Reply #9: The Muslim world can wait; the horrors of the West are quite sufficient...

[Voltaire99]

...to occupy our energies.

The late Edward Said observed that westerners are awash with feelings of superiority when writing their Orientalist perspectives.

Well might we help "the Muslim world," were we not living in our own backward society in which the poor wash up dead after hurricanes and half our fellows wish to teach the rot-brained creed of Intelligent Design to children.

Systemic poverty, enshrined racial and gender inequality, official indifference to suffering, a fraudulent electoral system, political choices running from center-right to far-right, a culture of rape, inchoate gun violence, a drooling media, mass exploitation in the satanic mills of our Wal-Marts...

Something needs to happen in the United States. Please help the cause of bringing the fruits of the Enlightenment here. The Constitution is a nice start, you know, but hardly, I think, enough.