Too much Cola Turka, Chevy?
The Washington Post (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist) reports that has-been comic Chevy Chase said of President Bush: “This guy started a jihad.”
Whatever one may think of the President, it would seem that Chevy has forgotten about 9/11. And the attack on the USS Cole. And the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut. And the Khomeini regime and the hostage crisis. And thousands of other incidents, stretching back in time to when Muhammad led the first Muslims in the first jihad. All Bush’s fault, I guess. All of them.
This isn’t really about Bush at all. It’s about the fundamental myopia shared by all too many analysts: that we have caused all this somehow, and if we adjust our policies in some way, it will all go away. Whatever pretexts those analyses fasten upon, that’s all they are: pretexts. Whatever one points to as having caused a jihad is sure to have been preceded by another jihad, all the way back to Muhammad — thus giving the analysis the lie. Yet for all their vaunted multiculturalism, most Western analysts don’t seem to be able to cast the noble Third World in anything but a reactive victim mode. The idea that Muslims might be fighting for reasons of their own, that ultimately have little or nothing to do with George Bush or the other pretexts of today, never seems to occur to them.