IN DEFENSE OF AL QAEDA
It might not be so bad if Al Qaeda won. The truth is, they don't want to rule the whold world necessarily; at least they're not going to insist on it in the short run. They just want to unite the lands which are currently Islamic under a caliphate, and dissolve the corrupt states that currently exist there. Life under the caliphate might not be so bad. The early Muslims were actually quite tolerant towards Christians and Jews, "People of the Book," and they were enamored of scholarship, too. Islamic architecture is beautiful, it feels like you're living in a fairy tale. Indeed, my last experience in a Muslim country-- Uzbekistan-- was the most wonderful week of my life.

Don't get me wrong, they have to be beaten. Like the socialists, Al-Qaedists are utopians: their goal is appealing, actually, but not really attainable, and meanwhile they are willing to resort to barbarities in order to reach it; inevitably, the vision ultimately can only sink under the weight of the barbarities by which it is pursued. But at least there's a basic quantity of logic, conviction and courage in al-Qaeda that I can respect, which is more than I can say for mainstream public opinion in Europe or, their newly-recruited ally, the US mainstream media. What European public opinion seems to have concluded, and even US public opinion is shifting towards, dragged by the relentless image war waged by the media, is that the war in Iraq was not justified because it led to things like prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (plus, needless to say, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not militarily necessary). This conclusion is so infuriatingly illogical that to watch it played across TV screens constantly has made me pretty much despair of civilization. This world is populated by idiots!...

The National Review saved me. I don't usually like these people (they're too far right for me) but all of a sudden they're an oasis of sanity in a world gone mad. Here they dissect the media's extravagant bias. And here they describe how the chaos in Iraq is following the script of the Zarqawi memo (an intercepted memo in which Iraq's top terrorist describes his strategy.)

Thank you, National Review, from the bottom of my heart. Maybe logic is not totally dead.