Another voice about European culpability for Iran's nuclear proliferation

As PalmTree Pundit so often says, James Lilek is good. How about this elegant prose about the European Left's relentless drive to demonize America over nuclear weapons:

In the good old days, one could count on the progressive elements to side with a pluralistic, tolerant, secular democracy against a theocratic regime made up of glowering, Jew-hating misogynists. But that was before the permanent adolescents of the '60s hijacked the left with their fragrant blend of anti-Americanism and loathing of the very culture that guarantees their freedoms. To them, Iran is a problem only inasmuch as it provides the Zionist Oil-Cabal Neocons with an 'enemy.' And if the mullahs respond to a successful revolution by nuking Israel on the way out? Well, how many Jews does the world really need, anyway? Europe's been asking that question for centuries. An answer might be nice. When suicide bombers start going after something the European left truly cares about, the 'activists' might wake up, but it's hard to tell what they think is worthy of defending. The churches are empty vestiges of an abandoned past; the art museums are bourgeois temples for the dead hand of the artistic patriarchy. The European left prizes naught but thin, windy bromides about justice and tolerance, ideas the enemies of the West (how quaint a phrase!) use to enable their own agenda. One day the hash houses will be closed down because they offend religious sensibilities; then the naughty districts will be shuttered.

Those writers who are learning the delicate art of irony could do worst than to study these paragraphs from the same article:

[Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass wrote], "Today, I will join Hans Blix at the United Nations for a discussion on the need to balance disarmament and nonproliferation. The real `nuclear option' that threatens our national security is not the one being debated in the Senate — this nuclear option will end in a devastating plume of smoke over our cities. ... 134 congressmen (Democrats and Republicans) share my concern about the direction of our nuclear policy. Today these members signed letters ... calling for the immediate cancellation of the Bush administration's proposed nuclear bunker warhead. We are concerned at the adverse impact of the nuclear bunker buster on America's credibility to lead on nuclear nonproliferation with North Korea and around the world." In other words: To dissuade countries from developing weapons in places we can reach only with bunker-busting nukes, we should give up bunker-busting nukes. Noted. And if the United States had dismantled the gas chambers in the federal penitentiaries, Hitler wouldn't have gassed the Jews. Why, he would been drenched with shame-sweat just thinking about it.