A Persian Turkish immigrant says Michael Moore’s agit-prop film Fahrenheit 911 spits in the face of his dead countrymen: Moore’s ‘Hate-Riotism’. (Hat tip: deja vu.)

“HATE-RIOTISM” describes the new breeze blowing through the American media. It is now “cool” and “relevant” to mock everything for which our soldiers are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Criticizing democracy and America has long been in vogue in continental Europe, from those who look with disdain at American “naiveté,” while still lamenting the Islamic onslaught. Now imported to our shores, hatriotism is the simplest way to get the growing contingent of professional protestors who populate television audiences to cheer. Mock America. Mock our involvement in Iraq. Mock President Bush…and get rousing applause.

The only problem is…America has freed my kinsmen.

I am a Persian Turkish immigrant raised as a Sunni Muslim, and in the interest of full disclosure, I must state that I left Islam in 1982, and became an American citizen. Yet as I survey the current cultural landscape, I cannot help but be less than enthused when Michael Moore states that his film is a call to true patriotism.

The present conflict is not a war against Islam, and neither is it a “war for oil.” In the previous six military endeavors, American troops sided with Muslims who were under attack, and there are much less extreme methods of garnering oil. This is a war of ideologies, and with Fahrenheit 911, Moore clearly shows his.

His visual narrative of Lila Lipscombe, a Flint, Michigan mother who sent her sons to the military and “lives to regret it,” as Roger Friedman of FOXNews.com notes, is “unexpectedly poignant.”

I wonder — was Moore equally moved when he heard of the honor killings which daily threatened the lives of Muslim women in Afghanistan? Was he equally as outraged at the female circumcision practices in my countrymen’s lands, because it lessens the threat of adultery?

In fact, I wonder…where were all the “hatriots” when our soldiers freed all the women of Afghanistan from the Taliban? Where were the feminists when our soldiers liberated the Afghan women to be educated for the first time in years?

The irony is, for all of their false bravado behind the First Amendment and their right to “free speech,” the hatriots are exercising this right because American men and women shed their blood to afford them this right against those who would seek to oppress it. I would invite Michael Moore to my homeland to make a movie criticizing Turkish oppression and see what happens. The freedom he enjoys now was purchased with a dear price.