American guilt and Moslem rage: what’s wrong with this picture?

Except for its obligatory description of Condoleezza Rice as “brilliant” (a once-useful word so tarnished now through ridiculous grade inflation that we might as well retire it for a century), the New York Sun gets the Newsweek Riots just right. The focus should not be on American guard’s behavior, or even on Newsweek’s error. Guards in such situation will inevitably make mistakes, and reporters will inevitably make mistakes. The focus should be on the Moslems, millions of whom support or go along with the kidnapping, beheading, and mass murder of infidels, but who claim victimology and engage in murderous riots around the world when they perceive that someone somewhere has slighted their religion. To add a point the Sun did not make, the focus should also be on own liberalism, which casts our trivial or unavoidable offenses toward Moslems as some terrible crime that we must be guilty about and apologize for, while it gives a free pass to the Moslems for their mayhem.

If we lived under a different dispensation and a sane, i.e., non-liberal, world view, here’s what the U.S. Secretary of State would have said to the Moslems:

“How can you people expect to be respected by the world, when at the news of a single tiny incident on the other side of the world you start tearing up cities and killing people? When 19 Moslem men committed the greatest act of terrorism in history against America, killing 3,000 people and destroying a major part of our greatest city and almost destroying our Capitol Building, and when millions of Moslems around the world cheered this crime, were there any anti-Moslem riots in America? No. Yet on hearing about a single supposed incident in a military prison housing dangerous Moslem terrorists, you Moslems, including you Afghanis for whom we’ve done so much, act as though your whole religion has been attacked by America. So grow up, Moslems. If you want to get along with America, then see America as a whole, see our good intentions and the good things we’re trying to do for you. But if you’re going to go crazy every time we make a mistake or every time you hear something about us you don’t like, you only persuade us that any civilized relationship with you is impossible.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 17, 2005 10:05 AM | Send