Tyranny of the Minorities

by Samuel Z. Anvil

Question: What do the Shiite extremist leader Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army have in common with the liberal columnist Thomas Friedman? Answer: More than you think.
Both self-appointed prophets of the Truth combine fanatical devotion to dubious, unproven ideas (actually to ideas repeatedly proven wrong) with a total disdain for anybody that disagrees with them, and enjoy the sympathy of the liberal media, which provides a ready platform for disseminating their bankrupt ideologies.
I won’t go into detail about Moktada al-Sadr’s shortcomings. Suffice it to say that he is the latest bearded specimen of a family that has spent generations sitting on their rear ends in the mosques of Islam’s innumerable “Holy Cities,” telling the true believers how to live their lives and arranging the murders of those who fail to take the family’s holy advice to heart, and that chubby little Muqtada is considered, even by his most loyal fans, to be the least distinguished scion of that know-it-all family.
Thomas’s intellectual shortcomings can be summed up in fewer words: “it’s all America’s fault.” He had a tough moment there on September 11, 2001, when Moslem "terrorists" handed him a real hot potato – how do you blame America for this? To give Thomas credit, it took him only a few days to recover from the shock of seeing the New York Times display sympathy for Americans, but he quickly wrenched his brain back into the politically correct way of thinking and figured out why “they” hate us, and what we can do to make “them” love us, and helpfully explained how we can fix our image problems in the Islamic world.
According to Thomas and his friends in the liberal and terrorist establishments, it’s all Israel’s fault. It’s those settlers. If only they hadn’t settled. They are the devil incarnate, those settlers. After all, the Middle East is not America where people of different races and religions can live on the same block without killing each other. The Middle East is full of “them,” the downtrodden, the desperate, the hopeless, the poor (with rich relatives in Saudi Arabia, some of whom are even real princes) and when a Jew (not a good Jew like Thomas but one of those religious fanatics) moves into the neighborhood they become … well, they can’t help themselves, can they? They’re enraged. Those settlers just go around “fueling Islamic anger” all day.
Thomas knows that the Arabs started the Six Day War (their third attempt to destroy Israel) when the “occupied territories” were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, and there were no settlers in them. He knows that his friend, poor misguided Yasser Arafat, founded the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1965, two years before Israel drove the occupying Arab armies from the West Bank and Gaza, and that the “Palestine” Arafat meant to “liberate” was what the rest of the world called “the State of Israel.” And he knows that to Arafat there’s no difference between the “illegal settlements” and Tel Aviv. Arafat wants it all, and he wants to drive all the Jews into the sea (Thomas of course excepted; he will be allowed to live in America until Islam conquers that too).
Thomas knows all that, but he’s decided that none of it matters. Arafat had him over for tea one day, you see, and Thomas can feel that Noble laureate’s pain. Thomas is studying how a Nobel laureate feels, just in case he should one day need to know.
But the worst thing is, that even though Thomas writes for the New York Times (a newspaper of record no less), and even though some of those real princes in Saudi Arabia have invited Thomas into their luxuriously appointed homes, there are still people who have the nerve to disagree with him. Why, there are whole newspapers and even a TV news network that disagree with him, that show no respect for the liberal ideology and even ridicule it. What kind of a country is this that allows such a thing?
So you see, Shiite extremist leader Moktada al-Sadr and New York Times extremist columnist Thomas Friedman have quite a lot in common. They both represent minorities terrified that their bankrupt ideologies will be exposed, who are prepared to use all the means at their disposal to impose their will on the silent majorities around them.
The big question in both Iraq and the United States (and Israel) today is the same: will the silent majorities in both countries finally turn against these extremist minorities to save their future?