Blaming the United States


...but never taking responsibility for their own choices and actions
Max Boot has an article in the L.A. Times.

WHY ARE SO many Muslims so enraged by a handful of cartoons published in an obscure Danish newspaper? It's not enough to point out how the governments of Egypt, Syria and Iran are stoking the protests in a cynical ploy to deflect Western pressure for democratic reform and to curry favor with Islamic radicals. Their strategy wouldn't be so successful if it didn't resonate with deeply ingrained attitudes among the Muslim multitudes.

I got an earful of those views last week in Kuala Lumpur while attending a conference sponsored by New York University and the Malaysian Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations. The ostensible subject was: "Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?" We never did answer those questions, but the infidel attendees did get a red-hot blast of indignation from the Muslim participants, who hailed not only from East Asia but also from Europe, North America, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Even though all of the Muslim delegates were intellectuals, activists, politicians and other movers and shakers, they resonated with the rage of the dispossessed. With considerable justification, they fulminated against the backwardness of the Islamic world compared to the West. With considerably less justification, they blamed their frustrations on the West.

If only I had a ringgit for every time some delegate complained that the plight of the Palestinians showed the world's anti-Muslim bias. One attendee even had the gall to claim that Israel is allowed to violate U.N. resolutions while no Muslim state has that luxury — at the very moment Iran is thumbing its nose at the United Nations! This was coupled with ritualistic denunciations of other anti-Muslim offenses — from the real (Russian repression in Chechnya) to the farcical (a Pakistani academic blamed the CIA for creating Islamic fundamentalism in his country).

I've said before that much of the mess in the Middle East is because the United States chose to overlook tyranny to contain the Soviet Union. But that isn't what we're being blamed for. If history is any guide, the United States could give every Middle Eastern nation exactly what they demanded tomorrow and the situation would not get better. Freedom (and by extension free markets) is not something that can be granted. It has to grow and be nourished.

The United States isn't blameless. But neither are those well educated Muslims who overlook the actions of their own governments while accusing the U.S. of things it never did.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - February 16, 2006 at 04:34 AM  Tag


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