Why our leaders don’t understand that America’s efforts to help others are annoying

Alan Roebuck writes:

At NRO, Andrew McCarthy has another good article on what’s wrong with our strategy for defending against Islam. The best part:

Afghanistan was not radicalized until the mid-Seventies when the imposition of another Western idea—Marxism—was attempted. This sparked an Islamist revolt that sprang first out of Kabul University….

Let’s say one were inclined to think, as General McChrystal is inclined to think, (a) that we could transform Afghanistan into something resembling a modern social democracy, complete with vibrant educational programs, and (b) that it is appropriate to make doing so the job of the United States military. How is that going to improve American national security against Islamist terror? To the contrary, the likelihood is that the effort will catalyze Islamism. It won’t matter that we think we are helping; we will be perceived by millions in the Muslim world, including in Afghanistan, as infidel occupiers who are trying to undermine Islamic culture. And the opposition’s epicenter will be the very schools we are encouraging the Afghans and our other allies—like the Saudis—to build.

Maybe if we keep leading the horse to water, one day he’ll drink.

LA replies:

Why can’t the American elite see that our intrusions in an Islamic country, even if well intended, will catalyze Muslims against us?

Because that would require them to see that Islam is a distinct belief system, with its own history, integrity, and subjective belief in itself. To see this fact about Islam would require the American elite to give up their own belief that there is only one belief system in the world (our own), and that other people are defined solely by whether they have accepted our belief system or not—by whether they have assimilated into our belief system or not. The idea that there are people who refuse to assimilate into our system, not because they simply haven’t gotten with the program yet, but because they have allegiances and principles that are opposed to ours, cannot be admitted, because then the world would no longer be an embryonic universalist community in which progress consists of “knocking down the barriers that separate people.”

- end of initial entry -

From James N.
Subj: Don’t Muslims has the right to be Muslims?

Last Summer, my congressthing, Carol Shea-Porter, went on a State Department-sponsored trip to Afghanistan.

Her mission?

To instruct Pashtuns in the proper relationship between men and women, specifically with respect to marriage customs and practices.

When I heard this (and given the volume of her press releases, it was hard to ignore), I almost had to wrap my head in duct tape, lest it explode.

How many soldiers and marines will die because of this arrogant and foolish intrusion into the domestic relations of the savage tribes of Afghanistan? And what delusion makes it possible for Mrs. Shea-Porter to imagine that she had any right to say anything to them about the subject?

Marco Jawsario writes:

There is another reason why the dogs in Afghanistan are not eating the Alpo we are putting in their bowls. The Islamic world sees America as “completely in the hands of the Jews,” and as such any attempts we make in that part of the world to introduce democracy and modernism will be viewed not with suspicion—but with hostility. Make no mistake, mis amigos, the heartening turnout of voters in Iraq in 2006 was no embrace of Thomas Jefferson, but rather a powerplay by the Shia to exact revenge over the Sunnis. In the Islamic world, if a child sneezes, it must be “the fault of the Jews.” When an outbreak of cholera hit the Upper Nile over 15 years ago, the Egyptian papers, let me say that again, the official Egyptian papers, blamed it on the Israeli Mossad having poisoned the pencils of Arab school children. As long as there is a considerable Jewish presence in America—and there will be for the foreseeable future—the Moslems, with their collective 85 IQ, will view anything we do as a pretense by the Jews to subvert their culture.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 03, 2009 03:00 PM | Send