Good David Brooks Piece
I really enjoyed this David Brooks http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/opinion/19brooks.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists OpEd piece. It ran Sunday in the Oregonian, I found it balanced and to the point.
Highlights from the left…
“Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness. I used to write for Newsweek. I know Mike Isikoff and the editors. And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.”
Highlights from the right…
“Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Koran down the toilet. The Nation and leftish Web sites are in a frenzy to prove that the story is probably true even if Newsweek is retracting it.”
The sobering conclusion…
“Finally, they are strategically ruthless. Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, who has spent years reporting on extremists, says they use manufactured spasms of hatred to desensitize their followers. After followers spend a few years living through rabid riots and vicious sermons, killing an American or a Jew or even a fellow Muslim seems no more consequential than killing a mosquito. That's how suicide bombers are made…
These are the extremists, the real enemy. Let's keep our eye on the ball.”
Good idea.
1 comment:
Good call, the real story here is the Islamo fundementalists who look for any excuse to call a jihad. This merely exposes the fact that all of the grievences Bin Laden has cited as reasons for waging jihad, are nothing more than convienent excuses meant to justify criminal behavior on a wide scale. Once upon a time, Bin Laden invoked the plight of the Iraqi people and railed against the U.S. and Britain for the sanctions (which we all know now were being manipulated by Hussein). Today, Bin Laden and his organization are killing those same Iraqi people. They were nothing more than political pawns, and unfortunately they find too many in the west willing to buy into their excuses and give credence to the idea that 9/11 was "chickens coming home to roost."
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