Ralph Peters says it all at FrontPage (thanks to Charles):
Religions are what men make of them. In the Arab heartlands of Islam, Muslims are making a gory mess of their faith. It’s time to end the politically correct baby-talk insisting that Islam isn’t the problem. In the decaying Arab world, Islam is the problem–because of the way bitter old men interpret and deform its more humane precepts while embracing its cruelest injunctions.
The decapitation of yet another American civilian can’t be dismissed as an aberration from “true” Islam. The tradition of beheading unarmed prisoners dates to the earliest decades of the Muslim faith. The butchering of Paul Johnson, Nick Berg and others isn’t a new phenomenon–it’s revivalism, “that old-time religion” returning for a re-match with secular devils.
Millions of Muslims find such atrocities inspiring. Millions more view such cruelty as just. It’s the vicarious revenge of the self-made failure. And for every rent-a-cleric the Saudi government pushes in front of a television camera to condemn such acts, thousands of other mullahs continue to preach anti-Western hatred–the brutal specificity of which would horrify even America’s leftists, if only they stopped apologizing to terrorists long enough to listen. …
Arab Muslims are allowed to spew anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Hindu, anti-everybody-else hate speech. That’s just their culture, you see. But it’s taboo for a Westerner to suggest that the roots of terror may go a bit deeper than a black sheep or two in a few Middle-Eastern families.
Leftist apologists for terror here in the United States attack any attempt at a frank discussion of the Middle East’s problems with charges of bigotry and neo-imperialism. But if we examine the madness of the American Left dispassionately, we find that it’s the Noam Chomskys, Susan Sontags and their acolytes from the campus greensward who are the true bigots. Imperialists, too.
By refusing to hold Middle Eastern civilization to reasonable standards of behavior and responsibility, our domestic Left has given new life to the “little brown brother” school of colonialist thought. According to the Left’s internal logic, Arabs aren’t capable of the same moral reflection and behavioral maturity well-educated whites demonstrate. And, of course, Arabs are oppressed (no matter that their oppressors are all Arabs).
Arab extremists and dictators have become the ghetto blacks of hard-Left foreign policy. They’re all victims of Washington and bear no personal responsibility for their own errors, failures or crimes. It isn’t the Saddams, Abdullahs, Assads or Mubaraks who oppress the Arab masses, you see. Despots are never guilty–unless they get too chummy with the Americans. Anyway, dictators are victims, too. The mass graves and misery that haunt the Middle East (if such inconveniences must be mentioned at all) are my fault. And yours, dear reader. We’re to blame for all that’s wrong with the world. And don’t you forget it!
The family secret of the hard-Left is that its followers share one powerful trait with Osama bin Laden: They need to look down on others, to feel superior and just. If the lords of terror dispense with displays of pity for their victims, it’s only because they haven’t yet attained the leftist’s level of hypocrisy.