For Western elites, Ahmadinejad is preferable to Hirsi Ali, the Castros to Cuban dissidents.
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
1/13/2015
…One of the most peculiar pathologies of Western elites is carrying on this apparent romance with non-Westerners who dislike the West, while spurning those who admire it. The feminist pro-Western critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was recently disinvited from speaking at Brandeis University. Earlier, Columbia University had welcomed the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an unhinged anti-Jewish and anti-American theocrat. Apparently hating America made Ahmadinejad the more interesting speaker; liking America made Hirsi Ali suspect and certainly less romantically revolutionary. How odd that for campus communities, being the victim of forced genital mutilation makes one less sympathetic than a man who had ordered the deaths of female supposed adulteresses.
In the spring of 2009, Iranians said to be numbering a million demonstrated against the illiberal theocracy in their country. Yet President Obama largely ignored the protesters, who were demanding free and fair elections. Dealing with the messy Green Revolution advocates of democracy apparently wasn’t as inviting an opportunity for Obama to showcase his multicultural diplomatic dexterity as would have been dealing with the previously recalcitrant Khomeinists. When Obama has gone out his way to reach out to autocratic theocrats, he seems to have believed that their anti-Americanism must be proof of the true aspirations of the Iranian people…
…Who in the Middle East wants to reach out to America when his motives will be questioned by the very civilization he admires? Does the U.S. reach out to Tunisia in the manner in which it courted the autocratic Recep Erdogan’s increasing Islamist Turkey? If non-Westerners without the affluence and security of the West pine for a chance at our values, what does that say about rich, safe, and smug Westerners who pooh-pooh their admiration?…
Read the entire article at National Review Online.
Update: Sen. Ted Cruz on Obama Paris Absence: A “Visual Manifestation” that, under Obama, “American has Receded from Leadership in the World” (video)
Sen. Ted Cruz reacts to Barack Obama’s absence in Paris this past weekend. He rightly points out that it was a “visual manifestation” that, under Obama over the past six years, “America has receded from leadership in the World.”
