http://www.nationalreview.com/article/377969/tweets-wont-stop-modern-barbarians-victor-davis-hanson
Boko Haram and the Sultan of Brunei couldn’t care less about Western outrage.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau
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Victor Davis Hanson 
Nigeria’s
homegrown, al-Qaeda linked militant group, Boko Haram, brags openly
that it recently kidnapped about 300 young Nigerian girls. It boasts
that it will sell them into sexual slavery.
Those terrorists have a long and unapologetic history of
murdering kids who dare to enroll in school, and Christians in general.
For years, Western aid groups have pleaded with the State Department to
at least put Boko Haram on the official list of terrorist groups. But
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team was reluctant to come
down so harshly, in apparent worry that some might interpret such
condemnation as potentially offensive to Islamic sensitivities.
The Obama administration has exhausted the vocabulary of
outrage in condemning the aggressions of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. We
habitually lecture Mr. Putin that he does not understand it is no longer
the 19th century, when blood and arms once settled differences. But
Putin has no apologies for his 19th-century worldview of stronger powers
dictating to weaker ones as they please. (Nor does Boko Haram have any
apologies for slavery.)
Americans go into a frenzy about insensitive language or
politically incorrect behavior by some celebrities and public figures —
L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, the Duck Dynasty TV family,
celebrity chef Paula Deen, former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, and
Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy. But if we are postmodern and sensitive, what
do we say or do about premodern racists with nuclear weapons, like the
North Koreans?
A recent article from North Korea’s official Korean
Central News Agency suggested that President Obama “does not even have
the basic appearances of a human being. . . . It would be perfect for
Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world’s largest African
natural zoo and lick the bread crumbs thrown by spectators.”
How
does the West deal with a mentality like that, originating from a
country armed with nuclear weapons? Pyongyang owns no television show
that we can boycott, no sports team that we can root against.
What do we do in the face of 19th-century evil that is
unapologetic, has lethal weapons at its disposal, and uses savage
rhetoric to goad us? Tweet it to death?
What about the sultan of Brunei, who just enacted sharia
law that orders stoning for women found “guilty” of adultery or for
homosexuals engaged in sex acts? That is a different sort of war on
women than that invoked by Sandra Fluke, who lamented that she did not
have free birth control from the government.
In response, an outraged Hollywood elite is boycotting
the sultan-owned landmark Beverly Hills Hotel — as if that will bother
the multibillionaire sultan rather than his minimum-wage Los Angeles
employees.
Americans have become touchy about the reciting of
prayers in public places. So what do we think of Saudi Arabia, which
just ordered 1,000 lashes for an activist who was deemed to have
insulted Islam?
The truth is that much of the world never left the 19th
century and is not too worried that it hasn’t. We have forgotten that
racism, slave trading, lashings, and stoning are not that rare on our
planet.
We should not confuse material progress with moral
advancement. Just because Boko Haram members have cell phones and AK-47s
does not mean that they have evolved much from their predecessors’ days
of whips and chains. And just because the sultan of Brunei flies in
private jets does not mean that his worldview is any different from that
of his forefathers who on horseback enforced the same sharia law.
We should also reset our notion of multiculturalism.
That is the popular campus fad that postulates all cultures are roughly
equal and just different from one another — as opposed to any one either
being better or worse. Left unspoken is the universal standard by which
we judge as evil the enslaving, stoning, or whipping of the innocent.
That moral belief system is Western to the core.
From Greece to Jerusalem to Rome to the Enlightenment to
the Founding Fathers slowly grew a standard of human rights that could
be applied to anyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. But that is
still not how most of the non-Western world works today.
The U.N. just appointed theocratic Iran to its
Commission on the Status of Women, even though Iranian women are stoned
for committing adultery and some are punished for being rape victims.
As
good multiculturalists, should we say, “Who are we to judge either the
U.N. or Iran?” Or should we tweet out that soon-to-be-nuclear Iran
better leave the 19th century — or else?
—
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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