And the grievance industry thrives even when the question is reversed. When Americans express hostility toward Moslems after 9/11 and the beheading story of the day, our Left can take the chance to ask why we can't learn to love the religion of peace. Is it perhaps because we are racists? Or just xenophobic? Or just not educated enough, at best. Pointing to 9/11 and other crimes is just an excuse to express our dark nature, no doubt.
Tony Blair (tip to Instapundit) calls out the bizarre grievance-mongering:
The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,' Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.
The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."'
Blair held out the example of the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan - criticised by Islamists as an example of the heavy-handed imperial West oppressing Muslims - to highlight unfounded claims of grievance. He asked how it is possible to claim that Afghanistan's Muslims are being oppressed when the Taliban 'used to execute teachers for teaching girls in schools'.
Blair added: 'How are [we] oppressing them? You're oppressing them when you support the people who are trying to blow them up.' Blair, who normally chooses his language carefully when he talks about Islamists, also takes a swipe at critics who accused him of undermining civil liberties. 'When I'm trying to change the law in order to make it easier to deport people who engage in terrorism - the idea that that's an assault on hundreds of years of British civil liberties is completely absurd. Some of what is written on this is loopy-loo in its extremism.
Yes! Blair is restricted to speaking of only Afghanistan when he asks how so many Moslems can be upset that we freed 25 million Afghans, but the logic applies to Iraq as well. I hope we can expect more of this as the Middle East special envoy. When pretty much anything can set the nutters off, it is rather pointless to keep asking ourselves why they hate us as if it is our fault.
We really need a new question when it comes to the jihadis and their Moslem enablers. Why do they hate? If we are to keep this a war between part of the West (the non-Left) and part of the Moslem world (the jihadis), this is important to answer.
UPDATE: Taheri piles on the Islamophobia bandwagon (via RCP?):
The terrorists who tried to kill people in London and Glasgow are the same ones killing people in Baghdad and Karachi. They are the same who killed tens of thousands of Egyptians and perhaps as many as a quarter-million Algerians over the decades. They are motivated not by any religious grievance but by an insatiable appetite for political power. They want to seize control of societies, break them into submission and impose on every individual a mad tyranny of terror in the name of God.
I guess we knew the answer to the question of why they hate all along.
