Monday, July 16, 2007

One guy gets it, those in the comments don't

Henry Porter over at the UK Guardian gets it.

This article is mildly interesting. The real fun part is the comment section at the bottom. Many people just do not get it.

It is the typical blame the West crap.

The Muslim terrorists are not motivated by our presence in Iraq or by past crimes supposedly committed by the West. This is about Jihad.

The Left acts like American and British forces are roaming Iraq mindlessly gunning down innocents in the name of blood lust. This is so far from the truth it boggles the mind. The Left blames our foreign policy, which they mean supporting Jews, for the Islamists rage.

This position is untenable. The West deals very lightly with Muslims. We have never enslaved our exploited them on a large scale. We take their oil, but we let them charge us unreasonable prices for it because of their little cartel.

The "blame the West" first crowd is always going to be there. They simply can not understand that the problems we face are not about changing our foreign policy or being more "tolerant" or Islam. The terror stems from a pathology that runs throughout the Muslim world. It is religiously based but has additions of Arab racism and a refusal to take responsibility for their countries.

The Koran promises its followers that they will be rewarded on Earth for being pious Muslims. Yet they look around and see a West light years ahead of them economically and socially. They have to account for this somehow. They can either undergo self-critique and admit that their societies are sick, or they can find a scapegoat for their failure. They do the inevitable human thing and blame the West and the Jews for their plight.They scream about imperialism and conspiracy when there is no evidence of either. Heck the only real imperialism the Middle East has ever experienced came at the hands of fellow Muslims.

This is why the mission in Iraq is so important. The president looked at the threat and saw it for what it was: the symptom of a disease in the Muslim world. We are trying to implant a source of hope into the Middle East. Whether this will succeed or fail is up in the air but it was time to do something. We need to find a cure for the sickness of the Middle East. Merely giving into the nihilists demands that we submit or die is not a good choice.

In the end, I think that the Muslims will not change. The West will move past oil and return them to the irrelevance and obscurity that they enjoyed for over 500 years. Of course they will take hundreds of thousands of us down with them in their rage. The Arabs will be return to being a small silly people.