In this thicket of deceit, Islamists present Muslims always as victims, never as perpetrators. (When has there ever been a community with such a litany of grievances?) And they have read the West well, especially Western Europe, with its gnawing discontents, its guilty conscience over a colonial past, its burgeoning Muslim populations, its thirst for oil, its distaste for war, and, yes, its anti-Semitism. The Islamists, perhaps accurately, see the West as weak-- and they exploit every fissure and crevice, every greed and appetite, every self-flagellating impulse. And as they privately snicker in their back rooms, they are busy taking the West for a ride: they laugh as the West beats itself over every dead Iraqi (the vast majority of the killings in Iraq are committed by Muslims against fellow Muslims, not by Westerners), and over every impoverished Afghan or Palestinian child (impoverished because their societies and economies have failed to develop, largely for internal reasons, beyond opium production and living on U.N. handouts), and over every human rights abuse to which some Muslims are subject in Guantánamo and Britain and the United States (when these pale in comparison with those perpetrated in every hour of every day in Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Saudi Arabia).
[...]
And there you have it. The Middle East is a mess and we had very little - if anything - to do with it. Their crimes are greater than our crimes so we're, more or less, absolved. Most Iraqis are now killed by other Iraqis so need to bother shedding tears over that spilled milk. They've "failed to develop" so let's just put all this hand wringing to bed and move on.
I suppose one of the usual lefty responses to this sort of thing is to reverse the emphasis: 'no, no, it's not Hamas we should be concerned about but Tel Aviv!' But that's a dumb ass' game.
Obviously, it's easy to dig up a ton of dirt on Hamas and allied tradespeople - from both their ideology and actions. This doesn't prove that the West (which, Israel, Morris argues, is a part of) morally towers above them.
What it means is that we're surrounded by complete and utter bastards; in both high and low places, posh offices and lowly villages, high tech stealth bombers and red-eyed men with cell phone bombs.
Bastards, all.
.d.
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