The key question for westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they're incapable of defending it when it's imperiled - or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled.
- Bruce Bawer on the western response to terrorism
2 comments:
Terrorism is not a threat per se. The reaction to terrorist acts can be.
Terrorism only threatens our freedom if we choose to let it do so, if we allow our fear to motivate us to abandon our core values. As we did, I would suggest, in that years following 9/11.
"The key question for westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them?"
This is that same canard we've been hearing for 8 years. "They hate us for our freedom."
What bunk. They hate us largely because we've forced our way into their countries and extracted their resources, while giving them as little as possible for them and supported autocratic regimes that enforce poverty and serfdom.
I find it amazing that people have such a low sense of self-esteem that they can't allow themselves to think they have done anything to engender the animosity that much of the world feels towards us.
Sure, there is a lot of class envy. But that is not what is motivating the terrorist acts that we are experiencing. To think otherwise is to engage in a profound self-delusion that does nothing to encourage any changes in our economic policy that would have a chance of rooting out the causes for the anger we see expressed.
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