Monday, July 25, 2005

Denial and Delusion, Part II

From the Jerusalem Post:

We, the nations of the world, are in a strange war. It is strange because its outcome hinges primarily on whether the side being attacked will admit that war has been declared against it and decides to fight back.

The 9/11 attacks were the culmination of years of Western denial, despite devastating attacks over many years directed at Americans and others. If the pre-9/11 level of denial was, in retrospect, surprising, the post-9/11 refusal to recognize the war that we are in is even more striking.

How many "9/11s" does the world have to experience before we get it? A seemingly offhand sentence in The New York Times news report of the horrific bombings in Sharm e-Sheikh yesterday, killing over 80 people, perhaps inadvertently illustrates how widely the current conflict is misunderstood.

"The bombings provided a gruesome coda to a week in which suicide bombers had threatened cities from Iraq to Britain to Egypt, lending to the impression of a rising tide of terror spilling from the conflicts of the region." [emphasis added].

Yes, the terror epidemic seems to have returned.

But in reality, it never left. And it is not spillover from "conflicts in the region" but from the refusal to systematically address a particularly potent epidemic: of the symbiotic/parasitic relationship between militant Islam and the dictatorships of the Muslim world

Just what I was saying the other day. Shall we decide that we are all in this together, unite for victory and and fight back with all that we have? Or will some persist in their denial and delusion?

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