While we're on the subject...

While we're on the subject of reductive orientalism, lets take a gander at Victor Davis Hanson's latest offering at NRO. I hope it doesn't get posted at ESPN by any of our intrepid young conservatives; if so, they're gonna get ripped, and ripped big-time. Consider:

Yet there is something far more to these bizarre events than mere "interconnectedness," or even media-savvy fundamentalists who have got the hang of Western telecommunications and know how to use them to stir up the mob.

There is not a necessary connection in the Middle East — or anywhere else — between the occasional appearance of technological sophistication and what we might call humanism, or the commitment to explain phenomena through reason and empiricism. We forget that far too often as we kow-tow to extremists and seek to apologize or fathom the holy protocols surrounding a religious text.

In the West, the wonder of a cell phone in some sense is the ultimate expression of a long struggle for the primacy of scientific reason, tolerance, critical consciousness, and free expression. That intellectual journey goes back to Galileo, Newton, and Socrates.

Everything from CDs to Starbucks that we take for granted is a representation of millions of past Western lives. These forgotten scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs, along with other reformers in politics, journalism, economics, and religion, created our present liberal environment. Only its institutions led to our prosperous modernity.

...

That long odyssey is not so in the world of bin Laden or an Iranian theocrat — or the ignorant who stream out of the madrassas and Friday fundamentalist harangues along the Afghan-Pakistani border. These fist-shaking, flag-burning Islamic fascists all came late to the Western tradition and now cherry-pick its technology. As classic parasites, a Zawahiri or al-Zarqawi wants Western sophisticated weapons and playthings — without the bothersome foundations that made them all possible.

An Afghan who riots because he learns of a rumor in a Western magazine, and those like him who explode and behead in Iraq, are emblematic of this hypocrisy. Nothing they have accomplished in their lives, either materially or philosophically, would result in a free opinion magazine, much less the technology to send out the story instantaneously — or, in the case of al-Zarqawi, to have his murdering transmitted globally on the Internet.

Instead, our Afghan rioters, and the Islamist organizations that have endorsed them, live in the eighth century of rumor, sexual and religious intolerance, tribal chauvinism, and gratuitous violence — but now electrified by the veneer of the 21st-century civilization that is not their own, but sometimes fools the naïve that it is.

With a cursory reading (and that's all it will get at ESPN), my first impression is a picture of cultural--not just personal--ignorance hidden beneath, as Hanson describes it, a "21st-century" polish. That kind of thinking doesn't go down well at the ever-tolerant ESPN boards. All cultures, after all, have intrinsic value and none ought to be valued more than another for any reason. Even the ones that tell us that upholding religious values justifies killing innocent citizens in your own country.

A more in-depth reading takes it a bit deeper: Despite cheap, accessible, and easy-to-operate consumer goods imported from the Westernized world, the thinking of a bin Laden or Muslim Brotherhood still leads back to swords, horses, and jihad, not ahead to iPods and Microsoft.

They want such things to use to destroy, but not along with them the institutions like democracy and freedom that would allow such progress in their own countries — and shortly make al Qaeda and the fundamentalists not merely irrelevant, but ridiculous as well. Thus, we can understand the increasing hatred of the United States and its policy of democratic idealism abroad that threatens to put them out of business.

As we learned on September 11, they try to kill us now with our own appurtenances before they are buried themselves under modernism, liberality, and freedom. That really is what this war is about: a last-ditch effort by primordial fascists to prevent the liberalization of the Muslim world and the union of Islamic society with the protocols found in the rest of the globe and which many in the Middle East prefer if given a chance.

As a military-historian and professor of classics, Hanson can get away with such declarations. Whereas a Sim or myself would get slapped down quickly for our prejudiced views of Muslim culture. Hanson's point is simple though; the 19 hijackers were well-to-do Arab Muslims. 19 well-to-do Arab Muslims that despite the finery they exhibited on the outside, were corrupted by the "swords, horses and jihad," that corrupts the Sheikh himself. Even the best the culture can offer is tainted by something poisonous.

Ultimately Hanson draws it all together in his close, after a discussion of self-loathing in Las Vegas:

Abroad, we battle Islamic fascists who hate us for our success and want to kill us with the tools of the modern world they despise. But at home, we are also at odds with our own privileged guilt-ridden aristocracy, whose very munificence has made them misunderstand why they are hated.

The Islamists insist, "We kill you for being soft." Westerners in response feel, "We are killed because we are not being soft enough."

And so they riot and kill in Afghanistan over a stupid rumor, and we seek to apologize that it somehow spread.

How truly sad.

Such reductive orientalism doesn't go down well at the bastion of tolerance known as ESPN. As for Sim and I, who knows where this might take the discussion, as it was published the same day as this tale of dictators and underpants.