Dennis Prager writes: This month Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have had their college require a course on Western civilization — as it did until the 1980s.
Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist in the Stanford Daily explained why: Teaching Western civilization means “upholding white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”
The vote and the column encapsulated the Left’s view of Western civilization: In Europe, Latin America, and America, the Left loathes Western civilization. Wherever there is conflict between the West — identified as white, capitalist, or of European roots — and the non-West, the Left portrays the West as the villain…
Today, the Left would revile any Westerner who used such language as xenophobic, racist, and Fascist. The Left similarly describes any suggestion that anything Western is superior to anything non-Western. Likewise, the Left dismisses virtually all Western achievements, but regards criticism of anything non-Western as racist, chauvinistic, imperialist, colonialist, xenophobic, etc.
That is why the Left is so protective of Islam. America’s first left-wing president, Barack Obama, will not use, or allow the government to use, the words “Islamic terrorism”; and all criticism of Islam is labeled “Islamophobic,” thereby morally equating any such criticism with racism. It is not that the Left is sympathetic to Islam; the Left has contempt for all religions. It is that many Muslims loathe the West, and the enemies of my enemy (the West) must be protected.
That is why the Left loathes Israel. If the Left actually cared about human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or freedom of speech, religion, and the press, it would be wildly pro-Israel. But Israel, in the Left’s view, is white, European, and colonialist; in other words, Western. And the Palestinians are non-Western.
So, then, the Big Question is, Why? Why is the Left hostile to Western civilization? After decades of considering this question, the answer, I have concluded, is: standards. The Left hates standards – moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and has excelled in all three.
…the protection of Islam on the Left is so thorough that one cannot even say such obvious truths as that the status of women has been far superior in the Judeo-Christian West than in the Islamic world. The veil, for example, is dehumanizing; yet, in a speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a rabbi, at the time the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said that the veil “deserves our respect.”
