Friday, September 08, 2006

How valuable is public opinion,...

especially international public opinion? At ChicagoBoyz Helen and (commenter veryretired), in How Valuable Is Public Opinion?, does an excellent job of describing the issues involved with polling, unthinking (useful idiot) and intentional fith columnists, and just plain, muddleheaded "leave me out of it" and "if only there was a different US president" attitudes.

Compare the thoughtful and thought provoking essay by Helen to this bit of vacuous claptrap "commentary" (Lost Love) by Hendrik Hertzberg in that bastion of the Presse Ancienne, The New Yorker.

Then think about all this in the context of Samuel Huntington's famous assertion that Islam has bloody borders (evident in any number of reports from any number of spots on the globe, but let's pick Thailand out of a hat - ht StrategyPage via Instapundit). Islam doesn't only have bloody borders. Islam is spurting blood all over everything, everywhere.

Why am I supposed to care, let alone base my votes upon, what some vegetable hauler in Slovenia thinks about why Muslems kill people? Worse yet, why should I care about the opinions of murdering Islamofascists who blame their hatred and the misery they cause on "Jews" or "Israel" or "America". When's the last time some murdering Islamofascist in Thailand set eyes on a Jew or, for that matter, and American - or even their favorite excuse, a Palestinian? What are the chances that more than 5% of the murdering fascists in Thailand, of Sri Lanka, or Waziristan, or anywhere they bleat out their vile dogma, could find Palestine, or Israel, or the Unites States on a world map? How many of them have ever seen a world map or given a few minutes thought to anything about the world, other than the infidels available for killing, outside their own little slice of hell?

I don't give a rat's ass about "World Opinion", Mr. Hertzberg. Far too many "World Citizens" don't give anything any more thought than you do.

Oh, yeah, and thank you, Helen.

UPDATE: Thomas Lifson, with a bit of dark humor, has an article titled Now the truth about 9/11 can come out at American Thinker. The article is a short commentary on the Sweetness & Light article, 9/11 Hijackers Wanted To Avenge… Bosnia!

I have no way to ascertain the accuracy of such a thing, but S&L tells us that the Al Qaeda video recently shown by Aljezeera has footage of

[T]wo of the 19 Islamists who took part in the attacks, Saudi nationals Hamza al-Ramdi and Wael el-Shemari... said that their actions were inspired by an urge to avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya.


To which S&L gives the oddly necessary response of:

That's right.

The hijackers claimed they were going to fly airplanes into important buildings in New York and DC to "avenge the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia and Chechnya."

It is necessary to read (or hear) it twice to overcome that squinting, "Huh? Say what?" feeling it provokes. Mr. Lifson then sums it all up wonderfully:

This is rather stunning. It is also nearly incoherent. The only conclusion I can draw is that there is a foul brew of hatred and envy, a melange of assorted grievances on behalf of Muslims from which various individuals draw their revenge fantasies.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Knuck:

I was once on a job in Latin America where a local engineer told me he didn't like Jews very much. Of course in the next breath he admitted he had never actually met one.

We have to win without caring what a Slovakian grocer thinks - or of what French enarque functionaries living on the Ile St. Louis think of us. We have to win in spite of them.

Well, of course we must care what they think - and care about what they do. But we must not care about their vilification of us. We must see that for what it is. That was my larger point in my comments to MHA's post "Why things will get worse before they get better".

Winning in spite of them means a very different US media and intellectual climate than the one we have today. It means a massive societal change within our elites.

Rick Ballard said...

"It means a massive societal change within our elites."

I would argue that the constitution of the elites has already changed significantly. The accusation by the Socialist Democrats that Republicans are "divisive" is probably the clearest indication. Elites which cannot be relied upon to deliver a coherent world view that a clear majority finds appealing enough to award with power are no longer elite.

It's true that the MSM and academe have not responded to the new elites as yet but the MSM is in an economic death spiral that will not be broken unless they do respond. The situation within academia is somewhat murkier, as it is not responsive to market forces or political power in its most obvious form but the number of true macademian nutters seems to be dropping - at least they seem to be a bit quieter at the moment.

As to having to "win on our own" - probably true but unlikely to occur prior to suffering a blow strong enough to demand retaliation at a level that would prove unacceptable today. Directly targeting the imams, mullahs and Saudi princes who are still financing and directing terrorism isn't politically feasible at the moment. At some point it will be and the surviving leaders of the death cult will seek other amusement.

Anonymous said...

Ah, he lives! Good to know.

Rick, you are correct in that the elites are no longer what they once were. But they still have enormous power, especially in the educational establishment and in the media. The blogs and generational change may have caused the flywheel to slow a bit, but the flywheel is awfully big.

As to having to "win on our own" - probably true but unlikely to occur prior to suffering a blow strong enough to demand retaliation at a level that would prove unacceptable today. Directly targeting the imams, mullahs and Saudi princes who are still financing and directing terrorism isn't politically feasible at the moment...

A blow, in itself, may or may not be enough. We would also need the tools to get by without the Bentley-driving Saudi princelings, meaning vastly more energy production here at home, which means we should be happy to see offshore oil rigs sprouting on the horizon instead of becoming apoplectic at the thought, and the willingness to see the job done right over many years. Still some distance away.

Barry Dauphin said...

So much for trying to help the Bosnian Muslims. Why not just fly a jet into Belgrade?