[W]ent to Iraq in the fall of 2003, and the winter and spring of 2004, traveling on [his] own, with no bodyguards or security of any kind. [Is he] courageous, noble or crazy? Or a bit of all three?
Lots of thought provoking stuff. A few samples:
You conclude that “women are the Achilles heel of Islamic states. . . .gender equality is one of the most – if not the most – potent weapons against the social factors that breed terrorism.”
You have hit bingo here my friend. Fighting for feminism under Islamism, in my view, is like fighting for private property and freedom of speech under communism, or fighting for equality for Jews under Nazism. Once Gorbachev initiated Glasnost and Perestroika, he destroyed the very system he was trying to save. If a potential Nazi system started letting Jews into the political process, Nazism would cease to be what it is supposed to be overnight. Once gender equality infiltrates and assimilates within Islam, it will no longer be Islam.
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I remember my Iraqi friend Naseer telling me how impressed his mother was to see American women soldiers. His mom didn’t realize such gender equality was possible, or that women could interact so easily with their male counterparts—and millions of other women across Iraq are learning similar feminist lessons. The Left has got to accept one fact that has stuck in their craw since the Vietnam War: where the American military goes, so goes human freedom.
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In your reaction to the women laughing, you said something that has its own profound eye-opening meaning: you said the laughter was music to your ears.
Ah music.
And isn’t it interesting that the despots (usually religious ones) who furiously hate women’s laughter and cannot even hear it without starting to gnash their teeth and foam at the mouths, also often do the same when hearing music.
I have always been fascinated and intrigued with this phenomenon: individuals and regimes that detest music. Why? What does it say about them?
We know that Lenin frowned on music, in part because he feared that it might reduce humans’ rage and make them disinclined to kill in a revolution. We know that Stalin was threatened by certain music that didn’t even have lyrics (e.g., Shostakovich, the Eighth Symphony of 1943). Khomeini despised music and banned most if it from radio and TV. The Taliban illegalized music. Etc.
The utopian impulse to purify humans, which Islamism surely is, often interrelates with the demonization and illegalization of music.
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We are fighting Islamofascism. Whether the enemy takes the form of some soft-spoken “pious” Muslim plotting the destruction of American from the mountains of Tora Bora, or a Baathist thug dreaming of becoming the next Salah-ad-din, doesn’t matter. They are twin faces of the same fascist death-cult.
To the people who protest that Saddam never attacked America, I say—how many Luftwaffe pilots bombed Pearl Harbor? And yet our nation sent the bulk of its war machine against Nazi Germany. To fight Al Qaeda without taking out Saddam Hussein would have been like striking Japan after December 7, but ignoring the Germans. Somehow, FDR and the American people realized that the Japanese, Germans and Italians (and later, the Soviets) were part of the same hydra-headed monster of totalitarianism. I can’t understand why our generation can’t grasp the same fact.
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Words matter. Words convey moral clarity. Without moral clarity, we will not succeed in Iraq. That is why the terms the press uses to cover this conflict are so vital. For example, take the word “guerillas.” As you noted, mainstream media sources like the New York Times often use the terms “insurgents” or “guerillas” to describe the Sunni Triangle gunmen, as if these murderous thugs represented a traditional national liberation movement. But when the Times reports on similar groups of masked reactionary killers operating in Latin American countries, they utilize the phrase “paramilitary death squads.” Same murderers, different designations. Yet of the two, “insurgents”—and especially “guerillas”—has a claim on our sympathies that “paramilitaries” lacks. This is not semantics: imagine if the media routinely called the Sunni Triangle gunmen “right wing paramilitary death squads.” Not only would the description be more accurate, but it would offer the American public a clear idea of the enemy in Iraq. And that, in turn, would bolster public attitudes toward the war.
Regarding the last point above: When I was a raving lefty back in the late 80's, two of the big foreign policy topics were El Salvador, and Nicaragua. I remember reading issue after issue of The Nation, Mother Jones, Z Magazine, and The Progressive, lamenting US support of fascist death squads, and expressing the impossible dream that the US might actually stand up for freedom, democracy, and women's rights by toppling totalitarian strong men, instead of propping them up. I reckon it was all just a lot of hot air for these people. It's one thing to preen and "fight" the impossible fight, something else to actually participate when the "impossible" becomes actual. I don't know, maybe complaining is the real point. If your complaint is fixed, you start complaining about something else, maybe how the complaint was fixed or even that it was fixed...Anything, anything to keep you fighting The Man, man.
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