BENJAMIN NETANYAHU says terrorism comes from tyranny, not desperation:

Indeed, the root cause of terrorism is totalitarianism. Only a totalitarian regime, by systemically brainwashing its subjects, can indoctrinate hordes of killers to suspend all moral constraints for the sake of a twisted cause.

That is why from its inception totalitarianism has always been wedded to terrorism–from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to the ayatollahs to Saddam Hussein, right down to Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat.

It is not merely that the goals of terrorists do not justify the means they choose, it is that the means they choose tell us what their true goals are. Osama bin Laden is not seeking to defend the rights of Muslims but to murder as many Americans as possible, and ultimately to destroy America. Saddam Hussein is not seeking to defend his people but to subjugate his neighbors. Arafat is not seeking to build a state but to destroy a state; the many massacres of Jews he sponsors tells us what he would do to all the Jews of Israel if he had enough power.

Yes. And as Dave Kopel writes over at The Corner: “Why don’t all the people who are supposedly so concerned about the oppression of Arabs demand that the people of every Arab nation be given the same property rights, right to vote, and freedom of speech that Arabs who live in Israel have?” Why, indeed?

READER ANTON RIVIERA WRITES, rather hostilely:

Why weren’t the people who are now supposedly so concerned about undemocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Syria making their voices heard, say, a decade ago? Might it be for the same reason that they were silent for so many years over the situation in Afghanistan? That they don’t actually give a shit about democracy and freedom for brown people in faraway countries as long as life is cosy in the god-be-praised USA? Or perhaps for a lightly different reason: that those Arab tyrannies were fine and dandy while they were placing their orders for US military hardware and keeping their repression to themselves.

Why indeed?

After all, the only people addressing the injustices that arrived with the Taliban in 1996, or across Saudi Arabia over the past handful of decades, have been the international human rights organisations, and the left. Of course, it’s those organisations that are now being demonised by you and your pack of dittoheads for identifying in the occupied territories the same patterns of abuse that they’ve complained about, consistently, for decades, to silence from the mainstream and condemnation from the right.

You fucking hypocrite.

Hmm. I must have forgotten my many pro-dictatorship, pro-Taliban posts on InstaPundit back in the early 1990s, huh?

Here’s another question: if all these groups were so good about opposing the Taliban, why did they suddenly switch sides the minute it looked as if someone might actually do something about the Taliban? And why aren’t we getting the daily press releases about Saudi gender apartheid that we’re getting about the IDF?

And what’s this “little brown people” crap? One only hears that sort of thing from the “progressive” Left these days. The racism in this statement is made more obvious by the fact that neither Arabs nor Afghans are particularly little, or brown. But today’s Leftism is all about shouldering The White Man’s Burden, isn’t it? Which means, of course, that you have to call as many people little and brown as possible, to enlarge your own importance.

UPDATE: Reader John Downing writes:

While I agree with Anton Riviera that the left is usually out front in drawing our attention to human rights injustices throughout the world, particularly American human rights violations, I think Mr. Riviera illuminates a bigger point. At the end of the Gulf war, the left was “out front” calling on the US not to topple Saddam but to humbly follow the UN mandate only to kick Saddam out of Kuwait. If there were any calls for toppling Saddam back then, they were
not from the left but from the right. But, again, I do agree with Mr. Riviera that they were muted. Which brings us to the broader point Mr. Riviera may be trying to make–in the past decade conservatives moved from hostility to interventionist policies to open advocacy of international intervention. Nation-building is no longer a bad word; as it was just 2 years ago in the 2000 presidential campaign. There are 2 reasons for this shift. First, conservatives/republicans take pride in America and its history more than the elite left. This love is best expressed by Lincoln’s statement that America is “The last best hope of Earth.” As an avid reader of the conservative press, I’ve noticed this quote resurfacing in publications from the National Review, to The Wall Street Journal, to the Weekly Standard, to InstaPundit.com. Second, conservatives now believe that military action can facilitate the “hope” Lincoln talked about. The dramatic success of the Gulf War and our actions in Afghanistan have debunked the quagmire argument attached to American interventionism since Vietnam. This triumph of American values coupled with the recent triumphs of the American military may frighten Mr. Riviera and other members of the humanitarian left. After all, aren’t many of these human rights groups founded on the premise that they are Earth’s “last best hope”? Personally, I
find it quite frightening when evidence mounts that I am not what I thought I was.

Indeed.