The Bill of Rights was not written for the Prom Queen, Rand Paul says in his filibuster on the Senate floor. It was written to protect unpopular voices and minorities, including today Arab-Americans
Bret Stephens, the Wall Street Journal columnist, says he was “almost grateful” for the attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris in January in which four Jews were killed because it demonstrated that Europe has a problem with anti-Semitism.
As the U.S. prepares to re-engage more deeply in the Iraq War, including the likely deployment of ground troops to help retake Mosul from Islamic State, there has been a push from mainstream commentators to recommit to an ideological view of our military campaigns in the Muslim world. A splashy cover story in The Atlantic, “What ISIS Really Wants”, offers an intellectual foundation for the reenergized War on Terror, presenting full recognition of ISIS’s “very Islamic” nature as a matter of urgent strategic significance. Eamon Murphy writes the obsession with naming Islam as the enemy of the West is in fact a defense of our own side’s troubled ideology. He says the guiding principle of post-World War II foreign policy — that the course of world events should be influenced, wherever possible, by force — is imperiled by the spectacular failure of the War on Terror, which actually succeeded in creating a transnational army of Islamic terrorists. That Islamic State rose in Iraq, then spread to Syria and Libya, threatens to give war a very bad name.
Rula Jebreal took on Bill Maher’s Islamophobia, saying that he was offering a literalist and simplistic view of the religion, like jihadists themselves. If you said this about blacks or Jews you’d be fired, she said. Now Salon has backed Maher up with a piece saying that Islamic beliefs are “untrue” and “ridiculous.” Yes and what about the parting of the Red Sea?
As we mark another anniversary of the attacks in 2001, it seems as if little has changed. We appear to be caught in a time loop where history keeps repeating itself again and again. If it was al Qaeda in 2001 that represented the pinnacle of all things evil that animated the US invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, today its al Qaeda’s evil twin Islamic State that is prompting air strikes in Iraq and upcoming airstrikes on Syria as well. Virtually absent in the media circus around ISIS is an honest discussion of how the US War on Terror, rather than halting the growth of violent Islamist groups, actually fosters fundamentalism.
As you are surely aware, the gruesome murders of American journalists by the Islamic state…