IMO, a perceptive opinion piece.
By JAMES TARANTO
Why Do They Hate Us?
That's the question we've all grown sick and tired of hearing since Sept. 11, 2001. It's not that the query is inherently objectionable; understanding what motivates the enemy is obviously helpful in wartime. But the people who ask this question almost never genuinely seek to understand; rather, they have their own axes to grind against the U.S. or the West, and seek to use the prospect of terror attacks to scare the rest of us into supporting their views. This we have dubbed vicarious terrorism.
Now and then a terrorist actually takes the trouble to explain his motives. London's Daily Telegraph reports on the trial of the man who allegedly (and now confessedly) murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh:
Mohammed Bouyeri, a baby-faced 27-year-old with dual Dutch-Moroccan nationality, broke his vow not to co-operate with the Amsterdam court by admitting shooting and stabbing his victim last November.
"I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion," he told its three-strong panel of judges.
"I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same." . . .
Bouyeri then turned to the victim's mother, Anneke, in the public gallery, and told her he felt nothing for her. Mrs van Gogh watched as he read out from what appeared to be a statement: "I don't feel your pain. I have to admit that I don't have any sympathy for you. I can't feel for you because you're a non-believer."
This had nothing to do with Israeli "occupation" of "Palestinian lands," America's "unilateral invasion" of Iraq, "torture" of prisoners at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, the widening "income gap," or any of the other litany of complaints that the terror apologists trot out. Islamist terrorism arises from religious fanaticism and hatred, plain and simple.
The Enemy Within
It now appears that the terrorists behind last week's London attacks were British citizens of Pakistani descent, rather than foreign nationals. As the BBC, which for some reason actually uses the word terror in this report, notes, this is a troubling development:
So why does it make so much difference that the bombers are, as now suspected, British?
In the hours after the bombings, Muslim leaders in the UK, joined by other faith leaders, senior police chiefs and ministers, launched an action plan long prepared for such an attack on British soil.
That plan focuses on keeping communities together by very publicly and loudly saying all that can be said to differentiate between British Muslims and those who would seek to use a faith to justify atrocities.
The strategy relied to some extent on the public seeing terrorism as a "foreign" threat--just as in years gone by the IRA threat could be presented as something that came from the unique, alien circumstances of Northern Ireland's sectarian society, rather than something that sprang from ordinary folk in ordinary neighbourhoods.
But the revelation that the four London suspects were British will confirm the worst fears of many Muslim leaders. . . .
If the apparent British suicide bombers are of similar stock--young British-born men who are not driven by desperation, then British society's ability to deal with this may be severely tested.
This is potentially a huge problem not just for Britain but for Continental European countries that also have large populations of unassimilated Muslim citizens. It does not appear to be a major problem for America, which has a proportionately smaller Muslim population and a long history of assimilating immigrants. If Islamist terrorism is potentially a domestic problem for Europe, then the stakes in the global war on terror are in a way much higher there than in America.
Thus far European countries have largely fallen into two groups--those that stand with the U.S., such as Britain, Italy and Poland, and those that are vocally anti-American, at least on Iraq, such as France, Germany and post-3/11 Spain. The countries in the latter group have not sat out the war on terror; they have troops in Afghanistan, and the intelligence services cooperate with America. But their high-profile anti-Americanism seems aimed in part at lowering their profile to terrorists--a tactic not of appeasement but of deflection.
The two major post-9/11 attacks in Europe have targeted strong American allies, and in the case of Spain succeeded in undoing the alliance. This suggests that the deflection tactic correctly identifies the strategy of the terrorists, which is to target U.S. allies in an attempt to flip their allegiance, à la Spain. But while deflection may work as a tactic, as a long-term strategy it is fatally flawed. If the terrorists succeed in inducing every European country to abandon the U.S., does anyone think the terrorists will refrain from bombing Paris or Frankfurt if it suits the next stage of their jihad?
And what happens if the U.S. suffers another attack on the order of 9/11--say, the massacre of thousands using chemical or biological weapons, or a bombing that kills hundreds and destroys some major piece of infrastructure? We'd like to think the response would be a redoubling of effort, but it could be a turning inward, which would be bad for the U.S. and catastrophic for Europe.
It is possible that a second 9/11 would lead to a decisive loss of public support for the Bush administration's policy of fighting terrorism overseas. Already the defeatists have responded to the London bombing by blaming it on the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a logical fallacy--post hoc ergo propter hoc--but Americans might find it persuasive after a large-scale attack on America. If having troops in Afghanistan and Iraq couldn't prevent this attack, the argument would go, why not bring them all home?
Undoubtedly in the wake of a 9/11 sequel there would be increased pressure to step up homeland-security efforts. Currently the "liberal" position is that homeland security is better than war, but "homeland security" after another attack would mean more than just pork for New York. It could mean fortifying the borders, severely restricting legal immigration and deporting illegal immigrants en masse, curtailing the civil liberties of noncitizens and possibly American Muslims, and expanding police powers far beyond those in the Patriot Act.
We don't advocate any of these measures. Rather, we mean to put forward a nightmare scenario, and to make the point that America could--though at enormous cost in both money and freedom--protect itself from terrorism by cutting itself off from the rest of the world.
If the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq, the Europeans would as well; they simply do not have the military wherewithal to win without America. These countries would then become terrorist bases, as Afghanistan was pre-9/11. With "fortress America" a daunting target, terrorists would likely turn their attention to Europe, which would have a much harder time isolating itself than America.
Lacking America's geographic isolation, European countries would be hard-pressed to seal their borders (though Britain would be at an advantage in this regard). And the large population of alienated Muslim citizens would necessitate far more draconian curtailments of civil liberties than America would need.
This is all speculative, of course, but it is meant to suggest that peace in Europe depends on a continuing vigorous American response to the threat of Islamist terrorism. It wouldn't hurt if the Europeans figured that out and acknowledged it.
Stop the Presses: It Was Homicide!
We often criticize left-wing media outlets like the BBC and Reuters over, among other things, their refusal to call terror by its name. But it's worth emphasizing that by far the worst offender in terms of abusing the language via politically correct terminology is Fox News. Here's a report from yesterday on the London bombings:
New evidence suggests four bombers blew themselves up on the London transportation system last week, killing at least 52 in what could be the first homicide attacks in Western Europe, officials said Tuesday. . . .
Two militant Islamic groups have claimed responsibility for the attacks on three subway trains and on a bus. Police had previously indicated there was no evidence of homicide bombings, suggesting instead that timers were used.
Although police stopped short of calling them homicide attacks, Clarke said "strong forensic and other evidence" suggests one of the suspects was killed in a subway bombing and property belonging to the three others was found at the location of the other blasts. . . .
Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said Europeans had been involved in homicide attacks in the Mideast, but he knew of no successful homicide bombings in Western Europe previously.
Gosh, what about the murder of Theo Van Gogh? Wasn't that a homicide? What about the 200 or so people murdered in Madrid last year? And how could the police have said there was "no evidence of homicide bombings"? What about the scores of blown-up bodies on the trains and the bus? Did the police figure all those people dropped dead of heart attacks seconds before the non-"homicide" bomb went off?
The answer is that Fox, and only Fox, has redefinied homicide to mean "the act of killing oneself"--what the rest of the English-speaking world calls suicide. So Fox would say, for instance, "Hitler committed homicide by shooting himself in his bunker." But what about what Hitler did to his victims? The Fox brain trust will have to get to work on a name for that. |
