ABOUT THAT TERRORIST WORLDVIEW…. When Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter get together for an interview on Fox News, I realize there’s no point in fact-checking their discussion. The madness-per-syllable ratio is just too daunting to bother.
But Media Matters noted that Coulter argued that liberals “would like to live with the terrorists. They agree about America.” While this is obviously blisteringly stupid, it’s probably worth noting how backwards this is.
I’ve followed this for a quite a while, because I’ve always been fascinated by the extent to which far-right criticism of Americans runs parallel to terrorists’ criticism of Americans.
Dinesh D’Souza, for example, wrote an entire book devoted to arguing that terrorists are right about the problems with the culture in the United States. Osama bin Laden and other dangerous Islamic radicals believe the U.S. is too secular, too permissive, too diverse, too free, and too tolerant — and D’Souza concluded that they’re absolutely correct. Indeed, D’Souza went so far as to argue that liberal Americans are to blame for 9/11 — the left invited the attacks by reinforcing the beliefs al Qaeda had about the United States.
In one particularly memorable episode of “The Colbert Report,” D’Souza conceded that he finds some of the critiques from radical, anti-American extremists persuasive.
Glenn Beck, at the time with CNN, came to the same conclusion:
“More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.
“The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.
“Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.”
And a few months later, the Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan also seemed to agree with our enemies about America: “We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good.”
So when Coulter argues that liberals “would like to live with the terrorists” because we “agree about America,” it’s hard not to notice that it’s not the left that finds the violent extremists’ worldview compelling.
