A message to the Left: grow up, this isn't a game By Janet Daley

A WHOLE swathe of this country's educated class is unable to distinguish between right and wrong. There is no other possible conclusion. There are apparently thousands of people out there (or maybe hundreds, or maybe it is just a few dozen with exceptionally good media contacts) who think that it is quite acceptable to see the mass murder of innocent people as a "message" that needed to be delivered.

The puerile anti-Americanism of the British Left has seemed a harmless enough joke during the good, safe years when there was enough capitalist bounty to give socialists a good party. Now, in this moment of terrifying international crisis, we are discovering something in our midst that goes way beyond the rather cuddly imbecility that most of its critics have attributed to it. For how long exactly has the liberal conscience been this malignant? Has the hatred and foaming malevolence now rising to the surface been bubbling away under that smug, lazy facade for a generation, just waiting for the triumphal moment to gloat about what many of its spokesmen have called America's "defeat"?

I am sorry to have to go on labouring the point about Left-wing newspaper comment which has already been so robustly addressed on these pages, but it is simply too deeply shocking to avoid. The pages of the Guardian, the British liberal intelligentsia's house journal, yesterday offered Paul Foot attacking "the Murdochs, the Conrad Blacks, the BBC foreign news chiefs and everyone else who refuses to understand the difference in the Middle East between the violence of conquerors, exploiters and oppressors on the one hand and the violence of the conquered, exploited and oppressed on the other". So mass murder might be justified then, if you are doing it on behalf of the "conquered, exploited and oppressed"? Does it matter, when you are committing this ultimate criminal act on behalf of the exploited, that you are financed by a billionaire born into one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia? (That is just the sort of association that Mr Foot is so eager to point out when it involves Western interventions.)

Nor does it matter, presumably, that the international terrorist alliance into which these murderers in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland are locked is part of a global criminal network which is tied to Colombian drugs traffic and old-fashioned low grade murder and money laundering.

After all, anything is acceptable if it helps to undermine the great United States plot to force American values on the rest of the world. Preventing the dissemination of free markets, with their corrupting prosperity and materialism, must be worth sacrificing a few mundane moral assumptions. Who is America, after all, to tell the world how it should live: if local populations prefer their Marxist tyrannies or their theocratic dictatorships, where does the United States get the right to bully them into personal freedom and private economic security? And when the theocrats and the dictators strike back, surely we should spare our sympathy for their tormentor. As Charlotte Raven puts it, on another page of yesterday's Guardian: "A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully": a theme so aptly taken up by the Guardian's political cartoonist, Steve Bell, who depicts George Bush and Tony Blair as two ape-like thugs with their knuckles scraping the ground, chanting a bellicose mantra which we are meant to see as mindless.

This is grotesque. But it is also a revelation, as fascinating as it is repulsive. On the one hand, it has the clear ring of elaborated neurosis: the extrapolation of your own adolescent rebellion into a cosmic political philosophy in which the most powerful country in the world personifies the domineering adult authority against which you pit yourself. But it also suggests an intellectual decadence that should be laughable - and was, in the innocent past of a week or so ago, laughed at. But they aren't funny any more. These are not champagne adventurists but salon terrorists who are excited - really excited - by this horrible event. Even when they contain their outright vindictiveness toward the country upon whose successful economy the developing world is utterly dependent, they suggest that there is something rational and meaningful in this "message" that has been delivered. As Martin Amis puts it in (where else?) yesterday's Guardian: "Terror is political communication by other means."

What kind of discourse is it that includes this kind of utterance? At what point would these people decide that an action was so evil, so utterly beyond the pale of human conscience, that it was ruled out as part of the argument? In the meantime, grown-up politicians have suspended all disputation in favour of an absolutely unified stand. This is not some war-time reflex of nationalistic piety, or a casual downgrading of the idea of democratic opposition. It is an acknowledgement that in order to have a debate, there must be two sides to the argument. And, as any sane person should be able to say with ease, there are not two possible answers to the question: was the attack on innocent civilians in America justifiable? There may be differences of opinion about the appropriate tactics for dealing with this gross criminality which threatens the lives of free people (and the freedoms which make their lives so worth living), and those differences will certainly be aired in private. But we have turned a corner.

This is not a question - however much sniping there has been, and may continue to be, between the press enclaves of Farringdon Road and Docklands - of the Left- and Right-wing press having a ritual go at one another. The moral confusion of a whole section of opinion formers and well-educated British people is being exposed and tested. No one will forget what has been said and written this past week. http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/dt?ac=003858128934066&rtmo=gGjljwSu&atmo=rrrrrrrq&pg=/01/9/19/do02.html

Blaming the U.S., whitewashing terror National Post

Sorrow and pity have given way to excuses and equivocations. Some commentators are now explaining the terrorist attack against New York City and Washington with the argument that the United States "had it coming." A representative example in this regard is George Galloway, a British Labour MP who recently declared the U.S. "had to swallow its own medicine" when thousands died on Sept. 11.

How a serum of freedom and prosperity curdled into murderous venom Mr. Galloway did not say, but he is not alone in his opinions. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, Susan Riley naively suggested the terror attack -- years in the planning -- might have been payback for the U.S. walking out of a UN racism conference a week earlier. A contributor to the Toronto Star thinks something called "Americanism" is part of the problem. Naomi Klein, the embodiment of trite Chomskyism, believes the United States has been guilty of "sanitizing and dehumanizing acts of war committed elsewhere" and wonders whether "U.S. foreign policy create[d] the conditions in which such twisted logic could flourish." Some TV pundits in Canada blame President George W. Bush's alleged "isolationism" (Paradoxically, others blame it on his "interventionism"). On a recent broadcast of the BBC's debate program, Question Time, the U.S. Ambassador was reduced to tears by hard-left audience members jeering that the United States brought terror on itself owing to its "anti-Arab and pro-Israeli policy."

However the view is hedged, when a person says the United States "had it coming," what he or she means is that murder is a morally appropriate rejoinder to a perceived slight or injustice. The annihilation of innocent civilians is thereby cast as a legitimate means to promote one's political or theological ends. This is familiar territory for the radical left: Since the time of Lenin, Marxists have preached the virtues of exterminating inconvenient classes of individuals in order to bring those still living into a state of equality.

How does one respond to such arguments? It is simple morally, but difficult rhetorically -- because those who attack the United States inevitably express their view through slippery, ill-defined phrases such as "cultural imperialism," "neo-colonialism," "economic hegemony" and the like. But look behind the slogans and you find empty air.

Take the culture issue: The United States does not force its boy bands, fast food and slinky Hollywood starlets down any nation's throat. The spread of U.S. culture is a matter of demand. In truth, it is the fact that millions of teenagers and young adults worship Western icons like Michael Jordan and Britney Spears of their own accord that drives Islamist militants to murderous distraction. As for the economic argument, it is the West that should be umbraged, not the Muslim world. Uncle Sam pours billions of aid dollars into Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and Afghanistan every year. Yes, the United States gives money to Israel, too. But that is the Middle East's only democracy -- and isn't the Left always telling us we should aid democracies, not dictatorships?

Consider also that in recent decades, the Western world has paid trillions of dollars for Middle Eastern oil at prices controlled by a Muslim-led oligopoly, OPEC, which would be illegal under the anti-trust laws of any major Western nation. That Middle Eastern oil-producing nations are despotic regimes in which a select few profit from oil revenues is not the fault of the United States. It is the fact that no Arab nation has ever had a truly democratic government that is the real reason political stultification and income inequality are rife in the region.

As for the charge that the United States is "anti-Arab," this is a slogan, not a supportable claim. Where Arab nations blundered away their land to a surrounded Israeli army, the United States has done everything in its power to help them get it back. The peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, which saw Anwar Sadat get back the Sinai, was brokered in the United States. (Islamist radicals subsequently assassinated Mr. Sadat for making peace, of course. Presumably, he, too "had it coming.") In the last decade, Washington has repeatedly attempted to involve the Palestinians in a peace agreement that would see the West Bank and Gaza revert to Palestinian control. Bill Clinton even offered up to US$17-billion to bribe Israel to leave the Golan Heights. And what about the Gulf War? In that conflict, the United States helped defend Saudi oil and Kuwaiti independence from Saddam Hussein. Did the oil-thirsty Americans have an ulterior motive? Yes. But that did not seem to bother Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and the other Muslim nations that joined with the United States to fight Iraq.

Ask yourself this question: Why do so many Arabs/Muslims seek to emigrate to the United States every year? If the United States in general and President Bush in particular are so "anti-Arab," then the leading U.S. Muslim-Islamist organizations should explain why they not only issued a resounding endorsement of Mr Bush's candidacy in last year's Presidential election, but specifically cited his pro-Muslim credentials.

All of this, though, is somewhat beside the point. Even if the United States were "anti-Arab," surely the bias would be properly addressed not by terrorist attacks, but by diplomacy -- assuming the Arab/Muslim dictators and their Western apologists satisfactorily explain what is wrong with U.S. policy in the first place. If the United States "had it coming," then would it be legitimate for Jewish terrorists to blow up the Eiffel Tower because the French government is pro-Palestinian and therefore "anti-Israel"? For that matter, did massacred Jewish families dining in a Jeru-salem pizza restaurant recently "get theirs" when a suicide bomber blew himself up? If it is legitimate to cite grievances over land and politics in the same moral breath as the mass slaughter of innocents, on what basis may we denounce any terrorist attack as evil?

At the heart of the propaganda campaign against the United States is a moral equivalence conflating what is evil with what is merely imperfect. In the Cold War, this tactic took the form of the argument that the United States was just as dictatorial as the Soviet Union because poor Americans were allegedly not "free" from injustice, racism and want. Now that we have entered a new kind of war, this fatuous argument has been recycled: Yes, Islamist maniacs slaughter thousands of innocents ... but think of the psychic pain inflicted on the Middle East by Taco Bell and the Backstreet Boys. Who is to judge which is more inhumane?

In Macbeth, Shakespeare reserved a special space in Hell for "an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale." That thought provides some consolation as we watch our television screens and see this shameful parade of apologists wagging their fingers at the United States.

http://nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20010919/695473.html

And Andrew Sullivan [http://andrewsullivan.com/] makes a brilliant point: One of the amazing things about the far left's embrace of the anti-American ideology of some in the Middle East is their willful blindness about what these fanatics actually believe in. Susan Sontag, for example, is a Jew. Does she honestly believe that America is responsible for more evil than a bunch of Muslim fanatics who would gas her in a second if they could? Could any gay person seriously argue for appeasement of people who would execute [him] on the spot if [he] lived under their rule? Could any serious feminist not believe in opposing fanatics who would eviscerate the slightest shred of freedom for women? I just don't get it. Liberals of all people should be the most serious about fighting this scourge. Is their hatred of America that deep?

http://andrewsullivan.com/

As to bin Laden's vicious anti-Semitism, check the PBS interview [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html] out. Here are [my] choice excerpts from the Goebbels of Afghanistan: "The enmity between us and the Jews goes far back in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between the two of us is inevitable. . . . The leaders in America and in other countries as well have fallen victim to Jewish Zionist blackmail. . . . Once again, I have to stress the necessity of focusing on the Americans and the Jews for they represent the spearhead with which the members of our religion have been slaughtered. Any effort directed against America and the Jews yields positive and direct results--Allah willing. . . . We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this is what the fatwah says. . . . We believe that this administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior and the Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them." This isn't like Nazism. In its pathological, paranoid hatred of the Jews, it is Nazism. And these guys want to appease it again? We suspect--we hope--the folks who've made sympathetic noises about America's enemies have done so merely out of habit, the enormity of the current situation not having quite sunk in yet. Perhaps it takes longer than a week for even an atrocity like this to pierce a shield of cynical complacency built over decades.

John Leo of U.S. News & World Report sums it up nicely:

What the War Is About [http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/010924/opinion/24john.htm] Now that everyone seems to agree that we are at war, it's important to make clear just what that war is about. It is not primarily about Israeli or Palestinian grievances. Some of the most dedicated fanatics--Osama bin Laden, for instance--rarely bother to focus on the Palestinian issue. Despite what our blinkered academic establishment thinks, the war is not about post-colonial resentments either. Colonialism is two or three generations past. The rich nations have spent so heavily on the underdeveloped world that who-did-what-to-whom many decades ago cannot explain what is happening. No, this is a global cultural war, pitting a pan-Islamic movement of fundamentalist extremists against the modern world and its primary cultural engine, America, "the Great Satan." But that does not mean we are in a battle against Islam. The vast majority of Muslims want no part of terrorism, and many Muslim states are as nervous about extremism as we are. The problem is a religious subculture that cannot cope with openness, change, rules, democracy, secularism, and tolerance--and that wishes to destroy those who can.

Much of this was pulled from the Wall Street Journal's daily "Best of the Web Today" Best of the Web Today - September 19, 2001 By JAMES TARANTO - I reccomend you go to http://OpinionJournal.com and subscribe.

-- Rich Marsh (marshr@airmail.net), September 20, 2001

Answers

Huh. And here I thought that trying to "walk a mile in the other fellow's moccasins" was a grown-up, not a puerile or adolescent, thing to do.

Clear enough, the hijackers thought the act was justified. Were they "sane"? The desperate seldom appear so -- to the comfortably placed.

Why were they so desperate?

Is it really such a crime, such a juvenile thing, to ask that question? Is it a further crime, to be able to answer it?

-- L. Hunter Cassells (mellyrn@castlemark-honey.com), September 20, 2001.

G'day Rich Marsh. Kindly allow me to tear this to pieces, if I may. Not sure if I'm from the left or not... like to think I defy spectral analysis. I only know that i don't really know.

"A WHOLE swathe of this country's educated class is unable to distinguish between right and wrong. There is no other possible conclusion."

---Sounds like what Chomsky's been saying for years about the US intelligentsia. They're completely blind to the possibility that the lives of USA's victims count for anything.

"There are apparently thousands of people out there (or maybe hundreds, or maybe it is just a few dozen with exceptionally good media contacts) who think that it is quite acceptable to see the mass murder of innocent people as a "message" that needed to be delivered."

--- Rich, have you heard of a lady called Madeline Allbright?..used to be quite a big wheel in Washington. Here was what she had to say about the mega-deaths caused by USA's post-shooting-war blockade of Iraq

"In 1996, when queried on CBS's `60 Minutes' as to whether the death of a half million children was worth the price, Albright's response was, `That's a tough question, but yes we think the price is worth it.' " 500,000 into 5000 won't go.

"The puerile anti-Americanism of the British Left has seemed a harmless enough joke during the good, safe years when there was enough capitalist bounty to give socialists a good party."

Maybe they were anti-American because of USA.gov's amazing international crimes? "Socialists" and "a good party" don't belong in the same sentence, BTW. A bunch of geeky undergraduates who signed-up in the hope of scoring with the 2 lefty chicks, one of whom may or may not be a lesbian. zzzzz.

"Now, in this moment of terrifying international crisis.." - that it is. (But no doubt there were at least a billion people who were pretty stoked about it, just like lots of Americans will feel kinda good once their .mil gets to blowing things up. It's a general human failing imho.)

"So mass murder might be justified then, if you are doing it on behalf of the "conquered, exploited and oppressed"?

---Do not many military operations result in mass murder, and are no military actions ever justified? Just-War theory is a complicated field, but just on a simple utilitarian basis, you could say killing one to prevent the killing of two is justified, all else being equal.

"Does it matter, when you are committing this ultimate criminal act on behalf of the exploited, that you are financed by a billionaire born into one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia? (That is just the sort of association that Mr Foot is so eager to point out when it involves Western interventions.)"

--- One mans zero's & ones are as good as another's? Your billionaires usually tend to finance mass murder on behalf of your billionaires, so this is a novelty at least.

"Nor does it matter, presumably, that the international terrorist alliance into which these murderers in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland are locked is part of a global criminal network which is tied to Colombian drugs traffic and old-fashioned low grade murder and money laundering."

-----hehehehehhe! My gawd, this describes the CIA and the banking system as well, if not better than it describes the particular murderers in question. It's a question of scale really - They probably go in more for your HIGH grade murder and money laundering, but let's not quibble over terms. The ra-ra supporters of Washington do a great job remaining ignorant of these sort of uncomfortable facts.

"After all, anything is acceptable if it helps to undermine the great United States plot to force American values on the rest of the world. Preventing the dissemination of free markets, with their corrupting prosperity and materialism, must be worth sacrificing a few mundane moral assumptions."

---I would think countries with a different set of values would be enthusiastic about undermining such a "plot". Especially to the extent that "American values" often translate on the ground into bombings, death squads and looting of national resources.

"Who is America, after all, to tell the world how it should live: if local populations prefer their Marxist tyrannies or their theocratic dictatorships, where does the United States get the right to bully them into personal freedom and private economic security?"

---The writer is asking this rhetorically, but it's actually not such a bad question, come to think of it. USA has installed and supported more tyrannies than I can count, none of them "Marxist" for sure, but corpses are corpses.

... "On the one hand, it has the clear ring of elaborated neurosis: the extrapolation of your own adolescent rebellion into a cosmic political philosophy in which the most powerful country in the world personifies the domineering adult authority against which you pit yourself."

---this is not a bad pop-psyche sketch of some rebellious young things' mental make up, true.

"Even when they contain their outright vindictiveness toward the country upon whose successful economy the developing world is utterly dependent,"

---Gee, how did things come to be this way??? And should they be this way??? And could things be re-arranged so that this is not the case??? Maybe the developing world might do better if USA stopped "helping them", given the explosive nature of much of that help. Maybe if the IMF (International MoFo's) were disbanded and all those debts went uncollected, maybe these countries could direct their resources towards improving their own plight, rather than cash- cropping to service unpayable loans to 1st world bankers.

"..they suggest that there is something rational and meaningful in this "message" that has been delivered. As Martin Amis puts it in (where else?) yesterday's Guardian: "Terror is political communication by other means."

---I think there might be message in there somewhere...a pretty unfriendly message for sure; but it's along the lines of "Don't Tread On Me."

"At what point would these people decide that an action was so evil, so utterly beyond the pale of human conscience, that it was ruled out as part of the argument? "

---Ask Mrs. Albrecht.

"In the meantime, grown-up politicians have suspended all disputation in favour of an absolutely unified stand. This is not some war-time reflex of nationalistic piety.."

---sure it is.

"It is an acknowledgement that in order to have a debate, there must be two sides to the argument. And, as any sane person should be able to say with ease, there are not two possible answers to the question: was the attack on innocent civilians in America justifiable?"

---fweeh! Talk about begging the question! (And besides, it was innocent civilians plus bankers, but that's an aside.) I don't know if it's justiFIED, but anything is "justifiable" if you try hard enough. Ask Mrs. Albright again. When USA get's around to blowing up someone something somewhere next week, they'll justify it by refering to last weeks tragic events. If innocents get killed too, " sad but so be it" they'll say. Escalating cycle of violence, satan laughing spreads his wings. Who drew first blood?

"There may be differences of opinion about the appropriate tactics for dealing with this gross criminality which threatens the lives of free people (and the freedoms which make their lives so worth living).."

---the lives of "free" people are worth more than the lives of people living under a really shitty government like Iraq? I guess you could argue this way if you were a cold-blooded utilitarian, but it wouldn't wash with the great unwashed. Iraqi citizens are far more threatened by the conditions caused there by the US, than you or I are by the terrorist threat. (Here's hoping.) I'm sure there has been lots of debate "about the appropriate tactics for dealing with this gross criminality which threatens the lives " of the Iraqi etc people, looks like someone decided that hijacking planes was it.

"The moral confusion of a whole section of opinion formers and well- educated British people is being exposed and tested. No one will forget what has been said and written this past week."

---I suspect that at least echelom won't! :)

-- number six (iam_not_a_number@hotmail.com), September 20, 2001.

"Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a waged for revenge or defense can be just."

- Cicero

-- Rich Marsh (marshr@airmail.net), September 20, 2001.

The articles supplied by Mr. Marsh in this posting are nothing but propaganda, and should be evaluated as such. Seen in this light, the material is actually quite funny. Almost every sentence distorts reality and presents lies as if they are truth. Thanks, "number Six" for the paragraph by paragraph rebuttals.

The rebuttals could go on and on, but of course the point of propaganda is to put a message "out there," regardless of truth, for once "out there" it is impossible to mitigate the propaganda's effects without engaging in counter propaganda.

A sad example of counter propaganda was the recent claim that CNN's tape showing Palestinian's celebrating the trade center debacle was from 1991. This has turned out to be wrong-- the tape is real. Now both the tape and this claim are "out there." Neither tells the truth.

CNN's tape of the Palestinians was one of the first shown in the U.S. after the towers collapsed, and this view has been shown repeatedly throughout the world. Is this honest coverage of Palestinian reactions? According to at least one correspondent based in Palestine, most Palestinians were deeply saddened by the destruction. Many Palestinians have first hand knowledge of destruction and sympathize with the Americans harmed in this incident. Where are CNN's balancing tapes showing these people? Could the tape be real, but also be propaganda?

We can expect more exaggeration, more misleading statements, and more outright lies from Big Media and Mr. Bush as the U.S. moves into total war mode. Anyone who cares a whit about reality better take everything they see and hear in the upcoming months with a huge grain of salt.

Oh, and as to all this confident talk about Bin Laden and Afghanistan. I for one give no credibility to either Israeli or CIA claims about responsibility for this attack. Both entities have agendas, both lie whenever it is convenient, and both have lied before. Before I am ready to see United States youth killed overseas in a "war" I want to see and evaluate the evidence that the "war" is necessary. At the least I would like my Congressmen to actually hold hearings and evaluate real evidence, not just military and CIA "assurances" that they have the right guys.

How laughable for example, that the FBI tells us that 19 specific passengers were the terrorists on these flights when no one survived and there appears (in public at least) to be no evidence that these men actually did it-- other than Arab-sounding names. This is a working hypothesis folks, not a fact. And the hypothesis seems to depend on accepting as a precursor hypothesis that "the Arabs did it." Once we assume the Arabs did it, it makes sense to look for Arabs on the planes.

But what if the Chinese did it? No one has even mentioned mainland China as a possibile culprit despite the Chinese and U.S. military perspectives-- reported on this Board-- that we will inevitably fight each other. I thought the first rule of good detective work was to identify all the possibly suspects. How has such a huge suspect evaded the radar screen?

How could a war against "terrorists" possibly be right, when we seem as a country have not even have considered all the suspects? It can't be. And the justifications given in public can be presumed to have nothing to do with the real motives.

-- Neil R (nmruggles@earthlink.net), September 20, 2001.