Why they’d like to see him assassinated

Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph describes the theory by which British leftists rationalize their hatred of President Bush, a hatred that leads one major newspaper, the Guardian, to wish for his assassination. It goes like this:

A moral equivalence is set up, in which Osama bin Laden and Bush are presented as two sides of a fundamentalist coin. On Wednesday, a television programme tried to equate the Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates the violent destruction of all societies that do not conform to sharia law, with the American neo-conservative intellectuals who taught that people should revive their interest in Plato and the civilisation of the ancient Greeks.

This analysis, as I said, is a rationalization for Bush hatred, not the basis for it. As Moore notes:

It is the critics themselves who are suffering from pseudo-religious certainty and superstition. Isn’t there something self-righteous, slightly crazed, about directing such overwhelming anger at the man whose job it is to pick up the pieces of September 11 on behalf of the free world? George W Bush as we see him today is a response to disorder, not its cause.

Yet, the rationalization reveals the true source of Bush-loathing — hatred of the religious and core philosophical underpinnings of western civilization (represented in the leftist parable by the ancient Greeks). But if you hate these things, what remains worth defending about the west? The only thing I can think of is its hedonism. That’s how the Islamofascists see it too. And they have figured out that, if that’s all the west is fighting for, the west will lose.
Via Real Clear Politics.

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