Happy Islamofascism Awareness Week!

Did you get a tree yet?

That's right, self-promoter David Horowitz has inaugurated a series of events on college campuses to raise awareness of the greatest threat to humankind, evah! Actually, "series of events" is probably a big strong, since barely half of the campuses Horowitz claimed to be holding events actually are:

We contacted those institutions, alerting them to the fact that their name was being used, and wondering what exactly was taking place. … It’s important to note though, after we contacted those institutions, most of those institutions indicated that no such events is taking place on those campus. And many contacted the sponsors and told them, “do not use my institution’s name in your campaign,” including some very renowned universities such as Yale and Princeton.

This is the most embarrassing thing to hit campus since parachute pants.

The truth is that there's almost no evidence of a Islamic jihadist movement within the United States. To the extent that it exists in other countries, it was on the verge of being crushed immediately after 9-11 until we turned attention to Iraq and did nothing but rescusitate it after that. The "awareness" should be on how unseriously the White House took the threat before the attacks, and how much they've done to make America less safe on the global stage after it.

Some of these nutcases actually think that we're going to be forced to convert to Islam en masse, with the country transformed into a giant arm of the caliphate. That's ridiculous, the Cold War was about 50,000 times more dangerous than a group of fanatics in caves. We have made US citizens more vulnerable to attack, by keeping them in the middle of a civil war in Iraq, but the idea that we're about to be taken over by an Islamic theocracy is absurd. It's not going to happen. And we shouldn't let those who profit from fear to demagogue us into another bloody war:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality...

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Planet Neocon, Fareed. And you spent some time hanging out there, too, as I remember. But welcome back.

When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)

In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.

I'm glad some of the elites ar seeing the insanity of those who claim that Iran is about to strike us any minute and that some son of a blacksmith who runs the traffic lights in Tehran is "worse than Hitler":



The only reason Iran has any leverage at all on us is because we have 165,000 Americans stationed in the country next door. The "awareness" should focus on getting us out of there.