Posted on 05/10/2011 6:40:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
If your sister were among the nearly 3,000 people murdered in the World Trade Center on 9/11, how would you react to Osama Bin Laden's death? More specifically, if you were to write an opinion piece on the subject for a major newspaper, what would you most want to communicate?
One would think that anyone who had lost a loved one on 9/11 would write about bin Laden's guilt, about evil and about experiencing some degree of moral and emotional satisfaction that the loved one's murderer had been killed by American forces.
But not Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. He had other, more pressing, things to say.
Two days after bin Laden was killed, Klitzman wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times reflecting on his sister Karen's death on 9/11. While acknowledging that bin Laden "more than anyone else had caused my sister's death" and noting that he is "glad" that bin Laden "was now at the bottom of the sea," Klitzman directed his rage and blame elsewhere.
The main focus of his passion was to blame the United States for arousing the hatred of Muslims (including those who murdered his sister) and for arousing the hatred of "the rest of the world" as well.
Klitzman writes: "When the members of Al Qaeda attacked on 9/11, Americans wondered, 'Why do they hate us so much?' Many here believe they dislike us for our 'freedom,' but I think otherwise.
"There are lessons we have not yet learned. I feel Karen would share my concerns that underlying forces of greed and hate persevere. American imperialism, corporate avarice, abuses of our power abroad and our historical support of corrupt dictators like Hosni Mubarak have created an abhorrence of us that, unfortunately, persists. We need to recognize how the rest of the world sees us, and figure out how to change that. Until we do that, more Osama bin Ladens will arise, and more innocent people like my sister will die."
In the course of my lifetime, I have read surely many thousands of columns. And as I read those with which I differ as often as I do those with which I agree, many have annoyed, some even angered me.
But I do not recall reading a column that I considered as reprehensible as Klitzman's. What other word can describe a brother using the killing of his sister's murderer to badmouth America and hold it ultimately responsible for her death?
Asking what America did to elicit the hatred of Muslim terrorists is morally equivalent to asking what Jews did to arouse Nazi hatred, what blacks did to cause whites to lynch them, what Ukrainians did to arouse Stalin's hatred or what Tibetans did to incite China's hateful treatment of them.
We would dismiss such questions out of hand. Why, then, do we not similarly regard "What did America do to arouse Islamist mass-murdering hatred leading to 9/11?"
The answer is Leftist ideology.
I suspect that Klitzman is a morally better man than his thesis suggests. But at some point, perhaps in college, he assimilated the leftist worldview with the dogmatic but meaningless phrases that appeared in his column: "underlying forces of greed and hate," "American imperialism," "corporate avarice" and "abuses of our power abroad."
Most people who hold left-wing views when they are young abandon those views as they get older and wiser. But for those who never abandon leftism, the dogma is so powerful, it functions as a fundamentalist -- secular -- religion. Just as the Orthodox Jew, the evangelical Christian and the traditionalist Catholic views the world through his respective religion's eyes, so the leftist views the world and everything in it through leftist eyes.
That is how a man whose profession is dedicated to the elimination of psychological pain through the study of the infinitely complex human mind and psyche can have such a simplistic and morally convoluted view of America that he uses his sister's murder as an occasion to reflect on the evil -- of America.
One more example of how leftism makes decent people do indecent things.
That guy must not think the same as you.
Psychs are nuts.
Hey he’s from Columbia. What’d you expect?!!!! The moral of the story is never send your kids to Columbia.
Excellent point
Excellent point
Nick Berg’s father was the same way; though I think he only blamed Bush.
Dennis Prager went to Columbia.
The Presiden’t Psychiatrist?
Wasn’t there a movie about that?
The writer should go live in a cave. Take advantage of no medical advances available in America.
Take advantage of no technology advances created here.
Use a Conestoga wagon to travel to other states.
Heat his home with camel dung and drink water from a stream.
Oh, the man is such an idiot it’s not even enjoyable to make fun of him.
He did
The President’s Analyst (1967) starring James Coburn.
Huh?
I wonder why the writer would suspect that? I don't see anything in the article that leads me that direction.
Nick Berg was working with the terrorist and International Answer to make a video to symbolize what had happened at Abeu Garb (SP) prison.
The problem is, the Berg video was made before the Abeu Grab (SP) photos were made public by CBS.
Why? Or do you just lob stink bombs?
When I first went to college I wanted to be a psychiatrist. I loved my intro to psych class, the teacher was funny and the subject was interesting. But when I took abnormal psych and something else (I don’t remember the class) my overriding thought was, “These professors are crazy and all they want to do is shock the students with their ability to use foul language —this was in the mid 1970s when that was still a bit shocking—and graphic sexual talk in class.” I realized I didn’t want to have anything to do with those bozos so I changed my major post-haste!
That’s it! Thanks! Funny movie!
And Michael Savage went to Berkley. It doesn’t change the fact that they are very nutty left-wing schools. Send your children there at your own risk. And don’t forget that you were warned.
Referring to the idiot psychiatrist who blames everything wrong with the world on USA
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