The Appeasement Library Association

I have long since forsworn having anything to do with the American Library Association, for reasons I have previously explained. I have no wish to pay $155.00 a year in order to support the openly left-wing agenda the association is now pursuing. Now, courtesy of Greg McClay at SHUSH, comes news that at ALA's recent Annual Conference, ALA Council passed a resolution calling for America to abandon Iraq to al Qaeda. Or, as American Libraries delicately puts it:

The governing body also called for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq in a carefully crafted resolution that succeeded where a similar attempt at last year’s Annual Conference in Orlando failed.

Greg has since posted the text of this "carefully crafted" resolution, and it is even worse than I feared. It is a "carefully crafted" monument to the moral and intellectual vacuity of the Blame America Left. The resolution can only be described as representing the worldview of those who live in some bizarre alternate reality in which radical Islamism and al Qaeda don't exist, where the Iraqi people enjoyed nothing but carefree days of kite-flying bliss under that delightful Saddam Hussein, and where the spectacle of 8 million Iraqis voting in the first free election of their lives never occurred. Everything that is bad in Iraq is America's fault, and if we only leave while agreeing to spend lots of money on Iraqi libraries, the nice jihadist fanatics and Baathist murderers who've killed seven times as many Iraqi civilians as they have American soldiers will put down their weapons , stop making car bombs, and all will be sweetness and light. Meawhile, the money we would no longer be spending in Iraq would instead be spent on libraries here at home, and we would all sing songs of joy and dance in a circle. All we have to do is simply stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's September 10th, 2001

This muddle headed resolution is the worst sort of nonsense. The terrorists in Iraq have imposed Taliban-style totalitarianism wherever they have gained control. They murder barbers for trimming beards. They kill human rights workers. This is the same enemy who murdered nearly 3,000 of us on 9/11. In the words of pro al-Qaeda Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih:

I think the best way I can answer this question is to say that I don't think there are any differences –save those related to specific circumstances—between the jihadis in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan. They all represent the same movement and the same ideology. I am not saying that all jihadi groups in Iraq are connected to al-Qaeda, but that their agenda and methodology does not conflict with al-Qaeda's.


If America should ever take ALA Council's advice and cut and run from Iraq, it would hand al Qaeda a victory that would sustain it for a generation. No, we wouldn't have to worry about Americans dying in Iraq anymore; they would be dying in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and in greater numbers in Afghanistan instead. Meanwhile, Iraq would return to the days of genocide and mass graves.

There are far worse threats to intellectual freedom in this world than the possibility of the FBI viewing library records. We are at war with the adherents of a totalitarian ideology of death that is the antithesis of everything ALA is supposed to stand for, an enemy who would destroy intellectual freedom everywhere and burn 90% of our collections, and yet ALA Council has now openly called for the US to abandon Iraq and the entire Middle East to their not so tender mercies. How any rational person could regard such an outcome as positive for American libraries, let alone America, escapes me.