Thoughtful Piece on Libertarian Naiveté WRT Islamification

Joe Hargrave is fast becoming one of my favorite Catholic bloggers on political issues. He is libertarian by temperament and is a fan of Ron Paul, agreeing with him most of the time. But his opinion has diverged recently over Paul's comments on the Ground Zero Mosque. He first mentioned it here on TAC where he blogs, and he put up a longer post at his personal blog on Tuesday. Here's an excerpt:

Though I agree with Ron Paul and other prominent libertarians on a number of issues, and even take their side on issues over which they typically disagree with conservatives, such as the war on drugs or even the “war on terror” – if by that is meant the occupation of foreign countries by American troops and the formation of an domestic police state – when it comes to the challenges posed to the West by radical Islam, many of them are, to use the most accurate and charitable word possible, naive.

I have heard Ron Paul, for instance, actually argue once that if Islamic terrorists hated the West for its values, as opposed to US foreign policy, they would be attacking countries besides the United States – as if they hadn’t carried out bombings in Madrid, London, Bali, Jakarta, or other places. Paul and other libertarians routinely deny that Islamic radicals hate the West for any reason other than foreign policy, or at the very least, imply that all hatred of the West can be reduced to that factor.

While I don’t doubt at all that US foreign policy has inflamed jihadism around the world, this reduction simply cannot explain what has been taking place in Europe for the past decades. The radicalization of Europe’s Muslim immigrant populations, growing sections of which declare their open hatred on a regular basis for democracy, free speech, and other Western political ideas, agitate for Sharia law, use the courts to try and silence critics, and even declare fatwas on them, cannot be explained by this analysis.

I think naiveté is certainly an accurate term, but I would also like to point out that stubbornness and willful ignoring of facts can be detected in Paul's remarks. I myself believe that there are other underlying reasons for his remarks, viz., contrarianism and desire for camera time, but these are not obvious, and everyone here knows that I don't like Ron Paul very much, so I'll just point out that no prominent conservative has been been using legal arguments against building the mosque contrary to personal property rights.

Hargrave does an absolutely incredible job of showing how libertarians are only only offering "simplistic reductions of complex geopolitical problems" when they blame everything Jihadists do on US Foreign Policy. It reminds my of what Chesterton said in his book Orthodoxy about the madman being simplistic and lacking "healthy complexity", residing "in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point." (Source) A pure libertarian really does believe that freedom solves everything, and many conservatives lean libertarian because we do see a need in the modern climate to give back freedoms which the state has taken away, especially economic freedom. However we can't be tempted to reside in this "prison of one idea". Bill Bennett has a short sentence he uses to explain why he is a conservative rather than a libertarian: "Culture matters."

I'll close by excerpting another instructive passage from Hargrave's piece:

Finally, it demonstrates the contradiction at the heart of libertarianism; in order to preserve certain liberties, you must begin to take a hard line against those who would uproot and destroy them. Yet another Dutchman, Oscar van den Boogaard, a “Dutch gay humanist” is now famously quoted as having said, reflecting upon the Islamification of his society:

“I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Fortuyn and van Gogh, like most Dutch libertines I imagine, would have rather enjoyed their liberties in peace instead of dying in their defense.