The 2000 Overton Leap

...to Dhimmitude

The 2000 Overton Leap (to dhimmitude)

NB: The Overton window is a political model describing the range of ideas, policies, and language considered acceptable by the mainstream public at any given time. It distinguishes between mainstream political viability and fringe or radical concepts.

Towards the end of 2000 a series of events provoked an extraordinary transformation of what had previously loosely been called the “liberal” movement in the West, namely a dramatic shift in the Overton Window. Everyone from the millennial generation grew up downstream from this flip, grew up in a world and a conversation unaware of the loss of freedom involved in that flip.

Before 2000, the standard definition of a liberal (at least in the US) was a moderate leftist who believed in the sanctity of life, equality before the law for all, meritocracy and opportunities for all, a public culture of dispute responsive to anomalous evidence. In this sense, even conservatives were liberals in their commitment to shared core principles of freedom and social responsibility to the people and the nation.

Universities and Newsrooms were full of liberals. Some even warned they were “taking over” news networks. The dominant Western theme was openness, whether to “others” or to new ideas. It was a time people thought that maybe the new millennium could usher in a global civil society. Liberals on all sides of the Oslo Peace Process (including liberal Arabs) agreed that a mutually beneficial positive-sum solution could bring peace.

Between 1999 and 2003, something happened. In late 2000, the Second Intifada broke out, and by 2003, it had become a jihadi suicide-terror war targeting Israeli civilians by the hundreds and thousands. These attacks were everything that a liberal - conservative and progressive - finds appalling: the contempt for human life, the tribal us-them hatred, the uncompromising resort to violence, the toxic masculinity.

But not. On the contrary, by 2003 - after the “al Aqsa Intifada,” (2000) Durban and 9-11 (2001), the lethal reporting of the “Jenin massacre” (2002) - at the height of the suicide terror war, Ian Buruma noted in passing (as obvious), that support for “the Palestinian cause has become the universal litmus test of liberal credentials.”

Supporting a movement that conducted terror attacks on civilian populations and taught genocidal hatred was liberal? Since when do liberals have litmus tests and credentials? What real liberal ever heard such nonsense?

Here was a “liberal” completely unrecognizable to a liberal from the previous century. And yet here they were. I don’t think Buruma was being ironic, but nor did he show a trace of indignation. Indeed, the left was riding at the high point of the wave of global progressive demonstrations: from 40,000 1999 assembled at Seattle, where Palestine wasn’t even on the agenda, to up to ten million globally in the anti-war rallies of 2003, where Palestinian war-mongers were everywhere (2 million in London, Nick Cohen). Three years later, incensed by pictures of the Prophet (PBUH), Muslim demonstrators openly promised to rape infidel women in the same streets of London (February, 2006).

The logic involved in this rallying to the Palestinians offered a textbook case of siding with the aggressor and blaming the victim: “each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt.” There was, apparently, there still is no point where Palestinian illiberalism – teaching hatred, calling for genocide, targeting children – could go too far, and withdraw the “liberals’” support. “The more grotesque the [Palestinian] terror, the deeper the [Israeli] guilt.” (Paul Berman)

And this huge leap from real liberal values on the one hand, to supporting a genocidal jihadi group which violated every humane principle liberals cherish, on the other, was accompanied by another leap, this time of a sober center of liberals and conservatives expressing concerns about open immigration, suddenly transported to the racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, far-right.

For the last 25 years, this Overton Leap of 2000 has held, and has been part of the lingua franca of public pronouncements. People still think of supporters of the Palestinians as “left” and “humanitarian” and people who sound the alarm about growing and radicalizing Muslim neighborhoods are dismissed as right-wing Islamophobes.

It empowered a cancel culture to shut down sane voices (the center banished to the “far right”) and gave voice to insane, self-defeating ones (the newly credentialed “liberal” Palestinianists). Given how harmful the Overton Leap of 2000 has been to the forces of liberty, and friendly to the forces of a foreign theocracy, it’s time to rethink.

As a first step, let us imagine how our enemy, the Muslim supremacists who consider non-Muslims as candidates for conversion, death or dhimmitude (ie, the constant state of subjection or death), look at these same events and deeds. From their perspective, the liberals of the 20th century were enemies whose principles they targeted for destruction. But these liberals of the 21st century, after the Overton Leap, were something new… an ally, someone to translate the jihadi narrative into Westspeak.

From the Caliphator’s perspective, these were pre-emptive dhimmi, who surrender their independence and follow the central rule of subjection: ‘thou shalt not criticize Muslims or Islam, and if you want favor, attack their enemies.’ Some dhimmi infidels did attack, especially Israel, but also the other Great Satan, the USA, and continue to do so enthusiastically. In any case, willy-nilly, our information professionals have been occupied by our enemy’s war narrative, and they our feeding us his war propaganda, targeting us infidels, as accurate news and as scholarship.

The information professions of the West, during the course of the first quarter of the 21st century, adopted the posture and behavior of pre-emptive dhimmi, people who repeat the Jihadi war narrative without, in some cases, even being aware of what they are doing.

If one were to make a four column page, however, with the columns labeled 1) Zionist journalism, 2) Liberal empirical journalism, 3) Western activist journalism since Leap2000, and 4) what the Jihadis want journalists to say, then the overlap of 1 and 2 would be considerable, and the overlap of 3 and 4 considerably larger. About 70% of the legacy media’s coverage of the Land twixt river and sea, gives over Jihadi war propaganda directly, and the remaining 30% avoids implicating Hamas in any nefarious deeds (like killing their own people).

Dhimmi journalism, like dhimmi scholarship - information professionals who report their own enemy’s propaganda as reliable information, are commiting liberal suicide.

This page is dedicated to restoring the status quo ante 2000, before the massive failure of the Western information professionals, back to a time when a three century-long commitment to the humane values that make freedom for all possible, would recoil in horror at global Jihad and its most explicitly genocidal offshoot, Hamas.

The liberal cause is a noble aspiration, and now, after twenty-five years of abuse and depression, in serious danger.

The Muslim supremacists launching this fight for the Global Califate, consider it a Hundred Years War, and we’re at the half-way point losing on almost every front in the cognitive war. Time to wake up our intelligence and pay attention to relevant and accurate information.

We wish to start by bringing to your attention, genuinely liberal voices that tried to speak out and got marginalized over the last fifty years, realistic voices that warned about the supremacist currents in Islam, and errors in dealing with the non-jihadi Caliphators. These are voices that should not have been silenced, yet were. If you will, we offer you a “liberal infidel remedial reading.” (Neighborly Muslims welcome.)

Must reads from the aughts (‘00s):

Brenner, The Lost Territories of the Republic (2002)

Paul Berman Terror and Liberalism (2003)

Phyllis Chesler, The New Antisemitism (2003)

Nick Cohen, What’s Left? (2007)

Andrew Anthony, The Fallout (2007)

Suggestions welcome.