Saturday, July 07, 2007

Frum & Perle: Twenty-Nine

Are these liberals talking about, let us say, Texans, or are these neoconservatives talking about Arab nations?

Enrich them enough that they can afford satellite television and Internet connections, so that they can see what life is like [...]across the Atlantic. Then sentence them to live in choking, miserable, polluted cities ruled by corrupt, incompetent officials. [...] Subordinate them to elites who have suddenly become incalculably wealthy from shady dealings involving petroleum resources that supposedly belong to all. Tax them for the benefit of governments that provide nothing in return except military establishments that lose every war they fight[.] Reduce their living standards year after year for two decades. Deny theme [sic] any forum or institution [...] where they may freely discuss their grievances. Kill, jail, corrupt, or drive into exile every political figure, artist, or intellectual who could articulate a modern alternative[.] Neglect, close, or simply fail to create an effective school system -- so that the minds of the next generation are formed entirely by clerics whose own minds contain nothing but medieval theology and a smattering of [...]nationalist self-pity. Combine all this, and what else would one expect to create but an enraged populace ready to transmute every frustration in its frustrating daily life into a fanatical hatred of everything "un-Islamic" [American]?


Brackets are mine, italics theirs. From AETE, pgs 160-161.

How sympathetic they are to the Arabs! Almost liberal! But, seriously, the horrors they describe in Arab nations are something they fail to recognize as very similar to what wingnuts hope to create -- and have indeed to a large degree created -- in America.