Salim Mansur's "Little Eichmanns"

When writing for a newspaper primarily marketed to people who don't know how read, it's amazingly easy to trick people into thinking that you're saying something other that what you actually are. The Toronto Sun so distracts most of it's idiot readership with tits and ass that it blinds them to just how often its allegedly conservative columnists actually agree with the Left and the scumbag jihadi movement.

There was a time not too very long ago when some shithead liberal would imply that the United States was "asking for" the attacks of September 11, 2001, and conservatives would make themselves feel all patriotic by shithammering them directly into public opinion hell. That always made me smile because, far too often, those same conservatives would go on to not just parrot the line of not just the left - albeit from a different perspective - but of the terrorists themselves.

In yesterday's Sun, Salim Mansur does exactly that, although he isn't honest enough to actually say so. And some of his arguments are specious enough to be actually retarded, even for the journalistic shortbus that is the Sun. Mr. Mansur's column goes a long way in providing a moral and ideological  justification for the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people. He reads like a slightly more tan Ward Churchill, although, unlike Churchill, Mansur actually is an Indian.

On 9/11 the U.S., the leading member of the West, was taken by surprise.

It happened once before in living memory.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, a Sunday, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbour and took America by surprise.

There are many differences between these two events set apart by 60 years.

Yet what is interesting to note — and deserving of study at length — is the varying responses of the American government and people to the deliberately planned acts of war against the U.S.

In any relationship or equation, there is at a minimum two entities.

Over the past several years, I have written in my columns about the broken culture of the Arab-Muslim world which is responsible for the sort of politics that eventually led to 9/11.

It might be said terrorism in the name of Islam is the symptom of a civilization wrestling with its own demise.

In the 60 years between the two acts of aggression, the U.S. and the West changed immensely and not necessarily for the better.

The manner in which Imperial Japan was defeated contrasts with the manner in which for the past decade the U.S. and the West, united or in disagreement, have confronted terrorism and violence emanating from the Arab-Muslim world.

Comparing 9/11 to Pearl Harbor is like comparing apples to ... a dead hobo that you found in the woods and poked with a stick.

The only similarity between the two is that the U.S government had every opportunity to recognize that the attacks were coming and maybe do something to prevent them. In the case of Japan, the intelligence wasn't centralized. In the months leading up to 9/11, the intelligence agencies weren't talking to one another. But in both cases, the intelligence was readily available to the government.

If you're even halfway smart, which most modern conservatives seem to think is a sign of moral degeneracy, the analogy stops there. Imperial Japan was, well, an empire. As such, it had vast real estate holdings that were chock full of military targets to bomb. Fundamentalist Islam, on the other hand, is an ideology and terrorism is a tactic. Ideologies and tactics are famously difficult to bomb since they tend to have no fixed address. As much as I'd like to launch a thermonuclear weapon at, say, supply-side economics, I recognize that there's no way to do so, at least with any precision.

In fact, Pearl Harbor wasn't completely unprovoked. Rather, it was a military response to the American oil embargo imposed on Japan after the conquest of Manchuria. In 1941, the United States produced slightly more than half of the world's oil and Japan imported all of theirs, just as they do now. How do you think the U.S would respond to such an embargo against them in the middle of war? As a matter of fact, one of the cases for the first Gulf War was the near total depedence of Arab oil by Europe and Japan

Pearl Harbor was an act of preventative war. Tojo's war council was convinced that America would eventually pose an existential threat to their ambitions, so Japan attempted to deliver a knockout blow first. Their thinking was not unlike that of the Bush administration toward Iraq in 2003. The only difference is that Tojo was right and Bush wasn't.

Mansur's analysis is purposefully ignorant in other ways, as well. For example, it is increasingly not the "Arab-Muslim world" that is fuelling international terrorism. The main reason that Islamist groups so detest the Arab autocracies is because they repressed them so well. There isn't a single Arab government that has embraced fundamentalist Islam as practiced by al-Qaeda because it directly threatens their very survival. Osama bin Laden was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and exiled nearly a decade before 9/11, and Ayman al-Zawahiri was imprisoned and tortured by the Egyptians thirty years ago.

The Islamists, on the other hand, were welcomed with open arms in Africa and South and Central Asia. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were Arabs, to be sure, but none of their primary hosts were. Each and every anti-American plot between the first World Trade Center attack and the second was hatched well away from the Arab world. It was only in the wake of 9/11 that some elements of the al-Qaeda movement appeared in Yemen, which is coincidentally being torn apart by a Great Game between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Even if you can get around Mansur's ahistorical nonsense, you still can't help but be struck by the incredibly warped morality of his central argument.

The overriding reason, I believe, is the extent to which the West has lost confidence in its own cultural values and historical achievements. This is a vast and complicated story.

In the future, some historian of much talent and imagination might sit down to write this story, as Edward Gibbon did to tell the story of the fall and decline of the Roman Empire.

But there were periodically intimations of this story, which went unheeded.
The drift of the West is unmistakable, and its denial is a sign of the problem.

Poets have the uncanny, even prophetic, ability to sense ahead of others things or situations gone awry.

Leonard Cohen, in some of his poetry and songs, has demonstrated this ability that great poets possess.

In the song The Future, released in 1992, Cohen described the malady of the West. He wrote, “Things are going to slide, slide in all directions,” recalling for me W. B. Yeats’ opening lines from The Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …”

Cohen’s most compelling words in this song tell of what went so terribly wrong in the years between 1941 and 2001. This can hardly be discussed these days because the emotions generated drown any sober thought on the matter.

But Cohen prophetically apprehended the source of moral disorder gripping the West.

He wrote, “Give me Christ/or give me Hiroshima/Destroy another fetus now/We don’t like children anyhow/I’ve seen the future, baby: It is murder.”

Can civilizations “don’t like children” survive? After 9/11, there is no denying Cohen’s chilling insight.

I'm sure that Leonard Cohen is thrilled to be used to support an argument that is morally questionable at best, and outright evil at worst.

Firstly, the Islamists don't "hate us for our freedom," and they've never seriously suggested that they do. They're hardly thrilled with things like abortion, gay marriage and gangsta rap, but they're not looking to establish a Caliphate in South Central Los Angeles or Greenwich Village. They want to reimpose the Caliphate that existed before America was discovered at all.

The Takfiris fear and despise the United States because its foreign policy props up the Arab dictators who stand in their way. Even the most anti-American of Middle Eastern governments, Syria, was more than happy to detain and torture terror suspects on behalf of the Clinton, second Bush, and (probably) Obama administrations.

Unless you're an abject dickhead, you recognize that there is no direct line between the Islamic terrorism of the 1970s and 80s and al-Qaeda. Thirty years ago, terrorists were instruments of specific states and tools in furthering their interests. Al-Qaeda abhors the very idea of the state. They have clearly defined geostrategic objectives, and Mansur's idiotic ramblings aside, they have little or nothing to do with the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.

What Salim Mansur, along with certain segments of the American Right, is doing is projecting what they don't like about Western civilization onto the enemy, which is an interesting propaganda tool in that it serves to at least partially justify the enemy's barbaric actions, if not actually endorse them.



In this, Mansur - along with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who said almost exactly the same thing the week of of the 9/11 attacks - are the useful idiots of the fundamentalist Islamic movement. It seems to me that you can't destroy an enemy that you don't understand. To my knowledge, no one in al Qaeda has ever mentioned abortion as a rationale for their actions. Not once. Yet, in imparting their cultural objections onto the terrorists, people like Mansur impede our ability to understand them, which makes effectively combating them almost impossible.

The jihadis probably don't "hate us for our freedom," but it's pretty clear that Salim Mansur does.

I might be the last person in the Western world who doesn't believe that those 3,000 people "shouldn't have worn that dress." They weren't Ward Churchill and Salim Mansur's "Little Eichmanns." They weren't anyone's policy prop. They were just people who had the audacity to go to work or get on a plane on a Tuesday morning in September. But if you believe that our culture invited the attack, it is almost inescapable to reach the conclusion that they were asking for it.