Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Tony Judt, What Have We Learned, If Anything? - The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008

No one who has lived in Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Japan, the UK, or France, not to speak of more habitually violent lands, could have failed to notice the omnipresence of terrorists— using guns, bombs, chemicals, cars, trains, planes, and much else—over the course of the twentieth century and beyond. The only thing that has changed in recent years is the unleashing in September 2001 of homicidal terrorism within the United States. Even that was not wholly unprecedented: the means were new and the carnage unexampled, but terrorism on US soil was far from unknown over the course of the twentieth century.

But what of the argument that terrorism today is different, a “clash of cultures” infused with a noxious brew of religion and authoritarian politics: “Islamofascism”? This, too, is an interpretation resting in large part on a misreading of twentieth-century history. There is a triple confusion here. The first consists of lumping together the widely varying national fascisms of interwar Europe with the very different resentments, demands, and strategies of the (equally heterogeneous) Muslim movements and insurgencies of our own time—and attaching the moral credibility of the antifascist struggles of the past to our own more dubiously motivated military adventures.

A second confusion comes from conflating a handful of religiously motivated stateless assassins with the threat posed in the twentieth century by wealthy, modern states in the hands of totalitarian political parties committed to foreign aggression and mass extermination. Nazism was a threat to our very existence and the Soviet Union occupied half of Europe. But al-Qaeda? The comparison insults the intelligence—not to speak of the memory of those who fought the dictators. Even those who assert these similarities don’t appear to believe them. After all, if Osama bin Laden were truly comparable to Hitler or Stalin, would we really have responded to September 11 by invading…Baghdad?

But the most serious mistake consists of taking the form for the content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump together the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA, Switzerland’s Jura Separatists, and the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica; dismiss their differences as insignificant; label the resulting amalgam of ideological kneecappers, bomb throwers, and political murderers “European Extremism” (or “Christo-fascism,” perhaps?)…and then declare uncompromising, open-ended armed warfare against it.

This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.

Tomgram: Mark Danner, Generals Bin Laden and Bush, March 25, 2008

To contemplate a prewar map of Baghdad — as I do the one before me, with sectarian neighborhoods traced out in blue and red and yellow — is to look back on a lost Baghdad, a Baghdad of our dreams. My map of 2003 is colored mostly a rather neutral yellow, indicating the “mixed” neighborhoods of the city, predominant just five years ago. To take up a contemporary map after this is to be confronted by a riot of bright color: Shia blue has moved in irrevocably from the East of the Tigris; Sunni red has fled before it, as Shia militias pushed the Sunnis inexorably west toward Abu Ghraib and Anbar province, and nearly out of the capital itself. And everywhere, it seems, the pale yellow of those mixed neighborhoods is gone, obliterated in the months and years of sectarian war.

I start with those maps out of a lust for something concrete, as I grope about in the abstract, struggling to quantify the unquantifiable. How indeed to “take stock” of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts.

Derfner, Rattling the Cage: Terrorism, theirs and ours, Jerusalem Post, March 12, 2008

If there were any reason to believe that deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza would stop the rockets on Sderot and Ashkelon, I’d be in favor of deliberately targeting civilians. If it worked, it would ultimately save both Israeli and Palestinian lives.

I supported Israel’s unstated policy of punishing the civilian population in Lebanon during the war two summers ago because I saw no other way to rein in Hizbullah, no other means of bringing pressure on those fanatics to leave us alone.

But unlike most of the Israelis at all levels who want the IDF to make ordinary Gazans suffer and die, believing that this will force Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop their terrorism against us, I recognize that such a policy is itself terrorism. Deliberately targeting civilians for a political purpose is textbook terrorism.

It’s not true what the cliche says - that terror is terror is terror. When Israeli fighter jets and cluster bomb launchers act with deliberate disregard for “collateral damage” in Lebanon following a deadly, unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, or when Israel chokes off the delivery of basic supplies to Gaza in response to steady, unprovoked rocketing by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, that’s terrorism. That’s punishing and killing civilians to force the enemy leadership’s hand.

Ethnic Divide Worsens as Sri Lanka Conflict Escalates - New York Times, March 8, 2008

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — There are no eyes on this war. A truce between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is over, and gone are the Nordic monitors who kept watch over it.

Security is tight, and tensions high, in Colombo. Some minority Tamils fear wrongly being arrested during checks like these.

The government has refused entry to United Nations human rights monitors. Independent journalists are not allowed anywhere near the front lines. Only occasionally does a glimpse of the war’s damage surface, as when the Red Cross confirmed that in the first six weeks of this year alone, 180 civilians had been killed, a toll it called “appalling.”

Fareed Zakaria, The Fearful Superpower, Newsweek.com, December 12, 2007

The notion that the United States today is in grave danger of sitting back and going on the defensive is bizarre. Since 2001, Washington, with bipartisan support, has invaded two countries and dispatched troops around the world, from Somalia to the Philippines, to fight Islamic militants. It has ramped up defense spending by $187 billion—more than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India and Britain. It has created a Department of Homeland Security that now spends more than $40 billion a year. How then would Giuliani go on the offensive? Invade a couple more countries?

To recover its place in the world, the United States should first recover its confidence. It remains the world’s only superpower, the only big country with a total portfolio of military, economic and political dominance. Most major states are either well disposed toward it or, at worst, neutral. The challenges America confronts come from small, faceless terrorist organizations and a few rogue nations. This is not to minimize the challenges. Today’s asymmetries of power mean that small groups can do big damage. But it is to put things in perspective. When President Bush speaks of Iran’s nuclear program as the road to World War III, one wonders if he has noticed that Iran’s total GDP is just one sixty-eighth that of the United States, or that its military spending is less than 1 percent of the Pentagon’s.

The real challenges that the United States faces come not from globalization’s losers but from its winners, not from yesterday’s bombs but from tomorrow’s factories. The crucial project for the next president will be to change the basic focus of U.S. foreign policy, away from the Middle East and toward the Far East. When the history of these times is written, surely the great trend that will dominate the accounts, far larger than the war in Lebanon or the tensions over Iran, will be the rise of China and India and how they reshaped the world.

Spreading his wings - Haaretz, December 8, 2007

…a Channel 1 reporter asked: “Brigadier General Spector, are you a ‘refusenik’?”

Though he did not initially grasp its full significance, the question itself was enough to make him queasy. He asked the reporter to repeat it. “At the time I was not proficient enough … I was not effective enough at responding, I hadn’t yet completely organized things in my head. I admit that what bothered me most then was not the moral aspect of the IAF, but its combat level. I asked myself why it was necessary to kill 15 children in order to liquidate one terrorist.”

And what about the moral angle?

Spector: “With regard to the moral aspect, I thought at first that there had been a mistake - that maybe the pilots and their commanders didn’t know there were civilians there, even though it’s not so logical to expect that in a densely populated area like Gaza, Shehadeh, of all people, would be in civilian-free surroundings,” Spector notes, referring to the July 2002 operation in which the IAF bombed the apartment building in which Salah Shehadeh, the head of the Hamas military wing in Gaza, resided with his family.

Gideon Levy, London’s burning for Dichter - Haaretz, December 9, 2007

Avi Dichter will not be going to London. The Israeli dream of taking in year-end sales, the new production of Othello or the sights of Oxford Street vanished before the public security minister’s very eyes. The Foreign Ministry advised Dichter not to participate in a conference there, because he could be arrested for involvement in the assassination of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh, when he was Shin Bet security service head. The one-ton bomb used to target Shehadeh in 2002 left 15 people dead.

The day after the horrible assassination, in late July 2002, I visited the homes that were destroyed in the Al-Darj neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces tried at the time to claim they were “huts,” to explain why it was unaware that people lived there. But they were apartment buildings housing dozens of families. The person who dropped a one-ton bomb on them in the dark of night knew it would kill many innocent people.

Among the ruins, I met Mohammed Matar, a Palestinian laborer who had worked in Israel for 30 years, lying in the rubble of his home, his arm and eye bandaged. In the “targeted killing” planned by Dichter’s Shin Bet, Matar lost his daughter, his daughter-in-law and four toddler grandchildren. The pictures of the horror from the Gazan neighborhood have haunted me ever since. Someone, I thought, must pay for this. Could it be that no one is to blame or responsible for such an act?

Shehadeh’s assassination became a seminal event for Israel’s critics the world over. It was not different from many other liquidation operations the Shin Bet had planned for the IDF. In July 2006, for example, Israel assassinated nearly all of the Abu Salmiyeh family - Dr. Nabil Abu Salmiyeh, a lecturer in mathematics, his wife and seven of their children - because wanted man Mohammed Def was visiting their home at the time. In the past seven years, 368 Palestinians were killed in liquidation operations of which Dichter was the founding father.

Dichter cancels U.K. trip over fears of ‘war crimes’ arrest - Haaretz, December 6, 2007

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter canceled a trip to Britain over concerns he would be arrested due to his involvement in the decision to assassinate the head of Hamas’ military wing in July 2002.

Fifteen people were killed in the bombing of Salah Shehade’s house in Gaza, among them his wife and three children, when Dichter was head of the Shin Bet security service. He is the first minister to have to deal with a possible arrest.

Dichter was invited to take part in a conference by a British research institute on “the day after” Annapolis. He was supposed to give an address on the diplomatic process.

Dichter contacted the Foreign Ministry and sought an opinion on the matter, among other reasons because of previous cases in which complaints were filed in Britain and arrest warrants were issued on suspicion of war crimes by senior officers who served during the second intifada.

The Foreign Ministry wrote Dichter that it did not recommend he visit Britain because of a high probability that an extreme leftist organization there would file a complaint, which might lead to an arrest warrant. The ministry also wrote that because Dichter was not an official guest of the British government, he did not have immunity from arrest.

Munson: Beers, Goldenberg and Barry are right to say that the term “Islamofascism” is often used in ways that obscure fundamental differences. They are wrong, however, to suggest that conservatives are generally unaware of this. The truth is that conservatives like Andrew Bacevich and Leon Hadar have been among the most insightful critics of the neoconservative tendency to obscure the very different goals of different Islamist movements.

The Myth of “Islamofascism” | National Security Network, November 14, 2007

The Myth of “Islamofascism”

By Rand Beers, Ilan Goldenberg and Patrick Barry

“Violent, radical jihadists want to replace all the governments of the moderate Islamic states, replace them with a caliphate. And to do that, they also want to bring down the West, in particular us. And they’ve come together as Shi’a and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda with that intent.” – Mitt Romney, 5/15/07

“The first step toward a realistic peace is to be realistic about our enemies. They follow a violent ideology: radical Islamic fascism, which uses the mask of religion to further totalitarian goals and aims to destroy the existing international system.” – Rudy Giuliani 10/07.

“Islamic fascism has declared war on us and the Western world. Their intent is to bring down Western civilization,” – Fred Thompson 10/30/07

Since 9/11 conservatives have continually lumped various groups and countries together including Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran into one threat that they term “Islamofascism.” The reality is much complicated. These various groups and countries have different intentions and capabilities, often work at cross purposes and are in some cases ideologically opposed to each other. In fact, Shi’a-Sunni tension across the Middle East is at an all time high, only further reinforcing the fact that these groups are different.

The simplistic term “Islamofascism” undermines America’s national security. By confusing these various threats, conservatives make it impossible to pursue effective policies. This ideological approach has caused the United States to miss numerous opportunities, where it could have played these groups off of each other to America’s benefit. Moreover, the term “Islamofascism” creates the perception that the United States is fighting a religious war against Islam, thus alienating moderate voices in the region who would be willing to work with America towards common goals. Dividing these groups and dealing with them separately is a far better policy than lumping them together.

Female suicide bomber hits Sri Lankan capital | csmonitor.com, Nov. 29, 2007

A female suicide bomber struck Wednesday in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, killing herself and one other person, but not the government minister who was the intended target. Authorities blamed the attack on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, whose long-running separatist war flared up last year after the collapse of a Norwegian-brokered 2002 cease-fire.

The suicide bombing came one day after Sri Lanka warplanes bombed a LTTE radio station to stop the broadcast of an annual speech by rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The group separately accused the military of planting a roadside bomb that killed 13 people, mostly students. In his speech, which was carried by other rebel media, Mr. Prabhakaran said it was impossible to make peace with the ethnic Sinhalese majority. For its part, the Sinhalese-dominated government has said it can defeat the LTTE in its northern stronghold and vowed Monday to kill Prabhakaran.

The suicide bombing took place near the office of Welfare Minister Douglas Devananda, reports Reuters. The minister’s personal secretary died and two other people were wounded in the blast, according to hospital officials. An officer of the elite police Special Task Force told Reuters that it was a suicide mission….

The LTTE has fought since 1983 for an independent Tamil homeland in northern Sri Lanka, in a war that has killed around 70,000 people. Tamils make up 11.9 percent of the island’s 20 million people, and almost 74 percent are Sinhalese, reports Bloomberg.

In July, Sri Lanka’s Army flushed the LTTE out of the island’s multiethnic east. Earlier this month, President Mahinda Rajapakse vowed in parliament to “eradicate” terrorism from the country and said that the LTTE had “demonstrated that they will never be ready to surrender arms and agree to a democratic political settlement.”

Unsurprisingly, the renewed conflict has driven away foreign tourists, reports Agence France-Presse. Arrivals fell 20 percent in the first 10 months of the year to 387,790. Tourism is the island fourth-biggest industry.

In an analysis last month in Asia Times Online, security consultant James Voortman said that having taken back the eastern region Sri Lanka now has the upper hand over the LTTE. But the cost of a military victory, if attainable, could be prohibitive.

Defense analysts are divided on whether or not the military can drive the Tigers from their northern stronghold. The proponents of an assault argue that the Tigers are currently weak. There is an element of truth in this, as is seen with the loss of the east and subsequent battles on the northern fringes…However, other defense analysts see this lack of activity as exactly what makes the Tigers even more dangerous. This theory claims that the rebel leadership has dedicated all of its manpower to defending the north. With the Tigers stronghold being heavily fortified, it will not fall easily, and the military is likely to suffer high casualties.

Political Leader of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers Killed in an Airstrike - New York Times, November 3, 2007

NEW DELHI, Nov. 2 — The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan separatist group known for suicide attacks on political and military targets, lost their most prominent international representative on Friday when the head of their political wing was killed in an airstrike by the Sri Lankan military, according to the guerrilla group.

The Tamil Tigers announced the death of the leader, S. P. Tamilselvan, along with those of five associates, in a news release issued early in the afternoon Sri Lanka time. The Sri Lankan military said he had been killed in air force strikes on an area called Thirivearu, near the rebel garrison of Kilinochchi, where the military said senior rebel leaders had gathered for a meeting. There was no independent verification available of exactly when he was killed, or where.

The killing further ratcheted up the stakes in Sri Lanka’s renewed quarter-century-long ethnic conflict between the majority ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government and the rebels, also known as the L.T.T.E. For more than a year, a series of open military attacks and counterattacks, suicide bombings and mysterious abductions has left no pretense that a 2002 cease-fire agreement, which Mr. Tamilselvan had helped draft, still holds.

Krugman, Fearing Fear Itself, New York Times, November 2, 2007

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

Sri Lanka Admits More Damage by Rebel Raid - New York Times, October 25, 2007

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Oct. 24 — A rebel attack on a Sri Lankan air base this week caused far more damage than previously acknowledged, destroying eight aircraft, including a vital surveillance plane, Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake said Wednesday.

The admission, in a statement to Parliament, came amid growing accusations from the opposition that officials had lied about the destruction from Monday’s predawn attack on the Anuradhapura air base.

…the prime minister announced that three helicopters, four training planes and a Beechcraft surveillance plane had been destroyed in the attack, essentially confirming the Tamil reports of the damage. He did not explain the discrepancy.

Peter Bergen, How Osama Bin Laden Beat George W. Bush, TNR, October 15, 2007

The removal of Saddam Hussein would prove to be a boon to Al Qaeda–creating a base for the terrorist organization where none had existed before, energizing jihadists around the word, and confirming for many Muslims bin Laden’s contention that the United States was at war with Islam….

As the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explains, “[T]he Iraq War has become the [`]cause celebre’ for jihadists … and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

David Ignatius - The Dignity Agenda - washingtonpost.com, October 14, 2007

After I mentioned Brzezinski’s ideas about dignity in a previous column, a reader sent me a 1961 essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, which made essentially the same point. A deeply skeptical man who resisted the “isms” of partisan thought, Berlin was trying to understand the surge of nationalism despite two world wars. “Nationalism springs, as often as not, from a wounded or outraged sense of human dignity, the desire for recognition,” he wrote.

“The craving for recognition has grown to be more powerful than any other force abroad today,” Berlin continued. “It is no longer economic insecurity or political impotence that oppresses the imaginations of many young people in the West today, but a sense of the ambivalence of their social status — doubts about where they belong, and where they wish or deserve to belong.”

A final item on my dignity reading list is “Violent Politics,” a new book by the iconoclastic historian William R. Polk. He examines 10 insurgencies through history — from the American Revolution to the Irish struggle for independence to the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation — to make a stunningly simple point, which we managed to forget in Iraq: People don’t like to be told what to do by outsiders. “The very presence of foreigners, indeed, stimulates the sense first of apartness and ultimately of group cohesion.” Foreign intervention offends people’s dignity, Polk reminds us. That’s why insurgencies are so hard to defeat.