Like the unhinged Rosie O’Donnell, the waningly influential Michael Moore is almost too easy a target to bother with anymore – and yet he keeps handing us such tempting ammunition. In an interview published the day after Independence Day, which he no doubt spent like the rest of us, celebrating this country and being thankful for our abundance and our freedoms, Moore blathers on predictably in his ongoing campaign against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Correction – his campaign against American victories in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Moore and the anti-war Left were truly anti-war, they would be protesting the real warmongers – Islamic fundamentalists – or at least protesting both sides equally. But they reserve their condemnation for the world’s greatest terrorists. I’m talking about those jack-booted, nuke-happy imperialists America and Israel, of course.
What should we be doing instead of trying to secure lasting victory in those countries? Plucking an estimate out of his sizeable, um, back pocket, Moore says, “$15 billion is what we’ve been spending almost every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don’t have it.”
Yes, if only the American “killing machine” would stop ravaging innocents abroad in order to steal their resources and enslave their peace-loving peoples, we could turn instead to doing some good in the world. For once. Because God knows Americans need to change our greedy, warmongering, rapacious ways and learn us some generosity, compassion and service to others. Then the world will like us again.
Moore pauses in the interview for an aside about the Catholic Church, which he proclaims a “woman-hating institution.” Again, if Moore and the Left are so opposed to “woman-hating institutions,” why do they remain stone silent about sharia law? While Moore is busy chiding the Catholic Church for its shocking oppression of nuns, was there outrage among Hollywood celebrities, Code Pink, NOW and the rest of the Left over the recent sentence of stoning in Iran for a mother accused of adultery? A mother who had already endured 99 lashes in front of her children, years in jail, and who will eventually be buried up to her chest and pulverized with rocks by a raging mob of Catholic fundamentalists? Oops, I meant Muslim fundamentalists?
(Thanks to international condemnation from those who truly care, however, Iran has been forced to relent – not to reconsider the barbaric practice of stoning or the mother’s ultimate fate, but to either hang her instead or simply wait, as they always do, until the eyes of the world are finally averted again. Then they will stone her.)
But Moore really hits his stride in the interview with this stretch of dialogue:
What do you think is going to happen up at the Pearly Gates when they check your citizenship and go, “Oh, you were an American? Ha, well, here’s your list of crimes”?
“Oh, yeah. No, I was against the war! I was against the war!”
“Did you pay your taxes?”
“Well, yeah, you got to pay your taxes.”
“Well, then you helped fund this, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“OK, well, you know, turn around. You’re not coming in the Gates.”
So in the collectivist Heaven of Moore’s imagination (the only kind of Heaven the Left would be willing to inhabit), you won’t be judged based on an individual accounting of your sins and good deeds; instead, St. Peter will turn away all Americans for their war crimes, presumably sending them to Hell instead. I have a question for Michael Moore: if Americans are being kept out of Heaven, who is being let in? Your friend Castro? Chavez? Ahmadinejad? bin Laden?
In the eyes of Moore’s God, it’s not enough simply to be anti-war (again, meaning anti-American). Because you participate in a democracy, because you pay your taxes to a democratically elected government, you are directly responsible for the actions of that government and are equally as guilty as a fellow citizen who supports war.
Revealingly, this is precisely the same position taken by Osama bin Laden and his Islamist brethren: that no American citizen is innocent of crimes against the ummah, the worldwide Muslim community, because they participate in democracy, a man-made system of governance which is in direct conflict with sharia, the law laid down by Allah himself. This is the very rationale used to justify attacks against American civilians everywhere, most notably of course, the 9/11 attacks in New York City.
(You know, New York City – where Dhimmi-of-the-Year-frontrunner Mayor Bloomberg is facilitating the erection of a massive mosque that will serve as a symbol of Islam’s greatest triumph over America to date).
As bin Laden puts it: “Kill[ing] the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Why? Because “Muslim scholars have issued a fatwa against any American who pays taxes to his government. He is our target, because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation.” “We do not differentiate,” he has asserted elsewhere, “between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa.”
It should come as no surprise that the Left and bin Laden are “not such strange bedfellows,” as Andrew C. McCarthy puts it; check out David Horowitz’s The Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, for example, or more recently, McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left are Sabotaging America. And yet Michael Moore and his ilk take blustery umbrage at such a suggestion. “I love this country,” he sincerely insists. “My films are acts of patriotism.”
Yes, the Left’s version of patriotism. Well, the next time Michael Moore takes offense at accusations of anti-Americanism, remind him that he and Osama bin Laden are united in their condemnation of Americans as war criminals.