Party On, Dean's World! Excellent!

I don't find myself agreeing with Dean Esmay over at the rightwing blog "Dean's World" very often but just occassionally he hits the nail on the head. I will say this for Dean - he isn't just another cheerleader.

As evidence I submit his post today in which he castigates those who are so up in arms about Muslim extremists' anger over Danish cartoons, rabidly wittering on about a "clash of civilisations", as "Just Another Foaming Islamophobe"s.

do people who make these sweeping generalizations actually know any muslims personally? Because I know quite a few, and not a one matches these stereotypes. Not one.

Muslims who want to defeat terrorism are my brothers. They're yours too.

Nice one, Dean. Even if your brethren on the Right don't seem to think so. Maybe you could refer them to Arthur Silber's great post today and especially to these words from Chris Hedge's book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning":

But in mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects--eventually in the form of corpses.

...When we allow mythic reality to rule, as it almost always does in war, then there is only one solution--force. In mythic war we fight absolutes. We must vanquish darkness. It is imperative and inevitable for civilization, for the free world, that good triumph, just as Islamic militants see us as infidels whose existence corrupts the pure Islamic society they hope to build.

...The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. ... By turning history into myth we transform random events into a chain of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march toward nobility. And no society is immune.

It only remains to me to point out that when Christianity was as old as Islam is now, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, along with witch-hunts and the Inquisition, were giving the zealots plenty to do. Christianity as a whole became more moderate. Islam will too and can do it far quicker if those of us who don't need an "evil empire" to justify our fears will help it do so.