One of the Idols of the Age is that “People Are The Same The Whole World Over” or, in another variant, “Everyone Wants The Same Thing.” George Bush believes it. He believes everyone wants something he calls “freedom,” which bears in his view a remarkable resemblance to the head-counting that nowadays too often passes for democracy, combined with free-market fundamentalism. The editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal believes that everyone wants economic prosperity, and once that is achieved, all other resentments, grievances, and triumphalist aggressive impulses will fade away — just as we are asked to believe, apparently, that they have faded away in Saudi Arabia, or the other oil-rich Muslim states.
The obverse of this medal is the belief that All People Are Bad In Just The Same Way. In a world of celebrated and often forced “diversity,” in order to make that Diversity work, we must be taught that when there is discernible bad (an earlier era would have allowed the word “evil”) linked to some ideology, then one must be quick to answer, without stopping to study or think, that “all” faiths are the same, “all” of them have their “fundamentalists” and “all these fundamentalisms” are not only dangerous but dangerous to exactly the same extent, in exactly the same way. Only thus can other idols be kept from toppling.
And thus it is that the greatest Idol of the Age in the benighted, put-upon, self-flagellating West, that is, Diversity, depends on the mental lock-step insistence on two things:
Diversity is a Good Thing, inside our (Western) countries, without any need for proof of its sheer wonderfulness, and
While Ever-Increasing Diversity Is a Good Thing, In The End, We All Are Equally Good or, When Bad, Are Equally Bad. No ideology, no inculcation, need be noticed, or compared, or contrasted. That might prove too upsetting.
Deep down, We Are All Exactly The Same. Why? Because the deep belief in “Diversity” depends on it.
If you caught Christiane Amanpour’s TV series on “fundamentalisms” awhile back, you may have seen the presentation of those “Christian fundamentalists” (read: Fanatics). You may have observed how carefully the cameramen captured those flags, and took shots of hands uplifted in prayer or hallelujahs, to make sure the viewer got the impression of a Nuremberg rally, with these “Christians” heil-hitlering all over the place. It was very carefully done, very artfully and deliberately done. She, Christine Amanpour, was of course determined to make this group of Christians look as bad as possible, and then to convince us that they represent a huge number of people.
She attempted the same thing with those wild-eyed fanatical Jews, those “Biblical settlers” who think — imagine that! — that the Land of Israel, that gigantic land, practically the size of Connecticut or is it Massachusetts, was given in a Covenant to the Jews. What a terrible thing, what a thing so utterly comparable, is it not, to the view in Islam that the entire world belongs to Muslims, and that they must, by right, dominate everywhere, everywhere Muslims must rule!
Did you see a little something not quite symmetrical in her view, in her presentation, or that of her crew, so willing to play ball? Meanwhile, one wonders how she and others like her can stand themselves. And why CNN and the other networks so obviously insult us, in reducing the menace of Islam, the menace that only a fool could ignore, and the full scope of which, based on immutable texts, becomes clearer to the intelligent every day, to something like the non-existent menace from those wild-eyed Nurembergian Christians, with Amanpour as their recording Riefenstahl, or those crazy “West Bank” settlers, in their trailers, choosing to live among a million Arabs — “Palestinians” — who of course have every right to be there, because…well, isn’t the Middle East the same thing as the Arab World, after all? Where do those pesky remnants of Jews, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Copts, Maronites, Mandeans, Yazidis, Armenians, and all the others come from? Why don’t they go back where they came from? The “Arab World,” the “Muslim Arab World” — now that’s more like it. That’s just the ticket.
Because, you see, Every Group Has Its Crazies. And those crazies, you see, are exactly alike, in what they want, and how they act, and the size of the demands they make on the rest of us. But exactly.
That’s the point of the abortive Dutch documentary. That’s the point of Amanpour’s series. You didn’t think there was another point, did you?