TO TERRORISTS, AMERICA SYMBOLIZES ONSET OF MODERNISM
By Victor Davis Hanson
As the third recent Middle East election nears in Iraq, Americans are still puzzled over why well-off Islamic fundamentalists crashed planes into skyscrapers and now send mercenaries to the Sunni triangle to slaughter us as we sponsor democracy. Yet since Sept. 11, 2001, we have grasped that Muslim fascists understood that the course of American-led world history -- democracy and globalized capitalism -- was leaving them behind. Thus they strike the United States before they are made irrelevant.
America symbolized the onset of a hated modernism and its breakdown of religious, gender and ethnic hierarchies that were so treasured by Islamic patriarchs. As this war wore on, we also fathomed the pathological partnerships of tyrannies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria with Al-Qaida and other terrorist cadres. Both groups scapegoated the superpower United States for their own failures.
Yet in the gloom over postwar Iraq, ex-CIA agents and moody public intellectuals have recently doubted this ``they hate us for who we are'' explanation. Instead, they have reintroduced the notion of ``they hate us for what we do'' -- as if there are legitimate grievances that logically earn such violent attacks organized by petro-heirs, doctors and crackpot mullahs. Even a toned-down Osama bin Laden is quoted as witness. He recently joked that Al-Qaida is going after America, not liberal Sweden: Had we just shrunk to the stature of the politically correct Scandinavians, then our problems would vanish.
But would they?
Not at all. First, the Islamofascists of the Middle East, like all autocrats, cannot be believed since they neither allow criticism nor tolerate self-reflection. Lying is their bible.
Second, alleged sins against Islam transform monthly. Americans have been murdered with near impunity all over the Middle East for nearly a quarter-century on a variety of pretexts. Sometimes fatwas and infomercials cited the ``loss'' of Jerusalem. Then there were the U.S. troops in the Land of the Holy Shrines or the U.N. embargo of Iraq -- such gripes still persisting long after withdrawal of American soldiers from Saudi Arabia and massive aid to, not boycotts of, Iraq. Do not forget hurt over the expulsion of the Moors from Spain or the Crusades -- as if the Islamicists alone can nurse centuries-old wounds. What unites this tired victimization is never logic, but always a pre-existing antipathy toward Western liberalism, tempting and repelling the fundamentalists all at once.
Third, bin Laden and various mujahedeen distort history. American beneficence -- saving Kuwaitis, protecting Bosnians, feeding Somalis, or billions in aid for Egyptians -- means nothing, while Islamic internecine murder is excused. The unspoken truth is that the killers of the Middle East have mostly been other Middle Eastern Muslims: the Kurdish holocaust, millions butchered in the Iranian-Iraqi war, Iraq's rape of Kuwait, Syria's obliteration of the city of Hama in a military action, Algerian massacres or the genocide in the Sudan. Land, oil, religion or ethnic hatred -- not America -- prompted such slaughter.
Fourth, terrorists still imperil liberal Europe, which subsidized Hamas, armed Saddam and chastised America for its pro-Israel policy. After Spain fled from Iraq, it was rewarded with further terrorist threats.
Fifth, Al-Qaida's hatred is opportunistically selective. The United States is slurred with allegations of petrol imperialism. But why no charges against a cutthroat nuclear China that is hungrier for Arab oil than is America and digested Tibet? Israel purportedly occupies Palestinian land, but Syria gobbled up Lebanon to the silence of the Arab League. We earn loathing for billions given to Israel, but why not gratitude for matching that amount to Egypt and Jordan?
It is humane to send massive aid to Southeast Asia after the tsunami. Yet the idea that the fundamentalist Muslim world in recompense will temper its hatred of the United States because we give far more than Saudi Arabia or China is sadly mistaken.
The United States has adopted a rational strategy against Islamic fascism: Kill the terrorists, remove illegitimate regimes that aid the extremists, foster democracies in their places and alter American policy from tolerance of the corrupt status quo to calls for reform. Yet we cannot finish the Islamicists' war unless we understand why they started it. For that answer, look at who Americans are and what we represent -- not at what we supposedly have done.
| FAIR USE NOTICE: The above may be copyrighted material, and the use of it on ROPMA.NET may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available on a non-profit basis for educational and discussion purposes only. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 USC § 107. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. |