Dreamland

Yesterday, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote the following:

The attacks in Arkansas and Washington are both manifestations of a radical type of intolerance, and they are linked in very deep ways. The left, generally speaking, doesn't want to acknowledge Muslim intolerance, and the right, generally speaking, doesn't want to acknowledge white, Christian intolerance. But they both exist, and they should both be acknowledged.

I was annoyed by that statement when I first read it. Then Andrew Sullivan approvingly referred to it last night.

I'm not sure what world Goldberg and Sullivan are living in. I don't know who they think is "generally speaking" for "the left," but they're confusing a general instinct on the left to treat Muslims and other groups fairly with a failure to acknowledge dangers. The criticism of a piece with the RJC's criticism of the "balanced tone" of President Obama's Cairo speech, and not too far removed from Charles Krauthammer's accusations that President Obama is hostile to Israel or to Debbie Schlossel's offensive piece that I referred to earlier this week, despite the appropriate criticism of that piece by both Sullivan and Goldberg.

I know lots and lots of people on the left - even Gentile ones and a couple of Muslims - and I don't personally know one who does not acknowledge - and fear - the problems of intolerance in radical Islamic groups. The exploitation of that acknowledgement and fear is what convinced enough of the left to ignore all of the other issues that they cared about and hand George Bush a second term. Do Democratic congressmen consistently join in objecting to any pressure on Israel in its exercise of its foreign policy because they don't acknowledge the dangers from Muslim intolerance? There are some (Jimmy Carter can often appear that way) on the fringe who fit Goldberg's stereotype, but it's not "the left" that I'm familiar with.

From Bill Moyers' Journal last night, here's the left that I am familiar with:

Finally, you know by now that in our nation's capital on Wednesday, an elderly white supremacist and anti-Semite is alleged to have walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle and killed a security guard before being brought down himself. 88 years old!

You will know, too, of the recent killing in church of Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the country still performing late term abortions. It was evidence that violence works. His family has now announced that his Kansas clinic will not be reopened.

You may be less familiar with the June 1st shootings in an Army recruiting office in Little Rock that killed one soldier and wounded another. The suspect in question is an African-American Muslim convert who says he acted in retaliation for U.S. military actions in the Middle East.

Perhaps that is too balanced for the RJC. I assume Goldberg and Sullivan should know better.