A Free Beacon piece on Kamala Harris’s pastor contains the following:
At a memorial service for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks held just six days after Al-Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, [Amos] Brown used the occasion to point the finger at the United States in remarks that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “set a lot of people’s teeth on edge” and “left politicians stunned.”
“America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” Brown asked the audience. “Ohhhh—America, what did you do?”
“America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn’t show up?” Brown continued, referring to his participation in the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, which the United States and Israel boycotted citing concerns about antisemitism.
In my book on the transformations of the Western public sphere at the turn of the last century /millennium (Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad), I wrote about the relationship between the U.N. Durban Conference that concluded on Sept. 8, 2001, and the 9-11 attacks that occurred three days later:
Did the global triumph of demopathic hatred targeting the U.S. and Israel at Durban have anything to do with 9-11? Not causally. The triple attack plan had been afoot for years. But given the atmosphere at Durban, Osama [bin Laden] had every reason to expect that his spectacular deed would resonate both inside and beyond the Muslim world: in his mind, an act of world conversion. When he gave the green light, he took the hate-fest of Durban to new levels, aligning the Muslim and the Progressive narrative of world redemption as a fight against the twin Western evils, the “Big and Little Satans,” the U.S. and Israel. Just as Arafat basked in the eager approval of the world press, so bin Laden had good reason to expect he too would gain widespread approval.
Had I known the case of Rev. Amos Brown, I would surely have cited it, since it illustrates my points about precisely the dynamic whereby Durban prepped global opinion to welcome 9/11.
Brown was at Durban and apparently participated with great enthusiasm in the hate-fest against the U.S. and Israel. When he spoke the following week in (already woke) San Francisco, accusing the U.S. of deserving the blow, he illustrated perfectly my conjectured link between Durban and the reaction to 9/11: Durban assured a global audience would rejoice in this blow against the alleged evil, suffocating hegemon.
The cry went up from British journalists to French “philosophes” to American radicals: the U.S. had it coming. Bluntly put, Durban had groomed progressives to welcome and celebrate their jihadi enemies in the most atrocious deeds committed against them. (They had already been doing it about Israel for almost a full year already.)
In terms of apocalyptic millennial dynamics, Durban marks the formal marriage of Caliphators (those activist Muslims working for the global Caliphate in our day) with the (radical) progressive left, in which both millennial movements, despite their fundamentally opposing visions of the millennium of peace to come, joined around a key element of their apocalyptic scenarios, a major boost to their (now joint) revolutionary power. They had both identified the apocalyptic enemy (the two Satans that Ayatollah Khomeini had denounced some twenty years earlier) as the U.S. and Israel.
Eric Hoffer wrote in the early 1950s: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
After 9/11, many Americans bowed to this identification of the enemy with their nation: some penitential (“What did we do to provoke their hatred?”) and some triumphantly aggressive (“America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”)
When Rev. Brown said, “America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” he placed himself squarely in the camp of those who “blame the democracy” for the savage hatred of the jihadis in quest of a global Caliphate.
Under normal circumstances, the grown-ups would have shut him down and shunned him. But those were not ordinary times. On the contrary, the assembled crowd at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium cheered him on and the alleged grown-ups, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, spurred to act by a man whose friend had died fighting the jihadis on United Airlines flight 93, left in silent protest.
Politician and LGBT rights activist Thomas Ammiano explained: “What can you say? It was largely a lefty and pro-peace crowd, and Amos was playing to the house.” So here, an LGBT rights activist assumed that a pro-peace crowd would cheer on a misogynist, homophobic jihadi attack that killed 3,000 civilians.
Is Amos Brown, whom Harris considers a wonderful, spiritually inspiring individual, a dupe or demopath? Does he really believe that this coalition of jihadi and progressive forces will indeed have a salvific effect and that when it’s time to take over, the Caliphators will convert to the progressive vision (“Imagine all the people…”) rather than regress to the power politics of the 7th and early 20th centuries?
Or does he recognize the aims and desires that animate his ally, which spell doom for the Jews and the democratic West, and he’s just helping the process take place by talking in Newspeak? Jihad means peace so why wouldn’t peaceniks cheer it on?
One thing is certain: If Harris wants to go down in the great history of the ages—and the times have placed her at center stage with a chance to do so—she must extract herself from the cosmopolitan hostility to the U.S.-as-a-nation that informs so many around her, oikophobes urging a self-destructive foreign policy on the one hand and supporting the program of the sworn enemy of the U.S. as a democracy on the other.
Otherwise, one shudders to think how she will be remembered or who will do the remembering.
Prospects? Not great. But one can always hope. Maybe Emhoff will realize he’s Esther.
