I continue to be amazed at the extent to which high-profile conservatives rail against Americans. The latest is Glenn Beck.
“You know, there’s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to be extremists? More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.
“The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.
“Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.”
A few thoughts. First, as Janna Goodrich asks, “If ‘they’ are ‘right’, what would Beck like to see done? The establishment of some form of Taliban rules against vice in this country? Because according to his arguments that would protect us from Islamic terrorists.” I’m fairly certain Beck hasn’t thought this through — he simply reflexively hates Americans’ morals — but it’d be helpful if he could explain how he’d like to reverse our “moral collapse.”
Second, it’s entirely convenient for Beck to blame our values for our unpopularity in the Muslim world, since it absolves the country of responsibility for its conduct. As Kevin Drum explained, Beck’s argument “perpetuates the trope that ‘they hate us for our freedoms.’ And if they hate us for our freedoms, guess what? It means they don’t hate us for our actions. And that means there’s no need for us to change anything we’re actually doing in the Middle East.”
And third, Beck, for all of his alleged patriotism, sounds an awful lot like American-hater Dinesh D’Souza.
D’Souza, you’ll recall, is the conservative activist/writer who argues that terrorists are right about the problems with the culture in the United States. Osama bin Laden and other dangerous Islamic radicals believe the U.S. is too secular, too permissive, too diverse, too free, and too tolerant … and D’Souza believes they’re absolutely correct. Indeed, D’Souza goes so far as to argue that liberal Americans are literally to blame for 9/11 — the left invited the attacks by reinforcing the beliefs al Qaeda had about the United States.
D’Souza even acknowledged to Stephen Colbert that he agreed “with some of the things these radical extremists are against in America.” Consider this gem from D’Souza’s book:
[I]f the political left and the Islamic fundamentalists are in the same foreign policy camp [because they both hate American imperialism], then by the same token the political right and the Islamic fundamentalists are on the same wavelength on social issues. The left is allied with some radical Muslims in opposition to American foreign policy, and the right is allied with an even larger group of Muslims [which includes radical Muslims] in their opposition to American social and cultural depravity. This is the essential new framework I propose for understanding American foreign policy and American social issues.
And now Glenn Beck is right there with him. To hear Beck explain it, Americans are awful. We are immoral. We deserve to be reviled. Those nasty things said about us in the Middle East are all true.
And somehow, we’re told that the left isn’t patriotic enough? Someone really ought to remind conservatives like Beck that you can’t love America if you hate Americans.