In his article The Rise Of The Democratic Police State, John Pilger writes:
The other day Blair said, "We are not having any of this nonsense about [the bombings having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront it as that." This "raving", as the American writer Mike Whitney observed, "is part of a broader strategy to dismiss the obvious facts about terror and blame the victims of American-British aggression. It's a tactic that was minted in Tel Aviv and perfected over 37 years of occupation. It is predicated on the assumption that terrorism emerges from an amorphous, religious-based ideology that transforms its adherents into ruthless butchers."
Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has examined every act of suicide terrorism over the past 25 years. He refutes the assumption that suicide bombers are mainly driven by "an evil ideology independent of other circumstances." He said, "The facts are that since 1980, half the attacks have been secular. Few of the terrorists fit the standard stereotype... Half of them are not religious fanatics at all. In fact, over 95 per cent of suicide attacks around the world [are not about] religion, but a specific strategic purpose - to compel the United States and other western countries to abandon military commitments on the Arabian Peninsula and in countries they view as their homeland or prize greatly... The link between anger over American, British and western military [action] and al-Qaeda's ability to recruit suicide terrorists to kill us could not be tighter."
So we have been warned, yet again. Terrorism is the logical consequence of American and British "foreign policy" whose infinitely greater terrorism we need to recognize, and debate, as a matter of urgency.
It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a little more. Pilger says something interesting and disturbing about Thomas Friedman's latest ideas about how to control terrorism. We have to control thought about the causes of terrorism. Pilger writes,
Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York Times. He has been described as "a guard dog of US foreign policy". Whatever America's warlords have in mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman will bark it. He boasts that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist". He promotes bombing countries and says world war three has begun.
Friedman's latest bark is about free speech, which his country's constitution is said to safeguard. He wants the State Department to draw up a blacklist of those who make "wrong" political statements. He is referring not only to those who advocate violence, but those who believe American actions are the root cause of the current terrorism. The latter group, which he describes as "just one notch less despicable than the terrorists", includes most Americans and Britons, according to the latest polls.
Friedman wants a "War of Ideas report" which names those who try to understand and explain, for example, why London was bombed. These are "excuse makers" who "deserve to be exposed". He borrows the term "excuse makers" from James Rubin, who was Madeleine Albright's chief apologist at the State Department.
Is this a fair characterization of Friedman's views? Well, here is the relevant part of Friedman's article, Expose the Haters. Friedman writes:
Sunlight is more important than you think. Those who spread hate do not like to be exposed, noted Yigal Carmon, the founder of Memri, which monitors the Arab-Muslim media. The hate spreaders assume that they are talking only to their own, in their own language, and can get away with murder. When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them....
We also need to spotlight the "excuse makers," the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. When you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion that blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow "understandable" is outrageous. "It erases the distinction between legitimate dissent and terrorism," Rubin said, "and an open society needs to maintain a clear wall between them."
There is no political justification for 9/11, 7/7 or 7/21. As the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen put it: "These terrorists are what they do." And what they do is murder.
Finally, we also need to shine a bright light on the "truth tellers." Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers' words also need to be disseminated globally. "The rulers in these countries have no interest in amplifying the voices of moderates because the moderates often disagree with the rulers as much as they disagree with the extremists," said Husain Haqqani, author of the new book "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military." "You have to deal us moderates into the game by helping to amplify our voices and exposing the extremists and their amen corner."
Every quarter, the State Department should identify the top 10 hatemongers, excuse makers and truth tellers in the world. It wouldn't be a cure-all. But it would be a message to the extremists: You are free to say what you want, but we are free to listen, to let the whole world know what you are saying and to protect every free society from hate spreaders like you. Words matter.
It seems to me that Friedman doesn't understand that explanations for an action may not justify it morally at all or make it more reasonable in some positive sense. Also, there is the disinction between description and evaluation. There is a crucial difference between an explanation that justifies an action morally, and an explanation that aims to merely describe the causes of an action or the motivating factors for an action. The latter sort of explanation can be given with no concern at all for the worth of the action. In fact, even an explanation that justifies an action morally could be understood without any concern for what it implies about the worth, reasonableness, or morality of the action. Furthermore, one may want to understand the causes of a action so that one can evaluate the causes, especially if one suspects that the causes are bad and undesireable. One may want to eliminate bad causes if the effects of those causes are also bad. An explanation of causes may tell us something important about our world that needs to be changed.
Words matter, and so it is important not to confuse things by covering over these important distinctions. Anyone who values democracy and wants to maintain and promote basic problem-solving and critical-thinking strategies will want to do whatever he or she can to keep these distinctions clear -- in their minds and in the minds of their fellow citizens.
Rejecting such crucial and basic distinctions, Friedman seems to think that all attempts to seek out explanations for terrorist actions are attempts to make these actions look reasonable or attempts to place some positive moral light on them, or to remove some negative evaluation of them. And he thinks that when it comes to terrorist actions, all attempts to seek out causal explanations for them are dangerous and morally outrageous attempts to put these actions in some positive light. Friedman's view seems to be that to seek out the motivational causes behind terrorist actions is always to promote or put some approval on them.
Or just as bad, Friedman seems to think that the only relevant explanation for terrorist actions is that terrorists are simply killers guided by radical religious ideology. But knowing whether this claim is true or false requires a thorough investigation into all of the facts and possible causes of their actions. This also requires (at minimum) looking carefully and critically at what the terrorists actually say are the reasons for their actions. This sort of investigation is what Friedman does not allow us to do. Friedman's proposal prevents us from listening to anyone or entering a constructive debate with anyone who articulates an explanation that differs from and challenges Friedman's favored belief. Friedman's own claim assumes what he denies, unless he has some mystical or other privileged access to the truth that does not require robust empirical inquiry and debate regarding the facts.
There may be reasons for Friedman's misconceptions and apparent errors. I suspect that what motivates Friedman to say these things is that he wants to stop any sort of investigation into the grievances and complaints of the terrorists. One plausible reason for this is that such an inquiry may ultimately lead to an investigation into the foreign policy of the US and its impact on Muslims and others around the world (and terrorist groups). Such an investigation, because it ultimately leads to understanding and exposing American foreign policy, may lead Americans to evaluate these policies. It may then lead to negative judgments about American foreign policy and the globalization that it often promotes. Such judgment may lead people to question America's policies. People may come to understand, not that terrorism is justified in some positive sense, but that American policy is seriously flawed and has to be changed. And that could harm the interests of corporate power that guides many of those policies. But such possibilities must be crushed for the sake of those interests. American policy is what must be kept hidden and never exposed.
But more than ever, a very bright spotlight needs to be placed on that.
