I was indulging my bad habit of listening to right wing talk radio the other day when I heard Colonel Oliver North, spouting off about the Muslim threat to our security.
He spoke as if Shia and Sunni were not even now killing each other, as if there were some monolithic Islamic entity intent on reviving the caliphate and yoking us all under Sharia law.
He even said that Tehran was the epicenter of this Islamic threat.
Huh? Wait a minute. Isn’t this the Colonel North who once was convicted of selling arms to the Ayotollahs to fund the Reagan administration’s illegal funding of the Nicarauguan contras? And for lying to Congress? (The convictions were later thrown out on a technicality, ironically through the intervention of the American Civil Liberties Union).
Apparently Colonel North assumes that America suffers from collective amnesia.
And given the record, who can blame him?
Hey, like everybody else in America, he was “converted” to anti-Islamic Bigotry on 9-11-2001!
It takes intellectuals like you and me to sort out the chaos that is Islamic theology to find the often hidden, rather rare coprolite of Islamic Terrorism.
It is the right’s great weakness that they want to see monolithic entities where there are none. After 9/11, Bush and his men wanted to see the world much as it was during the Cold War, with Good countries and Bad countries. They couldn’t accept what M from Skyfall so readily accepted. The bad guys aren’t countries. They’re individuals.