Iranian criminals
: In the Tehran Times, Ayatollah Khamenei says America is in league with “Zionist crimes” and calls for an oil embargo against Israel and its allies (read: us). It gets better/worse:
On Bush’s calling the Palestinians “terrorist” the Leader asked, “Can a nation which has been a victim of Israeli suppression and crimes for years and sends its young people out to defend them be called terrorist?… Referring to the failure of Adolph Hitler’s Nazism and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the Leader said that the U.S. logic of the bully was doomed to failure too.
So this is Iranian logic: A nation that straps bombs to its young to murder cannot be called terrorist but we can be likened to Hitler? What oil-soaked slime they are.
The Age of Emotions
: The keyword of this war has become “humiliation.”
In their often-pathetic effort to find tit-for-tat criticism of the Israelis for retaliating against Palestinian suicide-murderers, the Pope, The New York Times, and now even the President have complained that Israeli is “humliating” Palestinians and have urged them to stop.
Humiliation is suddenly a sin akin to murder — even sending your own children to murder, even accepting money for their deaths. In what world is humiliation equivalent to terrorism? In a world where emotions matter most.
It’s not happening just in the Middle East, of course. Emotions rule America.
This is now a country where politicians and artists and educators and business people who “offend” can come under attack from anyone — leftie PC harpies or rightie fundamentalist loons — and lose their jobs.
Listen to the streets, where “disrespect” is a verb and a justification for a fight.
“Humiliation,” “offense,” “disrespect” — these are only emotions. But we’ve made them real. We’ve made them weapons.
Calling Dr. Freud! Calling Dr. Freud! Look what you have done:
A century of therapy and psychoshit has brought us to the Age of Emotions, when feelings — not intelligence, not reason, not law, not morality, not ethics — but self-centered feelings can drive political discourse and even war.
It’s time to take the world off the couch and off its meds and wake up to the obvious: Terrorism and murder and terrorists and murderers are permanently evil and they don’t get time off that sentence because their feelings are hurt; they can’t use that as an excuse to commit their evils.
To hell with the emotions of the terrorists. And I don’t give a damn if that offends you.
Instapundit v. Economist
: I side with Instapundit. Glenn Reynolds is quite right when he complains about this line in The Economist:
Yet Palestine does not fit the September 11th template. For this is terrorism harnessed to a deserving cause: the independent statehood that America itself has taken pains to say it supports.
There is no mitigating factor that justifies terrorism.
Now that we are a victim of mass terrorism, we should understand that in our very soul.
I even got into a fight with my minister about this and he recalled it just this weekend: He, like others, says that the conditions the Palestinians have lived in and their goal for a state are sympathetic. But that has absolutely no relation to their actions of late. Can anything justify selling your children to murder? Could anything justify the Holocaust. Of course not.
