Well, I find most discussions of deconstruction and postmodernism pretty impenetrable; digressive writing would not be the worst of sins in that area. Bennett took some lumps in the Book Review this week too.
More coherent arguments are found in two books, by prominent conservative thinkers, that disagree profoundly about the nature of the United States and the goals of its foreign policy. ''Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism'' by William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education and drug czar, is devoted to fulminations against public figures whose statements about the terrorist attacks were informed by moral relativism or left-wing anti-Americanism (to his credit, he also rebukes Jerry Falwell ''and the other blame-America types on the Christian Right''). Most of Bennett's targets, like Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and Katha Pollitt, have been repeatedly criticized since last fall, not least by many thinkers on the left. More interesting and provocative is the chapter ''A War Against Islam?,'' in which Bennett expresses a justified skepticism about claims that political violence is alien to the spirit of Islam and draws attention to the vicious anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism disseminated by the state-sanctioned media in many ''moderate'' Arab countries.
''Why We Fight'' loses credibility, however, when Bennett turns to the controversial question of what, if any, connection the Arab-Israeli conflict has with Al Qaeda's war against America. The consensus in the Bush administration and the world community holds that, despite the use of comparably evil tactics by Al Qaeda and some Palestinian militants, there is a difference in kind between the theocratic crusade of Osama bin Laden's tiny sect and the struggle of the Palestinian people for a Palestinian state. Even a former Israeli justice minister, Yossi Beilin, has said that the Palestinians ''are not a group of terrorists like Al Qaeda'' but a ''big nation, with several millions of people who wanted their state.'' Bennett, like most neoconservatives, rejects this nuanced view. ''In the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967,'' he observes, ''Israel was eager to negotiate a return of the land it had conquered in exchange for peace and diplomatic recognition by the Arabs.'' There is no discussion of the Israeli settlements. Of the Palestinians living under Israeli military rule, he writes: ''For all the undeniable tribulations of occupation, it is a matter of record that they, too, have enjoyed a higher standard of living and a broader range of rights than their brethren anywhere in the region can dream of.''
According to Bennett, the ''essential human kinship with Israel'' he attributes to Americans is based on ''an understanding, almost religious in nature, that to our two nations above all others has been entrusted the fate of liberty in the world.'' Entrusted by whom? ''I myself am one of tens of millions of Americans who have seen in the founding and flourishing of the Jewish state the hand of the same beneficent God who attended our own founding and has guided our fortunes until now.'' The belief in two chosen peoples has its origin in Protestant fundamentalist prophecy theories.
Bennett's attempt to blur the distinction between the nonsectarian republicanism of America's founding fathers and the ethnoreligious nationalism of the Israeli right should not go unchallenged. In ''A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America,'' which influenced Hamilton, Madison and Jay as they wrote The Federalist, John Adams had this to say about constitution making in America: ''It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven. . . . Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretense of miracle or mystery . . . are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.'' nytimes.com
It's just so unfair when people quote the Founding Fathers as being not totally in concurrence with the "Christian Nation" "strict constructionist" school of history. Only someone sadly lacking in "moral clarity" would even think of doing that. |
