The Boston Blame Game: Left Wing Editon

[NOTE: This is a rare cross-posted from personal blog. I've added it here because touches at least tangentially upon Israel.]

Ever since the Boston Marathon bombings lots on lots of people on the Internet are playing a despicable blame game, blaming everyone and anyone they don't like for the terrorist attack; anyone except Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, that is. The conspiracy theorist version of the blame game includes claiming this was actually a U.S. government plot or an Israeli/Mossad "false flag operation". The right wing version often includes blaming Islam as a whole and every Muslim on the planet. For right now I'm going to pick on a left wing version: blaming the victims (the United States) and our friends in the world.

It's pretty easy for hard core left wingers to blame American foreign policy here: the use of drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and American support of Israel are used as prime examples. The United States is blamed, often solely blamed, for the loss of innocent lives throughout the Muslim world. Here is a dose of reality: radical Islamists have declared war on the West. When you're attacked you do have to respond. Anything else is perceived as weakness and encourages more violence. Are innocent lives are lost? That is the sad and tragic reality in any war. Yes, if we have a choice war needs to be a last resort. Sometimes, sadly, it is the only resort left.

The problem with radical Islam, something which is growing and spreading like a cancer in the Muslim world, is that people are taught to hate in their schools, in their mosques and in the media. Add a very large poor population, poorly educated or hardly educated at all, a relatively low literacy rate, and little or no access to other viewpoints. If the infidel or the American or the Jew or the Israeli or the European is made a scapegoat for all that is wrong in their lives the hatred is there. It doesn't require a drone strike or ill advised foreign policy to nurture that hatred.

Some ultraliberals, when referring to the Muslim world, talk about how we ignore or harm "the government(s) that represents those people". In the Islamic world there are only such representative governments in Turkey, Indonesia, and Iraqi Kurdistan, which is independent from the rest of Iraq in many respects. Everywhere else you have dictatorships and theocracies that vary only in the extent to which they brutalize their own people. The worst poverty I have ever seen was in a Muslim country I visited several times on business. If I took the time to describe what I saw your heart would break. The sad truth is those kind of scenes are repeated in many, many countries throughout the Islamic world.

The poverty I refer to wasn't caused by drones, by American meddling or by any other excuse used to explain the problem. Those issues are factors but, honestly, they are relatively minor factors. They serve as propaganda points for those stoking the hate. No American government policy included meddling in Chechnya, where the Tsarnaev's come from. Honestly, that excuse is nothing more than an excuse.

The conflict between a modern, tolerant view of Islam and the more radical and fundamentalist view has been going on for more than a thousand years. To blame recent policies, no matter how short sighted or flawed, is to ignore history. The principle blame here belongs to the terrorists, to the ideology they followed, and to those who promote that ideology and justify terrorism. A small dose of blame goes to the left-wingers who enable terrorism by blaming the victims rather than the real sources of the problem.

Be Careful What You Wish For

For months the American and European media reported on the so-called Arab Spring as if it was a breakthrough for democracy in the Arab world. Dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen have now been overthrown, with varying degrees of force and loss of life. The Western media acted as cheerleaders and Western leaders, including President Obama, first encouraged the overthrow of these regimes and then hailed these events as victories for freedom. Sadly, they were nothing of the sort.

Across the Arab world where elections, many of them the first free elections these countries have seen, are being won by Islamists who believe that democracy is a form of Western decadence. Assuming the Islamists come to power in some of these countries we could see the sort of one and done elections we saw in Gaza, where the winners, Hamas, promptly eliminated the democratic process that brought them to power as well as their opponents. It is very likely that the end result could be even more repressive than the dictators which have been deposed.

Somehow this hasn't quite dawned on the press who are trying to find distinctions and differences between the various Islamist and jihadist groups who seem poised to come to power across the Middle East. The Associated Press, in reporting the results of the Egyptian elections, engaged in some truly amazing and contradictory double speak. The first few paragraphs of their article are factual. For example:

The High Election Commission said the Islamic fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party garnered 36.6 percent of the 9.7 million valid ballots cast for party lists. The Nour Party, a more hardline Islamist group, captured 24.4 percent.

Having accurately described the parties involved the author(s) of the piece then find it necessary to tell us that, really, the Muslim Brotherhood might be moderates after all:

The party has positioned itself as a moderate Islamist party that wants to implement Islamic law without sacrificing personal freedoms, and has said it will not seek an alliance with the more radical Nour party.

Really? How could anyone come to that conclusion in the wake of what was said at the Brotherhood rally just before the election? The following is from The Jerusalem Post article on the rally since the American media somehow didn't find this newsworthy:

Muhammad Ahmed el- Tayeb, the imam of al-Azhar Mosque, told the crowd: “Al- Aksa Mosque is currently under an offensive by the Jews... We shall not allow the Zionists to Judaize al-Quds [Jerusalem]. We are telling Israel and Europe that we shall not allow even one stone to be moved there.”

Protesters chanted, “Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv: Judgment Day has come,” and passages from the Koran vowing that “one day we shall kill all the Jews.”

How is promising genocide for the Jewish people moderate? Can someone please explain that to me? Why are mainstream media outlets making excuses for these people?

John Henry, of the liberal Low Genius blog, hit the nail squarely on the head in a discussion on Facebook:

I think that western minds have a very serious problem parsing the idea that there really are some people - ordinary people who live under these regimes - who *don't want democracy*. We could go round for hours about why that is, but all the talk won't address that simple issue: what do you do when a people, given the option, *choose despotism*?

His comments referred both to the Russian elections and the recent elections in the Arab world. Here was my response to him:

Mostly it falls into cultural differences and what these people are taught in their schools (assuming they have them), by their media, and in their houses of worship. One of the reasons American foreign policy fails in so much of the world is that we tend to look at everyone as if they are displaced Vermonters. All we have to do is show them freedom and democracy and "the American way" (whatever that is) and they will suddenly be just like us. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have operated under this illusion. The result is what we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Americans are absolutely despised and where we will likely end up with totally hostile regimes.

Sadly the media also operates under the "displaced Vermonter" notion and wishes for events that have horrendous consequences that they can't seem to fathom even though they should be obvious to anyone who knows the Middle East at all. I fear the end results will not only be more repressive regimes but also a destabilization of the Middle East and a bloody regional war started by an attack on Israel. An old saw seems to apply: Be careful what you wish for; it may come to pass.