But I thought Chimpy McHitlerburton and his cabal of neo-cons were the imperialist scum . . .

Here's an interesting post about Islamist imperialism.

Blogger and English professor Jeffery Hodges presented a paper on Islamist imperialism, and he had the following rather startling exchange with the Korean professor who was preparing the response to his paper:

In preparing for the event, I worked with the chairman of my department, who was going to present the response. This was a man of the left who took an active interest in world politics . . . or so I thought. But in my discussions with him about the issues, I came to see that his reading of world events was refracted through the lens of political analysis by the Korean left, which focuses on America's role in all political events, and followed this logic:

Anyone who attacks America is anti-imperialistic.
The 9/11 perpetrators attacked America.
The 9/11 perpetrators were therefore anti-imperialistic.

I suppose that this is a pretty tight argument if one accepts the basic premise, but it's simply untrue that anyone attacking America is anti-imperialistic.I should have asked this Korean professor if the Pearl Harbor attack was an anti-imperialistic act and if the Japanese imperialists had therefore been anti-imperialistic despite their colonization of Korea and their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

But there was little time for irony.I was occupied with gently explaining to him that, no, the United States has no military bases in Israel and that Bin Laden's reference to American troops in the land of the two holy mosques was not an allusion to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with its Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque but a reference to Saudi Arabia and its two holy places of Mecca and Medina.

Then, he floored me with this question:

"Well, are there any of these sorts of attacks elsewhere in the world and not against Americans?"

Speechless at first, when I found my voice again, I asked:"Are you serious? Is this a rhetorical question?"

He assured me that he was serious.

So, I said:"Have you never heard of the jihad in Sudan, the attacks in Nigeria, the attacks in Indonesia, the conflict in the Philippines . . . and many other places, all of which have little to do with America?"

"And these have nothing to do with politics?" he asked."

There is always politics," I replied, "but you cannot ignore the factor of religion, especially in Islam, which encompasses politics within religion."

(Via Maverick Philosopher)

That Professor could be a poster boy for this great Norman Geras article on the simplistic reductionism of the left:

There is a space of political and moral particularity that the reference back to capitalism or imperialism, and the reference sideways to the United States of America, cannot displace. Structures and procedures of authoritarian or dictatorial or out-and-out murderous rule are just what they are, and they differ-in ways that matter as much as anything in the social universe matters-from democratic institutions and procedures and the protections afforded to individual human beings by the rule of law. These differences have their own specific gravity, and it is mystifying why so many people worldwide, whose central values purport to be about the liberation of human beings from oppression, have seemed to give them so little weight, so little practical, choice-determining weight, in how they have aligned themselves politically in recent times.

The Taliban in Afghanistan; Saddam's Iraq; the reduction of a human being by torture; the use of terror randomly to kill innocents and to smite all those by whom they are cherished; mass murder; ethnic cleansing; all the manifold practices of human evil-to look upon these and at once see "capitalism," "imperialism," "America," is not only to show a poverty of moral imagination, it is to reveal a diminished understanding of the human world. A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.