Peculiar pathologies

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

One of the most peculiar pathologies of Western elites is carrying on this apparent romance with non-Westerners who dislike the West, while spurning those who admire it. The feminist pro-Western critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was recently disinvited from speaking at Brandeis University. Earlier, Columbia University had welcomed the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an unhinged anti-Jewish and anti-American theocrat. Apparently hating America made Ahmadinejad the more interesting speaker; liking America made Hirsi Ali suspect and certainly less romantically revolutionary. How odd that for campus communities, being the victim of forced genital mutilation makes one less sympathetic than a man who had ordered the deaths of female supposed adulteresses.

After the September 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, President Obama, along with many in his administration, falsely blamed the killing of Americans on a right-wing Egyptian video-maker residing on American soil. Neither Obama nor high-ranking members of his administration mentioned the real culprits: an al-Qaeda affiliate that had pre-planned the terrorist attacks to glorify the 9/11 anniversary. Obama himself went on to declare, “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet Mohammed.”

That self-serving proclamation was an especially regrettable thing for the President of the United States to say, for a variety of reasons. Obama knew from intelligence briefings that the video-maker Nakoula Nakoula was not the catalyst for the attack. More importantly, Nakoula, quite unlike the radical Islamist killers, did not manifest his anger at his enemies through multiple murders.

The most lonely occupation in the world right now is that of the genuine reformer who is trapped under autocracy, risking his life to damn the madness in his midst, while being ignored by the West that he so genuinely admires.

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