Did we deserve the attacks of 9/11?

Every time I turn around these days, I hear some moralist suggest, in effect, that perhaps America deserved to be attacked on Sept. 11 because our culture is so rotten.

They seem to be saying that we should bow to the reforms the radical Islamists prescribe for us and the rest of the world.

Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, wrote today in the Wall Street Journal: "We make it too easy for those who want to hate us to hate us. We make ourselves look bad in our media, which helps future jihadists think that they must, by hating us, be good."

The Rev. Canon Andrew White, vicar of an Anglican Church in Baghdad, was quoted recently in the Christian Post as having said that Middle Easterners are repulsed by what they perceive as tolerance of homosexuality by Americans in general, even Christian Americans.

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report quotes Glenn Beck, a right-wing rattlepate on CNN, as recently saying:

More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals. The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We’re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts. Now I don’t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that’s the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They’re right.

Another darling of the political right, Dinesh D'Souza, wrote a whole book about how the terrorists of Sept. 11 were provoked by our libertine culture. His title summed up his sentiments quite neatly: "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11."

Of course, we all remember when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson got together on TV just two days after the attacks and blamed them on American decadence. God was angry, they said. That's what the terrorists thought, too. Jerry and Pat and the murderers were in agreement.

It wasn't so long ago that certain right-wingers were fond of saying that liberals were too quick to "blame America first." My, how times have changed.