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Like us, Moslems see only their better side.  And like us,  they
imagine that their darker impulses do not really exist.  Instead, they
feel that the urge to destroy and conquer belongs only to their enemy.
That's how the Moslem world justifies our imminent conquest, and
how the Moslem superorganism excuses its hunger.
What is the difference, then, between Americans, Africans, Latin
Americans and Moslems?  Why do I claim that they, not we, are the
barbarians?  It's a question of degree.  No American leader has ever
followed the path of Syria's Assad and embarked on a mass
extermination of political opponents to secure his position in office.  No
Yankee presidential candidate has emulated Equatorial Guinea's
Francisco Nguema and wiped out 50,000 members of a rival ethnic
group in some electoral ward that was rooting for his rival.
There is a little bit of the barbarian in all of us.  But some are far
more barbarous than others.  There are cultures that idealize carnage.
Others--we hope ours among them--put a premium on human life.
Some cultures feel that debate is superior to battle, that discourse is
preferable to the sword.  These cultures stress, not violence as a means
of conflict resolution, but conciliation.  They measure political
manhood by the ability to produce voluntary consent.  Their memes
generate democracy and pluralism.
We have a tendency to justify the pro-violence stance of the third
world.  We turn our backs on African genocide or Syrian political
killings as the good Germans turned away from the murder of six
million under the Nazis.  Or we find excuses for it.   When we do, we
become implicit accomplices in murder.  Many of those who
romanticize homicidal peoples have gone a step further.  They have
striven to replace the melting pot's leashed hostilities with
"multicultural" enclaves roused to permanent anger by the dogmatic
language of ethnic "struggle."
It is important that the societies which cherish pluralism survive.
It is critical that they spread their values.  It is vital that they not
mistakenly imagine all other societies to be equal, and their own to be
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