Please help me understand this leap...
Isn't the author partaking in exactly the same type of thing in blaming the actions of terrorists on others? Isn't the support of brutal regimes for the sake of oil and weapons contracts while rhetorically in the name of freedom and democracy moral relativism?
(Although the Thomas Frank phrase "commodification of dissent" is an excellent one and I do think it exists. It reminds me of Marx's Fetishism of Commoditites...
)http://www.wsj.com/articles/islam-and-t ... 1460416688The commodification of dissent may have the effect of blunting the impact of all kinds of extreme notions. But it can dull us to their extremism, leaving us astonished when someone turns notion into action. The catharsis of violence seems like an interesting idea in the pages of “The Wretched of the Earth.” In practice, it’s scores of young men and women gunned down in a Paris concert hall.
We’ve become lazy in our thinking about Islam and the West. Whether the Islam practiced by al Qaeda or ISIS is “radical” or merely traditional isn’t the question. It’s whether the West can recognize that the moral nihilism of today’s Jihadi Johns is the logical outgrowth of the moral relativism that is the default religion of today’s West.
