'Kumbaya liberalism'

Michelle Malkin, clever gal that she is, didn't just look at the cover of the latest New Yorker, she actually read the article:

The magazine piece quotes Obama's recommendations for how to stop jihad in a local Chicago newspaper op-ed he had published eight days after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It’s a self-parody of blind, deaf, and dumb Kumbaya liberalism:
"We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers. . . . Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair."

Yeah, that stuff in the Koran about smiting the unbelievers -- irrevelevant to those "root causes." The fact that Osama bin Laden is the privileged son of a multimillionaire or that Mohammed Atta was an affluent Egyptian who studied architecture in grad school -- never mind the facts, Democrats must stick to their flawed liberal theories. Michelle continues:

Ayman al-Zawahiri didn’t need more education or wealth to steer him away from Islamic imperialism and working toward a worldwide caliphate. He has a medical degree. So does former Hamas biggie Abdel Rantissi. Seven upper-middle-class jihadi doctors were implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings. Suspected al Qaeda scientist Affia Siddiqui, still wanted by the FBI for questioning, is a Pakistani who studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis.

And she points out that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is a proud alumnus of North Carolina A&T. The liberal faith in salvation through education -- a modern heresy that was one of the main targets of William F. Buckley's 1951 book God and Man at Yale -- has stubbornly survived more than a half-century of contradictory evidence. This idee fixe, based on the egalitarian notion that the only difference between an MIT grad and a ditch-digger is that the ditch-digger doesn't have an MIT diploma, persists in the liberal mind because, if it were ever abandoned, their entire worldview would collapse like a house of cards.

Always, the liberal education agenda is "more, more, more," an agenda that seems to have no fixed objective nor any limits, so that eventually (if the liberals have their way), the population will be entirely composed of full-time students and school employees. This education uber alles agenda seems mainly designed to keep people in school for decades, rather than letting them go out into the world and do something useful for a living.

And so Obama's solution to jihad is to foist this "progressive" nonsense onto the Arab world? The problem with Obama is not that he represents any new radicalism, but that he represents the same old liberal ideas that have failed wherever they've been tried.