The Middle East was supposed to despise Bush, not Obama. Obama's smooth-as-corn-syrup Cairo speech of 2009 was supposed to have given us the new "Arab Spring," not a continuation of the Bush-era "War on Terror." Instead, we have watched as our government has helped deliver upwards of half-a-dozen Arab countries into the hands of radical jihadis ("rebels," "liberation fighters," he called them). And the jihadi attacks on Western targets have continued unabated. From Benghazi to Boston, our administration has been trying desperately to impose their narrative in the teeth of reality, like flat earthers waving away photographs of the earth taken from space and believing that by sticking to their talking points they can flatten the earth.
Jonathan Karl, "Exclusive: Benghazi Talking Points Underwent 12 Revisions, Scrubbed of Terror Reference" (ABC News, May 10, 2013).
Michael Medved Comments on, and Plays ABC's Jonathan Karl's Devastating Benghazi Report (detailed and targeted):
Paul Farhi, "Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, a persistent voice of media skepticism on Benghazi" (Washington Post, May 7, 2013).
"Peggy Noonan: The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi" (Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2013) -- one of the clearest and most articulate statements from the conservative side.
Captives of the Liberal mindset completely miss the irony of the Liberal narrative on Islam. They think they can sweet-talk Muslims into their corner by their urbane post-modern, self-congratulatory enlightened vision of the geo-political history. This is what they think Obama achieved by all of his apologizing for Western imperialism his Cairo speech of 2009. They think that all that is wrong with the world can be laid at the feet of George W. Bush and everything they think he stands for -- a swashbuckling American cowboy bravado, yahoo-individualism, guns, Bibles, xenophobic Christianity, the oil industry, American exceptionalism, etc. They think that Muslims, or at least the more 'educated' and 'enlightened' ones, can be brought around to seeing this as their common enemy too.
The problem is that Liberalism has a blind spot. It's not these things that outrage Middle Eastern Muslims. Rather, they are outraged by all that American Liberalism itself stands for -- namely, "liberty" understood as the freedom from traditional values of moral restraint manifest in our rampant pornography, contraception, abortion, promiscuous embrace of recreational sex as an acceptable lifestyle, no-fault divorce, same-sex 'marriage', and all that spews forth from the fevered studios of Hollywood onto TV sets across the world. Nothing embodies this irony more than our own presidents' public endorsement of same-sex 'marriage.' This is anathema to Islam, as it should be. Yet our State Department was willing to lie about a terrorist attack on our embassy at Benghazi, Libya, at the cost of four American lives, including our ambassador, rather than compromise its Liberal fairy tale about everything coming up roses with Liberalism and its enlightened relations with the Muslims amidst the new "Arab Spring" aborning in the Muslim world.
Heads should roll.
[Hat tip to A. Sistrom]
Related: Brian Saint-Paul, "Radical Islam and the Left" (Crisis, February 7, 2007).
Although there are some things about Dinesh D'Souza that I cannot endorse (and I don't mean just his marital infidelity but his occasionally being caught not knowing his facts in interviews), I do like the gist of what I see in this article. Good points. Thanks.
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