Oh Really?

Fred Kaplan says that the “very fact of a black president with multinational roots unhinges the terrorists’ recruitment poster of a racist, parochial, Muslim-hating United States.”

I hear this claim all the time, but I don’t buy it. Is anti-racism really a driving passion in the Muslim world? Are they disgusted and threatened less by the hypnotic sensualism of capitalist culture and the corrosive skepticism of coastal sophisticates than by the religious, traditional, “parochial” Americans represented by Gov. Palin? If you ask an Iranian what he dislikes about America, do you expect him to say “Oh, without question too little of the open-minded ethnic and religious pluralism that is the cornerstone of my own society”?

No, Mr. Kaplan, I fear that the terrorists’ recruitment poster remains very firmly on its, er, hinge.