Posted on 10/21/2001 3:29:56 AM PDT by Mr. Mulliner
RELIGIOUS TERRORISTS
The roots of rageAmerica's anti-terrorist war on the Taleban has sparked protests in the Islamic world. Muslim-born American FAREED ZAKARIA probes the source of anger against the United States and finds in the Arab world fertile ground for religious terrorism
TO THE question 'Why do the terrorists hate us?' Americans could be pardoned for answering, 'Why should we care?' The immediate reaction to the murder of 5,000 innocents was anger, not analysis.
Yet anger will not be enough to get us through what is sure to be a long struggle. For that, we will need answers.
The ones we have heard so far have been comforting but familiar. We stand for freedom, and they hate it. We are rich, and they envy us. We are strong, and they resent this. All of which is true.
But there are billions of poor and weak and oppressed people around the world. They don't turn planes into bombs. If envy were the cause of terrorism, Beverly Hills, Fifth Avenue and Mayfair would have become mortuaries long ago.
There is something stronger at work here. Something that can move men to kill but also to die.
Osama bin Laden has an answer - religion. For him and his followers, this is a holy war between Islam and the Western world. Most Muslims disagree. Every Islamic country has condemned the attacks of Sept 11. To many, Osama belongs to a long line of extremists who have invoked religion to justify mass murder.
But he and his followers are not an isolated cult. They come out of a culture that reinforces their hostility, distrust and hatred of the West - and of America, in particular. This culture does not condone terrorism but fuels the fanaticism at its heart.
The problem is not that Osama believes that this is a religious war against America. It is that millions of people across the Islamic world seem to agree.
This awkward reality has led some in the West to dust off old essays and older prejudices predicting a 'clash of civilisations' between the West and Islam.
Islam and the West have often battled militarily. This tension has existed for hundreds of years, during which there have also been many periods of peace and even harmony. Until the 1950s, Jews and Christians lived peaceably under Muslim rule.
All that has changed in the past few decades. So surely, the relevant question we must ask is: What has gone wrong in the world of Islam that explains Sept 11, 2001?
Let us first peer inside that vast Islamic world. Many of the largest Muslim countries show little of this anti-American rage.
The biggest, Indonesia, had, until the recent Asian economic crisis, been diligently following Washington's advice on economics, with impressive results.
The second and third most populous Muslim countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh, have mixed Islam and modernity with some success. While both countries are impoverished, both have voted a woman into power as prime minister, before most Western countries have done so.
Only when you get to the Middle East do you see in lurid colours all the dysfunctions that people conjure up when they think of Islam today.
In Iran, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, the occupied territories and the Gulf, the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism is virulent, and a raw anti-Americanism seems to be everywhere. This is the land of suicide bombers, flag-burners and fiery mullahs.
It is worth remembering that not a single Afghan has been tied to a terrorist attack against the United States. Afghanistan is the camping ground from which an Arab army is battling America. But even the Arab rage at America is relatively recent.
When I first travelled to the Middle East in the early 1970s, the image of America was of a glistening, approachable modernity: fast cars, Hilton hotels and Coca-Cola. Something happened in these lands.
To understand the roots of anti-American rage in the Middle East, we need to plumb not the past 300 years but the past 30.
It is difficult to conjure up the excitement in the Arab world in the late 1950s as Gamal Abdel Nasser consolidated power in Egypt.
For decades, Arabs had been ruled by colonial governors and decadent kings. Now they were achieving their dreams of independence and Nasser was their saviour, a modern man for the post-war era.
With his tailored suits and fashionable dark glasses, he cut an energetic figure on the world stage. He spoke for all the Arab world.
He believed that Arab politics needed to be fired by modern ideas like self-determination, socialism and Arab unity. Before oil money turned the Gulf states into golden geese, Egypt was the undisputed leader of the Middle East.
Nasser's vision became the region's. The Middle East desperately wanted to become modern.
It failed. For all their energy, these regimes chose bad ideas and implemented them in worse ways. Socialism produced bureaucracy and stagnation. The republics calcified into dictatorships.
Look at Egypt today. The government is efficient in only one area: squashing dissent and strangling civil society.
Shockingly, Egypt has fared better than its Arab neighbours. Syria has become one of the world's most oppressive police states, a country where 25,000 people can be rounded up and killed by the regime with no consequences.
In 30 years, Iraq has gone from being among the most modern and secular of Arab countries - with women working, artists thriving, journalists writing - into a squalid playpen for Saddam Hussein's megalomania.
Lebanon, a diverse, cosmopolitan society, has become a hell-hole. In an almost unthinkable reversal of a global pattern, almost every Arab country today is less free than it was 30 years ago.
We think of Africa's dictators as rapacious, but those in the Middle East can be just as greedy. And when contrasted with the success of Israel, Arab failures are even more humiliating.
For all its flaws, out of the same desert Israel has created a functioning democracy, a modern society with an increasingly high-technology economy and thriving artistic and cultural life.
If poverty produced failure in most of Arabia, wealth produced failure in the rest of it.
The rise of oil power in the 1970s gave a second wind to Arab hopes. Where Nasserism failed, petroleum would succeed. But it didn't.
All that the rise of oil prices has done over three decades is to produce a new class of rich, superficially Western Gulf Arabs, who travel the globe in luxury and are despised by the rest of the Arab world.
Most Americans think that Arabs should be grateful for our role in the Gulf War, for we saved Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Most Arabs think that we saved the Kuwaiti and Saudi royal families. Big difference.
Far from producing political progress, wealth has enriched and empowered the Gulf governments so that they, too, have become more repressive over time. The bedouin societies they once ruled have become gilded cages, filled with frustrated, bitter and discontented young men - some of whom now live in Afghanistan and work with Osama, who himself comes from a privileged background in Saudi Arabia.
By the late 1980s, while the rest of the world was watching old regimes from Moscow to Johannesburg crack, the Arabs were stuck with their ageing dictators and corrupt kings.
Regimes that might have seemed promising in the 1960s were exposed as tired kleptocracies, deeply unpopular and thoroughly illegitimate. One has to add that many of them are close American allies.
About a decade ago, in a casual conversation with an elderly Arab intellectual, I expressed my frustration that governments in the Middle East had been unable to liberalise their economies and societies in the way that the east Asians had done.
'Look at Singapore, Hongkong and Seoul,' I said.
He replied sharply: 'Look at them. They have simply aped the West. Their cities are cheap copies of Houston and Dallas. That may be all right for fishing villages, but we are heirs to one of the great civilisations of the world. We cannot become slums of the West.'
This disillusionment with the West is at the heart of the Arab problem. It makes economic advance impossible and political progress fraught with difficulty. The question is how a region that once yearned for modernity could reject it so dramatically.
America thinks of modernity as all good. But for the Arab world, modernity has been one failure after another. Each path followed - socialism, secularism, nationalism - has turned into a dead end.
While other countries adjusted to their failures, Arab regimes got stuck in their ways. And those that reformed economically could not bring themselves to ease up politically.
The Shah of Iran, who tried to move his country into the modern era fastest, reaped the most violent reaction in the Iranian revolution of 1979.
But even the Shah's modernisation - compared with the east Asian approach of hard work, investment and thrift - was an attempt to buy modernisation with oil wealth.
It turns out that modernisation takes more than strongmen and oil money. Importing Cadillacs and McDonald's is easy. Importing a free market, political parties, accountability and the rule of law is difficult and dangerous.
The Gulf governments offered their people a bargain: we will bribe you with wealth, but, in return, let us stay in power - no taxation, but no representation either.
Arab societies are open enough to be disrupted by modernity, but not so open that they can ride the wave. As a result, the people can look at globalisation but, for the most part, cannot touch it.
Disorientated young men, with one foot in the old world and another in the new, now look for a purer, simpler alternative. Fundamentalism searches for such people everywhere; it, too, has been globalised.
One can now find men in Indonesia who regard the Palestinian cause as their own. Twenty years ago, an Indonesian Muslim would barely have known where Palestine was.
Often they learnt about this path while in the West. As did Mohammed Atta, the Hamburg-educated engineer who flew the first plane into the World Trade Center.
Arab societies are going through a massive youth bulge, with more than half of most countries' populations under the age of 25.
Young men, often better educated than their parents, leave their villages to find work in the cities, where they see great disparities of wealth and the disorientating effects of modernity; most unsettlingly, they see women, unveiled and in public places, taking buses, eating in cafes and working alongside them.
A huge influx of restless young men in any country is bad news. When accompanied by even small economic and social change, it usually produces a new politics of protest.
In the past, societies in these circumstances have fallen prey to a search for revolutionary solutions. France went through a youth bulge just before the French revolution, as did Iran before its 1979 revolution. In the Arab world, this revolution has taken the form of an Islamic resurgence.
Nasser was a reasonably devout Muslim, but he had no interest in mixing religion with politics. It struck him as moving backwards.
This became apparent to the small Islamic parties that had supported his rise to power. The most important, the Muslim Brotherhood, began opposing him vigorously, often violently. Nasser cracked down on it, imprisoning more than 1,000 of its leaders and executing six.
One of those jailed, Sayyid Qutb, a frail man with a fiery pen, wrote a book in prison called Signposts On The Road, which in some ways marks the beginnings of modern political Islam, or what is often called Islamic fundamentalism.
In his book, he condemned Nasser as an impious Muslim and his regime as unIslamic. Indeed, he went on, almost every modern Arab regime was similarly flawed. Qutb envisioned a better, more virtuous polity based on strict Islamic principles.
As the regimes of the Middle East grew more distant and oppressive and hollow in the decades following Nasser, fundamentalism's appeal grew.
The Muslim Brotherhood and organisations like it tried to give people a sense of meaning and purpose in a changing world, something no leader in the Middle East tried to do. Fundamentalism gave Arabs who were dissatisfied with their lot a powerful language of opposition.
On that score, Islam had little competition. The Arab world is a political desert with no real political parties, no free press, few pathways for dissent.
As a result, the mosque turned into the place to discuss politics. And fundamentalist organisations have done more than talk. From the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to Hezbollah, they actively provide social services, medical assistance, counselling and temporary housing. For those who treasure civil society, it is disturbing to see that, in the Middle East, these illiberal groups are civil society.
I asked Ms Sheri Berman, a scholar at Princeton who studies the rise of fascist parties in Europe, whether she saw any parallels.
'Fascists were often very effective at providing social services,' she pointed out. 'When the state or political parties fail to provide a sense of legitimacy or purpose or basic services, other organisations have often been able to step into the void.
'In Islamic countries, there is a ready-made source of legitimacy in the religion. So it's not surprising that this is the foundation on which these groups have flourished.
'The particular form - Islamic fundamentalism - is specific to this region, but the basic dynamic is similar to the rise of Nazism, fascism and even populism in the United States.'
Islamic fundamentalism got a tremendous boost in 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the Shah. The Iranian revolution revealed how, in a broken society, even seemingly benign forces of progress - education and technology - can add to the turmoil.
RISE OF THE FUNDAMENTALISTS
BY THE 1970s, Muslims in the Middle East had begun moving out of the villages and their religious experience was not rooted in a specific place.
At the same time, they were learning to read and discovered that a new Islam was being preached by the fundamentalists, an abstract faith not rooted in historical experience but literal, puritanical and by the book.
It was Islam of the high church, as opposed to Islam of the village fair.
Khomeini was not alone in using the language of Islam as a political tool.
Intellectuals, disillusioned by the half-baked or over-rapid modernisation that was throwing their world into turmoil, were writing books against 'Westoxification' and calling the modern Iranian man - half Western, half Eastern - rootless.
Fashionable intellectuals, often from the comfort of London or Paris, would write critiques of American secularism and consumerism and endorse an Islamic alternative.
The fact that Islam is a highly egalitarian religion for the most part has proved an empowering call for people who felt powerless.
At the same time, however, it means that no Muslim really has the authority to question whether someone who claims to be a proper Muslim is one. The fundamentalists have jumped into that void.
They ask whether people are 'good Muslims'.
It is a question that has terrified the Muslim world. And here, we come to the failure not simply of governments, but of intellectual and social elites.
Moderate Muslims are loathe to criticise or debunk the fanaticism of the fundamentalists. They are scared of what would happen to them if they spoke their minds.
The biggest devil's bargain has been made by the moderate monarchies of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi regime has played a dangerous game. It deflects attention from its shoddy record at home by funding religious schools (madrasahs) that spread a rigid, puritanical brand of Islam - Wahhabism.
In the past 30 years, Saudi-funded schools have churned out tens of thousands of half-educated, fanatical Muslims who view the modern world and non-Muslims with great suspicion.
This exported fundamentalism has, in turn, infected not just other Arab societies but countries outside the Arab world, such as Pakistan.
If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world.
Muslim elites have averted their eyes from this reality.
As the moderate majority looks the other way, Islam is being taken over by a small, poisonous element, people who advocate cruel attitudes towards women, education, the economy and modern life in general.
I have seen this happen in India, where I grew up. The rich, colourful, pluralistic and easy-going Islam of my youth has turned into a dour, puritanical faith, policed by petty theocrats and religious commissars.
If Muslims do not take it upon themselves to stop their religion from falling prey to medievalists, nothing any outsider can do will save them.
The Arab world has long felt betrayed by Europe's colonial powers, but its disillusionment with America begins most importantly with the creation of Israel in 1948.
As the Arabs see it, at a time when colonies were winning independence from the West, here was a state largely composed of foreign people being imposed on a region with Western backing.
The anger deepened in the wake of America's support for Israel during the wars of 1967 and 1973, and ever since in its ties with the Palestinians.
The daily exposure to Israel's iron-fisted rule over the occupied territories has turned this into the great cause of the Arab - and indeed the broader Islamic - world.
Finally, the bombing and isolation of Iraq have become fodder for daily attacks on the US. While many in the Arab world do not like Saddam Hussein, they believe that the US has chosen a particularly inhuman method of fighting him - a method that is starving an entire nation.
In my view, America's greatest sins towards the Arab world are sins of omission. We have neglected to press any regime there to open up its society.
This neglect turned deadly in the case of Afghanistan. Walking away from that fractured country after 1989 resulted in the rise of Osama and the Taleban.
This is not the gravest error a great power can make, but it is a common American one.
America has not been venal in the Arab world. But it has been careless.
Yet this is not enough to explain Arab rage. The disproportionate feelings of grievance directed at America have to be placed in the overall context of the sense of humiliation, decline and despair that sweeps the Arab world.
Arabs feel that they are under siege from the modern world and that the US symbolises this world. Every action America takes gets magnified a thousand-fold.
Most Americans would not believe how common the rumour is throughout the Arab world that the CIA or Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, blew up the World Trade Center to justify attacks on Arabs and Muslims. This is the culture from which the suicide bombers have come.
America must now devise a strategy to deal with this form of religious terrorism.
WORLD FACES DIRE SECURITY THREAT
ITS STRATEGY must be divided along three lines: military, political and cultural. On the military front, the goal is simple: the total destruction of Al-Qaeda.
The political strategy is more complex and more ambitious. At the broadest level, it now has a chance to re-order the international system around this pressing danger.
The third, vital component to this battle is cultural.
The US must help Islam enter the modern world. It sounds like an impossible challenge, and it certainly is not one it would have chosen.
But America - indeed, the whole world - faces a dire security threat that will not be resolved unless we can stop the political, economic and cultural collapse that lies at the roots of Arab rage.
The writer was raised in India in a secular Muslim family. He has taught international relations and political philosophy at Harvard university and was managing editor of Foreign Affairs, the journal of international politics and economics. He is now the editor of Newsweek International.
One thing that strikes me is that the Arab world is much more of an economic and political failure than some of the largest Muslim countries, but rather than having Arab nations following their non-Arab Muslim brothers out of failed economies and political regimes, it is the other way around. Islam is certainly the main factor and underlying reason for this.
I have seen this happen in India, where I grew up. The rich, colourful, pluralistic and easy-going Islam of my youth has turned into a dour, puritanical faith, policed by petty theocrats and religious commissars.This is the best article on the Fundamentalist Muslim problem I have read yet. Excellent post, and thanks!If Muslims do not take it upon themselves to stop their religion from falling prey to medievalists, nothing any outsider can do will save them.
We need to agressively mount a counter-campaign of Islamic moderation, or, as the article points out, even moderate Moslems will be afraid to speak up.
Last month I was in Malaysia and read a good editorial on this topic. Being published in the main English paper in a Muslim country, the author made obligatory criticism of American policy in the Middle East, but then addressed the need for the Islamic world to deal with its very irrational hatred. The hatred is absolutely endemic in the Muslim world and this is where the disconnect seems to be occurring between what has happened in history and what the reaction is.
Better that he try and "understand" and "explain away" the every-bit-as-Evil and as blasphemous and as false-"prophet"-following and as death-worshipping, actions of another of history's self-appointed "gods."
"Der Fuerher" [Read: The "prophet"] Adolf Shickelgruber Hitler!
These were acts of evil, pure and simple -- committed by the representatives of the greatest force for Evil the world has ever known -- and what's to "understand" about that?
As to why these cravenly-cowardly obscene sub-human scum were attracted to the service of such Evil?
I have spent one third of my adult life among Arab and other Muslims -- and the following, for me, comes closest to providing the answer.
FReegards and Blessings -- Brian
Hesperophobia
On blaming the Jews. [Or "The West"]
Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor September 13, 2001 5:00 p.m.
Back in 1982 there were some horrible massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Lebanese Arab Christians actually did the killing; but the Israeli army was in the neighborhood, and was at some theoretical level responsible for keeping the peace in the zone that included the camps. Because of this, the Israelis took much of the brunt of the world's outrage at the killings.
Commenting on these events, the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, remarked in disgust: "Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews!"
I've been getting the same feeling from some of my e-mail. The fundamental reason America is under attack by Arab terrorists, several dozen people want me to know, is that the U.S. supports Israel. And the only reason we do that, several of them have said, or hinted, is because of the political power of the Jewish lobby here in the U.S.A. A few of my correspondents have expressed themselves more ... bluntly than that. Put it this way: While I have not yet encountered the word "bloodsuckers" (perhaps my readership isn't "diverse" enough), some of this stuff comes pretty close — though I should say in fairness, most is argued on cold national-interest grounds. At any rate, a lot of people feel that the mass killing of Americans by Arab terrorists is all the fault of Israel and those American politicians who, for low and disreputable motives, or from sheer blindness to America's true ideals and interests, support her. Goyim kill goyim, and they blame the Jews.
Setting aside the statistical certainty that some of the dead Americans are Jewish (as, in high statistical probability, some were of Arab origins), and at the risk of yet more ill-tempered or abusive e-mails, I am going to declare that I don't think these recent outrages can be blamed on the Jews, nor even on pro-Israel American politicians. The root phenomenon is not American involvement in Middle Eastern affairs: The root phenomenon is hesperophobia.
This word was coined by the political scientist Robert Conquest. Its roots are the Greek words hesperos, which means "the west" and phobos, which means "fear," but which when used as an English suffix can also carry the meaning "hate."
Hesperophobia is fear or hatred of the West. [While I'm in the classical stuff, by the way, I committed a breach of good manners in my last posting by inserting a Latin tag without translation. I am sorry. Oderint dum metuant means "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us." Seneca rebuked Cicero for saying it, though it seems to have been current among educated late-republican Romans.]
Here is the news: A lot of people out there hate us. The name "Durban" mean anything? In China, in India, in Pakistan, in Indonesia and Malaysia, in Africa, and in the Arab countries, European civilization — the West — is widely hated. Matter of fact, quite a lot of Europeans and Americans hate it, too, as you will know if you spend much time on college campuses.
I can't see any strong reason for believing that if the state of Israel were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, hesperophobia would disappear with it. Not even just Arab hesperophobia would decline. A common word for Europeans in the Arabic language is feringji, from "Frank," i.e. crusader. Arabs don't hate us because we support Israel. They hate us because we humiliated them, showed up the gross inferiority of their culture. To them, and similarly humiliated peoples, we are the other, detested and feared in a way we can barely understand. Things got really bad in the 19th century. When European society achieved industrial lift-off, Europeans were suddenly buzzing all over the world like a swarm of bees. They encountered these other cultures, that had been vegetating in a quiet conviction of their own superiority for centuries (or in the case of the Chinese, millennia). When these encounters occurred, the encountered culture collapsed in a cloud of dust. Some of them, like the Turks, managed to reconstitute themselves as more or less modern nations; others, like the Arabs and the Chinese, are still struggling with the trauma of that encounter. Neither the Arabs nor the Chinese, for example, have ever been able to attain rational, constitutional government. For a devastating look at the paleolithic condition of politics and society in the Arab world, I strongly recommend my colleague David Pryce-Jones's book, The Closed Circle.
The 1991 Gulf War showed how little has changed since those first encounters. Here were the armies of the West: swift, deadly, efficient, equipped and organized, under the command of elected civilians at the head of a robust and elaborate constitutional structure. And here were the Arabs: a shambling, ill-nourished, shoeless rabble, led by a mad gangster-despot. (That was their Arabs. There were also, of course, our Arabs — the Kuwaitis and Saudis, cowering in their plush-lined air-conditioned bunkers being waited on by their Filipino servants while we did their fighting for them.) Final body counts: the West, 134 dead, the Arabs, 20,000 or more. The superiority of one culture over another has not been so starkly demonstrated since a handful of British wooden ships, at the end of ten-thousand-mile lines of communications, brought the Celestial Empire to its knees 150 years earlier. The Chinese are still mad about that: They are still making angry, bitter movies about the Opium Wars. A hundred and 50 years from now, the Arabs will not have forgotten the Gulf War.
If you haven't spent some time in its company, the depth, and bitterness of hesperophobia in these cultures is hard to imagine. As Thomas Friedman points out in today's New York Times, Palestinian suicide bombers do not target yeshivas, synagogues, or religious settlements. They go for shopping malls, Pizza Huts or Sbarro's outlets. Sure, they hate the Jews, but they hate the West as much, or more.
Israel is not a cause of any of this, except to the degree that Israeli culture is essentially Western. If the present state of Israel were inhabited by Christian Lithuanians or Frenchmen, the hatred would be nearly as intense. Nearly, not completely: Hatred of the Jews has been built into Arab-Moslem culture since the time of Mohammed. There is a tale you will hear from Arab apologists that the Jews were contented and well treated in the old Arab-Moslem empires. This is nonsense: More often than not, they were treated like swine. For a true account, read Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial, or Gil Carl Alroy Behind the Middle East Crisis. From the Arab point of view, Israel, or any Western state on "Arab land," is an outrage, an illegitimate creation, a crusader state. The fact that the Jews had a wealthy and powerful nation on that land three thousand years ago counts for nothing. Israel is, from the point of view of most Arabs, an alien graft that must not be allowed to "take." It is a reminder of what can barely be thought of without acute psychic pain: the squalid, hopeless, irredeemable inferiority of one's own culture by comparison with another.
So, so, so, is this any of America's business? What are we doing, meddling in the Middle East? Where is our interest? Well, U.S. politicians must speak for themselves, but if I had any position of authority in any Western nation, I would be urging full support for Israel, and I am not Jewish. (Following my Passover column, in fact, a lot of NRO readers, along with at least one ex-editor of The New Republic, believe I am an anti-Semite.) It's a matter of cultural solidarity. We of the West must hang together, or else we shall hang separately. American isolationists simply do not understand how much we are hated in other places.
What, after all, does the Buchananite program offer us, if carried through? We have no troops in Israel to be withdrawn. If we withdraw our aid, the Israelis will be less able to defend themselves against the Arabs. Should we just let the free market take over, U.S. arms manufacturers selling weapons to them cash on the nail? Apparently not: Several of my correspondents have explained to me that what so enrages the Arabs is the sight of their people being killed "by American weapons." Oh. No weapons, then (and presumably we should try to repatriate the ones they already have — lots of luck with that, guys). But if we don't arm the Israelis, who will? While other hesperophobic countries — China, for example — are gleefully arming the Arabs and other Israel-haters like Iran, and pocketing the profits?
And the end of it all will be ... what? Inevitably, without our support, it will be the destruction of Israel. They are so few, and the Arabs so many. The Arabs will overwhelm that tiny state, and there will be such an orgy of massacre as has not been seen since the Rape of Nanking. And we shall be doing ... what? Watching it on our TVs, with a six-pack and a bucket of Nacho chips in hand? That's the Buchananite vision? If so, it is a vision of cowards and fools, and I want no part of it.
Israel's culture is ours. She is part of the West. If she goes down, we have suffered a defeat, and the howling, jeering forces of barbarism have won a victory. You don't have to be Zionist, nor even Jewish, to support Israel. You don't have to be in the pocket of the Israeli congressional lobbies, or a suck-up to "powerful pro-Zionist interests." You don't have to pretend not to notice the occasional follies and cruelties of Israeli policy. You don't have to forget about the U.S.S. Liberty or Jonathan Pollard. You just have to think straight. You just have to understand that the war between civilization and barbarism is being fought today just as it was fought at Chalons and Tours, at the gates of Kiev and Vienna, by the hoplites at Marathon and the legions on the Rhine. It is, as you have heard a thousand times, this past few days, a war; and the thing about war is, you have to take sides, and close your eyes to your allies' imperfections for the duration. There isn't any choice. What happened this week was not, or not only, an act of anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism, or anti-Semitism.
It was in part all those things: but more than anything else, it was an act of hesperophobia
I don't know what it is, though. I just have to get inside the other guy's head, I guess, so I'm fascinated by explanations that come from people of a background that shows they know our enemies' way of thinking and can explain it in a way that makes sense to us. I'm committed to that process of learning while also committed to the absolute truth and justice of our cause to fight terrorism.
That, you will see, is different than our shameful national apologists who are only too glad to admit wrong-doing just because our enemies say so. Truth be told, there's something wrong and immature with those people who cannot stand the idea that there are people who hate us.
Saddam employs what biologists and chemists he has in an effort to make chemical and biological weapons not pharmaceuticals. Pakistan employs its scientists and engineers at nuclear weapons development, Iran seeks long range missiles. All of this in nations [Incuding -- least we forget -- India, Russia and China!!] with a standard of living closer to the Sudan's than to America's.
Other than buying a few jets to paint their national colors on and maybe some huge irrigation schemes the Arab/non Asian Islamic world has virtually no modern industry. Perhaps that is as it should be. Do we really want to see an emotionally unstable politically immature people with modern industry?
Our problem is a little different. Do we want to help the Islamic world?
No.
Absolutely NO!
[Thank you. Astutely well summarized!]
FReegards
Brian
The Truth also includes that they hate, not us, but themselves, so profoundly are they aware of the superiority of our Judeo-Christian Civilization over their abjectly-blasphemous, false-prophet-following, death-and-destruction-worshipping, manifestation of Evil.
Their attacking us is both the morbidly-pathological projection of that self-loathing -- and the continuation of the work of Evil upon the Earth also seen in the lives and works of such similarly self-loathing obscenities as "The [Similarly self-appointed] 'Prophet'" Adolf Schickelgruber Hitler [Whose manifesto was lifted straight from the life and times of his inspiration, "The 'Fuerher'" Mohhammed] -- and Mao and Stalin and Trotsky and Pol Pot -- and the list goes on ......
And, speaking of "prophets," I will go so far as to say that if Our Beloved FRaternal Republic's political leaders have the raw guts it will take them to see this thing through -- and as a Nation, we continue to have the raw guts it will take to support them -- September 11 2001 will turn out to have been what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and I already know it was:
A Godsend!
FReegards and Blessings -- Brian
PS: I mightn't make it back for Christmas this year -- but will be there for Chinese New Year and will bring you to Saint Andrews!
The reason I'm sure he's a CFR member is that it says he was an editor for Foreign Affairs which is their publication. And the fact that he's at Newsweek International adds a little more evidence. But I do like this article a lot too. I learned a lot.
Apologist for evil? Zakaria makes a slew of valid points, a fact with which I am quite sure John Derbyshire would agree. Zakaria makes no apologies for bin Laden. He merely attempts to explain him, and he does a fair job of it.
Simplistic appeals to the "absolute" illuminate nothing.
Any doubts I may have had that you are a petty man with an small and simple mind were removed with this post. Life is too short to bother with this kind of stupidity.
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