Archived news and commentary: September 17 - 23, 2001

2001/12/24 - 2001/12/31
2001/12/17 - 2001/12/23
2002/12/10 - 2001/12/16
2002/12/03 - 2001/12/09
2001/11/26 - 2001/12/02
2001/11/19 - 2001/11/25
2001/11/12 - 2001/11/18
2001/11/05 - 2001/11/11
2001/10/29 - 2001/11/04
2001/10/22 - 2001/10/28
2001/10/15 - 2001/10/21
2001/10/08 - 2001/10/14
2001/10/01 - 2001/10/07
2001/09/24 - 2001/09/30
2001/09/17 - 2001/09/23
2001/09/11 - 2001/09/16

Sunday, September 23, 2001

News and commentary:

"Improbable theories have wide acceptance" (Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, 2002/09/23)
A report from Pakistan: "In these dangerous days in a desperate land, rumors are flying thick, fast, and outlandish. Except they are believed deeply and widely across the Islamic world. Nowhere more so than in this South Asian nation caught in the whirlwind of Western outrage at the suicide attacks in New York and Washington. Take the tale of ''the 4,000,'' reported even in the mainstream Pakistani press as a theory at least as plausible as the notion of murderous hijackings orchestrated by an exiled Saudi Arabian multimillionaire on the lam in Afghanistan, which lies next door to Pakistan. Just before dawn on Sept. 11, so the story goes, 4,000 Jews working in the World Trade Center literally got a wake-up call from agents of Mossad, the Israeli spy agency. Or maybe it was the CIA. Or perhaps some shadowy cabal of international bankers and American arms manufacturers. ... But why on earth would Israel want to hijack airliners flying the skies of its close ally, destroy the World Trade Center, and smash the Pentagon? That's a no-brainer to Sartaj Qadari, who sells tea from a pushcart along a busy Islamabad thoroughfare. Turning down the newscast blaring from his battery radio, Qadari was happy to relate the street buzz. ''Israel was badly embarrassed by the uprising in Palestine, all those terrible pictures of Muslim people shot dead,'' he said. 'So they organize these actions to turn away attention. Now all the media men come to Pakistan, and who hears of Gaza or the West Bank? Mossad is sly, very sly.'''

"Eagan flight trainer wouldn't let unease about Moussaoui rest" (Greg Gordon, Star Tribune, 2001/12/21)
"When a Twin Cities flight instructor phoned the FBI last August to alert the agency that a terrorist might be taking lessons to fly a jumbo jet, he did it in a dramatic way: "Do you realize how serious this is?" the instructor asked an FBI agent. "This man wants training on a 747. A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!" The aviation student he was talking about was Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested the following day and last week was charged in a federal indictment with conspiring with Osama bin Laden and others to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks. ... Moussaoui first raised eyebrows when, during a simple introductory exchange, he said he was from France, but then didn't seem to understand when the instructor spoke French to him. Moussaoui then became belligerent and evasive about his background, Oberstar and other sources said. In addition, he seemed inept in basic flying procedures, while seeking expensive training on an advanced commercial jet simulator."

"My fatwa on the fanatics" (Ziauddin Sardar, The Observer, 2001/09/23)
"But we seldom question our own double standards. For example, Muslims are proud that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the West. Evangelical Muslims, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, happily spread their constricted interpretations of Islam. But Christian missionaries in Muslim countries are another matter. They have to be banned or imprisoned. Those who burn effigies of President Bush will be first in the queue for an American visa. The psychotic young men, members of such extremist organisations as Al-Muhajiroun and 'Supporters of Sharia', shouting fascist obscenities outside the Pakistan Embassy, are enjoying the fruits of Western freedom of expression. Their declared aim is to establish 'Islamic states'. But in any self-proclaimed Islamic state, they would be ruthlessly silenced. ... Now that Islam has become beset with the fatwa culture, it becomes necessary for moderate voices to issue their own fatwas. So, let me take the first step. To Muslims everywhere I issue this fatwa: any Muslim involved in the planning, financing, training, recruiting, support or harbouring of those who commit acts of indiscriminate violence against persons or the apparatus or infrastructure of states is guilty of terror and no part of the Ummah. It is the duty of every Muslim to spare no effort in hunting down, apprehending and bringing such criminals to justice."

"Crackdown on British cell" (The Observer, 2001/09/23)
"Fresh details have also emerged of the British links of the so-called 'twentieth man' in the suicide hijackings. Investigators believe four five-strong groups were supposed to hijack last week's flights in America, but one team only had four terrorists. French-Moroccan Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, is believed to have lived in Brixton, south London, until February last year. He was jailed on immigration charges a month before the hijackings after a flight academy he was attending reported suspicious behaviour. He was said to have been interested only in flying the plane, not landing or taking off. It is thought he may have been preparing to join the unit on board the United Airlines plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. His mother, who lives in Narbonne in southern France, said he had been 'brainwashed' by Islamic fundamentalists in London."

"Rumors of War: 'CNN used old footage to fake images of 'Palestinians dancing in the street' after the terrorist attack on the USA'" (Urban Legends Reference Pages, 2001/09/23)
"No, CNN did not air decade-old footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets. Eason Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive, confirmed that the video used on CNN was in fact shot on Tuesday, 11 September 2001, in East Jerusalem by a Reuters TV crew, not during the Persian Gulf conflict of 1990-91... ... Reuters, the international news agency whose camera crew shot the footage, issued the following statement: "Reuters rejects as utterly baseless an allegation being circulated by e-mail and the Internet claiming that it circulated 10-year-old videotape to illustrate Palestinians celebrating in the wake of the September 11 tragedies in the United States. Reuters welcomes a statement by the Universidad Estatal de Campinas-Brasil (UNICAMP), one of whose students was the author of the original e-mail, setting the record straight. The videotape in question was shot in East Jerusalem by a Reuters camera crew on September 11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the United States. The footage was broadcast by CNN and other subscribers to the Reuters video news service.'"

"This business all began in Saudi Arabia" (Stephen Schwartz, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/09/23)
"[Wahhabism] is a strain of Islam that emerged not during the Crusades, nor even at the time of the anti-Turkish wars of the 17th century, but less than two centuries ago. It is violent, it is intolerant, and it is fanatical beyond measure. It originated in Arabia, and it is the official theology of the Gulf states. Wahhabism is the most extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism. ... The same influences are brought to bear throughout the 10-million-strong Muslim community in America, as well as those in Europe. In the US, 80 per cent of mosques are estimated by the Sufi Hisham al-Kabbani, born in Lebanon and now living in the US, to be under the control of Wahhabi imams, who preach extremism..."

"Borderless Network of Terror" (Doug Struck et al., The Washington Post, 2001/09/23)
Collected reports about the global bin Laden network: "Arrested and tortured by Philippine intelligence agents, Murad told the story of "Bojinka" - "loud bang" - the code name bin Laden operatives had given to an audacious plan to bomb 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously and fly an airplane into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. - all after attempting to assassinate Pope John Paul II. The plot in the Philippines, which was recounted to U.S. investigators at the time, appears to be a model of the methods, aims and structure of the network that bin Laden's followers have assembled in dozens of countries around the world."

Saturday, September 22, 2001

News and commentary:

"Washington's racism and the Islamist trap" (Spengler, Asia Times, 2001/09/22)
"'The Arab is a patriot, not a whore,' the hardline Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky used to warn his leftwing colleagues back during the 1920s. "He can't be bought off by the promise of economic benefits. And he is just as intelligent as you are."
Implicit in America's pompous elocution against terrorism is a Kiplingesque premise that it is carrying the White Man's Burden to the underprivileged Middle East and South Asia. ... Indeed, President Bush's silly ultimatim to the Taliban in his speech before Congress of September 20 might enter the textbooks as the classic case history in cultural stupidity. America's unwarranted contempt for its Islamist adversary already has had terrible consequences, and well might have catastrophic ones. ...
Instead of confronting the truth, that an important section of the Islamic world elite has encountered America and rejected it, America hallucinates instead a Fu Manchu character, a pulp-novel super-villain with the capacity to reach out of a cave in the Khyber Pass and send aircraft hurtling into buildings. ...
It is most probable that a substantial portion of the Middle Eastern governing elite sympathizes with the Islamist critique of Western institutions, and has enough control over relevant military, intelligence and diplomatic resources to provide help on an occasional basis. Middle Eastern governments, after all, are not governments in the Western sense, but rather contingent assemblies of different interests and individuals. The Islamists are just the sort of Western-educated government official that the local CIA case officer (who speaks no Arabic or Urdu) is likely to cultivate."

"Ground Zero and the Saudi connection" (Stephen Schwartz, The Spectator, from the 2001/09/22 issue)
"But if you ask educated, pious, traditional but forward-looking Muslims what has driven their umma, or global community, in this direction, many of them will answer you with one word: Wahhabism. ... It is violent, it is intolerant, and it is fanatical beyond measure. It originated in Arabia, and it is the official theology of the Gulf states. Wahhabism is the most extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism, and its followers are called Wahhabis. Not all Muslims are suicide bombers, but all Muslim suicide bombers are Wahhabis - except, perhaps, for some disciples of atheist leftists posing as Muslims in the interests of personal power, such as Yasser Arafat or Saddam Hussein. Wahhabism is the Islamic equivalent of the most extreme Protestant sectarianism. ... Bin Laden is a Wahhabi. So are the suicide bombers in Israel. So are his Egyptian allies, who exulted as they stabbed foreign tourists to death at Luxor not many years ago, bathing in blood up to their elbows and emitting blasphemous cries of ecstasy. So are the Algerian Islamist terrorists whose contribution to the purification of the world consisted of murdering people for such sins as running a movie projector or reading secular newspapers. So are the Taleban-style guerrillas in Kashmir who murder Hindus. ... None of this extremism has been inspired by American fumblings in the world, and it has little to do with the tragedies that have beset Israelis and Palestinians."

"Attacks on U.S. Challenge Postmodern True Believers" (Edward Rothstein, The New York Times, 2001/09/22)
"In general postmodernists challenge assertions that truth and ethical judgment have any objective validity. Postcolonial theorists, who focus on cultures that have experienced Western imperialism, agree in part, suggesting that the seemingly universalist principles of the West are ideological constructs. Many have also implied that one culture, particularly the West, cannot reliably condemn another, that a form of relativism must rule. ... Follow this logic to its most extreme conclusions, and the rejections of universal values and ideals leave little room for unqualified condemnations of a terrorist attack, particularly one against the West. Such an attack, however inexcusable, can be seen as a horrifying airing of a legitimate cultural grievance. Military responses can seem no different. And so the conflict becomes a series of symmetrical confrontations, as is often asserted about battles in Israel. ... Poco, though, goes further. For while affirming most of the pomo rejection of ideals and universals, poco establishes its own universal: Western imperialism becomes a variety of Original Sin. The implication is that any act against the West by a postcolonial power can be seen as a reaction to an act by the West. These ideas simplify interpretation tremendously. Western imperial behavior is seen as the fundamental cause of terrorism, the evil of the former leading to the evil of the latter, thus creating a rough symmetry in which differences are minimized. ... One can only hope that finally, as the ramifications sinks in, as it becomes clear how close the attack came to undermining the political, military and financial authority of the United States, the Western relativism of pomo and the obsessive focus of poco will be widely seen as ethically perverse. Rigidly applied, they require a form of guilty passivity in the face of ruthless and unyielding opposition."

"In Europe, Some Say the Attacks Stemmed From American Failings" (Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, 2001/09/22)
Report on Anti-American sentiment in Europe: "Dario Fo, the Italian playwright and satirist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997, said bluntly in a widely circulated e-mail: 'The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty — so what is 20,000 dead in New York? Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.'"

"The Clash of Ignorance" (Edward W. Said, The Nation, 2001/09/22)
Said takes on Huntington's seminal essay "The Clash of Civilizations?" (Foreign Affairs, from the Summer 1993 issue) by refuting that there are any valid labels at all:
"How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate."

"Excusing Terror - The Politics of Ideological Apology" (Michael Walzer, The American Prospect, 2001/09/22)
"The last excuse is the claim that all the obvious and conventionally endorsed responses to terror are somehow worse than terrorism itself. Any coercive political or military action is denounced as revenge, the end of civil liberty, the beginning of fascism. The only morally permitted response is to reconsider the policies that the terrorists claim to be attacking. Here, terrorism is viewed from the side of the victims as a kind of moral prompting: Oh, we should have thought of that!"

"A Fanatic's Quiet Path to Terror" (Peter Finn, The Washington Post, 2001/09/22)
A profile of Mohamed Atta, one of the suspected hijackers: "The Sept. 11 attacks have laid bare the existence of a cadre of young men like Atta, ready to plot their own deaths years in advance to serve a cause, and normal enough on the outside to attract no special attention from neighbors and colleagues. No one knows how many there are, but initial investigations suggest that they come from many places - Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and the Arab diaspora community in Hamburg."

"Whooping It Up - In Beirut, even Christians celebrated the atrocity" (Elisabetta Burba, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/09/22)
"Soon came reports of Palestinians celebrating. The BBC reporter in Jerusalem said it was only a tiny minority. Astonished, we asked some moderate Arabs if that was the case. 'Nonsense,' said one, speaking for many. "Ninety percent of the Arab world believes that Americans got what they deserved." ... Once at the mosque I donned a black chador, but our Lonely Planet guide attracted the attention of a hard-looking bearded guy all the same. "Are you Americans?" he asked in a menacing tone. Our quick denial made him relax. ... "My people have been crushed under the heel of American imperialism, which took away our land, massacred our beloved and denied our right to life. But have you seen what happened in New York City? God Almighty has drawn his sword against our enemies. God is great - Allah u Akbar," he said."

Friday, September 21, 2001

News and commentary:

"Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders: World Islamic Front Statement" (Osama bin Laden, The Washington Post, 1998/02/23 [2001/09/21])
"Osama bin Laden has published two religious orders seeking to justify violence against Western interests in the Middle East. The first was a document entitled, Ladenese Epistle: Declaration of War. The statement presented here was published in February 1998":
"The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter. ...
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. ...
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. ...
On that basis, and in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim." (See also: "License to Kill: Usama bin Ladin's Declaration of Jihad" (Bernard Lewis, Foreign Affairs, from the November/December 1998 issue): "At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder. At no point do they even consider the random slaughter of uninvolved bystanders.
Nevertheless, some Muslims are ready to approve, and a few of them to apply, the declaration's extreme interpretation of their religion. Terrorism requires only a few. Obviously, the West must defend itself by whatever means will be effective. But in devising strategies to fight the terrorists, it would surely be useful to understand the forces that drive them.")

"Egypt's opposition press: Rejoicing is a national and religious obligation..." (Special Dispatch No. 274, MEMRI, 2001/09/21)
A look at reactions in Egyptian press, where many columnists in the oppositions papers rejoiced over the terror attacks: "In all honesty, and without beating around the bush: I am happy about [what happened to] America; I am happy about the great number of American dead. Let them accuse me of whatever they want. It doesn't matter and it does not lessen the happiness and excitement that overwhelm me. No one can make me take back what I say, no matter what their claims and explanations. All the innocent citizens who were killed are victims of America's barbarism and terror, ranging over half a century... " (Ahmad Murad, Al-Arabi) (But see also: "Dr. Ma'moun Fendi: We should condemn terror, with no 'buts'" (Special Dispatch No. 273, MEMRI, 2001/09/21): "The deaths of thousands... under the ruins is an unforgivable crime. What happened in New York can happen in Cairo, in Amman, in Riyadh. The hearts of the powers of oppression and destruction have no mercy; these hearts do not acknowledge blood ties or human fellowship; these are the forces that work solely for their own interests." (Dr. Ma'moun Fendi, in the London daily, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat))

"An open letter to the President of the United States" (David Duke, Stormfront.org, 2001/09/21)
It seems some peaceniks and leftwing liberals have something in common with the infamous white supremacist David Duke: "The attack on September 11 was certainly not about people hating our freedoms. It was purely in response to America's foreign policy; and it was primarily about our monetary and military support of Israel. As strange as it may sound to Americans, those who attack us do so because they view our nation's leaders in exactly the same way as we view them. They believe that you and all of America's recent leaders are the real terrorists."

"Bush Speech Wins Critics, Wins Praise" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2001/09/21)
"Even while President Bush was walking into the House chamber last night, the media commentators were predicting success. "Whatever the president says tonight will be well-received," said CNN's Judy Woodruff. "Whatever President Bush says, he is going to be wildly cheered," said CBS's Bob Schieffer. They were right. After a rousing, often inspirational address, no pundit on the major networks uttered a negative comment. They were, in a word, wowed." (See also: "Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation" (The Washington Post, 2001/09/20))

Thursday, September 20, 2001

News and commentary:

"The 'Writers' who let their words get in the way as tragedy unfolded" (Sam Leith, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/09/20)
"'These aren't hacks,' my old colleague Lucretia used to say of the people she commissioned, with a wobble of the chin that expressed infinite respect. "These are Writers."
Alas, it is some of those very Writers - among them our brightest and best novelists - who have responded most bathetically and self-importantly to last week's events in America. ...
Wisely, perhaps, Philip Roth refused to write anything about the attacks, and Bret Easton Ellis said that he was too depressed to start making phrases.
Others have fallen face-first down the open manhole. Martin Amis, writing for the Guardian, saw the collapse of the World Trade Centre as "the apotheosis of the postmodern era". ...
As a "utopian" retaliation, he suggested that the Afghan people be bombarded with food parcels marked "Lendlease - USA", oddly echoing a Thai MP who has been urged to resign after suggesting that Afghanistan should be carpet-bombed with pork fat. ...
And then there was Jeanette Winterson, also in the Guardian: 'Touch me. Kiss me. Remind me what I am. Remind me that this life is one we make together . . . The immensity of this event can only be mirrored by the immensity of what we are.
This tiny blue planet is home to something special and precious - ourselves. We are all human. We are all nothing and everything. The best we can do to begin again is to forgive.'" (See also: "Twin Towers" (Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian/jeanettewinterson.com, 2001/09/18))

"Weakest Link" (Michael Rubin, The New Republic, 2001/09/20)
Rubin travelled in Afganistan in the spring of 2000: "And I discovered something unexpected, something often overlooked in the strategizing of recent days: The Taliban are weak. They lack the military muscle, popular support, and internal cohesion to hold up under sustained attack. ... In the coming weeks, Pakistan will likely open its airspace to the United States, break off its relations with the Taliban, and at least make a show of sealing its border with Afghanistan. ... Pakistan's moves will weaken the Taliban. And a massive U.S. bombardment could weaken it further--perhaps prompting the Northern Alliance to march on Kabul and to pressure former Afghan warlords and government officials, now in exile in Iran and Uzbekistan, to reopen new pockets of resistance in other parts of the country."

"Mutating emotions" (Shaden Shehab, Rana Allam, Al-Ahram Weekly, 2001/09/20)
Report on reactions in Egypt: "'From a humanitarian perspective it is a sad situation, but then again US policies aim to kill every day,' says banker Hossam El-Dereiny. 'And what goes around, comes around.' Such sentiments found repeated echoes. A car mechanic in the impoverished area of Masr El-Qadima insisted that the attacks are unacceptable to any Muslim. But then comes the sub-clause. 'What does the US expect given what it is doing around the world?'"

"War Myths - What not to believe" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2001/09/20)
"1.We have incurred legitimate hatred from the radical Islamic states. Nothing could be further from truth. ... For the record, in the last ten years, the United States freed the Arab and Islamic state of Kuwait, opposed Saddam Hussein and his murder of Islamic Kurds and Shiites, prevented Muslim Afghanistan from becoming a Soviet satrapy, and saved the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo from extinction - as European and "moderate" Arab states watched the carnage of their neighbors and kin."

"The perpetrators of the attacks are not Arabs or Muslims" (Special Dispatch No. 270, MEMRI, 2001/09/20)
Translations of texts by Arab columnists which discusses the identities of the perpetrators of the terror attacks: "I have a sneaking suspicion that George W. Bush was involved in the operation of September 11, as was Colin Powell." (Samir Atallah, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat). "What happened is, in my opinion, the product of Jewish, Israeli, and American Zionism, and the act of the great Jewish Zionist mastermind that controls the world's economy, media, and politics…" (Ahmad Al-Muslih, Al-Dustour). (See also "British pro-Syrian journalist Patrick Seale: Suicide attacks are immoral but highly effective; the terrorists sought a 'balance of terror' with the US" (Special Dispatch No. 271, MEMRI, 2001/09/20) and "Lebanese professor: It is permissible to rejoice over 'the penetrating of the bastion of American colonialism'; 'Everyone gloated at the misfortune of the American administration, while its leaders scrambled to find a place to hide'" (Special Dispatch No. 272, MEMRI, 2001/09/20))

"Truth or Consequences" (William Saletan, Slate, 2001/09/20)
"Commentators are wondering how we made the terrorists angry enough to hurt us and how we might change our behavior to avoid further attacks. ... The practical point made by these consequentialists is that we can't stop terrorism without addressing its causes. ... The consequentialists present themselves as humanitarians and idealists. They purport to speak up for the plights, principles, and aspirations of people who are driven to commit acts of terror. But their mechanistic analysis dehumanizes these people. Terrorists aren't animals. No law of nature compels them to blow up buildings when they're angry."

Wednesday, September 19, 2001

News and commentary:

"Hijacking Islam" (Martin Kramer, National Review, 2002/09/19)
"In times past, Islam has served as the bedrock of flourishing, tolerant, and peaceful orders. But sociologists will say that a religion, at any point in time, is whatever its adherents understand it to be. If that is so, then Islam, as understood by too many Muslims, is in danger of deteriorating into a manifesto for terror. The reason: Too many Muslims have been silent in the face of horrific deeds committed by an extremist minority. ... "Islamic terrorism" first entered the lexicon on a Beirut morning in 1983, when two suicide bombers destroyed the barracks of American and French peacekeepers. The American toll came to 241 dead; the planners, Shiites inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini, claimed credit in the name of Islamic Jihad. ... A new era had begun - an era in which Muslim extremists interpreted their faith as a license to kill foreign "enemies of God." Radical Muslim clerics scoured Islam's sacred texts for justifications of violence, and found them. In the years to come, the clerics and the terrorists widened their license. At first, it included only "intruders" in Muslim lands: foreign forces, embassies, and civilians. Later it was extended to include "enemy" installations in third countries, and finally, civilians in the "lands of unbelief." No moral red line could stop the escalation. ... To stop the regression, the moderate majority will have to argue against the mobilization of Islamic religion for war."

"The pursuit of happiness is at an end" (Christopher Hitchens, Evening Standard, 2001/09/19)
"One needs to be unambivalent here. I have written-more criticisms of American foreign policy than most people. ... But the mass murder of last Tuesday is in no sense a reprisal or a revenge for past crimes such as that. The people who destroyed the World Trade Center, and used civilians as accessories, are not fighting to free Gaza. They are fighting for the right to throw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi. They didn't just destroy the temple of modernity, they used heavy artillery to shatter ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan earlier this year, and in Egypt have plotted to demolish the Pyramids and the Sphinx because they are un-Islamic and profane. Look at what they do to their own societies, from Algeria to Afghanistan, and then wonder what they might have in mind for ours. Liberal masochism is of no use to us at a time like this, and Muslim self-pity even less so. Self-preservation and self-respect make it necessary to recognise and name a lethal enemy when one sees one."

"Anti-Americanism blinds the left to what's at stake" (Anne McElvoy, Independent, 2001/09/19)
"Terrorists committed a mass execution of American citizens. This must, of course, be America's fault. It had it coming for being arrogant. It had it coming for supporting Israel. They had it coming for being so big and rich. In short, it had it coming for being America. ... There is something profoundly distasteful in the posture that the US must "look at" what it might have done to deserve the annihilation of thousands of its citizens, as if blame could be evenly shared out. ... I hear sensible people say that they are more worried by President George Bush's actions than by anything Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein have done or might be considering. Really, truly?"

"Blaming the U.S., whitewashing terror" (National Post, 2001/09/19)
"At the heart of the propaganda campaign against the United States is a moral equivalence conflating what is evil with what is merely imperfect. In the Cold War, this tactic took the form of the argument that the United States was just as dictatorial as the Soviet Union because poor Americans were allegedly not "free" from injustice, racism and want. Now that we have entered a new kind of war, this fatuous argument has been recycled: Yes, Islamist maniacs slaughter thousands of innocents ... but think of the psychic pain inflicted on the Middle East by Taco Bell and the Backstreet Boys. Who is to judge which is more inhumane?"

"The Solitary Vote Of Barbara Lee" (Peter Carlson, The Washington Post, 2001/09/19)
"The Capitol Police began guarding Lee on Saturday because of death threats she received after voting against a resolution authorizing President Bush to use military force against anyone associated with last week's terrorist attacks. The resolution passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House. Lee's was the sole dissenting vote. ... War, she believes, is not the most effective way to fight terrorism. 'Military action is a one-dimensional reaction to a multidimensional problem,' she says. 'We've got to be very deliberative and think through the implications of whatever we do.'"

"A message to the Left: grow up, this isn't a game" (Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/09/19)
"A whole swathe of this country's educated class is unable to distinguish between right and wrong. There is no other possible conclusion. There are apparently thousands of people out there (or maybe hundreds, or maybe it is just a few dozen with exceptionally good media contacts) who think that it is quite acceptable to see the mass murder of innocent people as a "message" that needed to be delivered. ... As Martin Amis puts it in (where else?) yesterday's Guardian: "Terror is political communication by other means." What kind of discourse is it that includes this kind of utterance? At what point would these people decide that an action was so evil, so utterly beyond the pale of human conscience, that it was ruled out as part of the argument?"

Tuesday, September 18, 2001

News and commentary:

"Terror Manual" (David Ruppe, ABC News, 2001/09/18)
"It's called "Encyclopedia of the Afghan Jihad," a roughly 1,000-page terrorism-training manual supposedly paid for and distributed widely by Osama bin Laden. U.S. authorities say they have CD-ROM copies of the six-volume manual containing information on how to recruit terrorists, discharge weapons, build bombs and conduct terrorist operations. Knowledge that the manual exists is not new. It reportedly was seized in Jordan last December from one of 16 men suspected of plotting attacks in Israel and Jordan around the time of the worldwide millennial celebrations. ... ABC News has obtained photographs of pages of the manual, containing chilling details, for instance, on how to put small explosive charges in a cigarette, a pipe or lighter in order to maim a person. There also are drawings of simple land mines that could blow up a car and radio controlled devices that could be used to set off a whole truckload of explosives, like those used to take down U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998."

"Now my generation is in a war we must win" (Robert Harris, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/09/18)
"In moral terms, this is about as black-and-white a casus belli as you could get: mass murder, of people from some 40 different countries, by terrifying methods, and with the promise of more to come. Yet the sophistry, especially on the Left, has already been wondrous: a time loop back to the Comintern of 65 years ago. "All must kowtow to the Pentagon and the almighty dollar, or be blown to smithereens," wrote Rana Kabbani, in last Thursday's Guardian, in a breathtaking reversal of the reality we had all just witnessed. "One hopes that the painful lesson that Americans have had to learn is not drowned out by cowboy ravings about 'getting the bastards'." The murder of 5,000 people: a 'painful lesson'?"

"Fear and loathing" (Martin Amis, The Guardian, 2001/09/18)
According to Amis, it is the American government, rather than Saddam Hussein, which is responsible for the suffering in Iraq. Thus, the hatred for America is "intelligible". He also maintains that American "national characteristics" have "created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away":
"Terrorism is political communication by other means. The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. ...
It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly. How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5% of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with 14m)? Various national characteristics - self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity - have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. ...
Violence must come; America must have catharsis. We would hope that the response will be, above all, non-escalatory. It should also mirror the original attack in that it should have the capacity to astonish. ...
Then terror from above will replenish the source of all terror from below: unhealed wounds. This is the familiar cycle so well caught by the matter, and the title, of VS Naipaul's story, Tell Me Who to Kill."

"Bush Visits Mosque to Forestall Hate Crimes" (Dana Milbank and Emily Wax, The Washington Post, 2001/09/18)
"President Bush, briefly setting aside his war planning efforts, visited the mosque at the Islamic Center of Washington yesterday to admonish the nation not to avenge last week's terrorist attacks on innocent American Arabs and Muslims. ... 'The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,' said the president, escorted by Islamic clerics into the ornate mosque full of Turkish tile, Persian rugs and Egyptian paintings. 'Islam is peace.'"

Monday, September 17, 2001

News and commentary:

"Familiar Rogue" (Laurie Mylroie, National Review, 2001/09/17)
"An enemy state was surely behind the carnage in New York and Washington. Only a state really has the capability to carry out such a massive, complex, and sophisticated operation. And the most obvious state is Iraq. ... The Trade Center was first attacked on February 26, 1993, in an attempt to topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin (a job completed last week.) ... Thus, there was good reason to suspect Iraq. And the White House was aware of it. Yet it came to believe that it could address the terrorism in New York, without explaining publicly what had happened. ... The Clinton administration's sly way of handling the 1993 bombing plots gave rise to the fraudulent notion that there was a new kind of terrorism not carried out by states, but undertaken by individuals or "loose networks." Yet there was nothing new about the terrorism. What was new was how the U.S. handled it. Clinton dealt surreptitiously with the national-security issue of state involvement and very publicly with the criminal question of the guilt or innocence of individuals - through trials. Predictably, more terrorism followed and the role of states in those attacks was never addressed. That led directly to last week's tragedy, as well as to our inability to recognize their real author."

"Nostradamus called it!" (Janelle Brown, Salon.com, 2001/09/17)
"Internet conspiracy theorists are having a field day after the attacks.": "This sudden interest in Nostradamus can be directly pinned to the "prediction" that has been zipping across the Net in the wake of Tuesday's tragedy: "In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two Brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb. The third big war will begin when the big city is burning." The Nostradamus-attributed "prophecy" of the World Trade Center disaster was swiftly proven to be a hoax, but no matter: The Net loves a good conspiracy theory, and even while the country mourned, the morbidly curious could also track any number of bizarre theories and observations online about Tuesday's tragedy."

"The End of Innocence" (Joel Rogers, The Nation, 2001/09/17)
Yet another anti-American tirade using the moral equivalence trick: "The first is that our own government, through much of the past fifty years, has been the world's leading "rogue state." Merely listing the plainly illegal or unauthorized uses of force the US was responsible for during the long period of cold war, and continued during the past decade of "purposeless peace" - assassinations, engineered coups, terrorizing police forces, military invasions, "force without war," direct bombings, etc. - would literally take volumes. And behind that list reside the bodies of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents, most of them children, whose lives we have taken without any pretense to justice."

"First Reactions" (Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, 2001/09/17)
Sontag's first reaction was to blame American foreign policy: "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

"A religion that sanctions violence" (Patrick Sookhdeo, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/09/17)
"The contradictory reactions to the terrorist attacks - official condemnation at leadership level and support among many people - are an indication that Islam is not always 'a religion of peace'. There are so many Muslims rejoicing at the tragic loss of American lives and the humiliation of the American government that they cannot be dismissed as 'a few extremists'. ... To recognise that no culture or people are without fault and that all should be subject to criticism is not racism; it is an honesty that emphasises our common humanity. ... Violence occurs in all religions, but in most it is not sanctioned and although there might be moderate elements within Islam, it is the extremist elements that have tended to dominate the development of the religion, with often tragic consequences."

"Pakistani businessman shot dead in Texas" (Aseem Chhabra, rediff.com, 2001/09/17)
"Waquar Hasan, a 46-year-old Pakistani citizen, became the second South Asian to be killed in what appear to be hate crimes in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Hasan was killed on Saturday, September 16, in his store, Mom's Grocery, in downtown Dallas, Texas. The same day Balbir Singh, a 52-year-old Sikh, was killed at a gas station in Mesa, Arizona. Numerous incidents of attacks on Muslim, Hindu and Sikh places of worship and individuals of Arab or South Asian descent have also been reported across North America."

"Bioterrorism: An Even More Devastating Threat" (Rick Weiss, The Washington Post, 2001/09/17)
"It's called bioterrorism, and experts say it would be a lot easier to conduct and is more likely to occur in the next few years than a replay of last week's terrorist tragedies. A small cloud of bacteria or viruses could easily and silently infect tens of thousands of people, triggering fatal outbreaks of anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic plague or any of a dozen other deadly diseases. And victims infected with contagious ailments could pass the microbes to thousands of others before doctors even figured out what was going on."

Copyright © Watch 2001-2006. Copyrights of quoted materials
belong to their respective owners.

"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

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