[Peace] [Prairiegreens] Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism/ Hitchens Nation article

[Barbara Dyskant]

   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                       stuff envelopes if Israel had withdrawn from 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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