**Because people commenting on this item are unable to articulate their views without the use of expletives, I have stopped the comments for a short while.
Two pieces today best describe the root of the confusion I’ve felt about reaction to this world war we find ourselves in. Where is the American left? Why do they allign themselves with the people who have declared the war and fired the first shot when those people certainly do not have their best interest at heart–who in fact allign themselves with people who want to kill them. The Palestinian cause, CAIR, which has been run by people who gave money to Hamas, condemning us when we declare the nature of our enemy as being Islamofascism; a bastardization of the Muslim faith. Maybe you can help explain why there’s not more universal outrage and condemnation of the enemies who pursue us.
The first is a piece in the Wall Street Journal in which the writer wonders aloud, why don’t liberals see that the Islamofascists would come for them first? Why aren’t they the ones signing up to serve in greater numbers. In Bret Stephens’ piece he begins with a ‘graph written by a young liberal woman who was there on 9/11 and who now sports an American flag on her backpack and who cheers the American fighter jets as they pierce the sky overhead. She writes in the Newsweek My Turn piece that she is a ‘…musician, an artist and, on a somewhat political level, a woman, a lesbian and a Jew.” Now she includes in her personal litany: an American.
Here are two ‘graphs I find the most compelling:
“maybe [the young woman] intuited that [Mohammed] Atta’s real targets weren’t the symbols of American mightiness, but of what that mightiness protected: people like her, bohemian, sexually unorthodox, a minority within a minority. Maybe she understood that those F-16’s overhead—likely manned by poilots who went to church on Sunday and voted the straight GOP ticket—were being flown above all for her defense…“
“…after 9/11 at least a few old time voices on the left—Christopher Hitchens, Bruce Bawer, Paul Berman and Ron Rosebaum, among others—understood that what Islamism most threatened wasn’t just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40 years: civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reporductive choic, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses… And so they bid an unsentimental goodbye to their one time comrades and institutions: the peace movement, the pages of the Nation and New York Review of Books…”
Bush Administration official Karen Hughes also asks a similar question in her piece in USA Today:
This is not right, or normal, or acceptable, and a much louder chorus of voices needs to join in condemning it. Terrorism threatens all of us. It targets the very foundations of a free society. Yet where are the mothers organizing against terrorism as American mothers did against drunken driving? Where are the fathers promising to teach their sons to choose to live rather than choose to die? Where are the religious clerics and congregations of all faiths arguing that no just and loving God would call on young men and women to kill themselves and others in the name of religion?
To be fair, many voices, Western and Eastern, Islamic and Christian, have spoken out against the violence. Yet the criticism seems oddly muted. Offensive cartoons sparked massive protests in nations across the Islamic world. The international outcry was immediate when civilians were killed in the recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
