The Machinery of Night

Reason

And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason -- it is his reason, and not ours.
---Lee Harris, via InstaPundit.

McDonald's
The ICC
Kyoto
Vietnam

You hear these reasons given constantly. "Of course you were attacked! Any country that would [fill in the blank] will attract the righteous anger of [fill in appropriate angry group]."

But those reasons are not the Reason. Every time you here a Susan Sontag or a Noam Chomsky talk about the Reason, you know they're full of shit. What they mean is this would be their reasons, if they were to strap on a bomb or hijack a plane. These are the reasons that eat at them.

But they're not Bin Laden's Reason. Bin Laden wanted to unite all Muslims into one nation, under Sharia law. He wanted to reconquer all the lands which Muslims had ever occupied. And why should he stop at those? He's an imperialist, an Islamic fundamentalist, and an Arab supremacist. If you were to change "Islamic" to "Christian" and "Arab" to "white", in that description, Sontag and Chomsky would think Bin Laden the most dangerous, the most hateful man in the world. Who would care what the "reasons" of such a madman were? Madmen, by definition, do not reason.

But they cannot grasp his true nature. They are too used to seeing the world through the lens of their own carefully-polished grievances that they cannot imagine that a "revolutionary" like Bin Laden could reason differently.

Remember this, next time you read in some turgid Euro-editorial or slobbering Indymedia spew, about the Reason for September 11.