I looked no farther than my email inbox for this latest article, “From the Jihad Watch Hatemail Bag,” which appears today in Human Events. In it I discuss the anti-Semitism, denial, and moral equivalence that marks not only my hate mail, but a disquieting proportion of the American public discourse.
I get a lot of hate mail, including the occasional message that illuminates some of the ignorance and willful blindness that still envelops much of the public sphere when it comes to Islamic terrorism. Many of the messages get stuck in some of the chief intellectual ruts that Americans all too commonly find it difficult to escape. …
Whatever their source, they manifest an odd blindness: what if, just for the sake of argument, everyone who speaks out against terror really is Jewish? What if the doctrine of violent jihad really were the vain imagining of a few “bad apples”? And what if the CIA really had created Osama, and Abu Ghraib really were as bad as Saddam’s regime, or worse? Would that make the radical Muslims stop targeting Americans? Would the bombings and beheadings stop? If only it were that easy.