The American Soviet

Via Western Rifle Shooters Association

The security forces of Bashar Assad — a thug whom Hillary Clinton deemed a “reformer,” and with whom Barack Obama was determined to restore diplomatic relations — are slaughtering hundreds in the streets of Syria’s major cities. I know that the Turkish government will express no outrage. It will not help to sponsor a flotilla of private ships to sail into the port of Latakia to protest the government-sponsored barbarity. European “human rights” activists will not fly into any Arab city to board a freighter, Gaza-style, that would bring humanitarian assistance by sea to those being blown apart by the Assad regime. I know that.

Recently, Palestinian teenagers, in service to a Palestinian terrorist organization, massacred — in the literal sense of the word — the Fogel family of Israel, a savagery replete with the throat-slitting of toddlers and infants. The Palestinian police authority — U.S. trained and equipped — just shot down Jewish worshippers at Jacob’s Tomb. This comes amid the Palestinian Authority’s commemoration of the 2002 Passover Massacre of 30 Israeli civilians, apparently a national moment of honorific reflection on the West Bank. Yet I know that no one in Europe and few in America will protest to the Palestinian Authority, which the West subsidizes, that it seems to commemorate butchery in its midst.

This week President Obama ordered Predator drone attacks against Libya, as NATO and American forces began re-targeting the Qaddafi clan personally. I know that there will be no outcry that the U.S. is a party to targeted assassinations of a foreign leader and his family, an act once deemed illegal for an American administration. I also note that the use of Predator assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan has increased fourfold since January 2009, and that we have blown up five times more suspects in the last 27 months than we did in the prior 96 months. I know that the UN and the Arab League are both praised by the Obama administration for authorizing us to impose a no-fly zone over Libya and ignored by the administration when we must go far beyond a no-fly zone to end the Qaddafi regime, which we seek to destroy even as we declare that is not our aim. And I know there will be no outcry from the American Left over a third Middle East war against an Arab Muslim oil-exporting nation (even though this one posed no threat to the security of the United States), over the complete bypassing of the US Congress in launching that war, or over the efforts to blow up a foreign leader and all in his vicinity. I know that.

The past week a sensationalized video of a transgendered female in extremis went viral on the blogosphere. Two young African-American women beat her senseless at a McDonald’s restaurant. The African-American staff is shown in the clip as mostly passive bystanders to the brutality. Yet I know this nationally viewed abhorrence is not a teachable moment about much of anything. Unlike the Professor Gates mix-up, this public spectacle will not be used by the president to warn us about the wages of incivility or the need for a new racial tolerance and understanding. Nor will there be, among the homosexual community, much of a national Matthew Shepard moment seeking to present the public beating as a symbol of a wider hatred of the sexually ambiguous among us. There is about as much chance of a Hollywood movie about the incident as there is of a sequel to Rendition. At best, we are to accept such violence as inevitable, as the powerless sometimes thrash out against the more privileged classes and races; at worst, these are the tragic wages of prior oppression that must be contextualized and constructed in the proper narrative of the centuries.

So what are we to make of the past week’s news?