This past weekend, I read Robert Wright’s anti-intellectual piece in the New York Times entitled “Who Created Major Hasan?“. Of course, since it’s Robert Wright and the New York Times, you know his conclusion. It was us (or US, if you prefer)
Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them.
So, clearly Wright is a proponent of sitting on our collective hands. Well, Christopher Hitchens took it upon himself to knock down Wright’s straw house;
For a start, did Hasan or [Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad — Carlos Bledsoe, the Arkansas murderer] ever say what “killing” of which “Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan” they had in mind? There isn’t a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that’s not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because “the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious.” Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.
It’s clear to me who created Major Hasan – the cowardly imams and terror sponsors who are afraid of dying themselves, but have no aversion to sending their own children into the flames. Hasan handed out Korans to his neighbors – what if one of us handed out the Bible to our neighbors in the Middle East? Tell me we’re the violent ones in this fight.
Yeah, just once I’d like to see someone on the Left, the non-racist, defenders of human rights Left, someone besides Hitchens, admit that the war is worthy of our commitment. The only reason these cretins think that they have any chance at all of winning this war is because they have pathetically ignorant pea-wits like Wright defending them and the New York Times to give the pathetically ignorant pea-wits a forum.
