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There are those (e.g. Susan Sontag) who criticize
American foreign policy and claim that we Americans "brought it on ourselves".
Those people, who are mostly left of center, pro-Palestinian and
anti-capitalist, should consider this analogy: Under current U.S. law, abortions and other forms of birth control are legal. There are fundamentalist groups all over the country which are fanatically and religiously opposed to abortion as a form of murder of the unborn. They have harassed patients; they have threatened and harassed abortion clinic employees at their place of work and in their homes. They have even shot at employees and one or two doctors have been murdered. They have burned down abortion clinics. Suppose one of these groups crashed a plane into a high rise building in New York City as an act of protest against abortion. By lefty logic, it would be the fault of American public policy for supporting abortion. We should therefore ban abortion and appease the terrorists. This will eliminate their reason to act violently. I say this: Violence against the innocent is never justified. I have no simple answers to the violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories, except that the Israeli settlers should be pulled out of there into Israel proper unless they and their parents and grandparents actually are from there, as opposed to Zionist extremists from New York. As for the Islamic fundamentalists, I believe they are misguided zealots and fools, and the despots of the Islamic world, including even Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Qaddafi and Syria's al-Asad, must all be secretly delighted to see the Taliban and al Queda being smashed by the Americans. The Chinese and the Russians can only be pleased to see the extremists being put down, despite their public criticisms of the U.S. The Indians should be relieved as well, as should Pakistan's military government. As usual, the Americans do the dirty police work of the world while most of the others publicly fume and lament and privately celebrate. |