Dum Pendebat Filius

Cathy Young, writing at Reason, says the London terrorist attacks have taught her an important lesson:

The bomings in London on July 7, which killed 53 people and injured many more, were a powerful reminder that terrorism remains a clear and present threat in our cities. But they were also, to me, a reminder of something else. As annoying as I frequently find the right these days, with its cynical partisanship, its arrogance of power, and its politics of religious zealotry, my discontent with conservatives will never send me into the liberal camp—because the response to terrorism even on the moderate left remains an egregious moral muddle.

Not just a moral muddle, mind you: an egregious moral muddle.

Perhaps the starkest illustration of this mindset is the fact that, only a couple of days after the bombings, the British Broadcasting Corporation reverted to its policy of avoiding the use of the word “terrorist.” According to BBC guidelines, the T-word “can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding,” and “careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments” ought to be avoided.

Yes, that’s silly. But what has it got to do with “the left”? How is this an example of the left’s “response to terrorism”?

Here in the United States, the initial wave of sympathy and outrage was quickly followed by attempts to pin the blame on the West, and on America in particular. In a letter to The New York Times published on July 9, one New Yorker proudly described his comments to a Dutch television news crew that interviewed him on the New York subway immediately after the bombings. When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? “Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us.” And why is that? “We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us.”

In other words: If we’re attacked again, it will be our fault (just as, presumably, the London bombings are the fault of British Prime Minister Tony Blair for lending his support to the war in Iraq).

OK, so: some dude writes a letter to the NYT, ergo “the left” is soft on terrorism.

The Times letter-writer is hardly alone in his views. Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a leading left-of-center commentator on the Middle East, argues on his website and in an article at Salon.com that the London bombings are “blowback” from the US and its allies’ misguided policies. Cole pooh-poohs the idea that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is a product of hatred for the West’s democratic values. In his view, it is a response to specific Western policies that are perceived as a war against Muslims, from Israeli oppression of the Palestinians to the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cathy Young doesn’t buy it:

Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, took place before the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, OK. Therefore all of Juan Cole’s reasoning is null and void. Who is he, anyway, not to defer to her obviously superior grasp of Mideast history and culture? Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but Cathy Young doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She goes on:

Cole tries to make the case, citing the 9/11 Commission report, that Sept. 11 was “punishment on the United States for supporting Ariel Sharon’s iron fist policies toward the Palestinians.” Yet the report makes it clear that planning for the attacks had been underway for about two years before Sharon became prime minister of Israel in March 2001, though Osama bin Laden evidently wanted to move up the operation in response to Sharon’s actions. And the radical Islamic terror network first struck New York City in 1993.

I can’t find the quote she cites. A Google search comes up with a hit on Cole’s home page, but that text is no longer there, nor does it appear in Google’s cache. A search of Cole’s site reveals the same thing. Did he remove the post she’s quoting? I don’t know. Does it matter? Only if you’re trying to build a case against Juan Cole, and, by extension, “the left,” for being a bunch of self-hating blame-America-first losers.

Other myopic responses abound. A few commentators insist on a moral equivalence between the deaths of Iraqi civilians in US military operations with the deaths of civilians in the London bombings. Yet the US military and its allies have made every effort to minimize civilian casualties; the deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians is overwhelmingly the work of so-called insurgents who drive explosive-packed cars into crowds of children while American soldiers hand out candy.

Who? Who is “insisting on a moral equivalence” between terror victims in Western Europe and terror victims in Iraq? Anonymous freaks posting comments at Daily Kos and Democratic Underground don’t count.

Meanwhile, on Fox News’s Hannity & Colmes, the Rev. Jesse Jackson is asked whether the evil of terrorism can be fought by other than military means, and gives this reply: “Well, you know, we found an end to slavery, which is evil, without killing the slave masters.” We did? Maybe Jackson has forgotten about the Civil War, in which the US military targeted civilians to a degree unimaginable in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

She’s got a point here, but one silly remark out of Jesse Jackson, who “peaked” as a political figure back in the spring of 1988, when Ronald Reagan was still the President, does not advance her argument more than a millimeter or two, if that. Keep in mind that she’s trying to bolster an argument that “the left” is in a “moral muddle” over terrorism.

To recap, her examples thus far have been:

1. The BBC and its silly policy about using the word “terrorism”
2. A guy who wrote a letter to the New York Times
3. Professor Juan Cole, an acknowledged Middle East expert
4. Jesse Jackson

And now her final paragraph:

It is certainly true that the war in Iraq has been mishandled; it may have been misguided in the first place. It is, regrettably, true that the cavalier attitude toward prisoner abuse has undermined our moral authority in the war on terror. But acknowledging our mistakes and misdeeds should not undercut moral clarity when it comes to terrorism. The jihadists are driven primarily by hatred of Western civilization and its freedom; their primary targets are innocent civilians; and they cannot be defeated except by force.

By this point, in an effort to display “moral clarity,” Young ends up repeating one of the central tenets of wingnuttia: “the jihadists are driven primarily by hatred of Western civilization and its freedom.” What we do doesn’t matter; they hate us for what we are. It’s this kind of misguided thinking that, when followed to its logical ends, leads people to consider which Arab cities we need to nuke, argue that what happens at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib isn’t torture (or to say so what if it is), and so on, all in the name of “moral clarity.”

This kind of thinking plays right into the jihadist’s hands. They want America to overreact and blame all of Islam for their (the jihadists’) actions. They want to see more and more Muslims become disgusted with America and join them. To pretend that these terrorists have no reasons for what they do, other than an inchoate, insensate hatred of “freedom,” isn’t moral clarity, but a serious mistake.