Today’s MUST-READ (but as usual only in addition to this blog, the threads in our discussion forums, and our columnists) is an essay by Orson Scott Card called The Riots of the Faithful (hat tip: Exile).
It takes about 12 minutes to read but it’s an easy-to-read and beautifully-written piece.
Here’s some extended highlights from it but there’s way too much good stuff in it to bait you adequately here.
Our country is at war. And it’s a war in which victory absolutely depends on the Muslim world perceiving it as a war between the U.S. and its allies on one side, and fanatical murderous terrorists on the other.
If it is ever perceived as a war against Islam, then we have lost. The world has lost.
So during such a difficult time, even people who think the Iraq War or even the whole war on terror is a horrible mistake still have an obligation of loyalty to the nation that offers them protection, prosperity, and freedom.
I mean, what kind of idiot breaks a hole in the hull of his boat during a storm, just because he doesn’t like the guy at the tiller and thinks the storm could have been avoided?
Even if the allegations about Quran desecration were completely and absolutely verified, why in the world would you publish the information during wartime? It’s not that the Media themselves regard the Quran as sacred. It’s just paper to them. And surely they would have to agree that if such actions might somehow gain the cooperation of a potential source of useful information (though that seems extremely unlikely to me), it would be infinitely preferable to physical torture.
But they dwell so blindly within the cocoon of their sheltered world, where it’s just awful for somebody to offend “multicultural” people (though just fine to be openly vicious to American Christians or Israeli Jews), that it doesn’t occur to them that they could just keep their mouths shut and avoid damaging America and putting Americans all over the world in danger.
[…] After all, who benefits from the publication of such a story at this time?
Only one group: People who want to bring down or weaken President Bush and everything he stands for, no matter the cost.
[…] And yet the irony is that the reason the radical Islamists hate the West so much is primarily because of the unchecked and uncheckable excesses of the Smartish. From Hollywood to newspeople to the soft-subject professors in our universities, the culture that makes people like Osama bin Laden want to blow us up or crush us into dust is the culture of the R-rated movie, the anti-religion intellectual, the glorified abortionist, the babies-without-marriage crowd, and the what-me-worry media elite.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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