BULBS GO ON ABOVE CERTAIN HEADS – AT 8:29 P.M. ET:  Reader Brian Kuhn writes: 

"Watching ABC News tonight, and for the first time EVER, I’m hearing a report on how these terrorists aren’t just downtrodden, poor, backwoods jihadists, but coming from wealthy families as well, and the reporter goes back to Mohammed Atta, a leader in the 9/11 attack, to make his point, listing name after name since ….
 
"Well, duh."

COMMENT:  Please notice how the leftist propaganda about terrorism parallels the leftist propaganda about domestic crime that was pounded into our ears from the fifties onward.  Criminals?  Why, they're just products of their environment.  They're victims.  If we didn't oppress them, they'd all behave.

And the fact is, a good chunk of America, especially "elite" America, bought it, and continues to buy it, because it sounds so respectable, so intellectual.  So, so un-cop. 

That leftist idea was properly satired in the song, "Officer Krupke," in West Side Story. 

Now we're given the same story, by many on the left, about terrorists, despite Harvard studies that debunked the "victim" idea years ago.  Terrorism is based on an ideology.  Victimhood may be part of it, as long as it feeds the ideology, but the ideology comes first.

By the way, one of the most notorious propagators of the terrorist-as-victim myth is Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, a vastly overrated man who did a pretty good job in the battle against apartheid, but has, in recent decades, often been an apologist for leftist theology.

December 29, 2009