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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (32995)	6/24/2002 4:42:09 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good, depressing, comment from Andrew Sullivan ISLAMIKAZES AND VIRTUE: Following up from Susan Sontag, Matthew Parris has an article in Saturday's Times of London that gives you a sense of where even mainstream conservative commentary now is in Europe. His column is about sacrifice, and he argues that the suicide bombers in Israel and the West Bank are the inheritors of Samson, Vietnamese Buddhist monks and other mythological types willing to endure death for the sake of their cause. He concedes that murdering others changes the moral balance somewhat; but he basically sides with Cherie Blair in believing that all Israelis are somehow legitimate targets because of their country's occupation of the West Bank: I do not think that in his heart an Israeli would deny that, if your enemy has taken land that is rightfully yours and occupied it, then not just your enemy's army but his wife and son and daughter and servants and all who, under his protection, come to live and make their living on the stolen land, are aggressors. By their presence they aid and abet the occupation. As with most European discussions of this issue, there is no historical analysis of how the West Bank came to be occupied, no account of the attempts of the Israelis to come to some sort of peace under Rabin and Barak, in fact, no historical understanding at all of how we come to be where we are. In fact, there's almost an equation of non-violent acts of passive resistance with the murderous fanatics of 9/11 and a subtle implication that Israel itself is actually land that is "rightfully theirs." Parris even evokes Christ in his litany of precedents for the Islamikazes! That's how far we've come from the days of last September, when moral clarity about terrorism was sharpest. It seems to me that his argument has only a shred of credibility if it is assumed that the Palestinian people have had no opportunities to win large amounts of territory through negotiation, if their suicides are not in fact primarily means to murder disproportionate numbers of civilians, and if their purpose was to express desperation rather than to affirm a death-cult imbued with Nazi-like anti-Semitism. But you won't hear these caveats in Western Europe - or indeed throughout much of the rest of the world. There seems to me little doubt that Israel and, by implication, America is losing this battle of ideas. Since it is the most important battle since the Cold War, we need to think far more ambitiously about how to wage it. andrewsullivan.com