Dum Pendebat Filius

As many left-leaning bloggers have pointed out in the last couple of days, it’s not surprising that this Dubai Ports World business has turned into such a political nightmare for the Bush administration; after all, the Bush administration has made it a point, ever since 11 September 2001, to keep the American public in a state of barely-controlled hysteria at the very thought of scary Arabs and Muslims. So it shouldn’t be surprising that this port deal is causing such a to-do; it’s quite logical, in fact.

Who’s more hysterical over Dubai Ports World at this point, Friday the 24th of February, the righties or the lefties? I honestly don’t know. Here’s some right-wing hysteria, “Bush’s Port Jihad” by Robert Spencer, a good example of “post 9/11 thinking”:

[...] No amount of good will can possibly efface the jihad imperative to subjugate the world under the rule of Islamic law, which is the avowed program of jihadists everywhere.

The UAE may be the most reliable ally the United States has ever had (and of course it isn’t remotely that) and there would still be no way for it to ensure that Dubai Ports World hires no one with jihadist sentiments. The situation in the Islamic world makes it quite likely that Dubai Ports World will be sending at least a few mujahedin to work in these American ports, and that they will be able to work there unhindered. The 9/11 hijackers used the UAE as a base of operations and source of financial support; have Emirati authorities cleared the country of jihad sentiment since then? On what basis can this be assumed?

How many examples of petitio principii can you count in those five sentences?

This writer seems to be saying that only if the UAE were “cleared… of jihad sentiment” could US national security fail to be placed in jeopardy by this deal. The fact that some of the 11 September hijackers passed through Dubai, and used bank accounts there, seems to him to mean that the UAE openly supported the hijackers, because of the vast amount of “jihad sentiment” to be found there.

After all, no one even in Washington is yet even asking the right questions of self-proclaimed moderates about where they really stand on jihad and Sharia issues. Officials in Washington and Europe have shown no awareness of the fact that it isn’t enough to have no ties to terror groups; a Muslim who nonetheless believes in the jihad ideology of Islamic supremacism and the subjugation of infidels is still susceptible to jihadist recruitment. Is it possible to determine whether such recruitment is likely or not in the case of any particular individual?

You get the idea. This writer is convinced — he knows — that every Muslim is a “jihadist,” ergo a terrorist, until proven otherwise. This is what right-wingers call “post-9/11 realism,” distilled down to its purest essence. The port-management deal is the first time the Bush administration is finding it politically inconvenient.