Our War on Terror - Books - Review - New York Times: "The president, apparently, remains determined to treat the American people as if they have no role to play in what will, in fact, be a “global struggle of uncertain duration.” In a January interview with Jim Lehrer, Bush was asked why he hadn’t called for more Americans to “sacrifice something.” He said: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”"
This whole Samantha Powers' article on the war on terror is worth reading. One appalling aspect of it is that she does not sufficient pillory the defense of suicide bombing from Talal Asad. Few things are more nauseating than left wing academics penning bullshit, self-righteous defenses of murder leavened with a truly disheartening moral equivalency. Powers expresses gentle dismay, but shouldn't she have much more directly condemned an intellectual in American defending murder and terrorism, and comdemned Columbia University Press for publishing this?
Here is Powers summarizing Asad's defense of terrorism:
"How real is the difference between our foes and us? One of the most incisive challenges to current debates comes from Talal Asad, whose ON SUICIDE BOMBING (Columbia University, $19.95) argues that the distinction between what Bush calls “us” and “them” exists in the heads of Western leaders, publics and intellectuals, but not in reality. Asad, a professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, takes aim less at the Bush administration than at the rest of us, and at what he sees as our unspoken complicity in “some kinds of cruelty as opposed to others.” He hopes, he writes, to “disturb the reader sufficiently” by showing the hypocrisy of rules that permit murderous conduct by states but deny it to nonstate actors. And he is angered by scholars, theorists and journalists who don’t speak Arabic and have never set foot in the Middle East, yet sound off about why suicide bombers do what they do. He is understandably aghast that the American public has expressed so little shock over the bloodshed inflicted in its name. And by the end of the book, his rage has overtaken him. The Bush administration’s actions in the Middle East have left him so disgusted that he declares simply, “It seems to me that there is no moral difference between the horror inflicted by state armies (especially if those armies belong to powerful states that are unaccountable to international law) and the horror inflicted by insurgents.”
And here she is dodging any stance of honor in which she clearly states her opposition to terrorist violence and mass murder:
It is hard to answer Asad’s argument without drifting into the distinctions he attempts to demolish. For instance, he cites the political philosopher Michael Walzer’s definition of the “peculiar evil of terrorism,” which, according to Walzer, is “not only the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution.” Asad then asks why the United States’ war in Iraq and the Israeli cluster bombs in Lebanon do not earn the same condemnation as bombs wielded by terrorists. But if you continue to believe (as I do) that there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective, you will indeed find “On Suicide Bombing” disturbing, if not always in the way he intends.
Nonetheless, Asad’s book is valuable because the legal distinctions he is challenging are especially vulnerable now....
"Nevertheless"?
Powers confesses to find it difficult not to fall into the categories of right and wrong to highlight that Asad is evidently a nutjob.
What we are seeing is a two fold normalization of the extreme pro-terrorism bent of the Arab world seeping into American politicial and intellectual discourse. It has, of course, already slid into Europe. And you see the result: bombings and conspiracies to bomb. Arab terrorism is an elite-driven phenomenon in which the idealistic and the confused are convinced to strap on bombs and kill others.
Do we really need to have studied the Arab world intently to be able to distinguish, clearly and easily between right and wrong in this case? I don't think so. A basic, unaligned, areligious moral sense is all that is required.
Here is a simple lesson:
wrong: to murder to terrorize others
right: to leave everyone well enough alone.
Of course there are many specifics in the realities on the ground. But does this give license to an academic to embrace defend and therefore essentially to celebrate murder. It is, truly, disgusting to behold.
To paraphrase Carl Shurz a hundred years ago: "My country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right."
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