Shhhhhh, don't point out the monsters among us ...

Glenn Greenwald responds to the woolly thinkers who counsel we make nice to those who's goal is to take control of this country by any means.

In what universe is it "obscene" to compare the architects of the Iraq War, the torture regime, and endless War with Muslims "to killers and terrorists"? The comparison is true by definition. The people who launched the attack on Iraq are guilty of an aggressive war -- what the Nuremberg prosecutors condemned as the "kingpin crime" that "holds together" all other war crimes -- which killed hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings, turned millions more into refugees, and destroyed an entire nation. The aptly named "Shock and Awe" was designed to terrify an entire civilian population into submission. John Podhoretz criticized the brutal assault on Fallujah for failing to exterminate all "Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35," while his father has spent years agitating for a devastating military attack on Iran. At least 100 War on Terror detainees in American custody died as a result of their treatment, tens of thousands more (including clearly innocent ones) were put in cages for years with no due process (where many remain), and as recent mosque-related controversies reveal, a substantial portion of the American population craves a religious war with Islam. And that's to say nothing of the acts of other countries which this faction supports: from mauling an imprisoned population in Gaza and attacking a harmless, civilian ship in international waters to propping up some of the most oppressive tyrannies on the planet, including many in the Muslim world.

Sometimes, one's political opponents are "monsters" -- or at least engage in genuinely monstrous acts -- and what's morally offensive is not those who point this out, but rather those who insist that the comparison not be uttered on the jingoistic ground of shared nationality. ...

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The endless, destructive War on Terror depends -- like most wars do -- on a cartoonish demonization of the Enemy as something utterly foreign, inhuman, and subject to entirely different drives than Us. Moulitsas' book, at its best, destroys that rotted premise by highlighting the many similarities between Them and Us. Because that similarity is a great taboo -- perhaps the greatest taboo -- it has triggered all sorts of outrage: outrage that is actually a testament to the value of the argument he makes.