The new CW: 10% of Muslims worldwide are “Islamofascist extremists”
Both Media Matters and Newsmax quoted from Mary Matalin, former assistant to President Bush and counselor to Vice President Cheney, on Imus on Friday, about the Jersey girls and Ann Coulter. However, they missed her more significant remarks, about twelve and a half minutes into this clip:
What is the alternative to this [the Iraq war]? Just pretend like they don’t exist? You know, the Muslim population, about 10% of them, are the Islamofascist extremists, but 10% of a 2 billion population is a population the size of this country. Which only got more organized and more fierce and better financed in the twenty years we didn’t do anything about this. Get out of Iraq and get to the big picture. And what is the alternative to eradicating them? [Unintelligible] You can’t think we can make a truce with these crazy people.
No one, not Media Matters on the Left, or Newsmax on the Right, or Imus or his broadcast associates, thought twice about Matalin’s comments that 10% of the Muslim world are “Islamofascist extremists.” Such words would have been unthinkable as well as unsayable five years ago. But a lot has changed in the last five years, as we have noted. Mary Matalin numbered the mortal enemies of America in the hundreds of millions of Muslims, and asked: “And what is the alternative to eradicating them?” And no one raised an eyebrow.
That Matalin’s comments appeared unremarkable to all listeners means that they have become the conventional wisdom. This is, by the way, the reason that everyone is a little crazy these days. Everybody — Left, Right, and Center — apparently knows what the problem is, but some don’t want to face it and others don’t know what to do about it.
UPDATE
To see how much the conventional wisdom has changed over the last five years, you can’t do much better than this letter that Iowahawk found from Zarqawi describing his adventures in paradise.