Very Funny: One tsunami too far

There is no accounting for some people's sense of humour, or what they imagine passes for satirical comment.

Take this picture, for example, and note the narrative (and subsequent comments) tacked on to it.

The logic adduced to this poster by the blogger suggests that the fifteen jihadists who perpetrated 9/11 were not human beings carefully hand-picked and groomed to carry out their evil scheme but were rather a random force of nature whose indiscriminate violence was not under the control of thinking, planning, deliberative human intelligence. Therefore, some people find American reaction funny in the extreme, since there is no way of retaliating and preventing natural disasters.

I would caution against identifying the exterminationalist Islamism which produced 9/11 (and Madrid, and London, and Indonesia etc etc) with uncontrollable forces of nature. It does not represent great intelligence on the part of those who find such analogies entertaining.

If any of you find this kind of bizarre "satirical" humour disturbing, I'd like to remind you that it is just one small example of a "new" type of thinking about America, 9/11 and the war on terrorism which has become pretty popular among an increasing number of members of the so-called "left".

Martin Amis once described it in a sort of "modest proposal":

... I started looking from face to face in the audience, and what I saw were the gapes and frowns, not of disagreement, but of disbelief. Then a young woman spoke up, in a voice near-tearful with passionate self-righteousness, saying that it was the Americans who had armed the Islamists in Afghanistan, and that therefore the US, in its response to September 11, “should be dropping bombs on themselves”! I had time to imagine the F16s yowling in over Chicago, and the USS Abraham Lincoln pumping shells the size of Volkswagens into downtown Miami – in bold atonement for the World Trade Center, for the Pentagon, for United 93, United 175, American 11, and American 77. But then my thoughts were scattered by the sound of unanimous applause. We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishisation of “balance”, the ground rule of “moral equivalence” in all conflicts between West and East, the 100-per-cent and 360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel). And yet the handclappers of
Question Time had moved beyond the old formula of pious paralysis. This was not
equivalence; this was hemispherical abjection. Accordingly, given the choice
between George Bush and Osama bin Laden, the liberal relativist, it seems, is
obliged to plump for the Saudi, thus becoming the appeaser of an armed doctrine
with the following tenets: it is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian,
inquisitional, imperialist, and genocidal.