The Middle East Media Research

The Middle East Media Research Institute performs an invaluable service by translating excerpts from the Arab press. Yesterday, MEMRI posted a number of Arab responses to Condoleezza Rice’s call for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. The responses come from a number of countries and from both government and independent (to the extent it is possible to be independent in an Arab country) sources. They are well worth reading in their entirety, but the thing that was most striking to me is how familiar the anti-Americanism of the Islamofascist press sounds. Virtually the entire anti-American catechism has been lifted wholesale from the teachings of the American left. It is all there: slavery, oppression of the Indians, Viet Nam, segregation, the Montgomery church bombing, Hiroshima, racial profiling of Muslims, and on and on. Oh yes, and Rice’s boss, the President, is a cowboy. Nor is Marxism left out: “Democracy is an idea for the road to power…and nothing else. It is the ideology of the greatest power on earth.” From Cairo to Riyadh, these editorialists sound amazingly like Noam Chomsky. It is hard to escape the conclusion that for the Islamofascists, as for western leftists, notwithstanding the supposedly vast gulf that divides their ideologies, the real animating passion is sheer hatred for America, for freedom, and for democracy.

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