It wouldn’t be a war without a barrage of stones coming at America from the Left.
In the December 2002 issue of Z Magazine, self-described as a place where “The Spirit of Resistance Lives,” i.e., chiefly a resistance to capitalism, patriotism and rich white guys, Sonali Kolhatkar blames America because too many Afghan war widows still have diarrhea.
The United States, of course, didn’t create the widows. That was a task accomplished by the Soviets in the 1980s and the Afghan warlords in the 1990s. Still, Kolhatkar blames the United States, only calling the shots in Afghanistan for a year, for not quickly enough erasing a state of wretchedness that’s been produced by centuries of political, social and economic dysfunction.
Ms. Kolhatkar is particularly upset by what President Bush said a year ago in his State of the Union address: “The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan’s new government.”
Kolhatkar counters with a recent quote from Awadia Mohamed, the coordinator for CARE International in Afghanistan: “While the plight of Afghan widows has improved psychologically, (they) have very limited access to food and health services despite the absence of the Taliban. In fact, 51 percent of widows surveyed reported being unwell, of whom 57.6 percent had fever and 13.6 percent had diarrhea.”
America gets no thanks from Ms. Kolhatkar for getting Afghan girls into schools and Afghan women out of their compulsory burqas, the head-to-foot covering that the Taliban forced women to wear. “Contrary to what President Bush would have us believe, the problems facing Afghan women run far deeper than clothing,” writes Kolhatkar. “What good is an uncovered face if it is starving to death?”
Ms. Kolhatkar’s conclusion: “One year later, it is clear that Afghan women are not ‘free’ — they are enduring American freedom.”
What’s left unsaid by Kolhatkar is that by “enduring American freedom” Afghan women are no longer denied access to medical care, it’s no longer against the law for a kid to fly a kite and $700 million in American aid is on the way to Afghanistan for food, farming supplies, roads, bridges, water facilities and sanitation systems.
On September 11, 2001, as he watched 3,000 people in America being reduced to ashes by foreign terrorists, leftist filmmaker Michael Moore wrote his remarkable reaction. The sin, he said, was America’s.
“We have orphaned so many children, tens of thousands around the world, with our taxpayer-funded terrorism (in Chile, in Vietnam, in Gaza, in Salvador),” wrote Moore, “that I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little whacked in the head from the horror we have helped cause.”
Moore continued: “We abhor terrorism — unless we’re the ones doing the terrorizing. We paid and trained and armed a group of terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s who killed over 30,000 civilians. That was OUR work. You and me. Thirty thousand murdered civilians and who the hell even remembers! We fund a lot of oppressive regimes that have killed a lot of innocent people, and we never let the human suffering THAT causes to interrupt our day one single bit.”
What Moore is saying is that more of our days should be interrupted, that more of us should be leaping from the top of skyscrapers.
And, wrote Moore, for us to identify the attackers that day as America-hating Arab fundamentalists was simply another installment of American xenophobia, a racist plot to grease the skids of war: “Maybe it’s because the A-rabs are much better foils. A key ingredient in getting Americans whipped into a frenzy against a new enemy is the all-important race card. It’s much easier to get us to hate when the object of our hatred doesn’t look like us.”
Additionally, Moore suggested that America’s top schemers might well have engineered the attack: “Am I being asked to believe that this guy who sleeps in a tent in a desert has been training pilots to fly our most modern, sophisticated jumbo jets with such pinpoint accuracy that they are able to hit these three targets without anyone wondering why these planes were so far off path?”
But even if it was bin Laden, it was still America’s fault: “Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!” And the fault of American capitalism: “Spare me the talk about all the precautions the airlines and the FAA is taking. They, like all businesses, are concerned about one thing — the bottom line and the profit margin.” And the fault of American consumers: “Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn’t living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?”
What we’re seeing, again, is Left idiocy, the same Blame-America-First mindset that turned a blind eye as 100 million people were slaughtered across the globe by dictatorial Marxist regimes.
