Another no-link post! (with a link)

I think bloggers, even not-quite-up-to-the-minute ones like myself, are frowned upon if they don't include links in every post. However, if everyone follows that rule, and if text and analysis are gradually cut in favor of a forest of links, then the blogosphere will eventually consist of a forest of links, all of which either lead to each other or to a major media outlet. The blogosphere would then simply become a more inefficient version of Google News.

To stop this trend, I offer no links, but rather my own thought of the day.

During World War 2, few Americans questioned the idea that the Nazis represented a force for bad in the world. Many Americans probably didn't come to this conclusion on their own, but merely accepted it from the government - still, those who stopped to think about it realized that the growth of Nazi power would probably mean less security, vastly increased risk of violence and death, economic devastation, and the abrogation of essentially every human right valued by our society. Not good.

During the Cold War, there was a significant minority of Americans who thought that communism was not such a bad thing. Even Soviet communism, which even many communist sympathizers recognized as barely-warmed-over Nazism, seemed benign to a small number of Americans. After all, only a few decades earlier, communism and socialism had been identified with the progressive movement that sought to limit the excesses of capitalism here in the U.S., and so there were those who believed that the Soviets were in pursuit of a nobal end goal.

But in addition, America was a changing place. More and more people were going to college and learning to question ideas, America was rocked by social movements and Vietnam, and the media was becoming more independent. The main reason that Americans sympathized with communism slightly more than they did with Nazism, I am guessing, is the simple fact that by that time average Americans didn't take their opinions straight from the government to the degree they used to. Of course, the American consensus now is that the Soviets and their ideology were also a force for bad, with gulags, enforced poverty, and vast abridgements of civil rights.

Now, if George Bush and other American leaders are to be believed, violent radical Islam (also called Wahabbism, Salafism, jihadism, Bin Ladenism, and Islamofascism) is a pernicious ideology just as evil and potentially as dangerous as Nazism or communism. Although many Americans agree, the percent that disagree is much larger than in past conflicts. Many of us question - is "jihadism" really such a huge force? Is it spreading, or just reacting to American provocation? Is there really such a thing as "jihadism", or is it just Muslims reponding to encroachments by the West?

One reason for these doubts is the lack of credibility of the people who warn us about jihadism. George Bush and his administration have proven themselves to be less than trustworthy time and time again, over WMD, over domestic spying, over torture, over a host of other issues. The Republican party itself has been shown by the current rash of scandals to be as corrupt as some of us have always expected it of being.

In addition, American society thinks for itself even more than in the days of the Cold War. The proliferation of news media, the spread of the internet, and the continued growth of college education mean that very few of us take our ideological marching orders directly from the government anymore. Even those who believe everything George Bush says probably have more loyalty to the Republican Party than to the government as a whole.

So we don't trust the messengers, and we don't trust messages in general, and so America has not united behind the struggle against jihadism (if it exists) as it did against Nazism and communism. But there's one more reason for this lack of unity - the deafening silence from liberal leaders when it comes to the threat, or lack of one, posed by jihadism. Very few Democrats, and (to my knowledge) no acknowledged "liberals," have taken up the anti-jihadist struggle as a rallying cry since the first few days after 9/11. With half the country voting "blue," this means that half the country is sitting around waiting for its chosen leaders - Democrats - to tell them if jihadism is really bad after all and if they should commit themselves to fighting it.

This situation can't continue. If jihadism is bad and dangerous, then liberals should be standing up in front of the cameras giving speeches about how bad it is, and how essential it is that we fight it - and, hopefully, offering some better methods for fighting it than we've been using so far. But if jihadism doesn't exist or is benign, liberals ought to say so too, and give clear reasons and evidence to support that claim. Either way, liberals have to say something, because the lack of a firm position on the issue of the "jihadist threat" is dangerously weakening an already weak party and movement. Fence-sitting loses votes like nothing else.

I personally believe that jihadism is real, and a real threat. A large number (more than half, if memory serves) of the conflicts currently ongoing in the world involve radical hard-line Islamic groups. Radical Islamist movements want to implement medieval-era sharia religious law in every country. They want to force women to be second-class citizens, ban Western culture, and basically make people live in a way that most of us wouldn't like to live. To me that's a threat, and I think it's a threat that should be fought by America, primarily through propaganda and diplomacy, but sometimes (as in Afghanistan) through military force.

The problem is that half of America hasn't yet decided whether they want to fight jihadism. Liberals would be much more effective at fighting jihadism than conservatives - just witness the Cold War, when diplomacy won the war with relatively few shots fired. In the same way, a liberal offensive against jihadism - encouraging human rights and openness in Muslim countries, building NGOs, liberalizing economies, reducing American dependence on oil, public diplomacy in cooperation with Europe, encouraging the spread of independent media in the Islamic world, exposing what goes on at madrassas, and making lots of anti-jihadist speeches - would probably be a lot more effective at undermining jihadism than Bush's ham-fisted blunders in Iraq. But we aren't doing it, because liberals haven't yet collectively decided that we ought to do it.

It's time for that to end. It's time for liberals to get up and say the obvious, which is that jihadism is bad, jihadism is dangerous, and that we should fight it. That doesn't mean surrendering to conservatives - it means taking the wheel out of their hands and doing a better job of driving. But sitting in the back seat pointing out what a bad driver Bush is doesn't do anyone any favors, in the U.S. or in the beleagured Muslim world that bears the brunt of most of jihadism's violence. So, to liberals, I say, stop turning a blind eye. Stop saying that the fact that most Muslims are peaceful somehow means that jihadism doesn't exist. Stop blaming Israel for a worldwide phenomenon. Stop saying America only cares about oil (especially if you can't figure out if Bush wants oil prices to be low or high!), and start saying America cares about freedom and human rights.

In short, liberals, take the wheel.

Hey, look, I managed to include a link after all.