“If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory.”Iran, he said, wants to impose “radical Islam” on the world and sees the United States as its greatest enemy because it is “the guardian of Western civilization and the world’s greatest power.”He argued that Iran-backed militias like Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, whatever their aggression against Israel, are actually fighting a different war.“Israel is merely a tool,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The main war, the real war, is with America.”
It's definitely true that Iran has been about destroying America from its beginning, and that it aspires to turn the whole world to its brand of Twelver Shi'ite Islam, which can reasonably be described as a radical position within Islam (both Twelver Shi'ite views and the view that the entire world needs to be brought under that particular strain; the view that the whole world should convert to Islam is not especially radical, any more than the view among Christians that every person will someday confess the divinity of Christ).
Normally, in American politics at least, the other side would attempt to rebut such a central claim. Not this time! This time they pulled down the American flags off Union Station's poles and burned them, ran up the flag of Palestine, carried the black flag of ISIS with signs stating that Allah was bringing about "the final solution" (supposedly while protesting against 'genocide'), burned effigies of both Netanyahu and Biden, attacked the police perimeter around the Capitol while successfully storming the Capitol (remember how fighting the Capitol Police and storming the Capitol on J6 was portrayed as an insurrection against America itself?), vandalized every American monument nearby and generally did all they could to underline the same point.
So ok, maybe there's some reasonable argument to make that things would calm down if there was a ceasefire in the war -- at least for a while, until Hamas rearmed and was ready to start the war back up again on its own terms. There isn't, apparently, any real debate that the side Israel is fighting is also an enemy of America. They themselves would like you to know that, would like to demonstrate it as clearly as they can.
Helping your friends and harming your enemies was the account of justice that Plato's Republic attempted to rebut. However, one of the key rebuttals was that you might be mistaken about who your enemies are. At least in this case, it's hard to believe there's any mistake.
UPDATE: NPR: Protests “Largely Peaceful.”
14 comments:
"Our enemies are your enemies."
I get the impression that a substantial proportion of progressives/liberals/Democrats consider a MAGA Republican more of an enemy than a Mullah.
So you think they're acting on the principle that 'the enemy of my enemy is a friend'?
Depending on their ideology, or cynicism, they very well might. After all, all Muslims are, purportedly, victims of the west, and the Republicans and western civ are corrupt and unjust. So siding with the pro-Hamas faction might seem to the the more virtuous act, no matter what the Hamas supporters do.
LittleRed1
So you think they're acting on the principle that 'the enemy of my enemy is a friend'?
In part, yes. Note that they do not realize that the Mullahs consider all the US their enemy.
A big part of it is that there is a substantial part of the Democrats/progressives/liberals that is not very knowledgeable about international politics, nor interested in learning more about it, and as a result view international politics as merely an extension of domestic politics. International politics is merely another place to display their virtue signaling.
Recall Michael Moore's reaction to 9/11: Dear Osama Bin Laden: as New Yorkers hate George W Bush, you shouldn't have destroyed the Twin Towers.
For decades, I have been appalled at the ignorance of "virtuous" lefties about Latin America. This virtuous ignorance continues today. Many college students demonstrating in favor of Palestine who, when asked to identify the river and the sea in "From the river to the sea," have no idea what river and what sea the Palis are referring to.
Yes. Democrats (I'm looking at you, Pelosi) have been doing that since at least the second Bush administration.
I recall a few conservative commentators in 2003 insisting it should be Iran we invaded, not the other two. Could be.
I always held that if we were playing a smart long game that we could actually count on following through on, invading the surrounding countries to Iran (Iraq and Afghanistan) could have been smart and productive. But we aren't good at playing long games, are we?
Heck, that might even have worked better as a short game.
[Netanyahu] sees the United States as its greatest enemy because it is “the guardian of Western civilization
Based on the elected 'leadership' of this country since about LBJ's time, that argument is near-impossible to make. As rhetoric, it's fine. As fact? Hardly.
After all, all Muslims are, purportedly, victims of the west
Recall that the Muzzies have been invading the West since about 1528. Yet we are told that "invaders are victims." What a world.
Much, much longer than that, Dad29. At the least, Muslim armies conquered most of Spain in the early 700s and were not completely kicked out until 1492. They invaded France, but got hammered in 732 at the Battle of Tours (AKA Battle of Poitiers -- and I couldn't resist the pun). On the other side of the West, Muslim threats to the Western Roman Empire led to the First Crusade in 1096.
However, if we look at Christian territories and not just at the West per se, Muslims began invading Christian lands in the Middle East and North Africa in the 620s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_the_Levant
This is an interesting account of one of the survivors of the Muslim slave raids on Iceland in 1627.
https://www.amazon.com/Travels-Reverend-Olafur-Egilsson-Barbary/dp/0813228697
On the other hand......
The Left's Hate On Religion screeds include a statement to the effect that 'all wars are religious wars' (with ALL being rhetorical, not factual.)
However, any accurate reading of Western history shows that wars are almost always about booty and/or territory. Religion may have been used as an ignitor, but rarely as the sole rationale.
Thus a question: were the Muhammedan/Saracen invasions "religious" or "territorial/booty" invasions? Deeper: was the Koran written in such a way as to mandate booty/territory invasions as "religious"?
Religious justifications for acts of war are often what I call, in Aristotelian terms, 'necessary accidents.' They're accidents because the justification will differ depending on which religion is involved; Catholic IRA partisans will justify terrorism in different terms from Sunni Muslims, for example.
They're necessary because acts of war are often horrible things to do, and moral people can only engage in them if they feel there is a sufficient justification rooted in their highest faith. Since the most effective fighters are moral people -- they have virtues like courage and self-mastery -- you can't really fight a war effectively without developing religious arguments if your soldiery is drawn from a religious people. (Communists and other atheists have to substitute philosophical arguments that are similarly rooted in their highest principles.)
It is true that structurally the arguments are easier to make because of the fact that the Islamic tradition was born in a war, and thus embraces acts of war for the faith as good in its basic texts. Averroes argued that jihad was a kind of double-good, because it was both a spiritual good (making the world safe for Islam) and a material good (slaves and loot). In fact he argued that a sufficient respect for women meant that they should also be allowed to fight in jihad and capture goods and slaves of their own; he was motivated in that by his reading of Plato, who argues in several places for equality of military service among qualified men and women. (Plato supported an equality of those with the qualifications, i.e. not equal numbers of men and women, but the best fighters selected from both men and women, so the women would really be in the top percentiles instead of just the top half.)
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