud – with a purpose-driven free-speech and civil-rights campaign. Call it a Christian crusade against Islamic jihad, despotism and subterfuge, YES, call it a crusade. [That will get some attention] Compel as many as possible to participate in the crusade, and to demonstrate peaceable, traditional means of smashing into the public debate in ways that can not be ignored.
We should be done with “sensitivity” to this organized effort to dismantle our Constitution – this after a liberal and corrupt federal government has practically dismantled our Constitutional Republic.
There should be an agenda for outing Muhammad as a political, historical war criminal, and Muhammad should be the center of critical analysis and condemnation for the atrocities he committed and espoused in the works of literature he left to future generations.
I believe a central focus of this crusade should be the open protest and denunciation of the political, historical war criminal of Calif Muhammad, the potentate of a dynastic regime: his likeness should be torched in effigy for the ethnic cleansing of Medina and advocating eternal ethnic strife against Jews, for repressive policies against persons of opposite beliefs and the thefts, acts of desecration, assassinations and other oppressions.
A full-throttle declaration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as well as the teachings of Christ against oppression should be a part of this. They have a plan, why don’t the good guys have a plan? With a plethora of protests featuring open redress of the grievances against Muhammadism through the free-speech burning of Caliph Muhammad in effigy is an appropriate step. The world has seen back-pedaling on burning the Koran. We don’t need to burn Islamic books if we have not come from there in our repentance to Christ, but it should be known that in the future those repenting from Islam may follow the Acts 19 pattern of burning the books of evil that in the past held them captive. This too would receive much attention, and would open the conflict to a proper view of that which is freedom of speech and religion, [including the freedom to accept the argument of one faith over another and repent openly against what is believed to be an oppressive, sinful past]
I think there is fear that the freedom of speech might explode against Islamic despotism this way, and that is motive for trying to shut down open condemnation of Islamic despotism and its historical acts of tyranny to begin with, that started with the brutally violent and criminal life of the founder of Islam, Caliph Muhammad.