The left banned any talk of Islamic terrorism or of keeping out potential Islamic terrorists. That bans have crumbled in the face of Donald Trump and European nationalists refusal to play along. Now the suppressed issues have helped propel Trump to the presidency and fueled populist insurgencies across Europe. The left has only itself to blame. From Mike Mish Shedlock at mishtalk.com:
Here’s an interesting view in the Wall Street Journal that will ring a bell for many readers: Liberals Killed the Freedom of Movement.
By suppressing debate about Islam, nationalism and terror, the left set the stage for today’s backlash.
Politicians across the West are saying the same thing in what is shaping up to be the widest rollback of the freedom of movement in decades.
It’s not just right-wing nationalists like Marine Le Pen in France or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Centrists get it, too. Some, like Angela Merkel, are still-reluctant restrictionists. Others, like Theresa May, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and French presidential aspirant François Fillon, are more forthright. All have wised up to the popular demand for drastically lower immigration rates.
The irony is that freedom of movement is unraveling because liberals won central debates—about Islamism, social cohesion and nationalism. Rather than give any ground, they accused opponents of being phobic and reactionary. Now liberals are reaping the rewards of those underhanded victories.
Liberals refused to acknowledge the link between Islamist ideology and terrorism. For eight years under President Obama, the U.S. government refused even to say “Islamism,” claiming ludicrously that U.S. service members were going to war against “violent extremism.” Voters could read and hear about jihadists offering up their actions to Allah before opening automatic fire on shoppers and blasphemous cartoonists.
The left also largely “won” the debate over Muslim integration. For too many liberals, every Islamist atrocity was cause to fret about an “Islamophobic” backlash. When a jihadist would go boom somewhere, pre-emptive hashtags expressing solidarity with threatened Muslims were never far behind.
But liberals don’t bother nearly as much about the pathologies in Muslim communities, and in Islamic civilization itself, that were producing so much carnage. Some would sooner abandon their own feminist and gay-rights orthodoxies than criticize what imams in Paris and London suburbs were telling their congregations.
To continue reading: Liberals, Not Trump, to Blame for Backlash
