“Those boys on the other side of that ridge…They never quite seem like the enemy.”
(General James Longstreet from the movie Gettysburg)

Longstreet was speaking of Union troops at Gettysburg, some of whom he had known and commanded before the war.

So what’s the excuse of our political and intellectual elites who never quite see an enemy when thinking about or writing of radical Islamists?

And not just western elites, either. In a frightening but predictable way, the entire War on Terror is in full backsliding mode as many ordinary citizens in Europe and America tire of the endless vigilance, the troubling compromises with civil liberties, the partisan political warfare, and the constant, nagging feelings of self doubt about the righteousness of our cause encouraged by 50 years of tearing at the edifice and hammering at the foundations of Western civilization by the European and American left.

At a time when our civilization is facing the greatest threat to its existence in more than 500 years, when the need for unity in recognizing, at the very least, that we are confronted by an enemy that wishes to do us immense harm, those most capable of giving voice to a rational defense of our values, our systems of government, our art - our very way of life, are wallowing in defeatism and worse, sympathizing with those who would do us in. Nurtured at the finest palaces of thinking the world has ever known - the Western university system - we are being systematically emasculated by the trimmers, the appeasers, and those afflicted with that most curious of Western diseases, the plague of multiculturalism.

In short, when perhaps our greatest need at this point in the war against Islamism is for our intellectuals - artists, people of letters, and philosophers to instill in the rest of us a sense of our own worth as inheritors of the traditions and values of Western culture, we are treated instead to lectures about moral equivalency and outright boosterism for the cause of the jihadis. In one of the greatest historical ironies in recorded history, those who have been nurtured in the freedom and tolerance of the West now would abandon the society that celebrates those values by either cowering in the shadows or giving voice to doubts reflecting the view that there is little in Western Civilization worth saving.

As early as 2002, leftist intellectuals sought to undermine the War on Terror by rejecting the very premise that we should be fighting a war at all. The “underlying causes” of the war were examined and found wanting. Policies of past and present western governments were used as justification for the jihadis to murder innocent people. There were even those who saw any effort of the United States to defend itself against states that gladly sponsor and support these murderous thugs as immoral.

And the damage to the cause has already been done. Exactly a year ago, Great Britain experienced its own national nightmare of a day when al-Qaeda linked terrorists claimed the lives of 52 British citizens in an attack on the London subway sytsem. The response of the British people to this attack was a curious combination of sorrow and appeasement. This exchange between a London policeman and an ordinary citizen who was protesting at a radical Muslim demonstration sponsored by a group whose leader thought the subway attacks justified is indicative of how a citizenry loses faith and courage when so few support the defense of their own country against murderous attacks:

…[an] English bobby vigorously silencing such a citizen, described as a van driver, who, according to the televised report, had angrily criticized the Muslim protesters. It is tragically enlightening.

“Listen to me, listen to me,” said the policeman, shaking his finger at the van driver. “They have a right to protest. You let them do it. You say things like that you’ll get them riled and I end up in [trouble]. You say one more thing like that, mate, and you’ll get yourself nicked [arrested] and I am not kidding you, d’you understand me?”

Van driver: “They can do whatever they want and I can’t?”

Policeman: “They’ve got their way of doing it. The way you did it was wrong. You’ve got one second to get back in your van and get out of here.”

Van driver: [bitter] “Freedom of speech.”

One wonders if those best able to articulate the value of free speech as well as how this peculiarly western notion is so vital to defeating our enemies would come out from the shadows and speak up with one loud voice in defense of this major Western tradition if such a conversation would ever have taken place. The policeman is there to protect the rights of all - not just those who threaten the peace.

In fact, western intellectuals are unwittingly assisting our enemies by feeding their paranoia and fantastical worldview. Every time they remind us of the moral equivalency between Westerners and jihadis, they feed the Culture of Grievance that so dominates the thoughts of radical Muslims:

How do you win against the Culture of Grievance? Call it COG for short, and don’t think you’ve never encountered it before. It’s at the heart of the Islamic radical movement, and a prime motivator of Islamic terrorists. COG is all over the place, but especially in places like the Middle East. COG is when a culture is more concerned about real, or imagined, grievances, than in just moving ahead and fixing things. Every nation has a certain degree of COG, which most of the time means little to foreigners. But when COG spawns terrorists (which COG often does) who go abroad and kill thousands of foreigners, than COG is an international problem.

Instead of a ringing defense of our way of life, the Western left emboldens the radicals by acknowledging that their claims of victimhood have merit. And while not coming out and advocating terrorism as a response directly, by justifying the murder of innocents by pointing to this policy or that event as “cause and effect,” the left plays right into the hands of those who use such critiques to mobilize and motivate their minions of death.

Perhaps we should take a page from Israel’s playbook in this regard. While it is true that Israel has its own “Blame Israel First” crowd on the left, the self confidence and belief in what they are doing to fight for their national lives stands in stark contrast to the hand wringing in most of the west. And what is truly remarkable to watch has been the abandonment of Israel by the European left. They have picked up the cause of the Palestinian terrorists who not only wish to defeat Israel but destroy her. How they arrived at this sorry conclusion is a puzzlement. Nearly 60 years ago, the European left gave Jewish nationalism a boost with their support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Why they have abandoned Israel in her hour of need has more to do with the Culture of Grievance than with any possible defense of Israeli society being reflective of Western traditions and values.

One would think that we could acknowledge mistakes made in the past without condemning an entire civilization to the ash heap of history. But apparently, the intellectual left is incapable of such a leap of faith. They have sacrificed rationality on the altar of Good Intentions. And I’m afraid that in the end, those good intentions may be the ruin of us all.