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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 26, 2004
Nuts
A friend writes: "I find that reading the news these days with hostage beheadings front and centre is quite depressing. You have to keep up with all of the horrors; doesn't it drive you nuts?" The repeated imagery of hostages taken their pleas broadcast internationally on Al Jazeera so that we can fully appreciate their humanity then videos released in which we can watch the victim scream out his horror while a hooded man uses a knife to saw through his neck and other hooded men stand by shouting Allahu akhbar, which means God is great! Or the imagery of the little Christian children in Beslan trying to run away from the school in which they were held captive in which they had drunk their own pee to survive dehydration running from the bombs set off in the gymnasium some running with their mothers and being machine-gunned in the back by more men shouting Allahu akhbar! Passenger planes themselves full of the living flown into office towers in the middle of Manhattan; trapped people leaping while the buildings burned from the highest floors when the heat became unbearable; the sound captures of those bodies landing: thud thud thud. Buses full of women and children and old men blown to pieces by suicide bombers in Jerusalem. The police forensic specialists and the Orthodox devouts using tweezers to gather the particles of Jewish flesh stuck to the surrounding pavement. Successive stills from a security camera above a railway platform in Madrid showing three successive flashes and in the glare the last nanoseconds in the lives of hundreds of commuters in the trains and on the platforms. Views through the rubble of a nightclub in Denpassar crowded with hundreds of Australian tourists pulverized by similarly timed explosions. Blood broken glass. And the many other scenes after car-bombs and truck-bombs and jelly-bombs and jacket-bombs: in Karachi in Istanbul in Riyadh in Tunis in Kabul in the courtyards of little Assyrian churches in rural Iraq or on the sidewalks in front of their small shops in Basra. Not random not spontaneous combustion but aimed in each case at the foreigners the Christians the Jews the Sufis the Yankees their "accomplices". And the chant from supportive demonstrators taking to the streets after such incidents in places so diverse as Brooklyn Rotterdam Paris Cairo Ramallah Tehran San'a Lahore: "Allahu akhbar Allahu akhbar!" This is an aside but I should like to mention that I am proud to work for a Canadian media organization that has been criticized for inserting the word "terrorists" into wire copy to characterize the perpetrators of such deeds; to work with editors who are capable of refusing the euphemisms that are offered in the wire-service style books. "Terrorists" is an objective description of a person who commits an act of carnage in order to advance a cause; words like "militant" or "radical" or "activist" or "rebel" or "gunman" or "captor" or "guerrilla" or "commando" ("membres du commando" in Agence France-Presse) are moral evasions. According to Reuters' oft-repeated dictum: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Yes and one man's Nazi is another man's saviour of Germany and Stalin was my garrulous Uncle Joe. It is an outrageous moral evasion to take the criminal at his word and I am proud of every person in my trade who refuses to play along. Letters and e-mails tend to come in thematic clumps; I noticed several like the one I first quoted in the last few weeks and they suggest to me the world is getting tired. What the world does when the world gets tired is beyond my prognostication but in answer to the question that was posed: No. It does not drive me nuts. I have no more right to allow it to drive me nuts than I have the right to ignore it: for an evil on the scale of what we face demands a coherent response. This in turn requires a clear head. The purpose of terrorism is to terrify: to drive us nuts to leave us incoherent to make us run away. To spread fear and confusion feeding upon each other. To make for instance the American electorate think: "O dear Iraq is a nightmare we had better get out right away." But that will not do. Instead we must look as calmly as we can right into the heart of the carnage and find unblinking a way to bring it to an end. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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