Ignoring History

The ubiquitous Glenn Greenwald has a good catch from Roger Simon, pissing in his PJ's over the idea that Muslims are going to conquer America and destroy all our rights, even our right to listen to music! Why didn't anyone tell me this earlier? Looks like it's time to kill me some brown people.

As Simon describes us:
They act as if the threat is not real and is only a blip caused by a post 9/11 overreaction by George Bush, thus ignoring virtually all of Western history since the year 800, not to mention the overwhelming demographic changes of recent decades.

Virtually all of Western history for the past twelve hundred years has been about us fighting Muslims?? Really?? What history has he been reading? I guess Columbus and the discovery of the New World didn't count for anything? The Reformation and Enlightenment were just afterthoughts? It was really the Nazis and Soviets who were the historical blips? Or am I just too dumb to understand how each of these isn't directly tied to our eternal struggle with Muslims? The Napoleonic Wars, the fight over slavery, the fricking Norman Conquest of England; all minor events in our twelve hundred year struggle against Muslim tyranny? My god, where the hell has this guy been?

These fruits have always been a joke, but their tunnel-vision on finding rationalizations of their idiotic plans has really gone way too far. Is there anything they won't say? I doubt it.

Unprincipled Lectures

And all this isn't even to mention that his entire premise is wrong. Liberals aren't ignoring the threat of Islam. Sure, I guess we've been ignoring this threat of an actual invasion of America; but seeing as how terrorism really isn't much of an invading tactic, I'm not so sure we're wrong in this. But we're not allies to Muslim extremists. If he'd bother paying attention, he'd know that we're actually hostile to their anti-woman attitudes and always have been. Just as we're hostile to it in extremist conservatives.

But even that's one of the myths perpetrated against liberals; as if we're only against white male Christians who want to turn America into a theocracy. But it's not just them. We're against anyone who wants these things. The separation of church and state isn't a cheap ploy to hurt Christians. We mean it. And that's one of the underlying problems with these people: They think we're like them. They don't have principles. They don't stand for anything but themselves. For them, principles are excuses you use to push your agenda. And concepts like "freedom" are nothing more than rationalizations that are tossed away like used toilet paper as soon as they become inconvenient. And that's what they imagine we're doing, because they don't even understand what principles are.

And that's exactly how they can write complete crap, such as suggesting that virtually all history since the birth of Islam has involved us fighting off their invasion of us. Because they lack higher values that would prevent them from saying such embarrassing tripe. They'll say and do whatever they need to in order to get what they want. Because that's the only principle they understand. And so Simon dreams up this embarrassing argument, somehow imagining that it might convince anyone to switch sides and start supporting a war that is only undermining the very struggle Simon believes he's supporting.

But his war really isn't even against Muslims. His war is convincing people that he's right. And while it is quite likely that we'll finally get terrorism down to a relatively benign level (after Bush leaves office, of course); Simon will never truly prevail in his war. Some things truly are impossible, no matter how much history you're able to ignore.