Some food for thought for those who believe it was US policies at fault for the terrorist attacks:
'Blaming the U.S., Whitewashing Terror'
Canada's National Post weighs in with a powerful editorial attacking those--mostly in Britain and Canada, but we have them in the U.S. as well--who are justifying Tuesday's atrocity by attacking U.S. foreign policy:
However the view is hedged, when a person says the United States "had it coming," what he or she means is that murder is a morally appropriate rejoinder to a perceived slight or injustice. The annihilation of innocent civilians is thereby cast as a legitimate means to promote one's political or theological ends. This is familiar territory for the radical left: Since the time of Lenin, Marxists have preached the virtues of exterminating inconvenient classes of individuals in order to bring those still living into a state of equality. . . .
At the heart of the propaganda campaign against the United States is a moral equivalence conflating what is evil with what is merely imperfect. In the Cold War, this tactic took the form of the argument that the United States was just as dictatorial as the Soviet Union because poor Americans were allegedly not "free" from injustice, racism and want. Now that we have entered a new kind of war, this fatuous argument has been recycled: Yes, Islamist maniacs slaughter thousands of innocents . . . but think of the psychic pain inflicted on the Middle East by Taco Bell and the Backstreet Boys. Who is to judge which is more inhumane?
In Macbeth, Shakespeare reserved a special space in Hell for "an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale." That thought provides some consolation as we watch our television screens and see this shameful parade of apologists wagging their fingers at the United States.
Along similar lines is a piece in London's Telegraph by Janet Daley, titled "A Message to the Left: Grow Up, This Isn't a Game." And Andrew Sullivan makes a brilliant point:
One of the amazing things about the far left's embrace of the anti-American ideology of some in the Middle East is their willful blindness about what these fanatics actually believe in. Susan Sontag [third to last item], for example, is a Jew. Does she honestly believe that America is responsible for more evil than a bunch of Muslim fanatics who would gas her in a second if they could?
Could any gay person seriously argue for appeasement of people who would execute [him] on the spot if [he] lived under their rule? Could any serious feminist not believe in opposing fanatics who would eviscerate the slightest shred of freedom for women? I just don't get it. Liberals of all people should be the most serious about fighting this scourge. Is their hatred of America that deep?
As to bin Laden's vicious anti-Semitism, check the PBS interview out. Here are my choice excerpts from the Goebbels of Afghanistan: "The enmity between us and the Jews goes far back in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between the two of us is inevitable. . . . The leaders in America and in other countries as well have fallen victim to Jewish Zionist blackmail. . . . Once again, I have to stress the necessity of focusing on the Americans and the Jews for they represent the spearhead with which the members of our religion have been slaughtered. Any effort directed against America and the Jews yields positive and direct results--Allah willing. . . . We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this is what the fatwah says. . . . We believe that this administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior and the Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them."
This isn't like Nazism. In its pathological, paranoid hatred of the Jews, it is Nazism. And these guys want to appease it again?
We suspect--we hope--the folks who've made sympathetic noises about America's enemies have done so merely out of habit, the enormity of the current situation not having quite sunk in yet. Perhaps it takes longer than a week for even an atrocity like this to pierce a shield of cynical complacency built over decades.
A fast learner is Russell Morse, a 20-year-old writer for the left-wing Pacific News Service. "When Clinton was sending troops to Kosovo and I had just turned 18, I said I would head to Mexico if Uncle Sam came for me," Morse writes. "When I saw footage of the World Trade Center crumbling on Tuesday, I decided I would go to war if they wanted me. I went from flag burner to flag waver in a matter of minutes."
What the War Is About
John Leo of U.S. News & World Report sums it up nicely:
Now that everyone seems to agree that we are at war, it's important to make clear just what that war is about. It is not primarily about Israeli or Palestinian grievances. Some of the most dedicated fanatics--Osama bin Laden, for instance--rarely bother to focus on the Palestinian issue. Despite what our blinkered academic establishment thinks, the war is not about post-colonial resentments either. Colonialism is two or three generations past. The rich nations have spent so heavily on the underdeveloped world that who-did-what-to-whom many decades ago cannot explain what is happening.
No, this is a global cultural war, pitting a pan-Islamic movement of fundamentalist extremists against the modern world and its primary cultural engine, America, "the Great Satan." But that does not mean we are in a battle against Islam. The vast majority of Muslims want no part of terrorism, and many Muslim states are as nervous about extremism as we are. The problem is a religious subculture that cannot cope with openness, change, rules, democracy, secularism, and tolerance--and that wishes to destroy those who can.
More Profs Against America
Students at California State University, Chico, responded to last week's atrocity by holding a "candlelight peace vigil." But the vicious anti-American speech political science professor George Wright gave was too much even for Chico's pacifists. Reports the Chico Enterprise-Record:
Wright alleged Bush wants to "kill innocent people" in the Middle East. He claimed there was an underlying and long-term effort by the United States to "militarize" the Middle East.
He then claimed the U.S. goal is to "colonize" the entire Arab world to capture oil "for the Bush family."
"We should try to understand why there are people in the world that hate the United States," he said.
He declared the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. were not attacks against "our way of life."
These were, according to Wright, an assault on the forces of economic dominance and "globalization" as far as the World Trade Center towers were concerned, and an attack on the center of military might through which the United States seeks to subjugate the world in the case of the Pentagon.
As the professor's rhetoric became more fiery, the crowd became restive.
"This should be about the victims!" shouted one woman in the audience.
"This is about the victims," Wright shot back.
"We're here for the victims," shouted another male voice.
"I'm praying for the victims," said a different woman.
Another young woman, her voice trembling with emotion, yelled, "My sister was on that island when the plane hit!"
At this point Wright slipped back into the crowd.
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