"Why the rush now to bomb Iran, a country that poses some threat to Israel but none--for the moment--to the United States...unless we go ahead, attack it, and the mullahs unleash Hezbollah terrorists against us?"
So writes Joe Klein over at Time's blog. (We'll leave unaddressed his intellectual flailing on Jews, Commentary magazine, the Iraqi government, 100 years, etc.)
Interesting way of looking at things. Iran is killing Americans right now--let alone the history of Iranian attacks on American targets starting with our embassy in Tehran--yet Klein doesn't feel any threat to America from Iran. I guess our soldiers and Marines in Iraq don't count as being Americans threatened by Iranian actions. For Klein, they are separate entities distinct from America.
This is part of a larger strategy that our Left promotes--the dismissal of any threat to America. Islamo-fascism, for example, is no reason to get upset according to our elite media:
Just imagine the world picture of somebody whose primary — or even (God forbid!) sole — source of news is the New York Times.
In particular, imagine that person’s image of Islam — and of the problems and issues surrounding the growing presence of Islam in the West today. At the Times — as at other important news organizations — the slant on Islam has been shaped almost exclusively by apologists like Karen Armstrong (author of Muhammed: A Prophet for Our Time) and John Esposito (director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University). In March, the New York Times Magazine published a long essay by another major apologist, Harvard law professor and Times Magazine contributing writer Noah Feldman, who took (shall we say) an exceedingly generous view of sharia law and its proponents. Last Sunday, the magazine ran a new piece by Feldman, arguing that Muslims are Europe’s “new pariahs” and that the only real problem related the rise of Islam in Europe today is — guess what? — European racism.
It’s a familiar claim, to put it mildly, and Feldman served up the usual rhetoric, conflating the nationalist bigots of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang party with people like the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, whose views on the Islamization of Europe are rooted in liberal values. Feldman dismissed as “prejudice” concern about first-cousin marriages among Muslims — never mind that almost all such marriages are forced, that the overwhelming majority involve rape and abuse, and that those who have campaigned hardest against them are not “racists” but women’s rights advocates. Feldman deep-sixed the catastrophic rise in rape, gay-bashing, and other crimes by young European Muslim males, the extensive abuse of European welfare systems that is helping to destroy them, and the broad-based cultural jihad which ultimately seeks nothing less than the replacement of democracy with sharia. Feldman insisted that “a hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures — even intolerant ones.”
If you are unwilling to defend our society, your self esteem is bolstered by denying that there is any threat to defend against. That way you are not displaying fear by arguing we must not fight. Instead, you are far-sighted. And tolerant. And deep down you know that those Red State rubes who cling to guns and God will keep the enemy you dare not name at bay while you condemn your defenders.
Some things are worth defending, after all. No matter what the price. No matter what the burden.
