GREAT MARK MORFORD PIECE

An excerpt from his latest SFGATE.COM article:

As it goes with America, so it goes with the world. You want to know why
there's vicious rioting and people dying across the world right now, from
Iran to Pakistan, Libya to Nigeria, all in the name of a mediocre cartoon
featuring Allah and a cute turban bomb? Why otherwise rational Muslims are
protesting by the thousands from London to Cairo? Here's a hint: It has
nothing to do with the cartoon. It has nothing to do with Muslims loathing
Christianity, or even with the Islamic fundamentalists who teach their
children to hate pretty much everyone (but especially America) from birth.

But it has a great deal to do with the world's foremost peace-keeping
superpower becoming the world's foremost thug, turning into a
self-righteous torture-happy God-monger and a grand perpetuator of war. It
has much to do with the U.S.-led stoking of an already white-hot Middle
East tinderbox via launching two brutal, unwinnable wars and fueling the
fires of division and separation and rage. Once we were the great beacon
of peace and diplomacy. But now the beacon has become bloody and malicious
and hollow. It has become a brutal joke.

Are we to blame for all the eternal tension and raging religious hatreds
in the Middle East? Of course not. Are we largely responsible for making
them far, far worse than they were just five years ago by deciding, under
Bush's pampered thumb, to become the planet's sanctimonious hell-bent
Jesus-crazed bitch-slapper? Hell yes.

READ THE REST: SFGATE.COM