[Imc] [Prairiegreens] Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism/ Hitchens Nation article
Barbara Dyskant
bdyskant at earthlink.net
Sun Sep 30 16:11:05 UTC 2001
by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism
Not all readers liked my attack on the liberal/left
tendency to
"rationalize" the aggression of September 11, or my use of
the term
"fascism with an Islamic face," and I'll select a
representative example
of the sort of "thinking" that I continue to receive on my
screen, even
now. This jewel comes from Sam Husseini, who runs the
Institute for
Public Accuracy in Washington, DC:
The fascists like bin Laden could not get volunteers
to
stuff envelopes if Israel had withdrawn from
Jerusalem
like it was supposed to--and the US stopped the
sanctions and the bombing on Iraq.
You've heard this "thought" expressed in one way or
another, dear reader, have you not? I don't think I
took enough time in my last column to point out just
what is so utterly rotten at the very core of it. So,
just to clean up a corner or two:
(1) If Husseini knows what was in the minds of the
murderers, it is his solemn responsibility to inform us
of the source of his information, and also to share it
with the authorities. (2) If he does not know what
was in their minds--as seems enormously more
probable--then why does he rush to appoint himself
the ventriloquist's dummy for such a faction? Who
volunteers for such a task at such a time?
Not only is it indecent to act as self-appointed interpreter for the
killers, but it is rash in the
highest degree. The death-squads have not favored us with a posthumous
manifesto of
their grievances, or a statement of claim about Palestine or Iraq, but we
are nonetheless
able to surmise a fair amount about the ideological or theological "root"
of their act
(Husseini doesn't seem to demand "proof" of bin Laden's involvement any
more than the
Bush Administration is willing to supply it) and if we are correct in
this, then we have
considerable knowledge of two things: their ideas and their actions.
First the actions. The central plan was to maximize civilian casualties
in a very dense area
of downtown Manhattan. We know that the killers had studied the physics
and ecology of
the buildings and the neighborhood, and we know that they were limited
only by the flight
schedules and bookings of civil aviation. They must therefore have been
quite prepared to
convert fully-loaded planes into missiles, instead of the mercifully
unpopulated aircraft that
were actually commandeered, and they could have hoped by a combination of
luck and
tactics to have at least doubled the kill-rate on the ground that they
actually achieved. They
spent some time in the company of the families they had kidnapped for the
purpose of
mass homicide. It was clearly meant to be much, much worse than it was.
And it was
designed and incubated long before the mutual-masturbation of the
Clinton-Arafat-Barak
"process." The Talibanis have in any case not distinguished themselves
very much by an
interest in the Palestinian plight. They have been busier trying to bring
their own societies
under the reign of the most inflexible and pitiless declension of shari'a
law. This is known to
anyone with the least acquaintance with the subject.
The ancillary plan was to hit the Department of Defense and (on the best
evidence we have
available) either the Capitol Dome or the White House. The Pentagon, for
all its
symbolism, is actually more the civil-service bit of the American
"war-machine," and is set
in a crowded Virginia neighborhood. You could certainly call it a
military target if you were
that way inclined, though the bin Ladenists did not attempt anything
against a guarded
airbase or a nuclear power-station in Pennsylvania (and even if they had,
we would now
doubtless be reading that the glow from Three Mile Island was a revenge
for globalization).
The Capitol is where the voters send their elected representatives--poor
things, to be sure,
but our own. The White House is where the elected President and his
family and staff are
to be found. It survived the attempt of British imperialism to burn it
down, and the attempt
of the Confederacy to take Washington, DC, and this has hallowed even its
most mediocre
occupants. I might, from where I am sitting, be a short walk from a
gutted Capitol or a
shattered White House. I am quite certain that Husseini and his rabble of
sympathizers
would still be telling me that my chickens were coming home to roost.
(The image of bin
Laden's men "stuffing envelopes" is the perfected essence of such
brainless rhetoric.) Only
the stoicism of men like Jeremy Glick and Thomas Burnett prevented some
such outcome;
only those who chose who die fighting rather than allow such a profanity,
and such a further
toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of
such innate fortitude
is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan
of September
11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in
August 1998.
I speak with some feeling about that latter event, because I wrote three
Nation columns
about it at the time, pointing out (with evidence that goes unrebutted to
this day) that it was
a war crime, and a war crime opposed by the majority of the military and
intelligence
establishment. The crime was directly and sordidly linked to the effort
by a crooked
President to avoid impeachment (a conclusion sedulously avoided by the
Chomskys and
Husseinis of the time). The Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant was well-known
to be a civilian
target, and its "selection" was opposed by most of the Joint Chiefs and
many CIA
personnel for just this reason. (See, for additional corroboration,
Seymour Hersh's New
Yorker essay "The Missiles of August"). To mention this banana-republic
degradation of
the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months,
to inflict maximum
horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes
intellectual and moral
discrimination possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most
elementary, at least the
missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers. (How are you
doing, Sam?
Noam, wazzup?)
So much for what the methods and targets tell us about the true
anti-human and
anti-democratic motivation. By their deeds shall we know them. What about
the animating
ideas? There were perhaps 700 observant followers of the Prophet Muhammed
burned
alive in New York on September 11. Nobody who had studied the target zone
could have
been in any doubt that some such figure was at the very least a likely
one. And, since Islam
makes no discrimination between the color and shade of its adherents,
there was good
reason to think that any planeload of civilians might include some
Muslims as well. I don't
myself make this point with any more emphasis than I would give to the
several hundred of
my fellow Englishmen (some of them doubtless Muslims also) who perished.
I stress it only
because it makes my point about fascism. To the Wahhabi-indoctrinated
sectarians of Al
Qaeda, only the purest and most fanatical are worthy of consideration.
The teachings and
published proclamations of this cult have initiated us to the idea that
the tolerant, the
open-minded, the apostate or the followers of different branches of The
Faith are fit only
for slaughter and contempt. And that's before Christians and Jews, let
alone atheists and
secularists, have even been factored in. As before, the deed announces
and exposes its
"root cause." The grievance and animosity predate even the Balfour
Declaration, let alone
the occupation of the West Bank. The gates of Vienna would have had to
fall to the
Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic
wounds.
And this is precisely, now, our problem. The Taliban and its surrogates
are not content to
immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom. They are
condemned, and they
deludedly believe that they are commanded, to spread the contagion and to
visit hell upon
the unrighteous. The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the
acquisition of
enough self-respect and self- confidence to say that we have met an enemy
and that he is
not us, but someone else. Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I
think, not
possible. (I say "fortunately" because I am also convinced that such
coexistence is not
desirable).
But straight away, we meet people who complain at once that this enemy is
us, really. Did
we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed "we"
did. Well, does
this not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power? A
sudden
sheep-like silence, broken by a bleat. Would that not be "over-reaction"?
All I want to say
for now is that the under-reaction to the Taliban by three successive
United States
administrations is one of the great resounding disgraces of our time.
There is good reason
to think that a Taliban defeat would fill the streets of Kabul with joy.
But for the moment,
the Bush Administration seems a hostage to the Pakistani and Saudi
clients who are the
sponsors and "harborers" the President claims publicly to be looking for!
Yet the
mainstream left, ever shuffling its feet, fears only the discomfort that
might result from
repudiating such an indefensible and humiliating posture. Very well then,
comrades. Do not
pretend that you wish to make up for America's past crimes in the region.
Here is one such
crime that can be admitted and undone--the sponsorship of the Taliban
could be redeemed
by the demolition of its regime and the liberation of its victims. But I
detect no stomach for
any such project. Better, then--more decent and reticent--not to affect
such concern for
"our" past offenses.
This is not an article about grand strategy, but it seems to me to go
without saying that a
sincere commitment to the secular or reformist elements in the Muslim
world would
automatically shift the balance of America's engagement. Every day, the
wretched Arafat is
told by Washington, as a favor to the Israelis, that he must police and
repress the forces of
Hamas and Islamic Jihad. When did Washington last demand that Saudi
Arabia cease its
heavy financing of these primitive and unscrupulous organizations? We let
the Algerians
fight the Islamic-fascist wave without saying a word or lending a hand.
And this is an effort
in which civic and social organizations can become involved without
official permission. We
should be building such internationalism whether it serves the short-term
needs of the
current Administration or not: I signed an anti-Taliban statement several
months ago and
was appalled by the eerie silence with which the initiative was greeted
in Washington. (It
ought to go without saying that the demand for Palestinian
self-determination is, as before,
a good cause in its own right. Not now more than ever, but now as ever.
There are millions
of Palestinians who do not want the future that the pious of all three
monotheisms have in
store for them.)
This is another but uniquely toxic version of an old story, whereby
former clients like
Noriega and Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban cease
to be
our monsters and become monstrous in their own right. At such a point, a
moral and
political crisis occurs. Do "our" past crimes and sins make it impossible
to expiate the
offense by determined action? Those of us who were not consulted about,
and are not
bound by, the previous covert compromises have a special responsibility
to say a decisive
"no" to this.
The figure of six-and-a-half thousand murders in New York is almost the
exact equivalent
to the total uncovered in the death-pits of Srebrenica. (Even at
Srebrenica, the demented
General Ratko Mladic agreed to release all the women, all the children,
all the old people
and all the males above and below military age before ordering his squads
to fall to work.)
On that occasion, US satellites flew serenely overhead recording the
scene, and Milosevic
earned himself an invitation to Dayton, Ohio. But in the end, after
appalling false starts and
delays, it was found that Milosevic was too much. He wasn't just too
nasty. He was also
too irrational and dangerous. He didn't even save himself by lyingly
claiming, as he several
times did, that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Bosnia. It must be said
that by this, and by
other lies and numberless other atrocities, Milosevic distinguished
himself as an enemy of
Islam. His national-socialist regime took the line on the towel-heads
that the Bush
Administration is only accused, by fools and knaves, of taking. Yet when
a stand was
eventually mounted against Milosevic, it was Noam Chomsky and Sam
Husseini, among
many others, who described the whole business as a bullying persecution
of--the Serbs! I
have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without
heat, as soft on crime
and soft on fascism. No political coalition is possible with such people
and, I'm thankful to
say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer
matters what they think.
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