from
THE BIG LIE
ON TERROR, ANTISEMITISM, AND IDENTITY
DAVID
SOLWAY
_____________________
Even
those who march left—a little left of right, left—a
little left of right in an effort to accommodate reality must
inevitably stumble and fall executing so awkward a mental gait.
A case in point is Canadian-born intellectual Michael Ignatieff,
who in his latest book, The Lesser Evil, elaborates
the general thesis that the right response to mass casualty
terrorism, even if some of our civil liberties must be temporarily
suspended, is to resist the national security state that necessarily
restricts our liberty and increases distrust among citizens.
Undeterred by the facts on the ground, he urges instead that
we should strive to “strengthen open government”
and to reinvigorate “the institutions of freedom”—a
proposal that in ordinary circumstances should enlist our unreserved
support but in the current situation seems a trifle lame considering
the self-admitted prospect of a collapsed economy and “zones
of devastation sealed off for years.” If a liberal democracy
must respect the rights of the enemy, as he contends, the fact
that this enemy refuses as a matter of policy to do likewise,
has rejected all international conventions governing the conduct
of war, and is planning to inflict upon his target nothing short
of the unthinkable, must qualify the argument if we are to survive
its consequences. In articulating the classic liberal position
that due process and basic dignity “are independent of
conduct and irrevocable under any circumstance,” Ignatieff
comes precariously close to a form of purist Christianity of
a Quaker or Amish stamp, a veritable godsend to the terrorists
in our midst. It is precisely the degree of restraint that is
in question here, as well as the moral fear of coming to resemble
the enemy in the process of defeating him—but a ticking
bomb is not defused by cerebral distinctions that address the
future when there may not be one.
Ignatieff
is especially slippery because in many ways he does seem to
have a grip on the complex issues and hard realities of the
day. He promotes the United States, acknowledges the necessity
of the war on terror, and recognizes, as he writes in The
Lesser Evil, that “defeating terrorism requires violence…and
may require coercion, deception, secrecy and violation of rights,”
and that “liberal societies cannot be defended by herbivores.
We need carnivores to save us.” At the same time, his
libertarian bias has the effect of ensuring that his Praetorian
carnivores will come to behave like harmless, contemplative
herbivores. For the democratic war on terror of which he appears
to approve is made subject to a series of tests that can only
cripple the resolve to fight it effectively, tests such as “the
dignity test—do [coercive measures] violate individual
rights”—that allow us to ensure that such procedures
“preclude cruel and unusual punishment?”; and the
“conservative test,” that is, do coercive measures
deprive detained individuals of judicial review? These are followed
by a chain of further trials, including the test of “open
adversarial review,” the consultation of other nations
and respect for international obligations, and the “last
resort test,” the latter defined as the question concerning
whether “less coercive measures have been tried and failed.”
Another such constraint is the proposed dismissal “of
the carnivores who disgrace the society they are charged to
protect.” But carnivores tend to behave in certain ways
and this is precisely why we require their services in the first
place. The only alternative, if we intend to be consistent,
is to geld them at the start, which would defeat their obvious
purpose. Ignatieff’s conclusion is that, “If all
this adds up to a series of constraints that tie the hands of
our government, so be it.” But of course such criteria
in their stringency, number, and, not least, in the time required
to apply them, would have exactly that effect and the war on
terror will have been critically handicapped and possibly even
lost.
The
two central legal principles Ignatieff likes to tout—the
twin towers, we might say, of “invariance” (laws
are immutable) and “equality” (laws apply to all)—were
damaged (though, fortunately, not irreparably) not by American
legislators or a neoconservative presidency, but by the terrorists
themselves. Commitments to minority rights should certainly,
as he claims, “be maintained as far as possible, in times
of danger.” But how far is as far as possible? And how
justified is it to favour the rights of a minority from whose
ranks the enemy is drawn and in whose bosom he is too often
sheltered? Let us not forget that this is the very enemy responsible
for compelling the majority of the citizenry, or its elected
representatives, to invoke the suspension of some of the rights
Ignatieff is strenuously defending. Civil libertarians will
condemn such revocation as a victory for the enemy and this
is doubtlessly the case up to a degree. Nevertheless,
the victory that might ensue in the absence of such measures
is one that may well be total and surely far more non-revocable
than the principles of invariance and equality sanctified by
the liberal Left. This is not Milton’s war in Heaven in
which the Law need never be suspended or attuned to circumstance.
This is what H. J. Simson, in his important study, British
Rule, and Rebellion, has termed “sub-war,”
which “creates a situation that cannot be met by the laws
and punishments of ordinary times.” To be sure, Ignatieff
does appear at one point to soften his stance, vacillating toward
an acceptance of commonsensical flexibility. But his hastily
cooked-up middle way between invariance and practical effectiveness—that
“laws do derive some of their powers from being difficult
to change, and yet if they are completely unresponsive to emergency
situations, they may be ineffective”—is really a
Baby Bear’s Porridge position, an ambiguous and mainly
verbal compromise, neither hot nor cold, in a world that does
not grant us the luxury of tepid equivocations and that is always
ready to strike in the chink between the self and its contradiction.
And, as we have noted, Ignatieff has set up so many hedges and
conditions against the agencies of revocation and operational
efficiency as to render them pretty well edentulous (perhaps
a reference to Eden when none were needed).
Let
us stay with Ignatieff a moment longer since he provides a good
illustration of how even an ideological dove gradually evolving
hawklet’s talons—he originally approved of the American-led
invasion of Iraq—manages to gain so little purchase on
the current situation. Ignatieff writes, “If apocalyptic
nihilism feeds on political despair, it is in the rational self-interest
of wealthy states to invest in assistance to help authoritarian
societies in the Arab world—societies that have failed
their people—to move toward democracy, even if the denouement
is likely to bring Islamic parties to power.” We should
see how tenuous if not preposterous such “liberal”
pronunciamentos really are. First, it is by no means certain
that what we are now encountering is “apocalyptic nihilism”;
apocalyptic movements may well spring from eschatological religious
principles and appear nihilistic only to those who observe from
the outside, which is more than likely what is happening now.
The war that has been unleashed today is an all-out theological
jihad, rooted in the Islamic scriptures, against both the secular
state and the founding religions of the Western world. In the
words of Jean-François Revel in his recent book Anti-Americanism,
“Islamic terrorism in general is the offspring of a religious
idée fixe and has nothing to do with theories
about poverty. . .On the contrary, Islamists utterly reject
as incompatible with the Qur’an all measures that might
contribute to improvement: democracy, secularism, intellectual
freedom and critical thought, equality for women, pluralism
and openness to other cultures.” Further, how wealthy
states, by which Ignatieff means the Western democracies—as
if the Islamic tyrannies were not already obscenely wealthy—are
to invest in the Arab world, whether materially or through digital
technology, so as to actually reach the disadvantaged beneath
the impermeable layers of autocratic state control is a predicament
that no one has yet been able to resolve, except in the realm
of the political fairy tale. The only way of effecting so revolutionary
a goal that has any possibility of success is “regime
change,” although the outcome of such interventions is
always problematic and runs counter to majoritarian liberal
thinking.
Finally,
if such assistance were to bring Islamist parties to power,
the chaos that would ensue on the international scene would
be catastrophic. Democracy is not a panacea that cures all ills
merely by being introduced, but is contingent upon a host of
keystone conditions—on entrenched safeguards, the separation
of Church and State, the schooling of the electorate, a sound
economic basis, a robust and solvent middle class, a functioning
and responsive bureaucracy, the political will for the ballot
box, and, in particular, guarantees of electoral repeatability.
But the concept of the rotation of power is alien to Islam,
except by the time-vetted methods of assassination, revolt,
and consanguinity. If the democratic option serves only to put
a terrorist regime in power, on the principle of “one
man, one vote, one time,” then democracy becomes the means
whereby violence is institutionalized, as, for example, was
the case in Palestine when Hamas emerged victorious—the
Hamas Charter promises to “spread the spirit of Jihad
among the Umma, clash with the enemies and join the
ranks of the Jihad fighters”—or in Lebanon when
Hizbullah assumed a lynchpin role in the establishment of a
new national parliament. Worse, merely imagine a violence-prone
Algeria, a militarily powerful Turkey, a nuclear Pakistan operating
as full-fledged, radical Islamic regimes on the world stage—very
real possibilities. Indeed it is Pakistan, with its nuclear
arsenal and its fundamentalist parties threatening to assassinate
the president and assume control of the government, that fuels
the gravest nightmare scenario. And Iran, as we know, is well
on its way to nuclear enrichment and is constantly ratcheting
up its anti-Western rhetoric. According to a report filed by
the Adnkronos News agency, Hojatolislam Gholam Hasani, who represents
the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, delivered
a sermon at a Tehran mosque in which he stressed that, “Freedom,
democracy and stupidities of this type…are not in sync
with the principles of Islam. Islam always spoke with a sword
in hand, and I don’t see why now we should change attitude
and talk with other civilizations.”
The
Western belief that the accession to power of Islamist groups
and parties through democratic means will lead to moderation,
responsibility, and an end to terrorism by forcing them to “get
real” in their dealings with the empirical world is completely
without merit and contradicted by the facts—one look at
Arafat’s Palestine and Khomeini’s Iran should have
dispelled all illusions about so improbable an alternative.
Add to this dismal scenario the multitude of terrorist organizations
and states who might soon deploy their own nuclear and biological
arsenal (or already have them) and it becomes nothing less than
a type of lunacy to maintain that the mere sowing of the democratic
seed among the Islamic peoples will produce a flourishing harvest.
Islam will see to the burning of the fields. The educated innocence
of Ignatieff-style academics can only do us inestimable harm
and must be diligently countered by a straight-shooting, no-nonsense,
aquiline realism if we are to survive our fateful appointment
with the most pitiless of enemies.
Ignatieff
proceeds to exacerbate the mischief in his keynote address to
the Banff Television Festival in June 2004, in which he defines
terrorism in Clausewitzian terms as “politics by other
means.” These are “disgraceful, illegitimate means,”
he concedes, but nevertheless “means that serve the needs
and aspirations of people.” Which brings up an obvious
question: what needs and aspirations of which people were being
served by the slaughter of September 11, 2001? The sandstone
dwellers of Yemen? The gun-toting tribesmen of North and South
Waziristan? The fanatic misogynists of the Wahabbi peninsula?
The metastasizing cells of cateran guerrillas? The Palestinians
who danced in the streets and handed out candy in the days after
9/11 to celebrate the death of defenceless innocents? Somehow
I doubt it. And since he mentions as well the Palestinian-trained
Red Brigades and the Baader Meinhoff cadre of the 70s and 80s,
may we not also inquire what particular stratum of the population
their adoption of terrorist methods might imaginably have benefitted?
Rather
than engage in such unanchored speculation, Ignatieff might
have been better advised to consult Amir Taheri’s Holy
Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism or the research
findings of Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside Al Qaeda.
Gunaratna has shown that in the decade 1993-2003, 86% of suspected
and committed terrorists were Muslims and the rest were mainly
converts to Islam. It is also disturbing that Ignatieff buys
into the contemporary cliché that the Islamist terrorists
murder and maim from political and economic desperation, forgetting
that the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers hailed
mainly from privileged backgrounds and that Osama bin Laden
never lacked for money. Ignatieff is one of the more respectable
and intelligent members of the Solonic comity; he is undone
not by irrational anger or a prior political allegiance, but
by the boy-scout ingenuousness of the well-tempered citizen.
Nevertheless, that he should reveal himself as so lazy a thinker
and so credulous an observer speaks volumes for the competence
of the constituency of which he forms a part.
David
Solway on the Jewish enemies of Israel in the
National Post.
The
Big Lie: Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity
Publisher: Lester, Mason & Begg
ISBN: 978-0-9781765-0-1
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