Monday, March 19, 2007

I completely agree with Christopher Hitchens about Iraq.

Bret Stephens has an article in the Wall Street Journal on the unholy alliance between the Islamist reactionaries and the European Left. Key paragraphs:

For Muslim voters in Europe, the attractions of the Socialists are several. Socialists have traditionally taken a more accommodating approach to immigrants and asylum-seekers than their conservative rivals. They have championed the welfare state and the benefits it offers poor newcomers. They have promoted a multiculturalist ethos, which in practice has meant respecting Muslim traditions even when they conflict with Western values. In foreign policy, Socialists have often been anti-American and, by extension, hostile to Israel. That hostility has only increased as Muslim candidates have joined the Socialists' electoral slates and as the Muslim vote has become ever more crucial to the Socialists' electoral margin.

More mysterious, however, at least as a matter of ideology, has been the dalliance of the progressive left with the (Islamic) political right. Self-styled progressives, after all, have spent the past four decades championing the very freedoms that Islam most opposes: sexual and reproductive freedoms, gay rights, freedom from religion, pornography and various forms of artistic transgression, pacifism and so on. For those who hold this form of politics dear, any long-term alliance with Islamic politics ultimately becomes an ideological, if not a political, suicide pact. One cannot, after all, champion the cause of universal liberation in alliance with a movement that at its core stands for submission.

Jay Nordlinger says in National Review:

You have to ask which the American president should be more worried about: correct policy or the approval of Le Monde. They don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Beyond which, when we say “Europe,” what do we mean? There is more to that continent than Frenchmen, Belgians, and David Cameron. When Eastern European leaders spoke out in favor of the U.S., Jacques Chirac said they were not “bien élevés” — that they were not well brought up — and that they “missed a great opportunity to shut up.” He further called them “infantile.” Frankly, I would rather appeal to a Czech or two than to Jacques Chirac. (You should hear Vaclav Havel on America.) Look: Trying to get Europeans to like you is a) a fool’s errand and b) not a fit concern for a U.S. president, particularly in war.

Meanwhile, some idiot in the Guardian justifies Iran's nuclear program and calls on the West to accept an Iranian bomb.

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