ISLAMISTS ADVOCATE RAIDING AMERICAN FORUMS AND REPEATING DEMOCRATIC TALKING POINTS

We're sure that this quote has been getting passed around, but our RSS reader decided that it didn't like the posts from last Wednesday-Friday and acted accordingly. So it's new to us:

In addition, MEMRI researchers monitoring jihadi Web sites have recently found Islamists trying to influence American anti-war efforts. On the Islamist Al-Mohajroon Web site, someone with the username Al-Wathiq Billah instructs readers on how to infiltrate popular American Internet forums to distribute jihadist films and spread disinformation about the war. "There is no doubt, my brothers, that raiding American forums is among the most important means of obtaining victory in the fierce media war ... and of influencing the views of the weak-minded American who pays his taxes so they will go to the infidel American army. This American is an idiot and does not know where Iraq is ... Every electronic mujahid" must engage in this raiding, Mr. Billah writes. Mr. Billah advises his jihadist readers to "register yourself using a purely American name" and to "invent stories about American soldiers you have personally known..." The writing should, he says, provoke "frustration and anger towards their government, which will ... render them hostile to Bush ... and his Republican Party, and make them feel they must vote to bring the troops back from Iraq as soon as possible."

This is what "not anti-war, just on the other side" means in the context of many of the far left sites to which the Democratic Party is now beholden. The excuses of "jihadists don't pay attention to our media" have never been particularly compelling, but they now require an intimidating combination of denial and ignorance to even pay lip service to. Which is not to say that people shouldn't express dissent against a democratic government during wartime - but it is to say that they shouldn't be allowed to comfortably deflect criticism with fantasized excuses. There's something almost ironic about this: for decades, the academic and activist left could be as crazy as their little hearts desired - precisely because nobody really listened to them. But now, when people are listening, it would behoove them to grow up.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]