Soccer Dad

Roots of Terror

Earlier I crossposted on Evelyn Gordon's history of the acceptance of Palestinian terror. Bunuel brought to my attention his post on the subject and to his post about Fouad Ajami's recent article "Facing up to Unholy Terror."
Both the Gordon and the Ajami articles are valuable, but I see them addressing different issues. Gordon is writing about the acceptance of the Palestinian cause. As I noted in my original post, Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote an excellent article describing the mechanics of that acceptance in the international arena. I would also add that Gordon's article is a direct contradiction to Anne Applebaum's "The Irrationality of Terror" in which she argues:

There are other examples of terrorist groups whose methods have had the opposite effect from what their leaders say they intend, the most obvious being the case of the Palestinians. Decades' worth of PLO terrorist attacks on crippled tourists and Olympic athletes achieved far less for the Palestinian people than television pictures of Palestinian children protesting in the streets. Even more was achieved, or almost achieved, when the Palestinians briefly ceased to use terrorism in the 1990s. By contrast, the resumption of Palestinian terrorism, and particularly the suicide bombing campaign, has led to a profound change of heart, a hardening of positions and, as in Russia, a much larger population of Israelis who assume that all Palestinians, whatever their views or background or grievances, are would-be terrorists.

Applebaum is just plain wrong. It was the terror that made the news and it was the terror that drove the cause. It became a mantra that Israel had to create a Palestinian state in order to stop the terror not to stop the protests. And Palestinian terror didn't stop even during the Rabin/Peres years of a decade ago. By the time Baruch Goldstein committed his massacre in 1994 killing 29, 29 Israelis had been killed since the signing of the Oslo Accords with no significant opposition by Yasser Arafat and the PA.
Perhaps Arafat overplayed the terror in recent years, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't successful before now. And why shouldn't believe that most Palestinians are would-be terrorists? Over the past decade and a half opinion polls have shown a majority of Palestinians supporting terror against Israel. Peace or no peace.
On the other hand Ajami notes how terror has changed in the Arab/Muslim world:

The chroniclers tell us that the Ottoman sultan Abdul-Hamid II (ruled 1876-1909) made a habit of keeping a small child on his knee in his weekly appearances in public. The 34th sultan of the House of Osman assumed that no decent assassin would willingly gun down a child. From the discotheques of Tel Aviv to the nightclubs in Bali and the schools in Beslan, the assassins are now of a different breed. The moral limits of our world have been stretched to the breaking point. The political ideologies of terror, armed with a religious warrant, have been defining our limits of tolerance, our morality itself, downward. "We love death," said that quintessential merchant of death Osama bin Laden, "as much as the infidels love life." Alas, this is not an idle boast, and terrors in the name of a radicalized, aggrieved Islamism have become a rebuke to claims of progress in our contemporary world.

I see Ajami's article more as a description of the corruption of Islam toward violent policitical ends. It makes a good continuation to Bernard Lewis's "The Roots of Muslim Rage."
Another point Ajami makes:

Earlier this month, a thoughtful and brave Saudi columnist, Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, in the London-based Arabic daily al-Sharq al-Awsat, ignited a storm with a piece of writing of extraordinary daring entitled "The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists Are Muslims!" It was time, he said, to acknowledge that the terrorist attacks of the past decade, in "buses and schools and houses" the world over, were carried out by Muslims. There is a "malady" in Islamic lands, he wrote, and a cure for this malady begins with "self-knowledge" and the end of denial. "Our sons, the terrorists," he wrote, "are loose in the world, the natural products of a deformed culture." In his autopsy, al-Rashed took on the preachers and the muftis, the religious judges, who have found in the Scripture warrant for this deadly radicalism. He singled out Sunni Islam's most influential preacher, the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. That cleric rules the airwaves with his access to television and the Web. He had issued a fatwa authorizing attacks on American civilians in Iraq, and al-Rashed saw in this ruling the ruinous ways of the radical preachers: "Imagine a man of religion encouraging the murder of civilians, a man in the fullness of old age inciting young boys to murder when two of his daughters are studying in the United Kingdom under the protection of a presumably 'infidel' power. We can't redeem our youth unless we take on the men of religion who have turned into revolutionaries who send other people's kids to war while they send their own to European and American schools."

is expanded upon by Daniel Pipes in "The Western Mind of Radical Islam"

Fat'hi ash-Shiqaqi, a well-educated young Palestinian living in Damascus, recently boasted of his familiarity with European literature. He told an interviewer how he had read and enjoyed Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Sartre, and T.S. Eliot. He spoke of his particular passion for Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, a work he read ten times in English translation "and each time wept bitterly."1 Such acquaintance with world literature and such exquisite sensibility would not be of note except for two points - that Shiqaqi was, until his assassination in Malta in late 1995, a fundamentalist Muslim and that he headed Islamic Jihad, the arch-terrorist organization that has murdered dozens of Israelis over the last two years.

The closest that Ajami comes to Gordon's article is here:

In truth, Israel had been the first battleground in this ongoing war between civilized life and terror: It was there that pizzerias and buses and discotheques became targets of terror. It was there that the cultists of death cut their teeth and developed their rituals of mass murder--the videotapes, the boys (and then the young women) with headbands proclaiming their zeal for "martyrdom," the posters lionizing mass killers. And it was there, too, that religious preachers bent the faith to their will. In distant lands, it was said that the ferocity of these attacks derived from Palestinian "grievances," that this conflict was sui generis. But the ruin soon spread to other lands.

He's saying the same thing that Michael Kelly wrote (and I've quoted many times)

Indeed, it is possible that what happened yesterday had nothing to do with the Middle East. But this evil rose, with hideous logic, directly from the philosophy that the leaders and supporters of the Palestinian cause have long embraced and still embrace -- a philosophy that accepts the murder of innocents as a legitimate expression of a legitimate struggle.

If it is morally acceptable to murder, in the name of a necessary blow for freedom, a woman on a Tel Aviv street, or to blow up a disco full of teenagers, or to bomb a family restaurant -- then it must be morally acceptable to drive two jetliners into a place where 50,000 people work. In moral logic, what is the difference? If the murder of innocent people is for whatever reason excusable, it is excusable; if it is legitimate, it is legitimate. If acceptable on a small scale, so too on a grand.

This is consistent with Gordon's argument, but, I think, a side point to Ajami.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at September 19, 2004 05:17 AM | TrackBack