Mumbai: 'It's America's Fault' says New Age Charlatan

Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.

How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not Washington's fault," he pointed out.

Blogger Betsy Newmark has it about right:

It takes a seriously twisted world view to pivot immediately to finding a way to blame America for terrorists storming hotels and other soft targets to gun down people innocently going about their business. Rabinowitz ties this view to the handwringing over a report that the majority of people in the Middle East think that 9/11 was a put-up job done by the United States and Israel.

Chopra delights in trivializing the momentus and obscuring the obvious. One need only read his "political" writings at Huffington Post to become lost in a sea of the most mind boggling shibboleths, inane platitudes, and nauseating screeds against Republicans you can find anywhere on the internet. No one bothers critiquing his thinking anymore because frankly, there is so little in the way of intellectual meat in his scribblings that any such effort isn't worth the pixels that would be expended in trying to explain the depth of his stupidity.

Read the rest of Rabinowitz's piece to get a good laugh.

Posted at 11:37 AM | Email | Permalink |