No, this is not a parody account. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg really said this.
At least he had the minimal degree of shame necessary to realize this would be a bad time to push his other obsession, gun control. Disarming law-abiding citizens worked out great for Paris, didn’t it?
This isn’t a new idea. The Climate Cult has been pushing global warming as the principal cause of terrorism for years. While hostages were still being slaughtered in the Bataclan concert hall, cultists were suggesting the killers’ true goal was to inconvenience the upcoming Paris conference on climate change… as if ISIS has ever done anything but laugh uproariously and thank Allah for their good fortune when they hear dingbat Western politicians nattering on about how global warming is a bigger security threat than terrorism. Becoming invisible is the super-power every murderer longs for. Islamists love their chances against weak infidel governments that can’t even name them, let alone fight them.
Linking climate change to terrorism is part of the marketing strategy to blame it for everything, in a nonstop blizzard of doom that scares normal people into accepting that sacrifices are necessary to appease the angry Sky Gods. “If even .01 percent of what the Climate Cult warns about comes to pass, we’re all doomed, so it’s reasonable to pay for a little insurance, right?” the thinking goes. That gives the cult an incentive to make the wildest claims at every opportunity.
And then the same people denounce those who are serious about the threat of terrorism as “fear-mongers.” They evidently want a monopoly in the fear market.
This is more than just an opportunistic marketing strategy, though.
Global-warming mythology is one of many ways the arrogance and narcissism of the Left manifest themselves. The various steaming-hot takes about how France brought the jihad upon itself, or Western foreign policy “created Islamic extremism” – as Salon put it on Tuesday, in their latest gambit to harvest hate-clicks by with offensively stupid headlines – are other examples. (No link, because I’m not going to help them harvest hate-clicks.)
This is the essence of multiculturalism: Everything is the West’s fault. All other people of the world are helpless before the power of Western imperialism, which shapes all of their beliefs and dictates all of their purely responsive actions. Every Third World villain is a puppet with a First World hand up its posterior. (Notice how often you see this exact plot line in post-9/11 films and TV shows about terrorism – there’s almost always a cabal of corrupt Western businessmen, politicians, or bureaucrats pulling the strings.)
Self-regard isn’t necessarily self-love. The narcissism of multiculturalism, political correctness, and radical environmentalism is a mixture of self-loathing and arrogance: the belief that all of history, and even the weather, are angry reactions to the sins of all-powerful Western society.
Of course, many of those who subscribe to this ideology consider themselves enlightened beings who float above the societies they nominally belong to, absolved of the West’s original sins by reading the right magazines and driving the right cars. The man behind the wheel of a Prius thinks he’s done his part to fight global warming – you’re the problem. The titanic carbon footprints of his political and spiritual leaders trouble him not at all, because they care.
Look at President Obama’s performance in the press conference he gave on Monday.
The slaughter of innocents in Paris didn’t make him angry – that was a mere “setback” in his estimation. What got him worked up was the thought of his domestic political enemies “popping off” about his failed military strategies, and sloganeering about “American leadership or America winning.” How dare the culture that created all these problems around the world speak of “winning” against enemies it sculpted from the clay of oppressed people with legitimate grievances?
Even the Charlie Hebdo killers had legitimate grievances, according to Secretary of State John Kerry.
“There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” he told employees of the U.S. Embassy in Paris on Tuesday morning. “There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration.”
Well, yes, it is an exaggeration, Secretary Kerry. ISIS doesn’t care about “everything you stand for.” They attacked and killed over a hundred people. They weren’t just making a statement, a symbolic gesture, like the ones liberals are so fond of making. This war is about what Islamists want to impose, not what they disdain… and when they hear Kerry granting “legitimacy” to the murder of magazine editors over some cartoons, they hear the sound of victory. It doesn’t matter that Kerry disapproves of those murders. As long as he can see and understand the Islamists’ “sense of wrong,” they’re making progress.
Moral narcissism was also behind Obama’s infamous retort that Christians shouldn’t get on their “high horses” about Muslim terrorism, because of the Crusades. That wasn’t just moral equivalence. People like Barack Obama think Christians caused today’s Islamist violence with the Crusades, just like they think Israel causes Palestinian violence by existing. There is little question in their minds where the original sin lies. The active forces in history are all Western. Some of the reactive forces are pretty awful, but the cultures from which they spring are not at fault in any way.
The common refrain that terrorists will “win” if we take effective security measures is another expression of arrogant narcissism. It reframes terrorism as a form of self-criticism: what ISIS really wants is to make enlightened societies get rough, so they can lecture us about our hypocrisy! What they really want is for us to over-react by hesitating to embrace thousands of unvetted Syrian migrants, because then they can crow about how Europe and America aren’t as tolerant and compassionate as they claim to be, and some cosmic debate judge will slide a couple of points their way.
News flash, children: Islamists don’t really care if you “hate” them or not. They don’t define the spread of hatred as victory. They define the spread of Islam as victory. They’re interested in your submission, and do not give a damn about your feels.
Like all barbarians, they crave legitimacy, which they see as the collapse of civilization’s resistance against the power of savagery. They’re not impressed by enemy nations standing firmly behind “principles” that involve opening their borders, security be damned. They do, however, become very excited when those same nations abandon the principle of free speech to appease Islamic law, because they fear violent oppression. Violent oppression is the currency of the barbarian, and when it gains the slightest value in a civilized nation, the barbarians are winning.
No one can effectively battle an enemy they cannot see.
No one can defeat an ideology they won’t even name. Those who equate self-interest with greed are unlikely to prevail against an enemy that believes its interests are divinely ordained. There are people on the Left who seriously believe Western greed caused the climate to change, which in turn caused drought-stricken Muslims to embrace terrorism. Those people are part of the problem, and have no meaningful role to play in the solution.
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