Nile: An oasis of reason in MSNBC's wasteland
GOP Vixen
By Bridget on Terrorist twits
I'm not a huge fan of MSNBC. (Two words: Chris Matthews.) I think their shows are rather dry and have some dense hosts (or just utterly annoying, like Matthews). But I did watch Monday's "Connected Coast to Coast"; filling in for Ron Reagan Jr. (another personality who freaks out my remote control) and Monica Crowley were Republican strategist Jack Burkman and Congressional Quarterly's Craig Crawford.
Together Burkman and Crawford made quite an obnoxious duo, but there was hope for the terrorism segment as one of the guests was Nile Gardiner, that sexy sultan of Anglo-American security policy. Nile's a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, but you'd never know it from the daft deft hosts who introduced him as being from the "Heritage Institute."
A snippet from the interview:
CRAWFORD: Are we doing enough to deal with the root causes and grievances that come out of the poverty-stricken areas of the Middle East which seem to create the jihad and suicide bomb, uh, bombers that become pawns in the hands of the terrorist leaders? Are we doing enough to deal with that to remedy that problem?
I'm noticing that many on the left are approaching the terror war like bleeding-hearts approach gang infestation here in L.A.: There must be some way in which society is failing the poor lil' gangbangers that is making them randomly plug a motorist in the head from an overpass on the Harbor Freeway. Like not enough after-school programs creates murderers.
So the response to Crawford...
NILE: Well, I should say first of all that surveys have shown that the vast majority of suicide bombers are in fact well-educated, often from very well-off, affluent families; for example, the suicide bombers in London were certainly not impoverished individuals forced into their actions out of sheer desperation. I think we are dealing with highly intelligent, very well-funded foes. I think it has very little to do with the root causes of terror or poverty. I think we are dealing with an evil ideology here, a perversion of Islam which feeds on hatred and anger among a small minority of Muslims across Europe, but we simply cannot appease this ideology and I don't think that we should be entering into a major debate about addressing the root causes. We're dealing with an enemy that simply cannot be negotiated with or reasoned with but it simply has to be destroyed.
(Emphasis added to emphasize smartness.)
CRAWFORD: (stunned pause) Nile, I take that point, but what is your explanation then for the higher-educated and the more wealthy terrorists who we've seen in these cases? What is their motivation? How is this happening?
NILE: Well, I think they're above all driven by a desire to establish a Muslim caliphate, a Muslim state, frankly, across much of the Western world and certainly we cannot in any way make any concessions to these people. They also, of course, have clear political goals they are trying to--
At which point he was interrupted by Burkman, who changed the subject.
I was befuddled at Crawford's pressing for a definitive reason for terrorism, one that perhaps would point at a concrete catalyst, like the West being mean. Are we so removed from accepting the abstract concepts of good and evil that we don't accept that chief 9-11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was driven by evil? |
