Getting to the Root
What’s really behind the terrorism.
Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
October 3, 2001 8:45 a.m.
hy was the World Trade Center destroyed? The Left tells us that U.S. foreign policy is at fault — specifically, our support for Israel and our sanctions against Iraq. The reply is that mere changes in policy won't placate the terrorists. It's America itself that the terrorists envy and hate — our freedom, our power, our prosperity. That sobering fact leaves us little alternative beside the use of diplomacy, finance, and force to bring the terrorists and the nations that harbor them to heel.
This is the debate of the moment, and rightly so. But if it's a question of why the World Trade Center was destroyed, why not go to the terrorists who attacked it? The hijackers are dead, of course, and their sponsor, Osama Bin Laden, is currently unavailable for interviews. But there remains a way to speak with some of those who attacked the World Trade Center. I'm thinking of the terrorists who ignited a truckload of explosives in the World Trade Center parking lot in 1993, killing six people. Had the amount of explosives in that truck been just a little larger, and had the truck been only slightly differently placed, the World Trade Center would have been destroyed, with a likely loss of two hundred thousand lives (the approximate combined casualty toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) — 50,000 office workers, 50,000 visitors, and 100,000 workers in the surrounding buildings (a better-placed blast would have toppled one tower into the other, and both towers would have crashed onto the surrounding buildings).
As it happens, U. C. Santa Barbara professor of sociology, Mark Juergensmeyer, interviewed Mahmud Abouhalima, a ringleader of the original World Trade Center bombing plot, while researching his book, Terror in the Mind of God. We also know a good deal about Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the exiled leader of the Egypt's most radical Islamic movement, al Gamaa-Islamiya ("the Islamic group"), who authorized the first World Trade Center bombing, and who, like Abouhalima, is now imprisoned for his role in the plot. Both Abouhalima and Rahman seem to have had ties, if shadowy ones, to Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Obviously, Bin Laden's September 11 operation finished off what Rahman, Abouhalima, and their accomplices began in 1993. So an understanding of Rahman's and Abouhalima's motivations should tell us a lot about the underlying causes of the terror we face today.
Given what we know about Rahman and Abouhalima, what are we to make of the claim that America's support for Israel is the root cause of the bombing (and the accompanying implication that a slackening of our support for Israel will bring an end to the terror)? Before assessing that claim, the craven and self-defeating nature of this whole line of thinking deserves comment. Everyone knows, yet too many forget, that it is foolish to negotiate with terrorists — that giving in to terrorist blackmail leads only to greater violence. That, after all, is what happened at the World Trade Center. A series of U.S. retreats in the face of terrorist attacks on our embassies, ships, and military barracks emboldened the terrorists to believe that a massive domestic assault on the United States would drive us out of the Middle East altogether. So even if the recent attacks were inspired by our foreign policy, how would changing that policy under terrorist pressure leave us any better off? Wouldn't such a retreat simply be inviting terrorists everywhere to manipulate our foreign policy through a series of nightmarish domestic attacks?
For the sake of argument, however, let's consider the claim that America's foreign policy is the "root cause" of the disaster at the World Trade Center. It's certainly true that Sheik Rahman vigorously condemned the United States for its support of Israel. Does that mean we ought to get tough with Israel, reducing our military and economic support by, say, 50 percent, and forcing Israel to make some key concessions to the Palestinians? I'm afraid that won't be enough, since what Rahman objects to is not this or that policy, but Israel's very existence.
Sheik Rahman, after all, is the leader of the organization that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat for simply recognizing Israel's existence. So to bring this terrorism to a halt — to satisfy Sheik Rahman and his fundamentalist allies — we're going to have to repudiate Israel altogether.
Let it also be noted that when addressing his terrorist followers, Sheik Rahman inveighed against America for our role in the Persian Gulf war. So obviously, to extirpate the causes of terrorism at their root, we'll need to send out a signal to Saddam Hussein that Kuwait is his if he wants it. Surely that will put a stop to the violence.
While we're at it, let's consider that other "root cause" of the attacks on the World Trade Center, our support for Egypt's secular government. More than anything else, it is our support, not for Israel, but for the government of Egypt, that turned Sheik Rahman against us. Rahman's dream, after all, is to return to Egypt, Khomeini-like, to stand at the head of a fundamentalist Islamic state. To that end, Rahman authorized the murder, not only of Sadat, but also of the Speaker of Egypt's Parliament and of the respected writer Farag Foda, whose crime was to publish books advocating the separation of religion from politics. And although the assassination attempts were unsuccessful, Sheik Rahman also authorized the murder of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and, perhaps most infamously of all, the murder of Egypt's beloved national icon, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, whose neck was slashed, and who lost the use of his writing hand in the attack. Rahman's only regret was that Mahfouz had not been punished earlier, since Rahman is convinced that Salman Rushdie would never have had the courage to write The Satanic Verses had Mahfouz been assassinated first. So to stop the terror at its source, we will surely need to withdraw our support from the Mubarak government, and from other moderate secular governments throughout the Middle East.
Then there are those annoying Copts — all six million of them — the Christian minority in Egypt whose very presence seems to mock Rahman's plans for a fundamentalist Islamic state. Since the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, the Copts have lived in fear, victimized by persistent discrimination. Indeed on several occasions, Sheik Rahman has declared the wealth of the Copts to be forfeit and available to the (Islamic) faithful. So if we really want to get at the root causes of terrorism, maybe we ought to do something about those Copts. (For more on Rahman and Egyptian fundamentalism, see Fouad Ajami's superb study, The Dream Palace of the Arabs.)
But what of that other "root cause" of the terror — our sanctions against Iraq, supposedly responsible for the deaths of uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians? Peter Beinart of The New Republic laid that claim to rest last week when he showed that it is not our sanctions, but Saddam's own policy of selling badly needed food and supplies to support his military, that is responsible for the misery of the Iraqi people.
But the problem goes beyond the tendency of the Left to blame the United States for what is in fact Saddam's cruel irresponsibility, or the Left's failure to consider our sanctions in light of the fact that Saddam is even now manufacturing weapons of mass destruction meant to be used against America's cities. Several commentators have noted that the United States gets no credit for having intervened to save many thousands of Muslims from ethnic cleansing in both Bosnia and Kosovo. It's worse than that, however. The United States is actually excoriated throughout the Middle East for not having acted sooner to rescue the Bosnian Muslims or the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo.
There's certainly a case to be made that we ought to have intervened more quickly in Bosnia and Kosovo, but it is almost unheard of for a nation to stage such massive military action on almost exclusively humanitarian grounds. In the perspective of history, it's remarkable that the United States acted at all, and perhaps more remarkable still that so many in the Muslim world, after all the complaints about American imperialism, feel free to saddle us with imperial obligations, and then give us no credit when we shoulder them. And how is it that we are to tolerate collateral damage against Serbs in the course of an attempt to stop their ethnic cleansing of Muslims, but are not to tolerate collateral damage against Iraqis or Afghans in an attempt to prevent the mass murder of American citizens?
And has it been remarked that, even before September 11, almost a quarter of Afghanistan's population was being kept from starvation by international food relief, the vast majority of which was supplied by the United States? In effect, the United States has been feeding the population of a country whose government has been harboring anti-American terrorists for years. Then there's the food aid delivered by the United States to literally hundreds of thousands of people suffering from drought in Syria and Jordan. Why is none of this included in the Left's careful cataloguing of American actions in the Middle East?
Of course, the real cause of terrorism is not United States foreign policy, but the ease with which America can be made to serve as a scapegoat for the profound social dilemmas of the Middle East. The life of Mahmoud Abouhalima, the terrorist who nearly murdered 200,000 Americans at the World Trade Center in 1993, stands as a sad testament to the weight of those problems.
Abouhalima fits the classic profile of the Islamic fundamentalist leadership — urbanized, college educated, with middle-class professional aspirations, but stymied by the weak economies of the Arab states. Quoted in a brief 1993 profile in the Los Angeles Times, Abouhalima's Egyptian friends say that he emigrated to Germany on a tourist visa after college, fearing that he would never be able to support a wife and family in Egypt. Abouhalima married a German woman to prevent deportation, then divorced her to marry another. Although maintaining a surface religiosity, Abouhalima's early years in Germany were a "life of corruption — girls, drugs, you name it." Eventually, however, both Abouhalima and his wife (who converted to Islam) adopted a rigorous observance of Islamic purity, and migrated to the United States.
In Abouhalima's view, having lived 17 years in the West, and having been tempted, and almost destroyed, by our dissolute secular values, he understands and can judge our society. "I lived their life [i.e. the Western life], he told Juergensmeyer, "but they didn't live my life, so they will never understand the way I live or the way I think."
Abouhalima's struggle is a magnified version of the difficulties faced by many young adults in the modernizing Middle East. The family networks and marriage arrangements so critical to Muslim social life depend upon the maintenance of a girl's virginity. Yet increasingly, young urbanized Muslim men and women mix in coeducational schools and professional settings, caught between the Western-influenced models of sexual freedom seen in television, movies, and magazines, and the rewards and requirements of the traditional family system. For these young people, there is no long apprenticeship in "dating" — no training in how to be "modern" — only an untutored giving in to temptation and chaos, or the alternative of a self-imposed return to traditions of purity and the veil.
Western social and sexual morality, along with America's political and economic power, are easily seized upon as scapegoats in such a setting. The accusation are distorted and contradictory, based not on "the West" as it really is, for all of its (many) faults, but on a simplistic and untutored caricature of our life. Yet the social problems that generate the accusations are real, and not at all unrelated to the encroachment of modernity and the ways of "the West" on these traditional societies. Nothing is more certain, however, than that neither tradition nor modernity will disappear anytime soon. Nor are they altogether irreconcilable, although the Islamic world, for complex reasons, has characteristically found the task of blending them a difficult one.
So we must balance the need to recognize and acknowledge the dignity, complexity — and anguish — of contemporary life in Arab and Muslim lands, with the need to swiftly crush the sad, but deadly and irredeemable product of that anguish — Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. There is no placating the Sheik Rahman's and the Mahmud Abouhalima's of the world. If we do not stop them with force, they will kill us. The Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression were root causes of the Holocaust, after all, but the Nazis were no less dangerous for that.
The last word goes to an Egyptian dentist, who has, with difficulty, rescued some small measure of prosperity from the poverty of his land. Of his old friend, the terrorist Mahmud Abouhalima, this dentist says, "I love him like my brother, but if he had any relationship with this accident (at the Trade Center), I hate him, believe me. I want to destroy him before you." |
