Western Pathology

VDH has another essay on the dangers we face from the Western Left:

Our own fundamentalist Left is in lockstep with Wahhabist reductionism — in its similar instinctive distrust of Western culture. Both blame the United States and excuse culpability on the part of Islamists. The more left-wing the Westerner, the more tolerant he is of right-wing Islamic extremism; the more liberal the Arab, the more likely he is to agree with conservative Westerners about the real source of Middle Eastern pathology.

The constant? A global distrust of Western-style liberalism and preference for deductive absolutism. So burn down a mosque in Zimbabwe, murder innocent Palestinians in Bethlehem in 2002, arrest Christians in Saudi Arabia, or slaughter Africans in Darfur, and both the Western Left and the Middle East's hard Right won't say a word. No such violence resonates with America's diverse critics as much as a false story of a flushed Koran — precisely because the gripe is not about the lives of real people, but the psychological hurts, angst, and warped ideology of those who in their various ways don't like the United States.

It doesn't help our cause when we pretend that Saudi Arabia is our ally when we know damn well that they fund terrorist activities. What can be done?

Dr. Hanson notes the growing problems at home:

...the American public is tiring of the Middle East, its hypocrisy and whiny logic — and to such a degree that it sometimes unfortunately doesn't make distinctions for the Iraqi democratic government or other Arab reformers, but rather is slowly coming to believe the entire region is ungracious, hopeless, and not worth another American soldier or dollar.

He's right. I'm feeling the ennui and frustration of it too. Worn down by the constant barrage of lies and treachery of the leftwing media, the wacko lefties of the West, and by the inscrutable mind of the Middle East, I wonder if it's worth it at all... Yet for the sake of the troops there, I still believe that they are making a sacrifice for the good of the world and possible hope in that troubled region.