A Fury for God: the Islamist attack on America; by Malise Ruthven; Granta Books; 324 pp; CAN $34.50 (paperback)
***
Al-Qaeda: In Search of the Terror Network that Threatens the World; by Jane Corbin; Thunder’s Mouth Press/ Nation Books; 336 pp; US $ 24.95 (cloth)
***
Why
Terrorism Works: understanding the threat,
responding to the challenge; by Alan M. Dershowitz; Yale University Press; 271
pp; US $ 24.95 (cloth)
***
Holy War: the rise of Militant Christian, Jewish and Islamic Fundamentalism;
by David S. New; McFarland & Company (North Carolina);234 pp; US $ 35.00
(paperback)
________________________________________________________
You cannot
have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, & you cannot
have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate
what you call Moral Virtue.[1]
n
William Blake (1757–1827)
The tragic
events of September 11, 2001, triggered in the United States a sequence of
responses from every echelon of society that covered nearly the nation’s
entire emotional and intellectual
repertoire. But for two days, before
even the shock registered properly and an eschatological Fear reigned
amid the smoke and dust, one glimpsed, in a series of video tableaux vivant,
the original American Idea in all its pristine grandeur. Oligarchs,
politicians and celebrities, their wealth, power or fame suddenly meaningless,
stood shoulder to shoulder with the fire-fighters, police, paramedics, and
public from far and near, the whole great, warm tide of humanity suddenly united and made equal by a
pitiless storm and the thunderclouds of Death.
On the barren heath of Ground Zero, poor, bare, forked animals, they
nonetheless briefly remembered, and found deep solace in the knowledge, that
they were all in this great enterprise together. What James Madison termed --
on April 1, 1794 -- the “Liberty of Conscience” revived among them. Indeed, the
rest of what Madison, ‘master builder of the Constitution’ and fourth US
president, said on that distant
occasion was poignantly relevant during those unreal days of awe: “Religious
bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble
enterprise, every expanded prospect”[2]. In scene after scene, each imbued with a numinosity that was
authentically holy in being wholly human, the enormous tragedy of the dream
still carried on the bent backs of rescue workers, bereaved families, onlookers
and TV reporters alike was what made my tears flow into theirs. The American
Idea, the vision of the Founding Fathers, was still alive, after all, somewhere
deep beneath the rubble of the twentieth century, somewhere deep within the
hardened hearts of everyone.
But shock was
followed by sorrow, which was superseded by rage --- at first general, then
specific, focussing on one man. Rage calmed into anger, growing less specific
as it evened out into an all-justifying righteous indignation that now lashes
out at any provocation, patent or latent, real or imagined, whether at home or
abroad. War is being waged against an abstract noun. “You’re either with us, or you’re with the enemy,” President
George W. Bush told the world, serenely unaware that such a Manichaean view of
the situation --- not to mention the inappropriateness of the thinly-veiled
threat --- made him scarcely different from ‘the enemy’ and is steadily
alienating, in varying degrees, virtually every country on earth. The only
American quality that failed to rise out of the ashes of Ground Zero and spread
its wings was the phoenix of Liberty,
accompanied by her moral-virtues-in-waiting and her counsellors of reason. But,
as three out of the four authors under review observe, her absence dates from
long before September 11. To adapt Oscar Wilde, no one wishes to shake hands
with Liberty when her hands are dabbled in blood. [3]
“Wild liberty,” wrote Emerson, “develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by
strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience.” America has ultimately
shown no grace under pressure.
How can we
reconcile the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity with the necessities
of security? Why did this happen? How can we address the causes in such a way
that it will not happen again? To what extent are we to blame? These were the appropriate responses for which one waited largely in
vain, while Liberty, along with the Constitution and its Amendments, was put
back in her crate and shipped off home.
The media voices of reason and objectivity were nearly all either
bullied into silence or else drafted into that vast choir chanting day and
night for God and America the Beautiful, as consent – for an endless revenge
--- was manufactured. It was frightening to behold.
But it was also
understandable. What the whole situation was not was ‘unexpected’ --- the term
most frequently used to characterize the suicide-highjackings. Given America’s
greedy, forty-year romp through the world --- the wars and sponsored coups
d’etat of self-interest, the tide of cultural trash, the double-standards
and hypocrisy, the sheer civilian death-toll --- it is only surprising that it
didn’t happen sooner. All of our authors here agree, however, that the chances
of something similar, or much worse, happening again are very high indeed.
Based on a 2% probability over ten years, if twenty different groups are trying
to obtain Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), the chances of one group
succeeding are a chilling 90%. This statistic is from a study by two British
strategic analysts, and is cited by Malise Ruthven at the close of his utterly
indispensable book, A Fury for God, to remind us of what has been at
stake throughout the previous 300 pages, and what the cost of ignoring his sage
and reasoned advice will inevitably be.
Like all of
these authors, Professor Ruthven, a British Arabist and author of three definitive
books on Islam and Islamist issues, is observing the above unstately, but
assuredly plump progression of events as he writes, yet unlike them --- and in
diametric opposition to most of the North American media – he is not impelled
to douse the flames with gasoline. The result is a work that, by synthesizing
most of the relevant serious and academic
studies available, provides not just a much-needed context for the
events of September 11, but a blue-print for dealing with the causes to prevent
their repetition, as well as the means by which Muslims of good will can
entirely disassociate themselves from Islamist terrorism. It is an immense
achievement, a book that no one with an opinion on this issue --- and is there
anybody without one? – can afford not to read.
After setting
the stage with the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Ruthven
focuses in upon Mohammed Atta, “generally thought to have been the pilot” [page
35] of American Airlines flight 11, after it was hijacked out of Boston and
flown into the North Tower. In particular, the author draws our attention to
the document found in his luggage (which, ironically, failed to make it on
board) by the FBI. A similar text was discovered in the wreckage of United
Airlines flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania. This document is quite
clearly the hijackers’ final instructions. Besides advice of a practical nature
(“[Check] the suitcase, the clothes, the knife, your tools, your ticket…your
passport, all your papers”) [p 35], Ruthven notices references to the practice
of the “righteous predecessors” --- the soldiers who fought alongside the
Prophet himself --- who “tightened their clothes as they wore them prior to
battle”. The text then almost magically links this to the needs of the mission:
“…tighten your shoes well, and wear socks that hold in the shoes and do not
slip out of them”. [p 36] Throughout, pious invocations alternate with
practical instructions, and the hijackers are urged on in their endeavour with
several Quranic quotations (“Obey Allah and His Messenger and do not quarrel
amongst yourselves lest you lose heart and your momentum disappear…You were
longing for death before you met it. Now you have seen it with your own eyes”)
[p 36].
“Most sinister of the passages,” [p 37] Ruthven
finds, is where the hijackers are
instructed on what to do if they encounter resistance: “If God grants any one
of you a slaughter, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your
father and mother, for they are owed by you.” [p37] The Arabic word used for
slaughter – dhabaha – “connects the act of murdering a passenger to the
ritual sacrifice of an animal by slitting its throat. Dhabaha is what
Abraham was prepared to do to his son…” [p37]
Martyrdom is then presented, not as something conferred by God as a
reward, but rather as something to be sought out by the individual, as if it were his own private act of
worship. The document’s author has, in effect, taken the shell of a traditional
religious conception, replacing its original content with something radically
new which finds its legitimation in the word of God and the example of his
prophets. The substitution amounts to a “deeply subversive form of ideological
militancy, and the idea that martyrdom is a pure act of worship, pleasing to
God”, irrespective of His specific command, is a “terrifying new kind of
nihilism.”[p38]
Very careful to
state unequivocally that “Islamism is not Islam”[p38], Ruthven then takes us
back, via the continuing debate over literalist interpretations of scripture --
that exists as much within Christianity as it does in Islam -- to the
foundations of Islamism itself and the concept of jihad.
The genesis of
the movement occurred during the 19th century resistance to the Raj
in British India, but had to wait a hundred years for its intellectual father,
Sayyid Abu ‘Ala Maududi (1903-1979),
who, born Indian, became a key
figure in the formation of an Islamic state in Pakistan. Whereas later
Islamists uniformly denied all outside influence upon their ideas, Maududi,
says Ruthven, was impressed “by the totalitarian movements in Russia, Italy and
Germany, [and] compared Islam favourably with communism and fascism as a
movement with the potential to mobilize the masses.” The author then quotes
extensively from Maududi’s tract on jihad, which, given recent events, ought to
be mandatory reading in the West: “Islam resists any government that is based
on a different concept and program, in order to liquidate it completely…Islam
wants the whole earth and does not content itself with only a part thereof. It
wants and requires the entire inhabited world.” [p 71 – emphasis added by
Ruthven]
Maududi’s work
is important because it exercised enormous influence on an Egyptian named
Sayyid Qutb, the principal ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood. “More than any
other recent Muslim writer,” Ruthven tells us, Qutb “is the inspiration behind
September 11.” [71] His two-year stay in the U.S. during the fifties is dealt
with in considerable detail here and can be viewed in toto as the defining
moment in the onset of Islamism’s war against America.
In the
ontological Islam that evolved as a rather uncertain adaptation of Heidegger’s
ontological phenomenology in Qutb’s thinking, the groundwork was laid for acts
of martyrdom which appear to be suicidal and/or hopeless acts of political
terrorism. It is a view of Islam that is quite modern and quite distinctive,
and beset by many contradictory themes, suggesting the ambivalence of Sayyid
Qutb and the intensity of his personal struggle to give his own martyred life
Islamic meaning. His was executed back in Egypt, but, as Ruthven points out,
Qutb could easily have had the death sentence commuted had he so chosen to do.
Next the author
shows us that, while the Quran itself contains no unambiguous condemnation of
suicide, a number of hadiths (sacred texts dealing with the Prophet’s life)
leave no doubt that Muhammed disapproved of it severely. He refused, for
example, “to say the customary prayers for the dead in a case of suicide”.
[p100] But just as the teachings and actions of Jesus are contradictory ---
only an act of will can see him as a ‘prince of peace’ --- the Quranic
injunctions of Allah are frequently offset by suras elsewhere containing
utterly different advice. Most Islamic theological schools have thus taught
that contradictory suras must be read together, their injunctions viewed as
complementary, often encompassing the whole range of responses to a given
situation from which a pious Muslim must extrapolate his own. Following Qutb’s example, however, the
Islamists --- much like Aryan Nations and other Christian extremists --- read
their scriptures tautologically, finding what they want to hear rather than
discovering what is there. Unlike the man-of-letters and literary scholar Qutb,
though, as Ruthven points out, the contemporary Islamists of al-Qa’ida tend to
have educational backgrounds not in the liberal arts but in the faculties of science, and these blind
them to the nuances of textual analysis while setting up a different kind of
contradiction in their psyches. “To fathom the significance of the Islamist
attacks on America,” he writes, “one must look beyond the reductionism that
would see it as an act of rage by a gang of religious fanatics or frustrated
professional wannabes.”[p120]
Citing various
authorities, Ruthven carves out a subtle but powerful argument. Liberal arts
students studying Western ideas are exposed to the evolution of those ideas and
to the weaknesses of Western culture, whereas students in science and technology
are more apt to see Western culture as monolithic and properly hegemonic. Under
these circumstances the belief that the West is wholly materialistic and devoid
of spiritual values --- which in Sayyid Qutb’s case was derived from an
aesthete’s disdain for the philistinism and vulgarity he chose to find in
America --- becomes something else
again. Like the architect and town
planning expert Mohammed Atta studying in Hamburg, such young Islamists come to
see their lives bifurcated between an Islamic culture that provides moral
values, community and spiritual satisfaction, and a Western culture that
provides access to the material improvement of their lives. Islamism is thus
the mirror image of orientalism, a dualistic perspective, in which the West continues
to serve as the standard by which Muslims evaluate their own culture.
A thousand
years ago Arab conquests had created an empire that stretched from the borders
of India to Spain, and which, salvaging the learning of the Ancient World,
advanced knowledge in areas likes mathematics, architecture and chemistry to
such an extent that the European Renaissance would not have been possible
without it. All of this was then viewed as “the argument from manifest success”
--- it was a sign of Allah’s favour and approval. By extension, however, the current and calamitous state of
the Arab world should be viewed as the reverse --- yet an ‘argument from
manifest failure’ does not exist. Instead, the Islamists are caught up in a
contradiction that has them despising the West for achieving the very things by
which they measure the past achievements of their own culture. Ruthven then
draws a devastating parallel between Mohammed Atta’s faction and the German
anarchist terror cell, Baader-Mienhof, concluding that “their final act was not
a gesture of Islamic heroism, but of Nietzschean despair….they conceived the
deed they committed on September 11th as an Outrage, a Fury for God.
The Baader-Meinhof slogan --- Don’t Argue, Destroy! – could well have
been their own.” [p133]
After a
meticulous study of the role played by Saudi Arabia in sponsoring Islamist
terror and by spreading its own repugnant and idiosyncratic version of Islam,
Malise Ruthven daubs an enormous question mark over the role played by the U.S.
in supporting a regime that is far worse in barbarism than that of the Afghani
Taliban. He points to the disastrous consequences of American foreign policy
around the world and its deplorable record in assisting democratic regimes to
replace those of tyrants. Then he cautions, using the example of French
intervention in Algeria, any attempt to suppress Islamist impulses, on the
grounds that they invariably strengthen the Islamist cause. The road to
democracy in Saudi Arabia, he admits, will be long and difficult. But the
experience of Iran since 1979 has shown that the forces of progress are better
served when people are permitted to work out their own destinies, without the
external pressures exercised by oil companies and arms manufacturers supported
by Western governments. Iran is now moving towards secularism and democracy
under its own momentum. The corrupt religious nomenklatura that blocks
reform will self-destruct when enough people are sufficiently well-educated to
see through its pretensions. As the writer Jessica Mathews has argued,
“Eventually (not soon) the mullahs’ conservatism, venality and economic
incompetence will undo them.”[4] The current heavy-handed interventionism of
the U.S. will not only impede this progress but could easily spark a global
conflict compared with which the al-Qa’ida attacks would be mere street-fights.
The people who
make up the leadership of the movement from which al-Qa’ida has drawn its most
able recruits, Ruthven concludes, are victims of a peculiarly modern dilemma, a
“clash of cultures” occurring , not so much between civilizations but
rather within the individual. The movement’s spearhead has been forged in a
furnace in which uneducated religiosity combines with rage, utopianism, social
anomie and technical sophistication. The author singles out for his final
criticism, however, the nature of the intelligence services supposedly designed
to prevent such things as September 11th from happening. Citing
several authorities, he identifies as prime cause in this security lapse an
over-reliance on electronic sources of intelligence, and too little stress on
‘humint’ – human intelligence --- which depends on personal intuition, personal
interaction and personal engagement on the part of agents with groups suspected
of handling terrorists. It is an
egregious shortcoming that afflicts our own intelligence services even more
severely than it does the CIA --- and it must be corrected. Time is not on our
side, either, for the statistic cited earlier indicates that the probability of
Osama bin Laden’s group exploding a nuclear device in one of our cities very
soon “is approximately 90%.”
“The
parochialism of the intelligence community,” writes Ruthven, “is a scandal in
societies supposedly committed to the values of ‘multiculturalism’.” [p290]
Advocating for this task the deployment of Muslims loyal to their adopted
states, who have a more sophisticated understanding of the subcultures in which
Islamist terrorists operate than their occidental counterparts, the author
stresses the urgency of this task when as many as 80% of North American mosques
are believed to be under the control of extremist Saudi Wahhabite clerics, if
only indirectly. But another function of such Muslims of good will, he states,
is to “persuade disaffected youngsters that their interests lie in rejecting
festering resentments and adopting the better values of the countries in which
they reside.” [p290]
This dense and
powerful book ends, mercifully, on a hopeful note, observing that there are
increasing numbers of former Islamist intellectuals --- such as the Tunisian
leader Rashid Ghanoushi and the Sudanese writer Abd al-Wahhab el-Affendi – who
have come by bitter experience “to recognize that the Islamist dream of
restoring the Shari’a ‘from above’ by political action is a recipe for tyranny
and violence.” Give the Muslim people the right to decide how they want to be
ruled, and the power to hold their rulers accountable. Naturally, they would
want to rule themselves according to the values of Islam, according to their understanding
of them. But, writes Rashid Ghanoushi, “it is the people who should decide what
these values are. The moment anyone starts saying that the authority in a
polity is for God and not for the people, or allow only one class of people to
determine for others what the values of Islam are, this means that someone,
other than the community (and above it) must decide what the will of God is.
Experience has shown that this is a recipe for bringing to power despots for
whom the will of God is the last thing on their minds.”[5]
After Malise
Ruthven’s magisterial work, BBC Television reporter Jane Corbin’s Al-Qaeda
seems little more than a TV show in print. Her --- dare I say it? – girlish
fascination with Osama bin Laden
---“For three years he was my screen-saver” is the book’s first sentence
--- and his austere good looks also grows a little wearing. But for those
interested in content minus context --- TV’s trademark shortcoming --- this is
a very readable account of the individuals involved with and origins of the
al-Qa’ida terrorist movement, particularly with its forays into bin Laden’s
personal history, and its overview of U.S. culpability through relationships
with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and a C.I.A in which ‘intelligence’ seems
anything but central to the actions of its agents.
By contrast,
David S. New’s Holy War is all but unreadable, prone to bizarre staccato
poetics (“Two domes, resplendent in the oriental sunshine. One silver, one
gold. Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Mosque of Omar. One hundred thousand square meters of
real estate. The epicentre of Middle East tensions.” Etc). He hates
conjunctions. The style. Most unsuitable. When the purpose is communication. Of
ideas. But no matter. There are none. To communicate. Here.
The book is
essentially a superficial rehash of very old material culled from such places
as the New Yorker magazine, and subjected to a style makeover that
becomes nearly as irritating as Eminem rapping it would be. Furthermore. Rather
than reason. It is hysteria. That is Mr New’s purpose. Evidently. Apocalypse!
Very soon.
Islam is not
alone in spawning a dangerous lunatic fringe, we learn --- in case we were not
already aware of the fact. Judaism has one. So does Christianity. Israel has
nuclear weapons, too, but lies about having them. Fundamentalist Christians
like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell will soon be running America. They’re in
collusion with crazy Jews who want to rebuild Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem on
the spot currently occupied by Islam’s third holiest shrine, the Dome of the
Rock. This will trigger the ‘End Time’. Osama’s in the mix somewhere too.
There’s little hope. Prepare to meet thy doom.
Some of this
waffle is twenty years old. Indeed, so marginal are Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell these days that their despicable comments on September 11th
being God’s judgement on Manhattan for having more than its quota of gay bars
(or somesuch medieval nonsense) went largely unnoticed, not to mention
unpunished. There are indeed Israelis who want --- and have tried --- to blow
up the Dome of the Rock. About eight of them. Besides being punished more
severely than many Palestinian terrorists for their attempted crime, they are
watched like hawks by the Mossad ---- a particularly easy task, since they
still dress in the garb mandated for Jews in a sixteenth century European
ghetto. While it could be argued that Timothy McVeigh --- the Oklahoma mall
bomber --- is a Christian Osama bin Laden, the argument falls down fairly
easily. Where’s his highly-trained and well-financed army, or his network of
terrorist cells in our midst, for example? And although New does provide the
rationale behind Israel’s ‘unofficial’ nuclear arsenal (without it the Arabs
would defeat them; if they announced it the Arabs would want their own nukes),
his incessant references to ‘nuclear blackmail’ and the ‘Samson complex’
(replete with Biblical quotations out of their context) have more than a whiff
of anti-Semitism about them. Like too much recent reporting on the conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel’s concerns over security issues are
dismissed as propaganda while Arab hypocrisy and bad-faith dealing are
presented as raw truth. In fact, given
Israel’s remarkable restraint in the face of living in a place where every day
is September 11, there are few countries one would trust more to possess
nuclear capability.
David New’s
book has more footnotes than the Babylonian Talmud, and so it is particularly
irksome to find that statements like the one reporting Russian and moderate
Arab intelligence services in possession of information proving Osama bin Laden
has purchased “in excess of 20” nuclear weapons “from the Chechnyan mafia in
exchange for money and two tons of heroin” [p. 181]are entirely unsupported by
any sources. Facts. They get in the way. When your purpose is fanning the
flames. Of fear. Are we not frightened enough as it is?
Alan
M. Dershowitz is clearly very frightened. Professor of law at Harvard’s
prestigious Law School, he is, according his publisher, “America’s most
renowned criminal defence and civil liberties attorney,” as well as, in the
eyes of Time magazine, “the top lawyer of last resort in the country.”
Numerous wrongly-accused and desperate innocents have resorted to his top legal
skills, some of them even more famous than himself, such as O.J. Simpson and
Claus von Bulow. This is his eighteenth book. There are sixteen others, and a
novel. It is safe to say that only lawyers might have actually enjoyed
reading any of these books, but many of them are of considerable virtue, particularly those providing powerful legal
arguments for the protection of civil liberties in America. Why Terrorism
Works, unfortunately, all but invalidates
Dershowitz’s entire career.
Although
there is a cogent and important study of responses to terrorism here,
emphasizing the utter necessity for governments to avoid perpetuating it by
rewarding the terrorists through peace conferences and making concessions, this
reasoned common sense melts away when Dershowitz turns to issues of ‘home
security’. For the great civil
libertarian now thinks that American law enforcement agencies should be
accorded the right to torture those suspected of withholding information in a
terrorist case. There should, he states, be a “Torture warrant” --- and it must
be easily obtainable for time is of the essence. More chilling still --- especially in Dershowitz’s unemotional
legal prose --- is the fact that he has even devoted considerable thought to
what form this proposed torture ought to take. “When I respond,” he writes,
somewhat bemused [when asked by people what kind of torture he recommends], “by
describing the sterilized needle being shoved under the fingernails, the
reaction is visceral and often visible --- a shudder coupled with a facial
gesture of disgust.” [p. 148] Perhaps, professor, this is because some
earthlings possess a thing called ‘compassion’, which does not compute on your
planet.
When
I encounter a sentence like, “The simple cost-benefit analysis for employing
such non-lethal torture seems overwhelming…” [p.144], my instinct is to lock a
book away with my library of horrors, where it will find conducive company
among the likes of Josef Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Leon Trotsky, the Marquis
de Sade, et al. No wonder the publisher of this book is so intent on
reminding us how eminent a man is its author: no one else could have published
such an appalling travesty. But, as we know from watching the O.J. Simpson
trial, a good lawyer can make or dismiss an argument for anything at all. Including,
as we find elsewhere here, the need for Washington to deal with a recalcitrant
foreign leader --- like, say, Saddam Hussein --- by dispatching a team of
highly trained assassins to ‘terminate’ his rule. After all, a simple
cost-benefit analysis will no doubt prove that this is far cheaper than pricey,
usually futile diplomatic efforts, and a positive bargain compared with the tab
for real warfare. How, I found myself
wondering, is this any different from me dealing with my speeding ticket by
blowing off the issuing officer’s head with a shotgun --- and would Professor
Dershowitz defend me?
It
would be laughable if Dershowitz were not, as he gleefully informs us, an
advisor to governments. Because of this, one senses, it augurs of things to
come south of the border that will make our own security something of a
question in the near future. The gist of Dershowitz’s reasoning to these
Orwellian suggestions of his is that he has worked with the government of
Israel, which is honourable, and that the Israeli army uses torture, and it is
the fourth-best military force on earth –therefore torture must be okay. I doubt if one in ten Israelis would
currently agree that Ariel Sharon’s blind-the-whole-town-for-an-eye hardline
military tactic was remotely successful, but even if they did, until Osama bin
Laden has two million supporters living in West Virginia, the two situations
are hardly analogous. I would also direct America’s most renowned civil
liberties attorney to a recent study by one of Egypt’s leading sociologists,
Sa’d al-din Ibrahim,[6]
which found a close correlation between extremist attitudes among Islamist
groups and their responses to police brutality. While some moderated their
violent behaviour after torture, many more were hardened by the experience and
became more involved in violent acts, or in some cases embarked upon them as
a result of the torture.
Professor
Dershowitz’s book is a sad indictment of contemporary American thinking,
especially coming from the man termed by Richard North Patterson, “America’s
most brilliant public intellectual”. We should not forget that the U.S. has
actually used nuclear weapons against innocent civilian populations twice
already, and has at least once taken the world to the very brink of a terminal
nuclear war when a largely fictional enemy mirrored its own threatening stance.
It is far from innocent in the current conflict, and has done far worse to
others than was done to it last September. The slaughter of innocents is always
the greatest of tragedies, whether they be in Hiroshima, Hanoi or
Manhattan. It would be a very foolish and unwise nation that would ignore the
sane reasoning and salient contextual arguments backing it up in Malise
Ruthven’s book for the insanity advocated in calm legalese by Alan
Dershowitz. Greater still, however,
would be the folly of a nation like our own that allowed past loyalties to
interfere with present duties and the learning from history’s many poignant
lessons. The wisdom of Benjamin Franklin on this subject cannot be too often
repeated:
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”[7]
Paul William Roberts is the author of
several books on Islam and the Middle East, including The Demonic Comedy:
Some Detours in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
New York). He is currently writing an historical novel set in Canada.
________________________________________________________________________
[1] In Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1957). A Vision of the Last Judgment (c. 1810).
[2]Letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1794. W.T. Hutchinson et al., The Papers of James Madison, vol. 1, p. 113, Chicago and Charlottesville, Virginia (1962-1991)
[3] “When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.” Comment to reporters on the murder in Dublin of the new Irish chief secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, by Fenian nationalists, May 1882. Quoted in Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde, ch. 7 (1987).
[4] International Herald Tribune, 5th March, 2002
[5] Quoted in Esposito and Tamimi (eds), Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, p.168
[6] Paper delivered at North-South Conference, Oslo, November 1995
[7] The motto of Franklin’s “Historical Review,” 1759.