The personalization of this war on terror was, in fact,
fomented largely by the far-left in the United States and
by the soft-left in Europe, who smeared, caricatured, and
defamed the president of the United States to a degree
almost unprecedented in recent history.
Moral Nihilism
by Andrew Sullivan
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 03.16.04
The hideous massacre in Madrid last week led to many responses, one of which was the Spanish electorate's decision to throw out its center-right government in favor of a solidly socialist administration bent on removing Spanish troops from Iraq. <font size=4>Here is the response of one European newspaper, the London Guardian, and my comments.<font size=3>
Life stopped in the winter drizzle of Madrid yesterday. Offices, shops and cafes emptied, as funeral candles were lit in moving scenes of solidarity. Black bows of mourning appeared on shop windows, the cabs of commuter trains, and on lapels. People looking at the wreckage in Atocha burst into tears. As dusk fell, every street around the railway station was crammed with people standing in the rain. The silence was overpowering. Spaniards turned out in their millions in a collective act of grief and protest. In the Basque country, as in the rest of the country, Spain emerged from its first day of mourning with dignity. If cities across Europe were waking up to the fact that they were as much in the crosshairs of an attack on this scale, as New York or Washington were, the Israeli mass circulation Yedioth Ahronoth could not restrain itself: "Welcome to the real world", it declared unsubtlely.
But which real world? The world in which neighbourhoods are razed, water supplies cut off, children shot, in thinly disguised acts of collective retribution?
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Notice how the Guardian instinctively, viscerally, blames the victim, Israel, for the terrorism that has plagued it for so long. For in the Guardian's view, the democracies are always wrong; and the terrorists always have a point. Alas, the measures the Guardian refers to are a few of the most extreme tactics that the Israeli government has deployed in an attempt to stop the constant stream of atrocities wrought upon the only democracy in the Middle East. They are not acts of indiscriminate "collective retribution"--nor, as the Guardian implies, deliberate attempts to kill children--but bids to stem the tide of murder flooding into Israel's streets and mass transportation systems.
The Guardian may pretend to be unaware, but the "real world" of Islamist mass-murderers in Madrid is not just reflected in the real world of Israel--but of Iraq and Morocco and Turkey, where scores of innocents, many of them Muslims, have also been targeted in Islamo-fascism's campaign of indiscriminate holy murder. Or the "real world" in New York City, where thousands were immolated by these theocratic extremists, despite the fact that, in recent years, the United States has expended vast sums of money and blood to save Muslim lives in Kuwait and Bosnia and Kosovo and Somalia and, now, Iraq. <font size=3>
Or is it the world in which George Bush uses actors to portray New York firefighters raising the American flag at Ground Zero in a £ 2.5m television ad campaign for his forthcoming election?<font size=4>
This canard has now been debunked. The latest online
version of Newsweek reports: <font size=3>
Editor's Note: In our initial reporting for this story, we were told by a member of the Bush-Cheney campaign's media team that paid actors had been used to portray firefighters in its first election ads, which drew heavily on images from 9/11. After publication, the official told us that he had been mistaken. The Bush-Cheney campaign also provided NEWSWEEK with documents indicating that the people in the ads were authentic volunteer firefighters, not actors."
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The Guardian is therefore wrong on the facts. But it is also wrong on the inference. Even if it were true that actors were used in a paid advertisement, how on earth does that affect the claim that 9/11 revealed the "real world" where Islamist terrorists are prepared to murder countless innocents in their dream of theocratic tyranny? That is the real world. We can only hope it doesn't take a horrendous atrocity in the center of London before the Guardian comes to grips with it.<font size=3>
Or is the world in which war is repeatedly declared but never defined and detainees are held for two years before repatriation, then rearrested, then released without charge? Are those who perpetrated the commuter train bombings to be hunted down and smoked out of their lairs, and if they were, are we confident that we would prevent the next attack, and the one after that?
<font size=4>
Well, what does the Guardian believe is the alternative to
hunting down the perpetrators of 3/11? Letting them go
unaffected, ready to bomb and murder again? Does the
Guardian honestly believe that merely ignoring terrorism
of this kind will make it go away? Or do the editors hold
that opposing terrorism is futile and that the only method
of countering it is to cave in to the demands of those
perpetrating it? <font size=3>
Mr Bush squandered the huge wave of international sympathy which the victims of September 11 should rightly continue to receive, as Sidney Blumenthal argued in these columns. He has divided Europe at a historic time of expansion and imposed greater strains on the transatlantic military alliance than ever a Soviet general sitting in Moscow at the height of the cold war could have done. Mr Bush has made his "war" a personal and a partisan one, when the response to al-Qaida should be neither.
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How on earth did President Bush "squander" the alleged
sympathy of many in Western Europe after September 11? All
he did was to respond, at first in Afghanistan, a war
opposed by many in the Guardian's pages, and thereafter in
Iraq. For both wars, he secured bipartisan support in the
U.S. Congress, and until the very last minute, support
from the U.N. Security Council and dozens of allies. Large
majorities of Americans--across party lines--supported and
still support both wars. To equate this president's
attempt to tackle the gravest threat to international
security with a Soviet general is pure moral animus, an
obscene conflation of the threat of totalitarianism and
the democratic response to it. The personalization of this
war on terror was, in fact, fomented largely by the far-
left in the United States and by the soft-left in Europe,
who smeared, caricatured, and defamed the president of the
United States to a degree almost unprecedented in recent
history. Just look at the Guardian's resident cartoonist,
Steve Bell, a man who draws President Bush routinely as an
ape. He was far kinder to Saddam Hussein.
<font size=3>
As evidence continued yesterday to lurch back and forth pointing first to Eta and then to al-Qaida, the outgoing Spanish prime minister, and family friend of George and Jeb Bush, Jose Maria Aznar, sadly began to follow their example. The mass protests took place under the official slogan "With the victims, with the constitution, for the defeat of terrorism". The reference in that list to the constitution was politically motivated. The Spanish constitution recognises several "nationalities" but only one nation, the Spanish one, and both the moderate Basque Nationalist party and Catalan separatists want to rewrite the constitution to gain independence for their regions. Both groups swallowed their pride and participated in last night's nationwide demonstrations. <font size=4>
Immediately after accusing President Bush
of "personalizing" the war on terror, the Guardian stoops
to mention that Jose Maria Aznar is a "family friend of
George and Jeb Bush." Why? Merely to smear him as well, as
someone who dared to confront Islamist terror while the
Guardian counseled appeasement. And why should it be that
a reference to the Spanish constitution is automatically
interpreted as a means to blame ETA? The constitution also
guarantees freedom of religion and the right to vote--two
freedoms that Al Qaeda would remove in an instant. To
uphold them at that moment was no more nakedly political
than urging all Spanish voters to turn out for the
election. <font size=3>
The crude political calculation being made yesterday was if Eta were found to be responsible it would boost the chances of Mr Aznar's nominated conservative successor Mariano Rajoy in tomorrow's general election. If al-Qaida were definitively found to be behind the bombings, Spaniards, 90% of whom were against the war in Iraq, might be less willing to give the ruling Popular party an absolute majority in parliament. A senior opposition Socialist pleaded in vain that whoever toyed with the truth at a time of so much pain, was doing something very grave. The turnout in Sunday's election is likely to be high in a country where the ghost of General Franco lingers.
The victims of the commuter train bombings in Madrid and the Spaniards who came out of the streets last night surely deserve more than party political responses. Europe too needs to mould a different response to its September 11. Spain has a history which places it at the crossroads of the European and Arab worlds. It understands both traditions. It is a country where once Jew, Muslim and Christian lived together. An international conference, to bridge the divide between Muslim and Christian communities, should be one first step. But there are many others. We need to take the fight against terror out of America's hands. We need to get beyond the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys, and seek a genuinely collective response. Europe should seize the moment that America failed to grasp.
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The stunning aspect of this boilerplate is how utterly empty it is. The only constructive suggestion the Guardian proffers is an "international conference." No this is not, apparently, self-parody. While hundreds lie dead, the most important thing is to stick on your lapel name-labels, hurry down to the nearest Marriott lobby, and have a seminar. Above all, after an atrocity of this scale, it is vital that the perpetrators of such evil not "be hunted down and smoked out of their lairs." Heaven forbid such an action. That would be the American way, after all.
In Europe, there are no bad guys, even those who
deliberately murdered almost 200 innocents and threaten to
murder countless more. Ask yourself: If the Guardian
cannot call these people "bad guys," then who qualifies?
And if the leaders of democratic societies cannot qualify
in this context as "good guys," then who qualifies? What
we have here is complete moral nihilism in the face of
unspeakable violence. Then we have the absurd canard that
there is a "divide between Muslim and Christian
communities." There is no such divide. There is a divide
within Islam between a large majority and a small minority
of theocratic, extremist mass-murderers, men and women who
have killed Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike, young and
old, and almost always innocent bystanders in free
societies. That small minority has terrorized large
populations, enslaved women, killed Jews and homosexuals,
launched a war against Western civilians, taken over whole
countries, and targeted individual writers and thinkers
for murder. With them we need a dialogue? With them we
need an unremitting, unrelenting, unapologetic war.
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Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR.
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