My Innaugural Posting

I have at last resolved to grace the blogosphere with my presence. As my first entry in what I hope will become both an anthology of articles I have published and my hasty responses to the day's news, I present a column which was rejected by The Red & Black. The content of their opinions page tends toward the banal, the parochial, the vulgar, and the uninformed, so it is both an unwelcome venue for me and a natural fit for Zaid Jilani, whose October 6 op-ed I answer in this column. Enjoy.

On Monday Zaid Jilani contended, with ineptitude and moral obtuseness, that United States foreign policy is blameworthy for Islamic terrorism. This is an insidious lie, it makes sense if you are partially but not fully educated on the subject, and it is contradicted by a body of evidence that Mr. Jilani willfully ignored.

Consider this. When the wicked hijackers began arriving in the US to crash planeloads of civilians into gigantic office towers, the following was the case: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, supported by Bill Clinton, had offered Yasser Arafat 94 percent of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, and a capital in East Jerusalem—the most generous proposal ever extended in the history of that intractable conflict. Chairman Arafat turned it down, refused to make a counter-offer, and the Palestinians are still without a state because of that reptilian rejectionist, not US foreign policy.

Consider also this. In 1975 Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, invaded East Timor, a tiny Catholic country newly independent from Portugal, and for the next 25 years massacred and starved its people. In 1999 the United Nations sponsored a plebiscite that led to East Timor’s independence, supervised by the Brazilian diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello. In 2003 de Mello was dispatched to Iraq as the UN envoy, where he was killed a week later in a suicide truck bomb that took the lives of 21 others and destroyed the UN’s Baghdad headquarters. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, declared he had assassinated de Mello because he had overseen East Timorese independence from Muslim rule.

The former example, along with Osama bin Laden’s opposition to a Palestinian state (he believes all Muslims should live under a theocratic and imperial caliphate), proves the suicide assault on the US seven Septembers ago was motivated not by concern for the Palestinians but by a fascistic ideology. The latter example proves Islamic terrorists will haul their bloody vendettas across continents in order to blow up a respected international civil servant who opposed Muslim tyranny.

There are so many instances that belie Mr. Jilani’s simplistic analysis. These include the 1994 Hezbollah bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that left 85 dead and 300 injured; the 2007 quadruple suicide bombings by Sunni terrorists of two villages in northern Iraq populated by the Yazidi, a religious minority deemed un-Islamic, which caused such carnage an American general called it “an act of ethnic cleansing… almost genocide;” al-Qaeda’s threat of jihad against Japan for deploying civil engineers to rebuild Iraq and against Denmark because Danish newspapers caricatured the alleged prophet Mohammed; and the conspiracy to destroy India, evidenced by the 1993 stock exchange bombing in Bombay and the 2001 attempt to obliterate its parliament.

The crux of this question is that the fundamental source of Islamic terrorism is the dysfunctional, illiterate, backwards societies from which it comes, whether the repressed, messianic theocracy in Iran (which the US did not create) or the reactionary, medieval Taliban subjugation of Afghanistan (which NATO deposed and replaced with an elected government). In these societies the emancipation of women has not been realized, basic civil liberties are not guaranteed, and the dearth of scientific patents and works of literature indicate an isolated and degraded culture that is as psychologically damaging to its denizens as it destabilizing and threatening to its neighbors. Until there is an abandonment of seventh-century mythology and a reckoning with modernity, the Muslim world will continue to exist as a ruinous, self-pitying incubator of prejudice and paranoia.

That Mr. Jilani should know all this and still blame the US for provoking terrorism and that he should write that the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was “the opportunity to make peace with these people” (even as survivors were being pulled from the smoldering wreckage and the declaration of jihad innate in that ruthless crime was a fresh scar on world memory) reflects poorly on his character and his mind. To be simultaneously so foolish and so sinister is a unique feat, one that could be pulled off only by a supposed leftist whose principal pleasures are advocating defeatism and apologizing for jihad.