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Among the Intellectualoids
Brute Causes, Not Root Causes
In the nature of things, people do not ordinarily blame the victims as the intellectuals blamed America for 9/11.
As with other earth-shattering events, the moment and place of learning the dread news of September 11, 2001 is etched into everyone’s memory. Equally well etched into mine are the rationalizations that were nimbly offered for the attacks by Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda by some intellectuals in the West. All of a piece, they came nonetheless in notable variety.
“Where in the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ of ‘humanity’ or the ‘free world,’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” queried the late Susan Sontag of the New York Times. Similarly, the late Palestinian academic Edward Said averred that Arab hatred of the West, is “is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people’s suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.”
Or forget Iraq — “this attack originated in the Muslim world and was clearly motivated by hatred of Israel and of US support for Israel” was the cursory verdict of Anatol Lieven, a British-born Chechen specialist.
A broader, Marxism-inspired North-South analogy was favored by others. “The homeless, the powerless, the terrorized, the minorities are using terror to strike back,” wrote Dutch journalist Van Houcke. “The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what are 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre, its violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger, and inhumane exploitation,” concluded Dario Fo, Italian Nobel Laureate.
For others, pure distaste for America — cultural, aesthetic and economic — provided sufficient warrant for 9/11. “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built a Tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed…. America is a country without roots, without culture, dominated by television and commerce. The country is dulled, money has made every value secondary, we have become obsessed with it. The attack should be seen as a criticism, and the true test of a great country is that it can tolerate criticism” was the view of the late Norman Mailer.
And still others found aesthetic value in the mass casualty attacks. September 11, declared the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, was “the biggest work of art there has ever been.”
But was September 11 about Sontag’s “specific American alliances and interventions” or only Lieven’s one? And if the product of one or several of Said’s “discrete depredations” by the U.S., how could it then be the fault of Fo’s murderous “speculators” and their “inhumane exploitation”? And whether the fault of both the U.S. and the transnational tycoons, what renders the 9/11 mass-murders a “work of art,” except perhaps relative to Stockhausen’s own oeuvre? Then again, if American deracination was the cause, how could it be that Mailer’s America — “without culture, without roots …dulled, dumber” — could nonetheless prove a “great country” if it “tolerated” — that is, responded with passivity — to the worst assault in history on its soil and citizenry? Here indeed was a study in flatulence, laced with incoherence. Note, too, that this circumscribed sampling takes no account of the more Byzantine and disordered theories prevalent in the Muslim world and among the conspiracy-theory junkies of the West, which alleged U.S. or Israeli instigation and execution of the 9/11 attacks by ingenious means for nefarious purposes as diverse as occupying vast tracts of the Middle East to laying new pipelines across Afghanistan.
In the nature of things, people do not ordinarily blame the victims as the intellectuals blamed America for 9/11. When, in December 2008, Lashkar-e-Taiba murdered hundreds in carefully coordinated, mass-casualty assaults in Mumbai, few blamed the Indians whom they had slaughtered. In fact, few even blamed the U.S. although, by the elastic standards of the intellectuals cited, an enterprising pundit could conceivably have nominated U.S. foreign policy favoring India as a cause.
Similarly, one rarely hears of people siding with the anti-Spanish terrorism of the Basque ETA or the anti-Turkish terrorism of the Kurdish PKK. The reason is not far to seek. Basques murdering Spaniards, Muslims murdering other Muslims, or Muslims murdering Hindus fails to allegorize the guilt of the U.S. or the West.
But September 11 could be engineered to function that way. The intellectuals spoke of specific U.S. policies as the cause of the attacks. They brandished as a root cause U.S. support for Israel, which serves for these minds as an allegory of Western imposition and colonial sin. Characteristically lacking, however, was any genuine analysis of this seemingly unanswerable indictment. Israel, as a non-Muslim polity established on land once ruled by Muslims, attracts the hostility of most of the Muslim world. Not Israeli borders or policies, but sovereign existence, galvanizes the hostility — more precisely, the Muslim supremacism — of a region long habituated to cowed, docile and compliant Jews. Yet, for all their apparent fearlessness and distaste of imperial pretension and superiority, the intellectuals brandished a cause rooted in this very soil which they did not care to probe too closely.
We find, too, in the literature of Islamism, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al-Qaeda, a commitment to the demise of the U.S., irrespective of specific policies — whether U.S. forces were based in Saudi Arabia or not (they have not been for some time); whether the U.S. pushed for an Arab-Israeli peace (which, indeed, it had, for eight years at the time of 9/11) or not; whether Israel even existed or not. Nor did the intellectuals’ anti-American pabulum possibly explain a host of other Al-Qaeda attacks — the December 2007 bombing of the UN headquarters in Algiers, to name one example from a long possible list. At no point were those who rationalized the assault on the U.S. capable of acknowledging the totalitarian vision animating the assailants. Nor did they deign to account for wider Islamist war on diverse societies from Israel to India to Thailand to the Philippines.
Common to Al Qaeda and the intellectuals who rationalized the attacks in the West is the belief that the West, especially the U.S., enables and controls nasty Muslim regimes. This too fails to withstand analysis.
It is undeniable that certain Western countries have at times supported one or other Middle Eastern regime. Yet it cannot be credibly claimed that these are created or maintained by them. Such a claim would certainly be news to former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who enjoyed three decades of U.S. subsidies but was pushed from office with the American spigot still on. Nor can it be said that Iran, Sudan or Syria, to name three examples, depend, or have depended, on Western support; to the contrary, these regimes, which are also among the region’s most oppressive and brutal, endure even in the face of years of Western boycott and pressure. Should the Bashar Assad regime in Syria shortly fall, its demise will owe everything to the Syrians who turned on them at great cost, not to the Obama Administration which, only months ago, was describing Assad as a “reformer.”
In 1990s Iraq, Saddam Hussein remained in power despite the palpable absence of Western support. Even in the 1980s, it was Soviet and Chinese support for Saddam which was far more substantial and consistent than anything Western countries (other than perhaps France) gave him. Indeed, the longest-ruling Middle Eastern dictator until very recently was Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. To which Western government did he owe his 42-year reign?
Clearly, who or what the U.S. has supported in the Middle East bears only limited relevance to the regimes that have held sway there. Equally clearly, the support for the most of oppressive regimes by countries like Russia, China or North Korea has not engendered a wave of anti-Russian, anti-Chinese or anti-North Korean sentiment among either the Islamists of the region or the intellectuals who chose to rationalize Al-Qaeda’s barbarism a decade ago. It is the Judeo-Christian U.S. that is their special object of their wrath.
About the Author
Daniel Mandel is a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and author of H. V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist (Routledge, London, 2004). His blog can be found on the History News Network.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (21) | Leave a comment
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martin j smith| 9.12.11 @ 7:43AM
There are at least two issues for me on this "blame the victim " matter. One is that we have a so called Democrat Party which is really now as far as I am concerned the SOCIALIST PARTY aligned with the EU's policy of appeasement. Second I am troubled by the LEFT Control of the media esp[ecially when they are the ones who cry"fairness doctrine all the time".
This "blame the victim" concept is but one propaganda tool used to basically destroy this nation. Its a template or a bum[er sticker. The Conservative side needs more money to get the right rescources to counter this garbage,
ENOUGH ROPE| 9.12.11 @ 4:02PM
Boycott the liberal media, end public school K-12 in every state, and boycott liberal higher education. The left dominates those institutions. We in the center and right can end those institutions simply by not consuming their products.
The progressives/liberals hate God, religion, Judeo-Christian morality, America, freedom, capitalism, families, the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, private property, American Exceptionalism, and America''s superpowerful military.
There are more of us centrists and conservatives than there are progressives/liberals. Boycott their organizations and repeal public schools. Then they will be far less powerful to destroy us, which is their goal. Do you have any doubts that if they gained fascist or Marxist type power that they would put us in concentration camps? Doubtful? Google the topic about the FBI undercover agent who infiltrated Bill Ayers' Weathermen group. The agent asked Ayers how many people would have to be killed to lessen dissent. The answer, then, was 25 million people.
Alan Brooks| 9.12.11 @ 6:43PM
Gore Vidal blamed America for Tim McVeigh- poor Timmy, he didn't get enough butter in his Maypo when he was but a little Laddie.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 9.12.11 @ 7:55AM
An examination of comments made by elected Democratic officials could have proven your points, and more simply.
Here are a few examples:
Cong. Murtha:
"Well, I say that the fight against Americans began with Abu Ghraib. It began with the invasion of Iraq. That's when terrorism started."
(Murtha, Nov. 17, 2005, News Hour with Jim Lehrer)
Sen. Durbin (On the floor of the U.S. Senate):
On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ..... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
Sen. Reid:
This war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.
Speaker Pelosi:
I think it is very difficult for the President to sustain a war of this magnitude without the support of the American people, and without the support of the Congress of the United States. That's why Congress will vote to oppose the President's escalation.
In short, the real enemy is the enemy within, and that would be the Democratic Party.
Here's a quote from Ann Coulter's Treason:
"Americans cannot comprehend how their fellow countrymen could not love their country. But the left's anti-Americanism is intrinsic to their entire worldview. Liberals promote the right of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and Communists. They instinctively root for anarchy against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason." -- Ann Coulter, P. 292
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 9.12.11 @ 8:39AM
By the way, here's Hillary Clinton trying to turn the 9/11 remembrance into a communist/collective Holiday. Unbelievable!
http://www.aol.com/
"On this 10th anniversary we can help redefine 9/11 for a new decade as a symbol of resilience and dedication to helping our neighbors and one another. By committing a day or even an hour to serving others we can transform the memory of grief into a hopeful future. We can create a living memorial to all the brave men and women who showed the world the best that America has to offer.
This September, what will you do to remember? Will you take time to maybe help paint a school, or plant a tree, or tutor a child? Wherever you are from you can demonstrate the common humanity that binds us together and makes our societies and our world stronger.
So let's stand up and continue to build a more peaceful and prosperous world together. Let us remember, and let us recommit. Thank you and God bless you."
Skippy| 9.12.11 @ 1:23PM
I wanna spend the day killing Jihadis!
Hell, I wanna spend every day killing Jihadis!
I call that service to my country.
Petronius| 9.12.11 @ 11:45AM
The Ann's have it!
Timothy L. Pennell| 9.12.11 @ 8:56AM
There is something terribly wrong, with Self Haters. People who hate their own Race. People who hate their own Religion. Hate their own Country. Basically, they hate everything that is associated with THEM.
"I don't want to be a in any Club that would have ME for a member."
We all know Self Hating Jews. Jews who protest on College Campi, on behalf of a people who's SOLE WISH, is to see all of them DEAD.
We've all seen the Self Hating White. They will do anything to PROVE that they're not Racist. Obama's buddy - Billy Ayers - and his Weathermen, proclaimed it their DUTY, to Murder WHITE BABIES. Think about it.
And, of course, we have the "Blame America First" crowd.
"If there's something wrong in the world, it MUST be America's doing." Those other countries don't have any power. Kinda like: "Only Whites can be Racists."
Here's the problem. These "Americans" (Always come from Privilege, and always on the LEFT) cannot fathom the Forest, for the trees. They've always had Freedom. They've always lived in a Stable Environment, free of Dictatorship (until now) and Evil.
In the late 60's or early 70's, I don't remember, exactly, there was a Black Radical who fled this Country, to North Vietnam, after he was sentenced to a long Jail Term, here. He HATED America. He was against the War. He wanted to KILL THE PIGS. Not too long afterward, he came back. He said that "I would rather spend 10 years in an American Prison, than one more year under COMMUNISM.
The self hater has no reference points. He FEELS. He runs around with Fellow Travelers, of the same mentality. America IS, therefore she is to BLAME.
They would NEVER consult a former Refugee. NEVER talk to a former guest of The Gulags. NEVER consult a former Cuban Political Prisoner.
What for? They already know everything.
The idea that the Left SYMPATHIZES with the MURDERERS in Guantanamo. The idea that they would get Constitutional RIGHTS, and a CIVILIAN TRIAL. The idea that we would DO whatever was NECESSARY, to get Intelligence from the Masterminds of 911, is UNTHINKABLE.
The United States is the only Country that thinks this way.
Whites are the only Race that thinks this way.
Christians and Jews are the only Religions that think this way.
How does this end, any way other than BAD?
Bill| 9.12.11 @ 8:58AM
Dennis Prager raised an interesting question as a commentary on the kind of thinking that asks, "what did we do to earn the hatred of the Muslim fundamentalists?"
He asked as his commntary on that kind of thing, "What did black people do to earn the hatred of white people?"
TrueBlue| 9.12.11 @ 7:39PM
Something that nobody ever wants to mention, black people were sold into slavery BY OTHER BLACK PEOPLE. Warring tribes in Africa would sell their enemies to foreign slavers for money and weapons so they could take more territory.
As far as the Left and their view of appeasing Muslim nations, they wouldn't be so happy if they had to live there. Women's Rights? What rights? If America is so evil, and these other countries so great, why don't they go live there and leave this country to the people that actually like it?
Bob K.| 9.12.11 @ 9:05AM
When did liberal and/or left wing politicians and newspaper and television journalists become "intellectuals?"
Brian Mc| 9.12.11 @ 9:08AM
Good vs. Evil...Love vs. Hate. Goodness never utilizes deception whereas Hatred must constantly use deceit and lies to foment its ugly empirical nature over Love and Goodness. It is apparent in the body of this article and why a rage came over me during the course of the weekend. The more I watched live TV and period documentaries: Evil being explained away, (murder into tragedy), the more enraged I felt for my ineffectiveness against it. So, I must cling tenaciously to Love and pray for my enemies with the help of God's Grace.
All the while Evil marches merrily along with the help of the left and its media.
John786| 9.12.11 @ 10:01AM
19 Saudis using Saudi money following their Saudi leader carried out 9/11. what did the Saudis do this?What was the magical kingdom not attack. Where is the truth here. Why did citizens of the closest Arab ally so hate America. The truth will out someday.
martin j smith| 9.12.11 @ 10:17AM
The thing is we know the problem--the real issue is what to do about it ? I believe that the "root cause of the lack of fighTing back lies in the REPUBLICAN PARTY LEADERSHIT.
Melvin| 9.12.11 @ 12:45PM
After an analysis by Egypt of the lost the Ramadan War, it was determined by Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein that the Arab coalition would never at least back then defeat Israel militarily.
So Nasser and other Arab leaders decided to enter into a war of attrition with Israel.
Nasser and the Arabs knew full well that this war of attrition would not achieve results in the short term, but would take decades to achieve to position Israel into a position of weakness, and separating, politically, Israel from it's main benefactor the United States.
But Nasser and the Arab leaders needed a defacto army to nip at Israel's heels, that is where Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians come in.
They would be the non-declared foot-soldiers of this war, mostly through terrorism, and minor engagements with the Israeli military that are designed to publicly humiliate Israeli with the carefully orchestrated Palestinian propaganda, that choreographed Palestinians be chewed up under Israeli tanks treads.
Palestinians have been extremely successful of infiltrating US academia by winning the hearts and minds of college administrators and a extremely fertile college student body, that couldn't find Israel on a map, but wearing the Palestinian headscarf's on campus displaying solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
It is appearing that this war of attrition is coming to a critical juncture. World opinion is at a all time high against Israel, the United States has a anti-Israel President in Barrack Obama, and Israel's one time allies now have become Israel's harshest critics.
Unfortunately we have those in this Country who can't see past they're Palestinian head scarfs, because they have bought into the Palestinian propaganda hook line and head scarf.
From the very second after the Jews declared Israel a state, Arabs and non Arabs made a blood oath to seek Israel's destruction. But this fact seems to be lost on those who seem to care only about, "Does my new Palestinian head scarf make my butt look big?"
Gary| 9.12.11 @ 1:14PM
Mailer is one to speak. Sure, it was easy for him to say people are obsessed with money. He lived I'm sure a comfortable life. If you are out of work you ARE obsessed with money, the lack of it. I hate it when the liberal well off show disdain for money. It won't guarantee you happiness but it will remove many problems from you table. As for the other asinine comments from "intellectuals" who needs them? Most are so full of themselves that humility and modesty are unknown to them.
Karen Fish | 9.12.11 @ 1:18PM
The Temple of Love - The World Peace Religion
http://www.thetempleoflove.com
Interfaith Harmony
http://www.interfaithharmony.com
Simon Templar| 9.12.11 @ 3:50PM
I think your head is broken. It is not, "your religions are broken" as your web site says about 20 times a page but rather your ability to recognize truth and your unwillingness to stand up for it.
It is your moral relativism, your historical revisionism, and your delusion that you are somehow morally superior and know how to fix the world with your grand utopias.
don| 9.12.11 @ 1:38PM
I tell people, you scratch a progressive you find a fascist, scratch a little deeper you find a nihilist.
POST American| 9.13.11 @ 5:31AM
----------------------FINAL WORD----------------------
----Great piece.
BTW, everyone catch that piece
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-----------Oh, and they NOW admit they've
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Globalists/USURERS and EUGENISTS
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-----------------JUST KEEP A GOIN'
----------------BAH BAH ----BAH BAH----------------
---------------------------JUST KEEP A GOIN'
John Monaghan| 9.13.11 @ 2:56PM
On the morning of 9/11 we left for a driving tour of Eastern Alberta and Saskatchewan. We watched the news every night. Mostly we watched Peter Jennings. I looked for a mea culpa. There were none. In fact the opposite. On one occasion Peter Jennings stood before a gathering of children perhaps ranging from 7 to 13 years of age. A young girl put the question ( paraphrased) Is it possible the attacks are/were related in any way to things America has done here and elsewhere?. Peter walked away, did not answer, never came back to this girl.