...continue to be more clearly drawn. From the Guardian:

The Salafist movement was under-rated and misunderstood and the reaction to it has been confused. As always, the right is triggerhappy and hostile to free expression; as always, the left never wants to do anything that would hazard its self-righteous sense of moral purity.

These are historic fault lines. The right tolerated fascism in the thirties, the left Soviet Communism in the fifties. Of course these two earlier totalitarian movements were different in nature and our response when it came was not always well judged - the tendency is to think first of the excesses of the right typified by the witch hunts of the odious McCarthy, but we should remember, too, that the Democratic party in the immediate postwar years of Henry Wallace would have abandoned Europe just as the left in the eighties would have left Europe at the mercy of the new Soviet missiles.

The apologists for the Islamo-fascists - an accurate term - leave millions around the world exposed to a less obvious but more insidious barbarism.

Now that Israel is in the thick of the fighting, I'm starting to see a lot of references to the present war comparing it to WW2. Personally, I think this is about as apt as the left's earlier comparison to Vietnam. The present war is something new, and it's going to have to be addressed that way. If you must have a WW2 comparion, however, I'd say that the West's multicultualism and subsequent moral relativist mindset is like starting WW2 with nothing but battleships.

You can tell that something has gone very wrong when Shiite militias freely borrow Bush's language to describe the Sunnis — they are Salafists, takfiris (extremists), terrorists — and then turn around and chant "Death to America! Death to Israel!" when their own side engages the West. The US could hardly be less prepared, either militarily or politically, to face the Shiite militias as adversaries. It fights for these Shiites, and against the Sunnis, in a mission devoid of strategic logic.