... Our own fundamentalist Left is in lockstep with Wahhabist reductionism — in its similar instinctive distrust of Western culture. Both blame the United States and excuse culpability on the part of Islamists. The more left-wing the Westerner, the more tolerant he is of right-wing Islamic extremism; the more liberal the Arab, the more likely he is to agree with conservative Westerners about the real source of Middle Eastern pathology.

The constant? A global distrust of Western-style liberalism and preference for deductive absolutism. So burn down a mosque in Zimbabwe, murder innocent Palestinians in Bethlehem in 2002, arrest Christians in Saudi Arabia, or slaughter Africans in Dafur, and both the Western Left and the Middle East's hard Right won't say a word. No such violence resonates with America's diverse critics as much as a false story of a flushed Koran — precisely because the gripe is not about the lives of real people, but the psychological hurts, angst, and warped ideology of those who in their various ways don't like the United States.

I will pass over quickly the day's other sorry stories, but they were equally revealing. From Karachi, we learn that Pakistani Shiite Muslims burned down a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. You see, a Sunni suicide bomber had just blown up 19 Pakistani Shia. In reaction to that attack, the Shiite mob went out and killed six employees of a business owned and operated by a Pakistani Muslim. Follow the logic of the Middle East: When you are angry at your own for their murdering, and are too weak or terrified to do anything about it, go out and destroy anything remotely American-affiliated.

I read the most of these news accounts last week while sitting in a Starbucks (Dunkin' Donuts next door) on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate in the former Communist sector of Berlin — watching a parade of protestors damn the militarism of the United States (a.k.a. "Top Gun") while a nearby TV blared accounts of a recent German mystery on state-run television, whose subtext was that the United States intelligence planned September 11 and blamed it on the poor jihadists.

Updates: Let's not forget the crazy "kossacks" who congregate at Daily Kos. And this after a warning from Kos himself to cut out some of the more extreme dishes of conspiracy-theory ratbaggery regularly served up:

Do we have any proof the [sic] Osama Bin A**hole orchestrated the 911 attacks? NO! We have all chosen to believe our governments account of the events, because to think otherwise would be too difficult to comprehend. And why shouldn't we believe our government? It's not like they are the most corrupt administration since the dawn of the republic who have lied to us every f***ing step of the way.



So there we have a snapshot of 60 years of American efforts to rid Germany of Hitler, pour in Marshall Plan money, keep 300 Soviet divisions out of Germany, and convince skeptical British, French, and Russians to support reunification: In response, welcome in American popular culture as you damn the United States in the conveniently abstract.

A war that cannot be won entirely on the battlefield most certainly can be lost entirely off it — especially when an ailing Western liberal society is harder on its own democratic culture than it is on fascist Islamic fundamentalism.

So unhinged have we become that if an American policymaker calls for democracy and reform in the Middle East, then he is likely to echo the aspirations of jailed and persecuted Arab reformers. But if he says Islamic fascism is either none of our business or that we lack the wisdom or morality to pass judgment on the pathologies of a traditional tribal society, then the jihadist and the police state — and our own Western Left — approve.