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Paul Berman, a so-called "liberal hawk," is back on the New York Times op-ed page today selling his particular brand of snake oil (annotated version here). You'd think this ideologue, whose left-leaning pro-war views were often sought out by editorial page editors in the run-up to the invasion to balance...well, all the right-leaning pro-war views, might be hanging his head in embarrassment at the current debacle. But no, he urges us to stay the course to combat his particular bugbear, Islamofascism. Based on his scholarly "discovery" of a sort of Islamic Mein Kampf written by an obscure theologian named Sayyid Qutb, Berman believes that all the diverse Muslim peoples (Arabs, Persians, Pakistanis) can be--are being--united by a paranoid millenarian philosophy that will eventually overcome all sectarian, nationalistic differences and cause Mohammed's followers to goose-step as one. So powerful is this "death-loving" cult that it even includes secular states such as (the former) Baathist Iraq.
By inventing a Unified Menace to replace the Soviet Union in the popular imagination Berman was helping, prior to the invasion, to do the intellectual heavy lifting for a belligerent and not-so-brainy Administration; now his role is to develop the fallback position after our failure to find WMDs. Which is: although Saddam wasn't involved with 9/11 (and wasn't an Islamist) he contributed to the Islamofascist "atmosphere" that made the attacks possible. Just so it's clear: we went to war and have lost almost 700 soldiers and killed 10,000 Iraqis because of the "atmosphere" emanating from the country. In his polemic for imposing liberal democracy by force, Berman never gives a hint that Muslims might reasonably fear people who offhandedly refer to actions in Islamic countries as "crusades" or have a military presence spanning such territories called "the footprint." Or who abet the taking of Muslim land by signing off on egregious policies of settlement, wall building, and "annexation" in the West Bank.
several more new drawings here (click thumbs for enlarged versions).
My Complete Musical Works in MP3 Form
1998 - present
1. Scratch Ambulance [3.75MB]
2. Phil's Revenge (TM vs Ectomorph) [2.65MB]
3. Brakin' 1 [1.86MB]
4. Brakin' 2 [2.03MB]
5. Calypsum (TM vs M. Mayer) [3.27MB]
6. Migrant Song [2.29MB]
7. Streetsong (TM vs 8BCS) [2.84MB]
8. Eins Zwei Drei [1.37MB]
9. Eins Zwei Drei (Melody) [1.05MB]
10. Monster Scales [1.25MB]
11. Robot Landscape [3.5MB]
1988
1. Arpeggiasm [1.76MB]
2. Dance of the Nematodes [2.18MB]
3. Lament for a Treefrog [1.22MB]
4. Life in the Mortuary [0.75MB]
5. Pass the Amphetamines [1.03MB]
6. Spring Has Sprang [0.83MB]
7. The Organist Died [0.59MB]