Time To Put The "We Deserved It" Argument To Rest
By Richard Davis (02/04/05)
The now-rescinded speaking invitation by Hamilton College to radical leftist and terror apologist Ward Churchill re-evoked a notion that has become canonical to liberals and leftists alike -- namely, that we got what we deserved on Sept. 11. As Churchill wrote in a vile polemic just hours after the attacks, the “chickens came home to roost.” But is that what happened?
Picture this: A band of fanatical Christian supremacists, resentful over centuries-long mistreatment of Christians by Muslims and imagining themselves to be on a mission from God, resort to terror and murder in their quest to drive Muslims from the Holy Land and attain world domination for themselves. Banned from other Christian countries and hunted as criminals, they hijack several planes and crash them into civilian targets in a major Muslim city, calling out the name of God as they do so, believing He is about to reward them with a bevy of heavenly virgins.
Would Muslims wake up the next morning and extol the bravery and “gallant sacrifice” (Churchill’s words) of the hijackers -- refusing even to call them terrorists -- and then proclaim that Muslims only got what they had coming? Would they immediately demand that their governments change their policies toward Christians and forswear any retribution? Of course not.
So why did our left react in just that way? Do liberals actually believe deranged fanatics are legitimate agents of foreign policy, or that they are bona fide representatives of an entire civilization?
The left began to blame America for the attacks even before the dust had settled in New York (literally in Churchill’s case). How did they know the motivations of the terrorists? It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t.
America’s involvement in the region is responsible, they say, but that involvement only dates back half a century. The Islamic world has been in decline for hundreds of years. Had America never existed the Middle East would be indistinguishable from what it is now -- except for much of the infrastructure and most of the wealth it does possess, products of our technologies and the many trillions of dollars we’ve exchanged for the region's oil (which we discovered and still develop for them). Let’s not forget the billions we’ve provided in aid, and the thousands of their children we’ve educated in our schools.
Do they hate us? Sure. But that is symptomatic of pathologies embedded deep in the Muslim mind and culture. Our acts -- and we’re really just talking about our support for Israel and the persistent anti-American propaganda that it has generated -- only inflame existing psychoses. They don’t cause them. Liberals have confused politics with psychology.
The terrorists themselves gave a litany of grievances, starting with the crusades and the loss of “Andalusia.” They demanded America leave Muslim soil and stop providing support for Israel. Like Churchill, Noam Chomsky, et. al., they cited Iraq and all the dead children caused by UN restrictions, which we now know to have been a despicable lie. Money for medicine and humanitarian aid was being systematically stolen by Hussein and his cohorts in the international community and at the UN -- that is, by the liberals’ best friends. They watched as children suffered and died, knowing they could have saved many of them, just to blame the US and pocket billions for themselves. America’s leftists were their willing dupes.
Liberals like Churchill, Chomsky, Howard Zinn and the late (thank you, God) Susan Sontag pontificate about Muslim grievances as if they were delegated spokesmen for the Islamic world. Yet the vast majority of Muslims, including those who sympathize with Islamist positions, reject out of hand any suggestion that the Sept. 11 terrorists acted in their name. In fact, many still refuse to believe the killers were Muslims at all. They think they were Jews.
Alleging that the terrorists were in fact representatives of the Islamic world slanders everyday Muslims, whom liberals pretend to support, while ennobling and legitimizing the terrorists, whom they pretend not to support. It does fit in nicely, though, with the liberal tenet that all Americans (nonminorities) are collectively guilty for all wrongs, past and present, and that everyone in the world and their cultures are our helpless victims. If for centuries the Muslim world has been a sewer of hate, ignorance, tyranny and oppression, periodically breeding lunatics bent on slaughter, that’s all our fault, too. Got that? Good. Here’s your tenure certificate.
The left likes to think that anyone who hates America, including Islamic criminals, does so for the same reasons they do. In truth, it would take psychoanalysis to disentangle the motivations behind each, but this much is clear -- Islamists hate us mostly because of our liberalism and what that has wrought here and abroad. That’s why we’re the Great Satan. In other words, they want to kill us because of our liberals, who in turn hate us for trying to stop them. In some strange parallel universe that all makes sense.
To liberals, terrorists represent the Islamic world when they want to make a point about the evils of America. But when it comes to blaming the Islamic world for the terrorists, that provokes howls of racism and Islamophobia. It can’t be both ways.
Those who refute the we-got-what-we-deserve argument by positing facts about America’s actual influence in the world are wasting their time. That suggests that terrorism might be justifiable, which it isn’t, and that terrorists, tenured or otherwise, are amenable to facts. They aren’t. The terrorists have made it clear there are only two things we can ultimately do: convert to Islam or die. These are Nazis. They kill because they are killers.
No doubt Churchill would have received a hero’s welcome at Hamilton. The college had already moved the event to a larger venue. Hate is big on campuses these days, and Hamilton seems particularly enamored of hate-mongers. Maybe one day his would-be listeners will get the honor of becoming the next “little Eichmanns” to pay for America’s sins. Perhaps their children will be at their side. Then Churchill can be invited back to explain why they got what they deserved. That’s what free speech is about, and we all know how much free speech means to campus liberals these days.
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