The UNC Attack: Wingers and the Loony Left in the Aftermath

Well, that title is probably a bit too inflamatory, given that it's tough to tell what's going on down there. The DTH reveals that Taheri-azar planned the attack for two months, and carried pepper spray and a knife with him.

According to this report from the LA Times, there has been political bickering between the left and the right in the aftermath of the attack. If I had to reconstruct what happend from the scanty evidence available, here's what I'd guess:

The Republicans went to the Pit, handed out flags, and, I'd guess, said a bunch of things that pushed in the direction of their general line. They say they were just handing out flags and urging unity, but we all know that that's ambiguous. The flag has, sadly, become a symbol of nationalism and conservatism--it shouldn't be that way, but that's a fact. And appeals for unity from Republicans these days are thinly-veiled appeals to support Bush as often as not.

These guys might have really been doing something non-partisan and completely innocent, of course. I put the odds of that at about 2 in 5, the odds of them doing something fairly blatantly partisan at about 1 in 5, and the odds of them doing something obviously ambiguous at about 2 in 5. This unclear-but-possibly conservative message drew out the campus loony left, which is way present but usually mostly under control at Carolina. My guess is that most of the folks standing around were just listening and trying to figure out (a) what was going on and (b) who was right.

According to the story, the lefties objected to the use of the term 'terrorism.' This objection is, of course, idiotic--but such idiocy is par for the course for campus (far) lefties. Spend any time on a major university campus and you have to get used to the lefties making objections that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. That's what makes them so infuriating. There's nothing like aggressive incoherence to piss one off.

According to the Times:

Mann's group was met at lunchtime by a boisterous, impromptu group of counter-demonstrators who argued that the rally wasn't helping to heal wounds. Especially insensitive, they said, was the insistence on calling the incident terrorism.

"This isn't community building!" a man shouted.

Jonathan Pourzal, an Iranian American, said: "You're strengthening the prejudices people have against Muslim people."

Sara Aghajanian added: "I am an Iranian American, and [the suspect] does not represent me at all, OK?"

Mann, surrounded by about 100 people and a number of news cameras, stood his ground firmly and politely. But in the end, he seemed exasperated:"OK," he said to the opposing group. "If we don't call it terrorism, what do we call it?"

Such sparring over the semantics of identity politics has long been a staple of life on U.S. college campuses, including UNC-Chapel Hill, one of the nation's top public universities.

Yup, those are the lefties I remember. Egad. It's like a flashback. My favorite part? "This isn't community-building!" That's the kind of bullshit one encounters from the campus left. One could go on and on about what an idiot it would take to make a comment like that under these conditions, but I'll limit myself to a couple of quick comments:

(A) Community-building is not the only good. Just because you're not accomplishing one particular good at one particular time doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. Telling the truth, for example, is at least as important as "community-building."

(B) 'Terrorism' is a perfectly reasonable description of what happened.

(C) So running people down with an SUV is community-building?

(D) Does "community-building" require that we refuse to accurately describe crimes?''

(E) Bite me.

My God...think about that first criticism: "this isn't helping to heal wounds!" Jesus H. Christ...as if this was--or should have been--the point! That criticism is so deeply stupid that I can't even write about it without throwing stuff across the room... When women point out that they have endured oppression for all of human history should we respond "that's not going to heal wounds!" Oh, the stupidity...

Sorry...flashbacks to graduate school...must calm down...

Some of you may not be familiar with the tone of vicious self-righteousness with which such claims are almost invariably made...so you're probably missing an important component here.

But, look, you can't reason with campus lefties. Most folks who frequent this blog know that I'm way more liberal than conservative...but take it from me: the most unreasonable people I've ever met bar none have been campus lefties. Jeez, they're even a little worse than fairly serious christian fundamentalists. They're not liberals--they're no closer to me on the political spectrum than is, say, Rick Santorum. They're largely illiberal, irrational, intellectually dishonest ideologues who read a little Foulcault somewhere and like to play the radical.

And, incidentally, they're responsible for making conservatives out of a large number of college students who'd otherwise end up liberal.

Anyway, I should probably note that these folks are an aberration at Carolina which is, in fact, surprisingly reasonable for a major research university. I'd guess that most student there know what's what with regard to this incident.

Also anyway, it's good to see everybody, er, coming together in Chapel Hill's first real act of terrorism since those toothless mutants in the Klan marched through back in the late '80's.