More Hitchy Goodness

Cap's on a Hitchens roll today, having first e-mailed me the transcription of his verbal undressing of Ronald Reagan Jr. on MSNBC, and then following it up with this column from the Mirror.

In the column, Hitchens responds to George Galloway, who offered some free advice to terrorists the other day, and blames Bush, Blair and the war on terror for the bombings in London.

By George Galloway's logic, British squaddies in Iraq are the root cause of dead bodies at home. How can anyone bear to be so wicked and stupid? How can anyone bear to act as a megaphone for psychotic killers?

Galloway appears able to bear that cross with little trouble at all. In fact, it's a role he seems to relish in, which is astounding when you consider Hitchens' list of Islamic grievances that are used to justify killing wholesale.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won't abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor's liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a licence to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.

The list is indisputable, and as Hitchens' points out "unappeasable." Not one item on the extensive list has a single thing to do with our presence in Iraq. In fact they pre-date our military involvement in the Middle East by more years than I care to count. Furthermore, it is this list of grievances and resulting actions that account for our very presence in the region.

Baldilocks, who probably does not get paid by the inch, sums up the list of grievances much more succinctly.

So it would appear that the only good non-Muslim, non-Arab, non-Islamist is a dead non-Muslim, non-Arab, non-Islamist.

Nevertheless, the anti-war left is currently in the process of boiling off any details and history that do not fit into a most decidedly un-nuanced, and overly simplistic "it's all Bush's fault," campaign slogan.

If there weren't so much on the line, if the security of the free world and the freedom of the Middle East were not very much at stake, it would almost be funny. Unfortunately these thing are at stake, and the left's obsession with minimizing, or eliminating, the factors involved, and playing politics with the outcome is not funny at all.

Not even a little bit.

Cross-posted at: Patriots For Bush