Greenwald responds to my latest post. He protests:
That I “legitimated” the London attack or argued it was a “legitimate protest” is as obvious a fabrication as it gets. Not only did I argue no such thing, and not only did I say the exact opposite of what Sullivan and others falsely attribute to me, but I expressly repudiated – in advance – the very claims they try to impose on me. Even vociferous critics of what I wrote, writing in neocon venues, understood this point (“I do find myself wanting to agree with Greenwald in arguing that this is an atrocious murder rather than an act of terror”).
I don’t fabricate things. Look at this direct quote:
“[T]he term [terrorism] at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states.”
Here’s my objection: the West kills “Muslims”; the Jihadists target “states.” That framing, in the direct wake of an act of religious barbarism, actually places Jihadists on a higher moral plane than the West. We’re killing people of a different faith on purpose; they’re just protesting by killing the soldiers who murder them. Maybe Glenn didn’t mean for it to come out that way. But it did.
And yes, I can see (just) how an off-duty soldier might qualify as a non-civilian, although we don’t yet fully know the details of the plot, and therefore complicate the “terror” label. That’s a point worth considering. I also conceded that a defense of the killing as blowback was involved here. So we’re not that far apart on those matters.
But I strongly resist the idea that the West has attempted to kill Muslims in the way that Jihadists have killed so many Muslims and infidels, even though civilian casualties have been a horrifying fact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the drone wars now winding down. We are seeking to defend ourselves from theocratic mass murderers after an unprovoked attack; they are seeking the triumph of their version of Islam, by any means, including mass murder. The US has not killed for religious reasons; the Jihadists kill solely for religious reasons, which include the sacrosanct nature of religiously-demarcated territory. That includes the Woolwich beheading, as the full context shows. The Jihadist was not defending the “land” he lives in. He is a British-born convert to a murderous form of Sunni Islam (which detests and seeks to murder Shiite infidels as much as any non-Muslims). He is, in fact, attacking his own land, its soldiers and its democratic norms. He wants to turn Britain into a Sharia-Islamist state. And he’s not shy about saying so. That equation of his land with, say, Pakistan, is a religious belief, not an objective fact.
Then there are the fabrications from Glenn. I “continuously justify any manner of violence and militarism” by the US. That accusation is just bizarre, given my record over the last several years, my support for withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, my opposition to new wars in Libya and Syria, my long campaign against torture, and on and on. But, yes, I do believe we are in a civilizational war, as I wrote just after 9/11.
It is a war between violent Jihadist theocracy and the Western tradition of separation between church and state. It is a war we did not seek and it is a war we are trying to end. For the Islamists, in contrast, this war is for ever – until their version of theocracy is triumphant. And the butchers of Woolwich are quite clear about their goals: the imposition of Sharia law and the end of democracy in Britain, their actual native land. For them to assume other countries as “their land” is an obvious sign that what lies behind this is not strategic blowback only – it is a theology of theocracy.
Norm Geras is not as blinkered:
[I]f a man says that he’s butchered someone on the street because of… Afghanistan, it is then true, if he is not lying or self-deceived, that somewhere in the causal chain leading up to that murderous act Western intervention against Al-Qaida and the Taliban has played some part in bringing the atrocity about. But it is by no means a sufficient explanation, as you can quickly ascertain by starting to count up in your head all those angered or upset about Western intervention who haven’t butchered anybody. At the same time, you can start to compute how many people responsible for jihadist terrorism today not only cite Afghanistan and/or Iraq but frame the reference within the terms of an Islamist ideology according to which the slaughter of innocents is an apt response to Western foreign policy. That’s a very large number of people. It is also true, of course, that not all Islamists commit terrorist murder, so this isn’t a complete explanation either, but you’d think the ideological factor should have some prominence.
A rational explanation of these acts is therefore available that places central emphasis on its ideological causes, and doesn’t just parrot what the jihadists themselves say. And those leftists and liberals (verkrappt section) who always draw attention towards what the killers say and away from the belief system that inspires them are not just appealing to rational explanation, they are offering a very particular type of skewed ‘explanation’ that obscures a crucial element of the picture.
I think Glenn has gone from a completely legitimate critique of the West’s “war on terror” toward the equation of Jihadist murder with legitimate self-defense after 9/11. I can see why the latter can spawn the former. I cannot see how they are both morally equivalent.
Read the whole Dish thread on the Woolwich beheading here.
The Dish 