-“We are at war with an imaginary Islam”; US Manufacturing Enemies: Nation Creates Conditions For War, Terror And Revolution [Picture]

From Salon comes this particularly lengthy and turgid exercise in Leftist denial of reality. “The United States is at war with a very different, mythic Islam of its own making that has nothing at all to do with this Islam of the Qur’an,” says Raymond William Baker, without bothering to examine the Qur’an at all — what care Leftists for evidence-based reasoning?

After 9/11, “from the storehouse of the Western historical imagination, age-old images of a hostile Islam were retrieved” — at the behest of the Bush Administration, you see, which was eagerly pursuing its imperialist agenda. Never mind that Bush appeared in a mosque and proclaimed that Islam was a religion of peace. That doesn’t fit Baker’s narrative, so he ignores it. Instead, he tells us that after 9/11, “the Islamist Imaginary in the service of the neoconservative version of empire was born.”

Baker, like many Leftists (as well as anti-Semitic paleocons), assumes, or would have his readers assume, that opposition to the global jihad was created by neocons in order to justify the imperial ambitions of the U.S. (and Israel), and that therefore all foes of jihad terror must inevitably be in favor of the Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures. The idea of a foe of the global jihad who for years consistently said that those conflicts were being pursued in a self-defeating and wrongheaded manner is, to him, inconceivable. But here I am.

In one sense, however, Baker is right: the U.S. is not at war with any kind of Islam, but the official version of Islam proffered by Obama, Biden, Kerry et al is certainly an imaginary Islam. Meanwhile, significant numbers of the adherents of very real Islam consider themselves to be at war with the U.S.                 source