Bush's Secularist Triumph
The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The president fights
them.
By Christopher Hitchens
http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/

Many are the cheap and easy laughs in which one could indulge at
the extraordinary, pitiful hysteria of the defeated Democrats.
"Kerry won," according to one e-mail I received from Greg Palast,
to whom the Florida vote in 2000 is, and always will be, a
combination of Gettysburg and Waterloo. According to Nikki
Finke of the LA Weekly, the Fox News channel "called" Ohio for
Bush for reasons too sinister to enumerate. Gregory Maniatis,
whose last communication to me had predicted an annihilating
Democratic landslide, kept quiet for only a day or so before
forwarding the details on how to emigrate to Canada. Thus do the
liberals build their bridge to the 20th century.

Who can care about this pathos? Not I. But I do take strong
exception to one strain in the general moaning. It seems that
anyone fool enough to favor the re-election of the president is by
definition a God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist,
enslaved by ancient texts and prophecies and committed to
theocratic rule. I was instructed in last week's New York Times
that this was the case, and that the Enlightenment had come to an
end, by no less an expert than Garry Wills, who makes at least one
of his many livings by being an Augustinian Roman Catholic.

I step lightly over the ancient history of Wills' church (which was
the originator of the counter-Enlightenment and then the patron of
fascism in Europe) as well as over its more recent and local
history (as the patron, protector, and financier of child-rape in the
United States, and the sponsor of the cruel "annulment" of Joe
Kennedy's and John Kerry's first marriages). As far as I know, all
religions and all churches are equally demented in their belief in
divine intervention, divine intercession, or even the existence of
the divine in the first place.

But all faiths are not always equally demented in the same way, or
at the same time. Islam, which was once a civilizing and creative
force in many societies, is now undergoing a civil war. One
faction in this civil war is explicitly totalitarian and wedded to a
cult of death. We have seen it at work on the streets of our own
cities, and most recently on the streets of Amsterdam. We know
that the obscene butchery of filmmaker Theo van Gogh was only a
warning of what is coming in Madrid, London, Rome, and Paris,
let alone Baghdad and Basra.

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of
secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself
able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that
immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I
am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the
immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present
moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to
represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed.

How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda?

Suicide murderers in Palestine”disowned and denounced by the
new leader of the PLO”described as the victims of "despair." The
forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided
spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in
Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people
than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even,
by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding
Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-
fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long
as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our
Constitution forbids him to do).

One probably should not rest too much on the similarity between
Bin Laden's last video and the newly available DVD of
Fahrenheit 9/11. I would only say that, if Bin Laden had issued a
tape that with equal fealty followed the playbook of Karl Rove
(and do please by all means cross yourself at the mention of this
unholy name), it might have garnered some more attention. The
Bearded One moved pedantically through Moore's bill of
indictment, checking off the Florida vote-count in 2000, the "Pet
Goat" episode on the day of hell, the violent intrusion into hitherto
peaceful and Muslim Iraq, and the division between Bush and the
much nicer Europeans. (For some reason, unknown to me at any
rate, he did not attack the President for allowing the Bin Laden
family to fly out of American airspace.)

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he - and the
U.S. armed forces - have objectively done more for secularism
than the whole of the American agnostic community combined
and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage
inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with
theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-
fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction
even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by
complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic
religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the
apparent corollary”that we should have been pursuing a policy to
which the fanatics had no objection?

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of
democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after
several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of
the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such
war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL. I dare say
that there will be a few domestic confrontations down the road,
over everything from the Pledge of Allegiance to the display of
Mosaic tablets in courtrooms and schools. I have spent all my life
on the atheist side of this argument, and will brace for more of the
same, but I somehow can't hear Robert Ingersoll or Clarence
Darrow being soft and cowardly and evasive if it came to a
vicious theocratic challenge that daily threatens us from within
and without.