Ironing to do (or Paradigms Botched)

This Breivik attack has uncovered a lot of wrinkles that need to be ironed out. Not that they weren't there before, nor that I have left them unnoticed and unremarked-upon. But this seems to have cast them in a more urgent light.

Thus, the otherwise flawless Diana West writes, in the context of an otherwise flawless essay:

We may assume Norway's Labor Party, like all parties on the European Left, draws votes from a majority of Norway's Muslims for its support of Islamic immigration and the cultural, legal and financial accommodations that follow.

The problematic wrinkle here is the implication she is drawing (an implication and claim quite common in the anti-Islam movement): namely, that the reason why PC MCs remain myopic to the problem of Islam and go the extra mile by bending over backwards to whitewash and placate Muslims, has anything significant to do with getting Muslim votes. Such an implication betrays a myopia of its own -- a myopia to the profoundly sincere worldview which is the real basis for the West's myopia to the problem of Islam: the PC MC worldview, that is.

Those who are beholden to it -- even when they are of the more flavorful variety of Euro-Labour Leftists -- are for the most part relatively sincere, intelligent and decent people who sincerely believe they are on the side of the angels when they take the side of the poor Brown Muslims against the ever-lurking White Man ever ready to lynch, round up and commit genocide against "the Other" (in this case, the Mother of all Others, the #1 Most Privileged Ethnic Peoples: Muslims). This isn't a matter of corrupt power-seeking; nor of corrupt bribery of officials; nor of some evil ideology hellbent on destroying the West (as Breivik believed and took to its logical conclusion).

This is a matter of a good paradigm -- the paradigm of Western Graeco-Roman/Judaeo-Christian virtues, among which are Respect for the Other and Self-Criticism -- gone bad. Gone to irrational excess.