LIFE IN THE OLD GIRL YET:

Cherished Ideas Refracted in History's Lens (EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, September 7, 2002, NY Times)

The enemy, after all, is not the narrowly defined Qaeda, but a wellspring of Islamic terrorist organizations, sponsored and embraced and sometimes feared by numerous states in the Arab world, many possessing networks in both Europe and the United States.

The battle against these organizations is dangerous and precarious. American society, the apotheosis of Western liberalism, is by definition an opponent of fundamentalist and totalitarian terror. But it is also a society reluctant to grasp the nature of the beast. It is most devoted to procedure and reason, to tolerance and egalitarianism, hoping to find similar values even in its enemies, despite the ever-mounting evidence.

More troubling is that this battle, even if infallibly waged, requires that liberal society strain against those very values, constricting tolerance and encouraging suspicion. Fundamentalist terror may not be representative of mainstream Islam, but that still doesn't make it any easier to root it out of mainstream Islamic communities in Western nations. Society is forced to challenge liberal values in the act of defending them.

Amazing how much a little balance has improved the Times since the Sulzberger's told Howell Raines to get on board with the war on Iraq. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 7, 2002 8:04 AM