(U-WIRE) EVANSTON, Ill. —
had an epiphany on Thursday.
I was sitting in Northwestern University’s Fisk Hall listening to left-wing British journalist Robert Fisk, a veteran foreign correspondent in the Middle East, when it came to me … but more on that in a moment.
First, a little background on the esteemed Mr. Fisk. He first came to my attention in December when he wrote a column for his newspaper, The Independent, headlined: “My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war.”
According to Fisk’s account, a mob of Afghan refugees in Pakistan savagely assaulted him. The men beat him with their fists and large stones. One young boy even tried to steal his bag — which held his money, credit cards and passport.
Fisk fought back and managed to get away with the help of a good Samaritan, a Muslim, who stepped between him and the attackers and probably saved Fisk’s life.
A harrowing tale, but not all that unique. Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and murdered by a group of Muslim extremists after being forced to record statements denouncing America and Israel.
Fisk was lucky. He survived. Yet in an almost Christ-like act of forgiveness, Fisk pardoned his attackers. According to him, their violent behavior was not their fault. It was America’s.
“The Afghan men and boys who had attacked me, who should have never done so, but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us,” he said.
I asked Fisk if he would have found the attack justified if the roles were reversed, if it had been an Arab journalist attacked by a group of grieving American relatives of those who died in the World Trade Center.
What he said surprised me. In Fisk’s view, Americans were too educated and too civilized to ever do something like that. Following this reasoning to its logical conclusion, the Afghan refugees who attacked him were little more than savages.
Aside from the obvious fallacy that Fisk makes in assuming that one needs a college education to know the difference between right and wrong, his statement shows a kind of colonial mindset of noblesse oblige that I thought had long since been buried but apparently is still alive and well in the dogma of the modern leftist.
This is the epiphany I spoke of earlier.
Many of the liberals whom I have encountered on this campus seem to be motivated in whole, or in part, by this ideology of noblesse oblige. They are comfortably middle- and upper-class — secure in wealth, education and social privilege. They are superior to the general population, and they know it.
Of course, that superiority brings with it guilt. This leads them to tear down the very institutions that gave them their privileged positions, while at the same time, they try to raise up those hopeless “savages” who cannot achieve success on their own.
Fisk made that very clear when he excused the Afghans who so brutally attacked him because the “Great Satan” made them do it. So pathetic were those people in his eyes that they lacked even a rudimentary moral agency.
Fisk, like so many other liberals, pities those whose causes he champions. There is no respect or compassion — only pity motivated by guilt.
Noblesse oblige, indeed.
This column is courtesy of Joshua Elder of Northwestern University’s campus newspaper, the Daily Northwestern.