Glenn Greenwald is an angry little man fighting an endless war on the war on terror. Every extremist group has its extremists and Greenwald is considered on the edge by even much of the left.
Greenwald’s view of the free world is as polarized and simplistic as anything you will find among the cave dwellers of Afghanistan. America is a force of pure evil. A new Nazi Germany terrorizing Muslims for no legitimate reason at all. Israel is the Little Satan. European countries are Medium Satans, depending on how many Muslims they’re bombing at a given time.
What sets Greenwald apart is his tediously monomaniacal quality. Where other leftists at least pretend to do something besides rant about the Military-Industrial Complex and occasionally show some flexibility on an issue or two, such as Mali, Greenwald plays the Stalinist, the cold warrior of a new war who will never bend and never say a nice thing about the Great Satan in all its forms.
The Manichean worldview of the Greenwalds descends into Great Satan theology in which nothing can be the fault of the terrorists, because everything is already the fault of America. In a single article, Greenwald blames America for
1. Supporting the Mali government
2. Destabilizing the Mali government
3. Arming the Mali rebels
4. Helping bomb the Mali rebels
5. Causing more terrorism by being the cause of everything wrong with the world
There is no room for Al Qaeda to do anything, because in Greenwald’s world, America is already a kind of incompetent evil deity who has already done everywhere.
Like most of the Anti-War Left, Greenwald is unwilling to engage with the topic of Islamic terrorism, even as he writes countless articles about the War on Terror. It’s a little like dedicating your career to writing about firefighters without ever discussing arson.
When Greenwald does mention Islamic terrorists, they exist only as blowback or moral equivalence. America bombs people. So does Al Qaeda. Case closed at the court of moral idiocy.
There is no doubt that the Malian rebels have engaged in all sorts of heinous atrocities (“amputations, flogging, and stoning to death for those who oppose their interpretation of Islam”), but so, too, have Malian government forces
This single paragraph, coming at the very end of another of Glenn Greenwald’s marathon screeds, is his only concession to the actual reason for the Mali bombing. And it’s followed by the usual moral equivalence. The Mali rebels kill people. So does the Mali government.
Does the Mali government forced women to stay in their homes on pain of being flogged? Not a topic that Greenwald wants to discuss because his pro-Jihadist moral equivalence won’t hold up so well once the details are dealt with.
Furthermore the Mali rebels are not really rebels, many if not most of them are foreign Jihadists, part of Al Qaeda’s world tour. But again that damages the indigenous rebels narrative that Greenwald and the Anti-War left rely on.
“As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers – over the last four years alone – have bombed and killed Muslims – after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Philippines.”
But is this key context really? And if it is key context, then what does it mean?
For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism.
Greenwald implies then that the West is at war with Islam. But are these wars that the West began or are these wars that Islamists have begun against the West?
For that matter, Libya was an intervention that the Muslim world largely supported. And including the Philippines is stretching things even by Greenwald’s standards.
The one thing that Greenwald does not mention is Al Qaeda, despite Mali being a conflict centered around it. The evil of the United States, in all its incarnations, is always present in a Greenwald screed, but Al Qaeda, the central player is absent.
Like a man who always writes about firefighters rushing to the scenes of fires, but never about the arsonists, Glenn Greenwald has nothing to say about Al Qaeda. Nothing besides the same old circular claim. Blowback. America created Al Qaeda. Then America bombs Al Qaeda.
But America didn’t create Al Qaeda. Yet the Anti-War American Left helps sustain Al Qaeda, fights to free its terrorists from Gitmo, protects their rights and fights the drones that kill them.
The Anti-War Left has enlisted on Al Qaeda’s side, while doing its best to avoid any mention of the name.
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