Recently, members of the radical left have been spewing
emotional but intellectually unsound ideas instead of rational
debate. If fellow liberals do not confront this trend, they risk
compromising their own credibility.
One example is Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton’s first
indiscretion occurred in 1987, when a black teenager named Tawana
Brawley was allegedly raped and beaten. Sharpton implicated New
York Assistant District Attorney Steven Pagones in the attack, for
which Sharpton was subsequently convicted of slander (he never
apologized or paid).
Sharpton again gave into race baiting in 1991, when a Hasidic
Jew ran over Gavin Cato, a black child, in a traffic accident.
Sharpton implied Cato had been killed on purpose, and said,
“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their
yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” In more recent
times, Sharpton railed against “white interlopers”
doing business in Harlem. But instead of confronting Sharpton,
leftist politicians like Hillary Clinton pander to him.
The problem with Sharpton’s acid-tongued approach to
politics is that it makes dialogue, understanding, and the search
for common ground impossible. Sharpton seeks to arouse his intended
constituency, black voters, with demagoguery.
Most of all, spewing venom helps no one. Cato’s family
will likely find little solace in Sharpton’s comments.
Attacks on white businesses will not help increase the economic
status of blacks in Harlem. If Sharpton stopped making accusations
and offered one concrete solution to a social problem, the civil
rights movement that the radical left has championed would not be
in such decay. Sharpton epitomizes the lack of rationality from
recent liberal thought.
Other leftists do not seek to demonize a specific ethnic group,
but rather the entire United States. This is especially common in
universities. Dr. Noam Chomsky, a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology professor, claims the purpose of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan is to “murder three to four million
people.” He describes the Afghanistan conflict as a
“silent genocide.” Chomsky also believes that the U.S.
role in the Cold War was to “pick up where the Nazis left
off.” All of these claims are gross distortions.
Chomsky’s conclusions come from small truths which have
been magnified to produce a collage of American malevolence. This
lowers intellectual debate and promotes falsehoods. When someone
chooses to remain ignorant, it is very difficult to have any
serious debate. The radical left is thus quashing the very
intellectualism it avows to promote.
Student groups on campuses across the country have often taken
equally one-sided approaches. During a recent demonstration at
Cornell University, an American flag was defaced and the Founding
Fathers slandered as “cheats, rapists and murderers.”
One student even fumed that George Washington was a
“terrorist.”
These students again chose to let emotions take precedence over
scholarly thought. It is true that millions of Native Americans
died from colonization until the mid-1800s. However, anyone with a
basic knowledge of history knows that Europeans unintentionally
killed many more Indians with disease than acts of war.
These students have not tried to separate inadvertent tragedies
from actual malice, or individual mistakes from overall
accomplishment. They are muddling issues and focusing the debate on
the wrong topics.
Until the radical left — from the race mongers to the
conspiracy theorists and the America-haters ““ recognizes the
error of its ways, it will continue to hinder real dialogue,
progress and fairness. Responsible liberals such as former Nation
Magazine writer Christopher Hitchens have confronted the extreme
members of their political spectrum. Until more liberals do the
same, true liberalism is in grave danger. As someone who often
considers himself a liberal, I think that would be a terrible
tragedy.