Al Qaeda's Freedom Isn't Free

Terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's # 2, released an audiotape that criticized America indirectly by lashing out at the results of last year's Arab League meeting. That gathering tentatively embraced human rights, women's rights and the democratic processes. According to Zawahiri, this "U.S. concept of freedom" is only:

a cloak for spreading corruption and injustice in the Islamic world.

Liberty as construed by the Americans was based on "usurious banks, giant companies, misleading media outlets and the destruction of others for material gain," charged the voice in the recording aired by Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera.

Real freedom was "not the liberty of homosexual marriages and the abuse of women as a commodity to gain clients, win deals or attract tourists."

Some of Al Qaeda's views -- opposition to capitalism, certainty of a right-wing media bias -- are in tune with the loony left. But how can the "mainstream left" countenance the apparent alliance between liberals and radical Islam? Zawahiri's condemnation of gay marriage is the tip of the iceberg: Islamofascists are hostile to every civil right and liberty precious to Democrats and Republicans alike.

Just in my lifetime, the left and right have exchanged roles. Democrats now distrust democracy, preferring judicially imposed group rights to the ballot box. Once committed to human rights internationalism, they've been enervated by iron-poor blood to the point that they offer nothing more profound than "no."

Today's Democrats gave up on democracy, without rationale or evidence. Whether a gift of god, or a product of "natural rights," Freedom is every man's right--and the world's best hope. As NRO's Victor Davis Hanson says:

Democracy brings moral clarity and cures deluded populaces of their false grievances and exaggerated hurts. The problem in the Middle East is the depressing relationship between autocracies and Islamists: Illiberal governments fault the Americans and Jews for their own failure. Thus in lieu of reform, strongmen deflect popular frustration by allowing the Wahhabis, al Qaedists, and other terrorists to use their state-controlled media likewise to blame us rather than a Mubarak, Saudi Royal Family, or Saddam Hussein. Yet just as crowded Germans today do not talk of the need for lebensraum and resource-less Japanese have dropped dreams of a Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, so too a democratic Middle East will more likely look inward at tribalism, patriarchy, fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and polygamy rather than automatically at Israel and the United States when their airliners crash or a car bomb goes off.

Al Qaeda's idea of liberty is dictated by god and disseminated by autocrats--in short, it's anything but free. I'm proud America's midwifing liberty throughout the world. Harry Truman and John Kennedy would too, and support President Bush's efforts to reform what is, in effect, the widespread enslavement of the Arab people by their governments.

Neither Truman nor Kennedy would be fooled by Al Qaeda's false sense of freedom. But, given the path of their party, I doubt today's Democrats would listen. Were Truman and Kennedy alive today, they'd both be Republicans.

(via LGF)