The denial of facts by the Left, in the Academy, the Old Media and the Democratic Party
Overview
Many on the Left, in the Academy, the Old Media and in the Democratic Party, refuse to acknowledge certain facts as facts because they are inconvenient to ideology or to winning. The Democratic Party can not become a national majority party again until these kooks are purged.
Pat Moynihan is famously credited with saying: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” This statement needs to be taken very seriously today, for in many places, the world has been stood on its head, and facts being perverted by men of ill will or ignorance.
Palestine and the Academy
Let’s start with the ludicrous Palestinian conference at Duke. Analyzing the basics of the Palestinian-Irsaeli conflict is trivially simple: if the Palestinians put down there guns today, there would be a Palestinian state tomorrow. If the Israelis put down their guns today, Israel would be wiped off the map. So the conference serves in reality as nothing more than a cover to sound like Germany in 1932 (or parts of France today), via Adler and Langer in the WSJ:
One keynote speech of the PSM’s exercise in “education through dialogue” was delivered by Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Yale professor of genetics, who presented a short history of what he portrayed as the virulent Zionist “disease.” There was also a lecture by the PLO legal adviser Diana Buttu, a polished speaker whose theme was that Palestinians under Israeli occupation have suffered a fate worse than blacks under apartheid in South Africa, and that Israel is today “the greatest abuser of human rights” in the world. Nasser Abufarha, a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, spoke of Israel’s “racist ambitions” and defended the terrorist activities of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in combating Zionist “aggression.” Brian Avery, an activist for ISM, explained that both George W. Bush and John Kerry were “on auction to the Jewish lobby.”
One of the two ISM-led workshops at the Duke conference was “Volunteering in Palestine: Role and Value of International Activists.” A last-minute addition to the schedule, the workshop was conducted by ISM co-founder Huweida Arraf. Acknowledging during her talk that the ISM cooperates with the terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Ms. Arraf encouraged students to join the group and instructed them on how to enter Israel surreptitiously and how to deal with possible arrest and deportation. The Duke administration never commented publicly on the inclusion in the PSM’s program of a workshop recruiting for a group with self-professed ties to terrorists and an openly avowed interest in generating casualties.
Another, less practical workshop–”Segregation, Apartheid and Zionism Are Crimes Against Humanity!”–was led by Bob Brown, a veteran of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Mr. Brown’s theoretical discourse consisted mostly of unsubstantiated personal anecdotes and random invective. Thus, he reminisced about meeting Saddam Hussein’s spokesman Tariq Aziz in Baghdad in 1974; alleged that Condoleezza Rice’s father had tried to force him to marry her some years back; and referred to the Six Day war, in which Israel fought off the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, as “the Jew war of ’67.”
The Jew war indeed. And some students believe such things. I don’t know about you, but I was an idiot in college.
Moorism, Rathergate and SwiftBoatVets
Less pernicious, but right up there, is Michael Moorism, on display in Fahrenheit 911. See Dave Kopel’s and Christopher Hitchens’ critiques of the film, as well as Moore’s defense, and make up your own mind. Since even Moore’s defenders do not claim that the film is objectively true, there is not much point in debating that. The danger of Moorism rises from this: there are those in the anti-Bush crowd who loathe Bush so intensely, that the objective reality no longer matters. This itself is a sickness.
We come to the main point. This sickness must be cured for the Democratic Party to become a majority party in the United States again. Fooling all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time is not a sustainable strategy for a majority party. Here are two test cases:
Rathergate. Here’s Powerline’s review of the pathetic work of Corey Pein in the Columbia Journalism Review. Pein convicted himself when he said: “We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15.” Well, Corey, try reading Powerline or LGF, or one of Dinocrat’s men of the year, Joseph Newcomer. Wishing that fake but accurate means true don’t make it so. I thought they taught that in J school.
SwiftBoatVets. I’m not going to rehearse all the arguments about the Magic Hat, VC the Wonder Dog, the Sampan Incident or Chistmas in Cambodia again — we’ve done that ad nauseam, and quite well, by the way. Yet many in the Old Media continue to behave as if the many sworn charges against the veracity of John Kerry by dozens of his fellow officers, and everyone in his chain of command, were simply fabricated as a partisan trick.
A modest suggestion
This space proposes that step one of a recovery program for the Left is admitting the truth of Rathergate, SwiftBoatVets, and the fiction of F911. If you can’t get agreement on such simple matters, there is really no point in discussing Iraq, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, social security reform or much else political. Enjoy a nice bottle of wine with your friend, and wait for the Democratic Party to hit bottom.