Digitus Impudicus

Shame Shame Shame

Charles Krauthammer has a very interesting article that draws an analogy between what's going on in the Middle East today, and the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. He also discusses another revolutionary push for liberal freedom in Europe, circa 1848.

Good reading, and I suggest you check out the whole thing. The reason I bring it up here is because he closes with a few thoughtful, and somewhat provocative, summations of recent events. I also bring it up because I cannot resist the temptation to poke my finger into a few granny-glasses-adorned eyes. I always believe in being somewhat respectful of our peaceful, hemp-shirted, aging Paleo-Hippies™, but considering the recent nature of their vitriol which they freely dispense as if from a fire hose, a little blowback is justified, and very much in order.

Money Quote:

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.

Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.