Dean's World featured a lengthy diatribe against Little Green Footballs yesterday, followed by an intense comment thread in which I took part. This is my response to Dean.
First, I'll link to the same video Charles and Dean did, because it's slick, powerful, and effective.
But while Dean seems to suggest this is a kind of proof that there are moderate Muslims, and therefore we should redouble our efforts to avoid "Islamophobia", I say we haven't seen this often enough to know that we don't have anything to fear from Islam itself. It reminds me of some Cox & Forkum cartoons, and a reprint they post today makes me think it's not a coincidence they're on the same topic.
In their accompanying post, the artists opine:
It remains to be seen if the American people will turn on Bush. But it's clear he is not fighting to win.
I'm as strong a supporter as the President has, and I'm voting Republican enthusiastically as far as the eye can see. And yet I can't say I disagree.
Dean, I don't judge your dedication to the war, or your support of the troops. But threads like yours that suggest we're not being nice enough to Muslims are what drives the President to try and fight a "decent" war. And that not only drives me nuts, it's quite probably the cause of most of our deaths in Iraq. If we'd fight balls-to-the-walls, we'd not only run the enemy to ground, and scare the bejesus out of anyone thinking of supporting them, but we'd inspire our own people to stop squabbling and sniping, and quite possibly destroy the anti-war liberal nutroot movement by depriving Liberalism of what little sanity it has left.
The enemy is already willing to sacrifice some of its future for its cause. We can only defeat them when we convince them their only two options are surrender or sacrificing ALL of their future as targets to our war machine.
That's despicable and unthinkable. But that's what total war is all about.
I'm very sorry for all those good and decent, freedom-loving Muslims who don't want their religion to become just another target of hatred in this conflict. I feel bad that some people will end up hurt by prejudice. But no matter how many times you say there should be no scare quotes around "moderate", we haven't rounded up all Muslims like we did to the Issei. And in return for our allegience to our principles, do we see stories of large swaths of young Muslim Americans joining the fight against jihadism to prove their loyalty, the way the Issei did? Not so much.
Do we see rallies of enraged Muslims, angered that their American homeland was attacked and their religion hijacked by lunatics? I haven't seen any.
Do we at least hear about American imams encouraging their faithful to help root out terrorist infiltrators in their communities? On the contrary, CAIR sues the government for trying to protect its own members from the terrorists.
So we have a President trying to fight a war without offending anyone, and Muslims who spend a great deal of time being offended over cartoons, the pope's remarks, and our government's intrusion into their privacy when they just happen to talk to terrorists calling them on the telephone for a little chat.
Amid all this, I'm supposed to indulge your need to berate people because they get a little stir-crazy over this kind of lunacy and say stupid stuff about Muslims?
Sorry, but I can't really say you're being very classically liberal on this. I want to offer democracy and freedom as an alternative to the Arabs and Muslims we're dealing with. But, unfortunately, it's got to be an alternative to their own deaths.
It's them or us. It's for us or against us. It's victory or death.
UPDATE: Back over at Dean's World, Mary Madigan seems to be calling Dean out on the carpet for his post.
(H)ow many of us have gone nutpicking in LGFs comment section? ...How many people avoid reading or linking to sites that have been blacklisted as Islamophobic, despite the fact that these sites contain hard-to-find information about real, often local terrorist groups?
Maybe we have been looking for hate in all the wrong places.
Another update is in the extended entry.
UPDATE II: Dean's post here, and the comment section that follows, and this post he also links to in another post, I think get at the heart of what he's trying to say. He thinks it's a serious problem, and he intends to do something about it.
I don't think it's very serious. The numbers of people we're talking about is small, and the number of people they are affecting with their rhetoric is even less. It's barely a concern for me compared to the serious concern I have about some of the people we're supposed to be so concerned about not offending, like the liberal apologists at CAIR. And I think this discussion does far more to hurt the cause of the war by giving aid and comfort to Democratic political aspirations founded upon our defeat, than it does to harm what little goodwill is left around the world for The Great Experiment, sown by those self-same Democrats.
In fact, I think certain enablers of strife overseas, especially in the Middle East (a la al Sadr), look at any attempt of ours to show compassion and decency in this way as weakness, and they use it to foment more violence in the hopes that we will give up and they can impose a new barbaric rule on their own people with them at the helm.
I'll say this: I agree that where real bigotry is being sown, we should fight it. Thanks for joining my crusade. Now how about we get back to fighting terrorists?
