A question for my comrades on the Left, and for my centrist-liberal friends, asked in all ingenuousness: I must confess to a little bafflement at all the outrage, and the near-total dearth of solutions, regarding Mr. Obamas belated assault on Isis. This Chomsky-esque fury over going to war By His Word Alone and violating the territorial integrity of the sovereign state of Syria and flouting international law seems a little punctilious, if youll forgive me, in the face of a moral horror like ISIS. These people are beheading children, machine-gunning civilians into mass graves, decapitating abject Western captives, racially cleansing captured territories of Kurds, putting infidels to the sword, and embarking, with unconcealed relish, on a program of ethnic and religious genocide. (WARNING: Exhibits A-Z here bit.ly/ZR2cOB. They are graphic, and ghastly.) Life under their sociopathic theocracy is a waking horror for women, gays, (*very* closeted) Christians and even Muslims who dont subscribe to their apocalyptic theology and anyone, for that matter, with a free thought taking dangerous shape in his head (which he will promptly lose, if hes rash enough to question Revealed Truth). How anyone can call himself, or herself, a secular humanist, a freethinker, an atheist, a feminist, an out and proud member of the LGBT community (all of whom are, or should be, on the Left or at least sympathetic to it) and not applaud any attempt to rid the world of this ideological pestilence is unfathomable to me. Yes, bombs arent the ultimate answer to this problem. Yes, the (relatively) civilized world needs to devote its energies to addressing all the social, economic, and cultural ills that make the false promise of jihadism so appealing to so many. Yes, the chickens of Americas decades-long coddling of dictators in the region are coming home to roost. Yes, Mr. Bushs little adventure in Iraq is the mother of a million evils. Yes, his, and Obamas, blithe acceptance of civilian casualties in drone strikes, and Obamas rudderless foreign policy have sewn the dragons teeth of militancy. Yes to American exhaustion over all the tears and treasure weve poured into that big black hole in the sand, the Middle East. But these are the easy criticisms, the fish in a barrel we on the Left never tire of shooting. (The Right has its mud ducks, obviously. Were berating the choir, here.) All of that is the easy part. The fiendishly tough part is: what to do, right now, as innocents are being slaughtered, about a group hell-bent on dragging all of us back to the Bronze Age, and beheading those who wont bend a knee to their antediluvian world view?
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 15:26:01 +0000
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