She notes an inability to listen. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have openly expressed their hatred of Christians, Jews and Americans, and their desire for random murder. And yet, in her estimation, all too many people in the universities and in the pulpits profess to be in the dark about Al Qaeda's true intentions, or pretend to know the real reason behind the attack — some modest, real-world complaint about American or Israeli policies.
....She concludes that, in too many university and church discussions, ''repeatedly the worst possible gloss is put on American motivations and the best on the motivations of those who attacked us.'' And, in this manner, not afraid to make a bit of noise, Elshtain sends her arguments rolling across the lawn, everywhere encountering weedy clumps of prejudice and ill-conceived assumptions, and everywhere leaving behind a well-trimmed swath of intellectual clarity, which is pleasing to see. [NY Times] Pleasing indeed, and an amazingly succinct summation of the rightness of the War on Terror and a refutation of the Vietnam analogy, "in which America was always a villain and never a victim, and American military response was always a catastrophe, never a measured act of self-defense or a humanitarian boon," the latter two we have seen twice now in a little over a year, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Pete Seeger will be 84 tomorrow: he is allowed to live in the past, but what is your excuse?
Article comments
1 - mike
I used to live in the past, but now I live in the present. Soon I will be living in the future.