Terry Glavin at The Propagandist:
Count the number of dead Muslims among the Taliban’s victims and you will find they outnumber Al-Qaida’s American victims in Manhattan on that horrible September day by an order of magnitude. And yes, it is actually proper in this particular case to ignore the distinctions between Al Qaida and the Taliban. Don’t even start.
Set aside for a moment the thousands of Muslims murdered by Islamist lunatics in Pakistan and elsewhere in recent months. Let’s just look at Afghanistan for a moment, and just the first six months of this year. UN human rights workers recorded 1,271 civilians deaths and 1,997 injuries over that period. That’s 3,268 casualties. Of that number, 386 are attributable to the almost-always inadvertent harm caused by NATO and Afghan forces. The rest – 2,477 casualties – are directly attributable to the same sorts of Islamist madmen as those who turned Lower Manhattan into a smoking charnel house that day.
Remember these things the next time you find yourself confronted by some doofus who wants you to join him in instructing Barack Obama or Stephen Harper to “stop the war.” Notice that the doofus will profess to be left wing, but when he’s talking about Muslims he can’t help but resort to the terms “they” and “them,” and he will look you straight in the eye when he’s saying “we” and “us.” All I can think to do when I’m stuck in such awkward situations is to ask: What the hell do you mean, “we”?
From such geezers of the “right-wing” sort, I can’t count the number of times I have heard this plaintive question: Why don’t “they” do something about all these jihadists? Why don’t “they” speak up? It’s everything I can do to keep my temper and simply point out that in the company I happen to keep, among those I would consider to be the bravest anti-Islamists and the most fervent partisans of democracy, toleration, secularism and freedom, the overwhelming majority happen to be Muslims.
