THOSE WHO ARE ‘SYMPATHETIC’ TO THE TERRORISTS’ ‘CAUSE’…. Perhaps hoping shocking comments will help reverse his ratings slide, Glenn Beck said something especially interesting yesterday. The logic was a little hard to follow, but the host was trying to make the case to his radio audience that President Obama ignores challenges on purpose due to some kind of anti-American sentiment he harbors.
Beck eventually argued:
“[H]ere is the point on that. I believe that’s because [the [president] just sees us as the oppressor nation. He just sees us as a nation who is and has oppressed the Native Americans and, and the Muslim communities around the world. And so he’s – he’s – he’s not with the terrorists, I’m not saying that, but he is sympathetic to their cause.”
Beck soon after walked that back a little when even his co-host wouldn’t endorse the sentiment. Beck went on to say, “I’m not saying that he’s sympathetic with people blowing people up,” only that Obama “sympathizes that America has done some bad things.”
As Beck nonsense goes, this is fairly routine. But the argument itself stood out for me because there are some Americans who’ve expressed sympathies for terrorists’ worldview.
For example, there’s Glenn Beck. A few years back, when Beck was still with CNN, here was his take on what terrorists think of the United States.
“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.”
Those were Glenn Beck’s exact words. He considered what radical terrorists think about Americans, and Beck concluded that their criticism of us have merit. He actually agreed with it.
Indeed, this is not an altogether uncommon sentiment among conservatives. Dinesh D’Souza, for example, wrote an entire book devoted to arguing that terrorists are right about the problems with American culture. 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 at least partially 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.
Around the same time, 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.”
I happen to strongly disagree with the right about this, and believe terrorists’ hatred of Americans is misguided. But putting that aside, it’s fascinating to me for Beck to say of the president, “he’s not with the terrorists … but he is sympathetic to their cause,” after Beck himself expressed sympathies for terrorists’ motivations.
Put it this way, there is a potential problem about political observers relating to a terrorist worldview, but it’s not coming from the left.
