Wolfgang von Skeptik

Reflections On This Newest Threat

IN A JUST AND RATIONAL world, yesterday’s disclosure that Islamic terrorists are scouting the vast and complex Washington state ferry system as a probable precursor to a Puget Sound version of the 9/11 attacks would prompt an immediate flood-tide of support for George Bush and Republican senatorial candidate George Nethercutt, and a proportionate ebbing of support from John Kerry and Sen. Patty Murray. Bush is at least a fighter – never mind how undeniably inept he has proven himself in Iraq – and Nethercutt has declared himself a fighter too, while Kerry is an avowed appeaser and Murray is by her own admission an admirer of Osama bin Laden. But the Washington-state poll numbers aren’t likely to change much in the wake of the anti-terrorist authorities' frightening revelation, and a large part of the blame for that has to go to local media, most of which is as fiercely protective of Kerry and Sen. Murray as der Voelkischer Beobachter was of der Fuehrer: this is, after all, where Mary Mapes launched her “reporting” career by falsely accusing the Seattle Police Department of murder (for which see The Wall Street Journal link in “Mary Mapes: The Missing F-Word”).

It is unlikely to bolster the Bush campaign, which may already be damaged beyond repair by the lethal combination of hubris, media bias and ruinous disclosures, and it may not even help Nethercutt – click here for a dismaying status report on Nethercutt’s effort to oust Murray – but it is nevertheless revealing to review just what Murray said nearly two years ago about bin Laden. The original story, in The Vancouver Columbian, is available here. (Vancouver, Washington is a middle-sized city on the Columbia River a few miles north of Portland, Oregon. It is often confused with Vancouver, British Columbia, a much larger metropolis about 300 miles further north, in the southwestern corner of Canada.)

Despite the fact the undeniable proof of Murray’s disdain for America and her apparent ignorance of both foreign policy and Islamic terrorism was disclosed by a reputable local daily, the story was mostly ignored by other Washington state media outlets. Indeed, in an informal survey of Puget Sound-area acquaintances, the only folks I could find who knew of Murray’s remarks were either regular readers of conservative web sites or regular listeners to talk radio. Thus Nethercutt has been forced to rely on television advertising to spread the word of Murray’s disturbing views, which has enabled Murray to respond by calling Nethercutt a liar and an extremist and linking him to the Taliban-like cabal of Christian Fundamentalists who took over the state GOP (and attempted to take over the state itself) in 1996. The guilt-by-association linkage of Nethercutt to these zealots (whose influence was minimized years ago) is a replay of the tactic that cost Sen. Slade Gorton his seat in 2000. It is an exceptionally nasty campaign, especially for Washington state,

But even the conservative media missed the underlying implications of Murray’s praise of the evil mastermind of 9/11. For what Murray said – that bin Laden has “been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful” – reveals a misconception of Islamic terrorism so breathtaking it defies explanation. Here is the rest of the damning quote: “We haven’t done that. How would (Arab Muslims) look at us today if we had been helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan.” Given epic U.S. expenditures of taxpayers’ money on foreign aid – far greater than the sums donated by any other nation on the planet and including millions to Afghanistan even during the Taliban era – the real question is how could a U.S. senator possibly be so misinformed?

The answer, I believe, is that she is not misinformed at all – that her assertion is a deliberate, malicious distortion in service to her radical feminist ideology. When Murray first sought election to the Senate, her stated purpose – though acknowledged only to the most radical feminist groups in Washington state – was building a national network of women with the ultimate goal of subverting “patriarchy.” To anyone familiar with the doctrines of radical feminism, its ideological cant is obvious in Murray’s bin Laden remarks: the notion that Islamic terrorists should be embraced as fellow “enemies of the white patriarchy,” the corollary belief that supporting Islamic terrorism will undermine the “rape-culture” of American liberty, further the collapse of Western Civilization and hasten the advent of “gynocracy” – the world-wide female supremacist state mandated by “herstory” to replace the global caliphate. Thus Murray deliberately mis-represented bin Laden as a social reformer (“day care facilities...health care facilities”) dedicated to an Islamic variant of the feminist agenda (never mind the fact that “Islamic feminism” is a contradiction in terms). Moreover, in the wake of the Vancouver incident there came a number of reports of Murray making similar statements to other groups – and though she apparently no longer publicly sings bin Laden’s praises, I cannot believe for an instant she has discarded her matrifascist values. Indeed, her favorite straw-man adversary remains “a white man in a necktie.” The “mom in tennis shoes” is in reality a subversive in sneakers.

That a senator with these particular values is raising a stink about U.S. seaport security surely begs questions about her motives – suggesting that, at the very least, her real purpose is venomously partisan: merely discrediting the Bush Administration, no matter whether the deficiencies she has identified are ever remedied, or what additional risks their public identification imposes on the U.S. population and infrastructure. But there’s no denying Murray has raised public consciousness about the issue, much as Kerry’s comments about the war in Iraq have warned Iraq’s would-be libertarians that – if Kerry is elected – they will likely be betrayed much as were the South Vietnamese, the Iraqis sacrificed on the altar of abandoning Iraq to its tyrannical impulses merely in the interest of “normalizing” the Middle East and thereby withdrawing U.S. troops as quickly as possible. In this context, Kerry’s “The wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time” and Murray’s “This administration is flirting with disaster with its lack of sustained and serious attention to port security” are variations on a common theme intended to undercut support not just for the Bush Administration, but for the war itself – and by extension, America’s very right to self-defense. Murray’s hatred of the Bush Administration and all its policies is an expression of her feminism, while Kerry’s parallel antagonism is an expression of his incipient pacifism and his belief in unilateral disarmament. Once again, reincarnations: Murray as some reborn disciple of Virginia Woolf who still regards Western Civilization as a boil on the buttocks of all womankind but has finally and at long last learned how to be effectively subversive and Kerry – as always – as the karmic rerun of Neville Chamberlain.

Which brings me, albeit by a roundly path, back to the terrorist threat against the Washington state ferry system. I cannot doubt the threat is real; anyone who has ridden on these functionally austere but nevertheless undeniably friendly vessels or even watched them from afar as they ply the emerald-green waters of Puget Sound will understand the grim post-9/11 reality of the ferries’ dreadful vulnerability and their horrific potential as well. The great irony is that far too many Washingtonians refuse to believe Islam's 14-century onslaught against civilization is anything but a violently bigoted figment of the “patriarchal” (or perhaps “imperialist”) imagination. It is true: urban Western Washington state is the home of veritable legions of matrifascists and all their lockstep auxiliaries in the racial, ethnic and pacifist victim-identity cults, not to mention the anarchists and the white male psychological self-castration cult of political “correctness.” More than once I have referred to this region – and not always in jest – as “the Feminarchy of Washington.” It is an epicenter of hate-Bush, hate-America, hate-Western-Civilization hysteria that probably has no counterparts outside San Francisco and a few of the more leftist-dominated Eastern college campuses. The anti-war frenzy that has grown out of this ideological miasma has a bitter, vandalize-your-yard vindictiveness that is unlike anything I have ever witnessed – even during the Vietnam era – and Murray’s loud protests about port security merely feed its underlying terrors. But now the Islamic savages who started this war are directly threatening some of its most fevered opponents, and it will be revealing to see how they react. Will they surrender like the cowardly Spaniards, or will they at long last awaken and redirect their rage against the real enemy? I truly don't know. But I would remind them of a relevant observation voiced long ago by a man named Lev Bronstein, a military genius who was later known to the world as Leon Trotsky, founder, organizer and first commander of the Red Army: “You may not be interested in war. But war is interested in you.”

Posted by Loren at October 12, 2004 08:41 AM