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.
The anti-American indictments of so many Mailers, Sontags,
and Saids and their perfervid European confreres, for all their
spurious bravura, are palpably hollow. The intellectuals who chafe
at an America rendered strong by the culture, values, and commerce
they abhor found it irresistible to indict it when the Islamists
who mean to destroy it attacked it for those very reasons. Such is
the background to their symbiosis — not root causes, but brute
causes.
More than 200 years ago, the philosopher Edmund Burke
enunciated a trenchant insight into the global significance of the
French Revolution that was at that moment devouring lives across
France and was shortly to convulse most of Europe:
We are in a war of a peculiar nature. It is not
with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion
or as interest may veer about: not with a state that makes war
through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude. We are at
war with a system, which by its essence, is inimical to all other
governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace or war may best
contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed
doctrine that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a faction
of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every
country.
Revolutionary politics and armed doctrines find an echo in every
country. Communism was able to bridge seemingly impenetrable
cultural and geographical divides. The response of the
intellectuals to the barbarities of 9/11 put us on notice that
Islamism has done no less in our own time.
