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Obama Undermines Cultural Confidence
By Frank Diamond, For The Bulletin
While watching President Barack Obama jets about the globe apologizing for American “arrogance,” without precisely explaining what he means, my mind drifted back a bit. I thought about 1219, when St. Francis of Assisi gained an audience with the Sultan leading the armies besieging the city of Damietta during one of the Crusades.
St. Francis challenged the Muslim clerics at court, saying that he would fling himself into the fire if they did likewise. Seeing who burned and who emerged unscathed would demonstrate who worshiped the true God. “No thanks,” said the Muslim clerics. One of them slunk away during the saint’s presentation. St. Francis had to be restrained from, er, frying solo, so to speak.
Only a mystic could display such faith. Yet, you need a certain amount of belief, call it cultural confidence, to just survive. The axis of evil in our society — Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media — undermines that confidence all the time. Any student on any college campus would find himself in big trouble if he wrote an essay that begins: “Our culture, steeped as it is in Judeo-Christian traditions, is far superior to those cultures that spring from the Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist traditions.” The diversity police would be upon him in an instant. Sensitivity training would be mandatory.
We put ourselves in a bind by extolling the virtues of all cultures in our frenetic efforts to offend no one, not even our enemies. We need to get back to believing in American exceptionalism. Muslim fundamentalists certainly believe in the transcendent virtue of their culture. Madrassa schools throughout the Middle East that graduate wave after wave of little homicide bombers certainly don’t preach, “I’m OK, you’re OK.”
You don’t even have to travel far to see what they are up to. In 2003, the New York Daily News found that books used in that city’s Muslim schools routinely condemn Christians and Jews, and preach Muslim supremacy.
Yet, our new president drones on about our attitude. Should we be surprised? President Obama hails from academia, which over the last four decades has been waging war against Western culture. Dead white European males are the bad guys, don’t you know? Mozart was a cultural imperialist and Shakespeare skipped the harassment seminar.
If by labeling America arrogant, President Obama means that there is something inherently wrong about our society and the Western culture from which it sprang, then we’re in trouble. It is not arrogant to say that we are exceptional. It is not presumptuous to argue that we run our society in the correct manner, even down to allowing those of us who feel that hedonism casts too great a shadow across pop culture the right to point that out.
Not too long ago we witnessed the collapse of second most militarily powerful country in history. The Soviet Union didn’t die on the battlefield. It died because its people, including its leaders, stopped believing in Communism. Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media wants us to believe in a secularism tied to a Constitution that they wish did not contain the word “God.” But who would throw himself into the fire over their mush?
Fanaticism need not be met with fanaticism. However, it does need to be challenged by those who have a sincere and healthy appreciation of just what they are defending. Japanese kamikazes in World War II were fought off by not-so-average Joes who believed that the American way was the best. Our soldiers possessed cultural confidence.
Mark Steyn, in his book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, tells of British Gen. Sir Charles Napier in India in the 1840s confronted with the Hindu custom of “suttee,” in which widows were thrown upon the funeral pyres of their husbands. Napier responded: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
Mr. Steyn concludes: “India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud....”
Would President Obama think Napier had been arrogant? Would his aides first have to run the question by a focus group?
Be very afraid.
Frank Diamond can be reached at fpdiamond@yahoo.com
St. Francis challenged the Muslim clerics at court, saying that he would fling himself into the fire if they did likewise. Seeing who burned and who emerged unscathed would demonstrate who worshiped the true God. “No thanks,” said the Muslim clerics. One of them slunk away during the saint’s presentation. St. Francis had to be restrained from, er, frying solo, so to speak.
Only a mystic could display such faith. Yet, you need a certain amount of belief, call it cultural confidence, to just survive. The axis of evil in our society — Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media — undermines that confidence all the time. Any student on any college campus would find himself in big trouble if he wrote an essay that begins: “Our culture, steeped as it is in Judeo-Christian traditions, is far superior to those cultures that spring from the Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist traditions.” The diversity police would be upon him in an instant. Sensitivity training would be mandatory.
We put ourselves in a bind by extolling the virtues of all cultures in our frenetic efforts to offend no one, not even our enemies. We need to get back to believing in American exceptionalism. Muslim fundamentalists certainly believe in the transcendent virtue of their culture. Madrassa schools throughout the Middle East that graduate wave after wave of little homicide bombers certainly don’t preach, “I’m OK, you’re OK.”
You don’t even have to travel far to see what they are up to. In 2003, the New York Daily News found that books used in that city’s Muslim schools routinely condemn Christians and Jews, and preach Muslim supremacy.
Yet, our new president drones on about our attitude. Should we be surprised? President Obama hails from academia, which over the last four decades has been waging war against Western culture. Dead white European males are the bad guys, don’t you know? Mozart was a cultural imperialist and Shakespeare skipped the harassment seminar.
If by labeling America arrogant, President Obama means that there is something inherently wrong about our society and the Western culture from which it sprang, then we’re in trouble. It is not arrogant to say that we are exceptional. It is not presumptuous to argue that we run our society in the correct manner, even down to allowing those of us who feel that hedonism casts too great a shadow across pop culture the right to point that out.
Not too long ago we witnessed the collapse of second most militarily powerful country in history. The Soviet Union didn’t die on the battlefield. It died because its people, including its leaders, stopped believing in Communism. Hollywood, academia, and the mainstream media wants us to believe in a secularism tied to a Constitution that they wish did not contain the word “God.” But who would throw himself into the fire over their mush?
Fanaticism need not be met with fanaticism. However, it does need to be challenged by those who have a sincere and healthy appreciation of just what they are defending. Japanese kamikazes in World War II were fought off by not-so-average Joes who believed that the American way was the best. Our soldiers possessed cultural confidence.
Mark Steyn, in his book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, tells of British Gen. Sir Charles Napier in India in the 1840s confronted with the Hindu custom of “suttee,” in which widows were thrown upon the funeral pyres of their husbands. Napier responded: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
Mr. Steyn concludes: “India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud....”
Would President Obama think Napier had been arrogant? Would his aides first have to run the question by a focus group?
Be very afraid.
Frank Diamond can be reached at fpdiamond@yahoo.com
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