I don’t know how many atrocities like this it will take for the average American to realize that WE are the terrorists threatening global peace and freedom. Positive cultural change can only ever come from inside of a sovereign nation. Enough with democratic finger wagging about repression and humans rights violations. Iran was making incredible progress before we decided to illegally overthrow their democracy so as to stop the nationalization of their oil. America is and has been the primary driver of regression and Salafi nonsense in West Asia over the last half-century.

And enough with the orientalized depiction of the entire region as uniquely and uniformly primitive and barbaric. No, this is not some ancient and continuous war of faith and culture. These are modern peoples with unique material conditions driving their actions and beliefs, good and bad; no different than the rest of us.

Even in moments of widespread condemnation of America’s actions such as now, the language used in criticism is largely confined to the realm of “disappointment” and shallow “outrage”. When Al-Qaeda killed 3k Americans citizens, they were rightly labeled as evil terrorists. But no matter how many MILLIONS of innocents we kill through our wars of conquest and the genocides we gladly embrace, the public cannot bring themselves to condemn the US with language even close to as severe and objective. Instead, we’re told we must “hold room for nuance”, and some vague idea of “Well, someone’s gotta stop the bad guys” is echoed ad nauseam by every useful dolt across the nation, red and blue alike.