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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 30, 2001
A devil's pact
By striking a target the terrorist is accomplishing two things. He is striking one thing and he is not striking another. It is the principle of selection at work a statement is being made that is both negative and positive as all things in this world have their polarities. Now if the "Islamist" terrorists (crucial distinction: not Islamic but Islamist; not the Muslim religion but political factions distorting the religion to violent ends) had the means they would happily annihilate the whole of the United States and the rest of the Western world including us. Major Islamist terrorist operations have been conducted after all against seven of the countries in the "G-8" group of nations and luck alone prevented several of the other hits from being as spectacular as that on the World Trade Centre. The terrorists do not presently have the means. Instead they choose symbolic targets. The World Trade Centre in New York was chosen in 2001 just as it was in 1993 and just as it was chosen in an illustration on a calendar distributed well before the Sept. 11 attack to Muslim schoolchildren in the Netherlands. (This calendar depicted an Islamic air force descending on Manhattan aiming for the World Trade Centre -- it has been much discussed in the Dutch media.) Symbols are terribly important even to us. Look how the Americans have wrapped themselves in their flag or how our prime minister has been babbling about his "core values". There is no escaping symbols. The World Trade Centre was we all know a symbol of American power prestige wealth. At another level the even taller twin Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia were commissioned as a kind of Islamic and Asian response to it -- a statement of polarity and competitive if imitative pride -- though paradoxically these had a European master architect as the "WTC" had a Japanese one. Much has indeed been made of the WTC as a symbol of America but to begin to plumb the Islamist mind we must see the symbol more completely. I have seen columnists argue: "But they don't understand! It was not just a symbol of America the buildings had people in it from all over the world!" They do understand. The WTC was a citadel of modernity pluralism irreligion. Its international workforce was an intrinsic part of its meaning. An Egyptian terrorist in all probability flew a plane into a building that he knew would contain many Egyptians working in New York. We must take that in. They were among his intended victims; and they were not "innocents" in his mind. In his mind they were traitors working for the enemy. And the terrorist imagined himself to be a kind of avenging angel. Please understand I am hardly defending this terrorist point-of-view I am no kind of cultural relativist. I am trying to understand it in the cause of defeating it as a doctor tries to understand a disease. Turn the scene to Jerusalem. The terrorists from the West Bank from Lebanon and Syria and beyond would if they could destroy all of Israel and perhaps every living Jew. The propagandists from Hamas Hezbollah Egyptian Jihad Al Qaida and many "more moderate" organizations have never tried to conceal that long-term aspiration in fact have boasted of it to raise their funds. It took tremendous pressure from the United States to get Yasser Arafat to remove a statement in the preamble of the PLO constitution that expressed this purpose -- the annihilation of Israel -- and when it was finally removed it was done quietly. Discussion within the Palestinian community was actually suppressed. The terrorists have not the means to destroy Israel have been able only to hit symbolic targets and then for the most part only by using suicide bombers. There is an interesting pattern to these hits. The targets are invariably "main street" locations places like coffee shops and pizzerias a shopping promenade. There has never been to my knowledge a suicide attack on a Yeshiva or any other symbol of the "ultra-orthodox" Judaism that corresponds in some tortuous way to the imagined "ultra-orthodox" Islam of Wahabi fanaticism. In a strange demented way the terrorists cannot imagine that to be their real enemy but rather they instinctively target the modern secular infidel Israel. In the twilit terrorist mind as in that of the Nazi "true believer" modernity The West is a conspiracy of "Jewish bankers". Unlike the German Nazis Arab Islamists cannot be "anti-semitic" for racially they are semites themselves. They are most certainly anti-Jewish but as I know at first-hand they will never admit that they have any prejudice even after making a declaration such as Death to the Jews! In their minds they are envisioning "Jewish bankers" -- mental caricatures imagined to rule the modern West. They will even explain that the Jews they are attacking are not real Jews but rather apostates -- secular modernists who deserve no mercy. Some will go further still to argue that they are trying to do "the real Jews" a favour then make a distinction between "Jews" and "Zionists" that comes from the far end of the rainbow -- from a place we can't visit but see from afar. They choose carefully their symbolic targets. To them the WTC was a symbol of the "Jewish conspiracy" and so is the Pentagon. Likewise these are symbols of "pluralism" -- of the modernist secularist Americanism that "the Jews" have imposed on the world. And we who happen not even to be Jewish are the "Christian Crusaders" who have bought into this plot. We are all one in the eyes of this demented enemy. I've been listening all week to the many Canadians smugly condemning the United States on CBC radio and elsewhere. In one way or another and not always subtly the Americans are accused of bringing this horror upon themselves by "their foreign policy" or by "their arrogance" or for some similar reason. I have heard several express a kind of pride that Canada has never been the target of a major hit by Islamist terrorists. And this is true as I mentioned above: we are the only major Western democracy that has not previously been made a target -- notwithstanding CSIS estimates that there are several hundred members of radical Islamist groups lurking within our borders. I ask my reader to think about this for the next week. Should we be proud to have been excused as a target? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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