Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Lady Gaga o gli insediamenti?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304370304575151541851806562.html
Lady Gaga Versus Mideast Peace
Are settlements more offensive than pop stars?
Pop quiz—What does more to galvanize radical anti-American sentiment in
the Muslim world: (a) Israeli settlements on the West Bank; or (b) a
Lady Gaga music video?
If your answer is (b) it means you probably have a grasp of the
historical roots of modern jihadism. If, however, you answered (a), then
congratulations: You are perfectly in synch with the new Beltway
conventional wisdom, now jointly defined by Pat Buchanan and his strange
bedfellows within the Obama administration.
What is that wisdom? In a March 26 column in Human Events, Mr. Buchanan
put the case with his usual subtlety:
"Each new report of settlement expansion," he wrote, "each new seizure
of Palestinian property, each new West Bank clash between Palestinians
and Israeli troops inflames the Arab street, humiliates our Arab allies,
exposes America as a weakling that cannot stand up to Israel, and
imperils our troops and their mission in Afghanistan and Iraq."
Mr. Buchanan was playing off a story in the Israeli press that Vice
President Joe Biden had warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
"what you're doing here [in the West Bank] undermines the security of
our troops." Also in the mix was a story that Centcom commander David
Petraeus had cited Arab-Israeli tensions as the key impediment to wider
progress in the region. Both reports were later denied—in Mr. Biden's
case, via Rahm Emanuel; in Gen. Petraeus's case, personally and
forcefully—but the important point is how eagerly they were believed. If
you're of the view that Israel is the root cause of everything that ails
the Middle East—think of it as global warming in Hebrew form—then
nothing so powerfully makes the case against the Jewish state as a
flag-draped American coffin.
Now consider Lady Gaga—or, if you prefer, Madonna, Farrah Fawcett,
Marilyn Monroe, Josephine Baker or any other American woman who has, at
one time or another, personified what the Egyptian Islamist writer
Sayyid Qutb once called "the American Temptress."
Qutb, for those unfamiliar with the name, is widely considered the
intellectual godfather of al Qaeda; his 30-volume exegesis "In the Shade
of the Quran" is canonical in jihadist circles. But Qutb, who spent time
as a student in Colorado in the late 1940s, also decisively shaped
jihadist views about the U.S.
In his 1951 essay "The America I Have Seen," Qutb gave his account of
the U.S. "in the scale of human values." "I fear," he wrote, "that a
balance may not exist between America's material greatness and the
quality of her people." Qutb was particularly exercised by what he saw
as the "primitiveness" of American values, not least in matters of sex.
"The American girl," he noted, "knows seductiveness lies in the round
breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and
she shows all this and does not hide it." Nor did he approve of
Jazz—"this music the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive
desires"—or of American films, or clothes, or haircuts, or food. It was
all, in his eyes, equally wretched.
Qutb's disdain for America's supposedly libertine culture would not
matter much were it not wedded to a kind of theological Leninism that
emphasized the necessity of violently overthrowing any political
arrangement not based on Shariah law. No less violent was Qutb's
attitude toward Jews: "The war the Jews began to wage against Islam and
Muslims in those early days [of Islamic history]," he wrote in the
1950s, "has raged to the present. The form and appearance may have
changed, but the nature and the means remain the same."
Needless to say, that passage was written long before Israel had
"occupied" a single inch of Arab territory, unless one takes the
view—held to this day by Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah
and every other jihadist group that owes an intellectual debt to Qutb,
including significant elements of the "moderate" Palestinian Fatah—that
Tel Aviv itself is occupied territory.
Bear in mind, too, that the America Qutb found so offensive had yet to
discover Elvis, Playboy, the pill, women's lib, acid tabs, gay rights,
Studio 54, Jersey Shore and, of course, Lady Gaga. In other words, even
in some dystopic hypothetical world in which hyper-conservatives were to
seize power in the U.S. and turn the cultural clock back to 1948,
America would still remain a swamp of degeneracy in the eyes of Qutb's
latter-day disciples.
This, then, is the core complaint that the Islamists from Waziristan to
Tehran to Gaza have lodged against the West. It explains why jihadists
remain aggrieved even after the U.S. addressed their previous casus
belli by removing troops from Saudi Arabia, and why they will continue
to remain aggrieved long after we've decamped from Iraq, Afghanistan and
even the Persian Gulf. As for Israel, its offenses are literally
inextricable: as a democracy, as a Jewish homeland, as a country in
which liberalism in all its forms, including cultural, prevails.
Which brings me back to the settlements. There may well be good reasons
for Israel to dismantle many of them, assuming that such an act is met
with reciprocal and credible Palestinian commitments to suppress
terrorism and religious incitement, and accept Israel's legitimacy as a
Jewish state. But to imagine that the settlements account for even a
fraction of the rage that has inhabited the radical Muslim mind since
the days of Qutb is fantasy: The settlements are merely the latest
politically convenient cover behind which lies a universe of hatred. If
the administration's aim is to appease our enemies, it will get more
mileage out of banning Lady Gaga than by applying the screws on Israel.
It should go without saying that it ought to do neither.

 It should go without saying that it ought to do neither.
Esatto, bene detto.