QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 6:19 P.M. ET:  From superlative Canadian columnist Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe & Mail, based on her interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born dissenter from Islam, who is under constant death threats because she has spoken out against Muslim oppression:

Why are so many liberal intellectuals, social democrats and feminists so silent on the more noxious features of Islam – the fierce intolerance toward unbelievers, the repression of individual freedom, the routine abuse of children, the misogyny, the forced subservience of women? “It’s the seduction of totalitarianism,” she says. In her view, Western defenders of Islam are the intellectual heirs of those highly intelligent men and women who used to heap praise on Comrade Stalin. “It’s a blind spot that left-wing intellectuals have always had.”

COMMENT:  Ali is correct, and that blind spot can destroy us.  Most civilizations are not destroyed by foreign enemies.  They commit suicide.  Our suicide can come if we continue to permit the influence of the decadent left to infect our universities, our media, and our culture. 

Fortunately, there are those who are fighting back.  But conservatives in particular have often been too courteous, too deferential, too afraid of the tag of "McCarthyism" to fight effectively.  We have to fight as if our children's lives depended on it, which they do.

June 12, 2010