in leftist rhetoric? Hmmmm.
Over at Newshogger, Libby takes issue with my earlier post on the strange piety of Bilal Abdulla.
It’s not surprising that one of the Glasgow doctors who was arrested for the basically failed bombing attempt is a Sunni who is upset by the Iraq occupation. It’s also no surprise that Protein Wisdom’s resident genius fails to make the connection between the unnecessary invasion and toppling of a secular regime there and the incitement to violence in a man who otherwise would have peacefully practiced medicine. We’ve come to expect Dan to cherry pick his quotes to advance his theme, in this case being the ungrateful heathen who selfishly preferred a stable existence under a domestic tyrant to the chaos and daily carnage of imposed “liberation” under an occupying foreign military force.
It’s not surprising that I’d choose quotes from an article that bolster my point–so not surprising that he calls it cherry picking, and fair use be damned. In my world, we call it quotation of a source. He’s welcome to supply the passages that contradict me, and I’ll post them in an update.
That point aside, it seems to me self-serving that according to a relation, Bilal didn’t care for Saddam, but didn’t much mind that his family benefitted from the Baathist dictator at the expense of the majority Shia. In the old days, liberals seemed to have trouble with this kind of arrangement, borrowing the term “apartheid” to describe it. Saddam’s regime was rather more private about its killings, in general, but with some exceptions, than al-Qaeda in Iraq is, so people basked in the sense of security, suffering anxiety only when family or friends inexplicably disappeared, though these disappearances were continually chronicled in the Western press.
Because they knew that the sanctions were working and Saddam was hemmed in, the left was unmoved by the spontaneous demonstrations that displayed children supposed to have been killed by the deprivations imposed by sanctions seldom covered by Western media. Although they were deeply concerned about Saddam’s attempted assassination of the first President Bush, they understood that it was really a lark, just as they’ve responded with equanimity to the recent revelations of Mitterand’s role in the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda.
Most importantly, they realize that if the Baathists were evil, at least their evil was secular, and in the final evaluation, that’s what matters.
Wait, you’re the resident genius?
Fuck. I need to get a new gig.
C’mon, Jeff. Share the love.
More radical muslim cleric logic.
“It’s not surprising that one of the Glasgow doctors who was arrested for the basically failed bombing attempt is a Sunni who is upset by the Iraq occupation.”
I just love the moral equivalency implicit in this comment of his. It’s apparently OK to blow up innocent men, women and children of Scotland since the doctor was “upset” over the fact that his Sunni mass murderer dictator was overthrown. How sad for him.
I was thinking more along the “visiting wiseguy” line. Or maybe “sagacious squatter”. At any rate, it probably doesn’t take much to be a genius to those evolutionary dead-ends.
Oh, come on, Jeff, somehow I get the feeling that Libby may not be entirely sincere in his evaluation of Dan’s IQ …
“Of course, the truth is, not all terrorists are Muslim. The wingers like to forget that the title for the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in the United States is still held by Timothy McVeigh…”
No matter how many times that gets repeated, I still cannot get my mind around the kind of thought process that embrace it.
Well, you know, he was forced into it by his outrage against Janet Reno’s incineration of Branch Davidians, predictably enough.
Which is why I wept bitter tears when he was executed.
And, of course, he gets even that wrong. The deadliest was a guy in the 20s, IIRC, who protested the school tax by blowing one up.
We won’t even mention that there’s a fair-sized body of evidence that the atheist McVeigh had some ME / Iraqi help that Klintoon didn’t bother to have looked at.
Say what you will about Hitler, but it’s not like he was a devout Catholic or anything.
“No matter how many times that gets repeated, I still cannot get my mind around the kind of thought process that embrace it.”
I would have thougth that maybe Sherman or the things we did to the natives would have been more terroristic than mcveigh.
I blame Peabody.
look, Peabody just built the machine, it was Sherman that was always encouraging him to go back and screw with things.
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