Distinguishing moderates from extremists

Daniel Pipes has a list of questions he says are helpful in Identifying Muslim Moderates. It occurred to me that with surprisingly slight modification the list could become a guide for identifying liberal moderates:

  • Violence: Do you condone or condemn partial-birth abortion, or illegal direct action by militant environmentalist, animal-rights, gay-rights and similar organizations? Will you condemn by name such organizations as NOW, Greenpeace, PETA and ACT-UP that promote such things?
  • Modernity: Should traditionalists have equal rights with liberals (for example, in judicial and academic appointments, and with regard to the right to follow their own beliefs in running their own organizations)? Is wide-ranging humanitarian intervention, meaning a form of warfare, acceptable in today’s world? Do you accept the validity of political and social views that reject liberalism? Do liberals have anything to learn from antiliberals?
  • Secularism: Do you accept the laws of a non-liberal government and unreservedly pledge allegiance to that government? Should the state insist on liberal propaganda in the public schools, or impose liberal ideological observances such as the Martin Luther King Holiday? When liberal habits conflict with secular laws (e.g., regarding sexual conduct), which should give way?
  • Liberal pluralism: Are libertarians and mainstream American “conservatives” fully legitimate liberals? Do you see liberals who disagree with you as fascists? Is PC (condemning fellow liberals one has disagreements with as bigots or reactionaries) an acceptable practice?
  • Self-criticism: Do you accept the legitimacy of scholarly inquiry into racial differences? Which is responsible for AIDS, sexual liberation or the Roman Catholic Church?
  • Defense against the militant Left: Do you accept enhanced security measures to fight the militant Left, even if this means extra scrutiny of yourself (for example, stepped-up border controls to control immigration and thus multiculturalism)? Do you agree that institutions accused of funding the anti-American and anti-Christian Left should be shut down, or do you see this a symptom of bias?
  • Goals in the West: Do you accept that Western countries are majority-Christian or do you seek to transform them into liberal countries ruled by liberal constitutional law?

As Pipes points out in the case of Muslims, the answer to a single question doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but taken together the questions do “offer a good start to the vexing issue of separating enemy from friend.”

5 thoughts on “Distinguishing moderates from extremists”

  1. As a policy measure, I
    As a policy measure, I advocate that the U.S. federal government, acting through the FBI and CIA, should keep files on all known and active militant liberals. They should be tracked and watched. Doing so would be a legitimate interest of government in reducing violence and promoting goals in the West. All governments harboring known militant liberal groups should be invaded and overthrown. Furthermore, the assets of all organizations providing financial assistance to militant liberal groups should be seized and used by the federal government to delve into the “record, public and private, Internet and print, domestic and foreign, of an individual or institution.”

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  2. What we are dealing with
    What we are dealing with here a no L(l)iberals, radical or otherwise, but the Fifth Marxist International of parasites, cause and motto: Parasites of the World, Unite !

    It constitutes a gigantic class struggle within the advanced capitalist societies and on the international, global stage, and the parasites are winning everywhere except presently in the U.S. in current political terms. They have overrun old Western Europe and Canada easier and faster than Mongols did their part, and in the U.S.A. they are way ahead of the conservatives in most aspects of political strugle that matters.

    Unless you manage to cleanup the public services at all level of government, especially education, judiciary and NGOs, you have already lost. That’s the discomfort that is waking you up now, as the 9/11 did, for some. And unless we face it as a class struggle of parasites vs. the productive and constructive forces of the capitalist society, and address it as such, let’s not even think about winning.

    Frank Novak

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