"The left is power-mad"

by Aaron Velasquez

One has only to wait for the word "greed" to be uttered in conversation to know that one is speaking to a Leftist, or more properly, a Marxist. Indeed, "Greed" is the rallying cry of the morally superior relativist. Wall street greed, corporate greed, Republican greed, your greed if you disagree. "Greed" is the great Satan that caused our current economic turmoil, according to any properly programmed left-winger.

To be sure, a conservative would tell you that the human characteristics of acquisitiveness and desire fuel our entire world economy, and he would probably tell you that this is a Good Thing. A Marxist/Democrat would call this "greed" and say that it is a Bad Thing.

If you listen to the outraged wails of leftists and Muslims, you might reasonably be under the impression that the United States is in the business of persecuting Muslims. The reality is radically different. If anything American policies should have made us the Muslims' best friends.

Before 9/11, the United States had fought two wars on behalf of Muslims, the Gulf War under George Bush Sr. and the Kosovo War under Bill Clinton. In fact during the second half of the 20th century, the only wars that the United States fought that were not against Communism or Nazism-- were fought on behalf of Muslims. That is not a fact that you will glean from any of the usual media portrayals of the United States foreign policy as hostile to Muslims. In fact US foreign policy was about as helpful to Muslims as you can imagine.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in federal court in New York. Holder's decision was driven by the need for the U.S. government to decide how to dispose of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. Naval base outside the boundaries of the United States selected as the camp in which to hold suspected al Qaeda members.

We very carefully use the word "camp" rather than prison or prisoner of war camp. This is because of an ongoing and profound ambiguity not only in U.S. government perceptions of how to define those held there, but also due to uncertainties in international law, particularly with regard to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Were the U.S. facility at Guantanamo a prison, then its residents would be criminals. If it were a POW camp, then they would be enemy soldiers being held under the rules of war.

First Published on The American Thinker

Cinnamon Stillwell is the West Coast Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

In the wake of the horrific attack at the Fort Hood military base in Texas earlier this month, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the media has turned to Middle East studies "experts" for enlightenment. Instead, what the media, and, by extension, the American public, has received is the moral relativism and obfuscation that too often meets any effort to address Islamism or jihadism in an intellectually honest manner.