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How Anti-Jihadists Lose All Credibility

I am as skeptical as anyone about what might come from rapid political change in Egypt, but this IBD editorial is a tendentious and embarrassing contribution. In addition to using the absurd, misleading word Islamofascism, the editors write this nonsense: Even after getting beat up by anti-American mobs, CNN’s Anderson Cooper portrayed rioters as largely […]

I am as skeptical as anyone about what might come from rapid political change in Egypt, but this IBD editorial is a tendentious and embarrassing contribution. In addition to using the absurd, misleading word Islamofascism, the editors write this nonsense:

Even after getting beat up by anti-American mobs, CNN’s Anderson Cooper portrayed rioters as largely secular yuppies yearning for modernity and the triumph of human rights over martial law.

The IBD editors must believe their readers to be uninformed morons. Anyone paying the slightest attention to the events in Cairo know that foreign journalists, including Cooper, were targeted by pro-regime thugs sent into Tahrir Square to cause havoc, muzzle media coverage, and harass human rights workers. The “anti-American mobs” the editors are referring to were supporters of Mubarak and the status quo, and these thugs were not so much anti-American as they were hostile to anyone and anything that seemed to be lending support to the protesters. They go on to offer this gem of insight:

He and other media elite have it exactly backwards: Egyptians are revolting against Western-style democracy.

This is unspeakably stupid. Obviously, there is no “Western-style democracy” in Egypt for them to revolt against. This is about as dense as saying that the Green movement was a protest against British colonialism. It requires a rare degree of dishonesty and ignorance to make such claims. Like some of the other more hysterical reactions against the protests, the IBD editorial serves as a useful reminder that the judgment of a lot of anti-jihadists in the West is hopelessly impaired by their complete failure to make any distinctions among Muslims or between different groups of Islamists. The catch-all term “Islamofascism” is the perfect symbol of this tendency to conflate everything together. Even if they happen to make some valid observations along the way, their overall interpretation and understanding of politics and religion in the Near East and elsewhere are so flawed that their analysis can’t be taken very seriously. It is the anti-jihadist hysterics’ crying wolf at every opportunity that makes people completely indifferent and hostile to any warnings that come from them.

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