OxBlog

Sunday, September 26, 2004

# Posted 1:20 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY: Apparently, that's Al Qaeda's new strategy. The LA Times also insists very forcefully that Muslim outrage at the invasion of Iraq has created a new generation of terrorists. That's a respectable hypothesis, but every time I hear it I want to know why the invasion of Iraq was so different from the invasion of Afghanistan.

If Muslims -- especially Arabs -- tend to believe that the Mossad and the CIA were responsible for September 11th, why was the invasion of Afghanistan any less provocative than the invasion of Iraq? Are Muslims and Arabs so committed to upholding international law that they will murder Turkish, Iraqi and Indonesian civilians in order to vent their outrage?

What I'm getting at, of course, is that American journalists project their own moral judgments onto the behavior Arab and Muslim terrorists. It is possible, of course, that Arabs and Muslims did perceive the invasion of Iraq as a uniquely offensive act. But if so, why? And what is the evidence?
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