Thursday, February 22, 2007

Stealing Bread From the Mouths of Decadence

I have a few thoughts as a follow up to my previous post on the state of our image in the Muslim world. I neglected to point out that the main reason people put forth the spurious claim that, "We weren't popular in Muslim world to begin with, and no matter what we do they're not going to like us anyway," is as a rebuttal to suggestions that our foreign policy, and rhetorical posturing, need adjustment.

The Iraq war hasn't hurt us and there is no need to change any of our bellicose actions, our lack of even-handedness in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or other exploitative policies, because it wouldn't matter anyway. This is wrong, of course, since our actions and policies do actually have consequences (imagine that), but the motive behind the argument should be understood.

There is an interesting analogue to this argument that has recently been put forth by the likes of Dinesh D'Souza who, in his most recent book, argues that the root of jihadist extremism lies in the Muslim world's anger at...liberals. Again, it's not our foreign policy, it's not the scenes of death and destruction attributed to us that are beamed to Muslim homes by an admittedly hostile media, but rather our embrace of various moral failings wrought by the liberal/progressive movement.

As J. Goodrich at Tapped points out, D'Souza found a willing accomplice in the odious Glenn Beck:

BECK: You know, there`s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to be extremists? More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.

The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We`re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.

Now I don`t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that's the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They`re right. [emphasis added]

This is actually a three-fer. Not only do we not need to change anything we're doing on the foreign policy front - no, that's all peachy-keen - but we might want to consider rolling back some of the progressive advances made in certain areas such as women's empowerment, and give religious conservatives a larger say in how this country is run. Oh yeah, and it also stokes more domestic anger at the dreaded, treasonous libruhls.

And for that level of "expertise," supposedly liberal CNN is giving Beck an expanded role on the network. Brilliant!

// posted by Eric Martin @ 5:35 PM |


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