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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Would you say the same thing about 9/11 with respect to people who were not already committed to the pro-America position?

Support for the 9/11 hijackers outside of the Arab world seems pretty nonexistent, largely because the primary target (or at least the target that ended up getting all the news coverage) was a pair of buildings occupied by thousands of civilians. If they’d just stuck to ramming planes into the Pentagon and the halls of government in DC, I frankly think that there would have been a much larger sense of “Holy shit, I don’t agree with these guys’ worldview, but that was extremely impressive.” Instead people can’t really separate the means from the ends because of the very visually-evocative optics of a bunch of middle-class office workers leaping to their deaths or crushed under rubble. Similarly, while even people who broadly support Zionism still mostly squirm over the carnage in Gaza, I doubt many people feel all that bad for guys who work for Hezbollah.