The Shame Of Al Gore
Posted 2/13/2006
Leadership: What possesses a former vice president of the U.S. to travel to the birthplace of Islamist terrorism and denounce his country? Only a special breed of demons, apparently, can explain Al Gore.
The chief demon, of course, surely must be Gore's continuing quest for the presidency. Embittered he may well be by his loss of the highest office six years ago. But showing such supreme disloyalty to his country, as he did in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, cannot be condoned as an honorable means of pursuing the prize once more.
Speaking at the Jiddah Economic Forum, an event staged by oil-rich Saudi royalty, Gore indicted the American government for its "terrible abuses" of Arabs since the 9-11 attacks on New York and Washington. Such treatment, he charged, played into the hands of al-Qaida.
And just what was the nature of these abuses? Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."
Understand: Fifteen of the 19 al-Qaida hijackers on that fateful day, a day that saw 3,000 Americans go to their fiery deaths, a day that created thousands more orphans, were Saudi citizens. Those hijackers lived undetected in this country precisely because immigration authorities had been permissive.
So Gore believes the tightening of the rules, post-9-11, was one of a series of "terrible abuses"?
And just what, in Gore's theology, is "unforgivable"? His outburst came on the heels of an absurd United Nations report accusing the U.S. of torturing wartime captives at Guantanamo, where guards, struggling to keep hunger strikers alive, reportedly have resorted to intravenous feeding.
A little perspective: The United States went to war to liberate 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those regimes sustained themselves by torturing dissidents in the most unspeakable ways.
Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator, derived pleasure from stuffing live human beings into wood chippers and hanging them on meat hooks. And the U.N. thinks a vitamin-enriched IV is inhumane? Was that Gore's example?
Because of the ridiculous asymmetry of Gore's indictment, it may be possible to find some dark humor at his expense. But his calculated comments came at the height of the cartoon intifada, much of it stoked by Saudi-controlled media.
That uprising, aimed at freedom and democracy, indeed at Western civilization itself, just last week left many non-Arabs dead, European diplomatic quarters torched and journalists' lives threatened. Unconscionably, Gore poured gasoline over the global flames.
The ex-vice president once felt entitled to move unimpeded into the Oval Office. Unhinged by the 2000 electoral debacle, he has forgotten the meaning of "loyal opposition." Now his only entitlement is disgrace.
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