There’s Nothing To Explain

Commentary Magazine ^ | December 2, 2008 | Abe Greenwald

[Jbny]

No one takes the environmentalist’s mantra “think globally, act locally” more to heart than the jihadi. With his eye on the future global caliphate, and his gun trained on the nearest infidel enclave, he is a patient servant to his cause. Westerners have a hard time understanding Islamic terrorists, in part, because we go about it the wrong way round. Rhetoric aside, good liberals think locally and act globally. That is, they take the supremacy of reason and humanity found in their immediate environs, and mistakenly apply it to death cultists on the other side of the world. Paul Berman calls this “rationalist naiveté.” But seven years after 9/11, the persistence of this mischaracterization feels like something more sinister than naiveté. The Left’s rush to explain the Mumbai attack in terms of Western antagonism, and not in terms of the doctrine of jihad, feels like simple collusion with monsters.

The musings of the average American accountant or traffic cop or lawyer are one thing, but are we really to believe the editors of Newsweek and Time suffer from “naiveté” in their understanding of global frictions. Yesterday, the New York Times furnished Pankaj Mishra with prime op-ed real estate, so that the following point on Mumbai could be reiterated:

[flowerplough]

Fools may take the supremacy of reason and humanity found in their immediate environs, and mistakenly apply it to death cultists on the other side of the world, but my reading of the “most holy and blessed Qran” tells me that Allah, through his Prophet and followers, demands my conversion, my submission, or my death.

[sageb1]

Unfortunately, liberals attempt to rationalize everything - not just jihadism, but everything. There is no black and white in their world. They need to understand that there are people who simply are motivated by an evil that is not ours to psychoanalyze, but that needs to be destroyed.