Salon.com: Muslim riots over cartoons is Bush's fault

Stingray: a blog for salty Christians ^ | February 9, 2006 | Michael McCullough

[DallasMike]

Come on, if there's a problem in the world, you just knew that it had to be Bush's fault. A few Danish cartoonists poke mild fun at radical Islam's stereotypically violent response to anything and everything and the Muslims respond by acting, you guessed it -- stereotypically violent. Embassies are burned, people riot in the streets, and people are killed.

And what else have we been treated to by radical Islam over the past few years? The 9/11 attacks, the attacks on American interests in the 1990s, beating and burning schoolgirls who aren't dressed in burqhas, suicide bombings, support of suicide bombings, female circumcision, and killing women who have been raped because it somehow must have been their fault. And that's just a beginning -- whole libraries could be filled with books on how the radical Islamists have treated and humiliated. Let's face it, radical Islam is violent at its core.

However, the American mainstream media is too afraid to blame Islam's deep problems on Islam, so they do what they do best -- blame them on President Bush. Salon.com, which is becoming increasingly simple-minded and deceptive these days, published an article by University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole entitled All cartoon politics are local. In it, Cole contends that Muslims have a point in their claim that they have been forced to endure the prejudice and discrimination of western culture for hundreds of years. Never mind that the events that Cole speaks of, such as throwing the Moors out of Spain, were responses to attacks by Muslims to gain control over western peoples. In fact, it was only at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 that the Europeans finally halted the repeated invasions of Europe by Muslims. Throwing history aside though, Cole writes:

The dispute has typically been treated in the Western media as a further sign of the fanaticism of Muslims. But the tempest did not arise out of nowhere. Muslim anger has been greatly heightened by the widespread belief that at best the West has treated the Islamic world unjustly and at worst launched a war against it. Moreover, the caricatures have most often been deployed by Middle Easterners and Muslims in disputes with each other -- disputes that have been sharpened by the Bush administration's blundering interventions in the region. Western attempts to cast the issue as one of freedom of expression display an ignorance of the local context of these conflicts, which are not mostly about religion so much as they are about religious nationalism and about power struggles within Muslim societies.

Of course these conflicts are about religion, Professor Cole! How many Lutherans do you see blowing up Methodists? How many Buddhists do you see blowing up Hindus? I am not aware of a single ongoing campaign of terror in the world where radical Islam is not at the root.

The new movie Munich is about Palestinian terrorists murdering Jews at the 1972 Olympics. How are we going to blame that one on President Bush? What about all the attacks on Jews and westerners in the years prior to November, 2000. Can we blame those on Bush, too?

If President Bush has blundered in anything, it has been his unwillingness to de-Islamify countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, much as we de-Nazified the Germans after WWII. If we had allowed Hitler's top deputies to live and had not removed all relics of Nazism from Germany after the war, then we would have had another war, and another war, and another war. I fear that until the free world gets the guts to cut off the head of radical Islam, we shall be dealing with the consequences for decades to come. And until people like Professor Cole begin to deal with facts instead of tooting their own political prejudices, the American mainstream media will continue in its plummet towards irrelevance.

[DallasMike]

Stingray:  Conservative Christian News and Commentary

[benjibrowder]

The dispute has typically been treated in the Western media as a further sign of the fanaticism of Muslims. But the tempest did not arise out of nowhere. Muslim anger has been greatly heightened by the widespread belief that at best the West has treated the Islamic world unjustly and at worst launched a war against it. Moreover, the caricatures have most often been deployed by Middle Easterners and Muslims in disputes with each other -- disputes that have been sharpened by the Bush administration's blundering interventions in the region. Western attempts to cast the issue as one of freedom of expression display an ignorance of the local context of these conflicts, which are not mostly about religion so much as they are about religious nationalism and about power struggles within Muslim societies.

This seems a little backwards. Seeing as they attacked us first, they attempted to destroy our government first, they have plotted against us since Carter and possibly even before that. Does Salon actually sell this trash?

[My2Cents]

What isn't Bush's fault?

[jw777]

Ted Kennedy Drinks, cause Bush is President. Ha aha hah ah ah ah ahahahhahaha

[DallasMike]

Does Salon actually sell this trash?

Yes, and they're quite proud of it, too.

[Fenris6]

Professor Cole, meet Bernard Lewis.

[short version: Cole is a racist - bigotry of low expectations]

"There is some justice in one charge that is frequently leveled against the United States, and more generally against the West: Middle Easterners frequently complain that the West judges them by different and lower standards than it does Europeans and Americans, both in what is expected of them and what they may expect, in terms of their economic well-being and their political freedom. They assert that Western spokesmen repeatedly overlook or even defend actions and support rulers that they would not tolerate in their own countries.

...there is nevertheless a widespread [Western] perception that there are significant differences between the advanced Western world and the rest, notably the peoples of Islam, and that these latter are in some ways different, with the tacit assumption that they are inferior. The most flagrant violations of civil rights, political freedom, and even human decency are disregarded or glossed over, and crimes against humanity, which in a European or American country would evoke a storm of outrage, are seen as normal and even acceptable.

...The underlying assumption in all this is that these people are incapable of running a democratic society and have neither concern nor capacity for human decency."

The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis, p104

Apparently, George W. Bush has higher expectations:

[DallasMike]

That's a good analysis. Why shouldn't we expect more out of Middle Eastern countries? After all, many Asian countries went from cultivating rice paddies to being economic powerhouses in less than a generation.

[bert]

I thought Salon.com died and went to hell years ago. Guess not.