Sticky Notes

Read these excerpts from a  WSJ Online piece:

• "After the Madrid bombings a spokesman for al-Qaeda left a message: "You love life, and we love death." The horror is that greatness is tied to death rather than to achievement in life.

• White guilt in the West -- especially in Europe and on the American left -- confuses all this by seeing Islamic extremism as a response to oppression. The West is so terrified of being charged with its old sins of racism, imperialism and colonialism that it makes oppression an automatic prism on the non-Western world, a politeness.
  

• But Islamic extremists don't hate the West because they are oppressed by it. They hate it precisely because the end of oppression and colonialism -- not their continuance -- forced the Muslim world to compete with the West. Less oppression, not more, opened this world to the sense of defeat that turned into extremism.

• Islamic extremism is the saber-rattling of an inferiority complex. 

   

  Long piece - good read.