I read today that a Newsweek poll in Pakistan found that 48 percent of Pakistanis believe that Israel was behind the September 11 massacre. Reports from around the Middle East also show this to be a widespread belief among Arabs and Muslims. It is also echoed by the defeatist factions on the far left and the far right in this country. Prince Alaweed responded yesterday to Rudy Giuliani’s heroic return of the Saudi prince’s blood money in these words: “The whole issue is that I spoke about their position [on the Middle East conflict] and they didn’t like it because there are Jewish pressures and they were afraid of them.” This quote was to the newspaper Okaz, according to the New York Post. Alaweed knew exactly how to explain the affront to his native audience. There is only one word for this sickness and it is anti-Semitism. Somehow, we have not yet named the psychosis that affects large numbers of Muslims. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, whatever Tony Blair naively believes. The overwhelming majority of Arab Muslims do not want an accommodation with Israel. They want its obliteration and the expulsion or murder of every Jew that lives there. This anti-Semitism is openly fostered and fomented by many of the “moderate” Arab regimes we are now busy cozying up to. It is widely believed across the Muslim world – from the Philippines to Morocco to the denizens of our own native Muslim, Mr. Farrakhan. One of our greatest mistakes in the past few years has been to avoid calling this what it is: a sickness that only half a century ago was responsible for the greatest crime in the history of mankind. Why, one wonders, have no Western leaders confronted this ugly truth and condemned it? Why hasn’t the Pope? The rhetoric of bin Laden is not simply fundamentalist. In its structure and paranoia, it is not so different from the doctrines propagated by Hitler. These bin Laden-supporting Muslims want non-Muslims expelled from a wide swathe of Arab territory. They want Lebensraum, and the primary victim of such Lebensraum will once again be the Jews. Israel may not be the first cause cited by bin Laden but it surely is a critical one. It seems to me that our squeamishness in naming and recognizing this phenomenon is blunting our ability to confront it. Once again, we are faced with an expansionist, terrorist ideology that uses the demonization of Jews as one of its major rallying cries. What more do we need to know?
FISH RISES TO THE BAIT: Post-modernist Stanley Fish doesn’t believe that relativism prevents us from condemning terrorism or indeed Islamo-fascism. “If by relativism one means a cast of mind that renders you unable to prefer your own convictions to those of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began,” he argues. “Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions. Relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger. But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end, because it is simply another name for serious thought.” Well, if relativism is simply a synonym for serious thought, of course it doesn’t prevent us from making moral judgments. Many, many of us who regard this war as a moral necessity have indeed attempted to understand the arguments of the enemy and have found them for the most part repugnant and evil. But this is a semantic dodge. What relativism forbids is being able to state that something is actually evil as an objective truth. It’s just our conception of truth. And our truth is no more objectively valid than bin Laden’s truth, or Pol Pot’s or Stalin’s. So we fight this war simply as a function of our own will to power. Think about this for a minute and you realize that it’s a version of “my country, right or wrong,” a belief divorced from any attempt to subject ourselves and our enemy to neutral judgment or inspection. Jingoism from the left! And it’s this lazy jingoism, this worship of power for its own solipsistic sake, that led great philosophers like Heidegger to embrace the Nazis. It’s also this philosophical lassitude that leads Western “intellectuals” into the moral dead-end which this crisis has exposed like a flash-light and from which they are belatedly trying to rescue themselves. Fish’s op-ed is a worthy attempt to do just that. But he still doesn’t get it, does he?
ANTHRAX HYSTERIA: I feel a bit bad, as I was one of the first to say that biological warfare was clearly the next phase of the attack. But the current wave of anthrax hysteria is getting absurd. Don’t get me wrong. Only the F.B.I. could have taken this long to recognize this wave of attacks as an obvious coordinated act of terrorism. According to the New York Times today, they’re beginning to contemplate the possibility. Way to go, guys! I also believe we need far more government action to get a smallpox vaccine developed and distributed, and a far more proactive policy with regard to Iraq’s intent to use chemical and biological weapons against the U.S. and Israel. But beneath all this, there’s a silver lining to the latest attack. If this is the best they’ve got, it’s truly pathetic. I always thought that bin Laden must have planned a second strike to back up his first one. I cannot believe he wouldn’t have launched it by now if he could. Perhaps intelligence and law enforcement here and in Europe have stymied larger attacks. Perhaps anthrax is a horrifying intro to worse horrors. But if not, we have reason to be glad. This wave could kill at most a handful of people. It’s a truly puny weapon. Its main purpose (which is why the terrorists have targeted media types) is to spread chaos and alarm, which we are in danger of letting them get away with. Looked at objectively, the campaign is risible. One thing we have to guard against, I think, is over-estimating the enemy. Look how swiftly we have crippled the Taliban regime. It’s only our own caution that is preventing their complete collapse. With this biological attack, we have incurred very very few casualties and have been given a classic casus belli for extending the war. Advantage: America. So buck up and stop the freak-outs.
KINGSOLVER’S GAFFE: In the piece of drivel I linked to yesterday by Barbara Kingsolver, the following sentences appeared: “I would like us to sign the Kyoto agreement today, and reduce our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous, sensibly reorganized lives. If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size of Iceland’s.” A reader helpfully points out that Iceland has no defense budget whatsoever. Its entire defense structure is provided by the United States, and has been since 1951. Always nice to see the arguments of peaceniks not just exposed but demolished.
MATH: It never was my strong point. The proportion of the American population killed on September 11 was not 0.02 percent, but 0.002 percent. Actually, the correct number strengthens my point about the tiny risk of being killed by terrorists.
The Dish 