RELUCTANT BELLIGERENCY

By Gil Troy

The Forward, THE IVORY TOWER, December 20, 2002, p. 8

Snipers around Washington, D.C. shoot 13 people. Fifty Chechens hold 700 theatergoers hostage in Moscow. A nightclub explodes in Bali, killing nearly 200 mostly Australian revelers. Terrorists attack an Israeli-owned hotel near Mombasa, killing two brothers and 6 Kenyan dancers, among others, while co-conspirators narrowly miss downing an Arkia charter jet with 261 passengers.

It is only natural to wonder what, if anything, links these vicious assaults -- and what, if anything, this terrorism epidemic teaches us. As liberal Westerners, we are drawn to and repelled by a coherent narrative that unites these evil assaults against the everyday. As media consumers, we often see complex events reduced to bold headlines. We are addicted to the media’s simplistic roller coaster of up-and-down, black-and-white stories. Life makes sense when CNN produces bold graphics.

Nevertheless, we recoil at some of the linkages to which our logic leads us. We see Islamic extremism festering behind John Allen Muhammad’s murder spree, the Chechen smertniki, the Indonesian extremists of Jemaa Islamiya,  Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, and the unholy trinity of Islamic Jihad-Hamas-Hezbollah terrorism. We see how Palestinians perfected this form of terror -- and have attracted many apologists.  No principled democrat wants to see Islam caricatured or Muslims ostracized. But many Westerners await widespread, forceful denunciations of the Islamicist scourge from within the Muslim world. After all, it is Muslims who are most capable of ostracizing and ultimately squelching their own extremists.

Unhappy with this narrative, fearful of being “racist” – when the real issues center around ideology, theology, and nationalism – many on campus have blinded themselves to this very real threat. Many intellectuals who despise fundamentalists in the Midwest show remarkable tolerance for fundamentalists in the Mideast.We hear a lot of simplistic sloganeering about “root causes,” “American imperialism,” “America’s oil addiction,” and, in a case of Freudianism run amok, Bush Junior’s need to finish the job in Iraq his father failed to. It is amazing how long intelligent people can sustain a conversation about the potential war in Iraq without mentioning September 11.

Rather than trying to recreate their parents’ much romanticized experiences in the 1960s, today’s students need to learn from their parents’ and grandparents’ failures, wherein many of the smartest people in those generations woke up too slowly to the threats facing the Western world. In fact, for all the progressive caricatures of the West as a haven of bloodthirsty racists, Western democracies are slow to anger.

Throughout the twentieth century we tended to be reluctant belligerents. In the 1930s, democrats, especially campus radicals, hesitated to recognize the threat of Nazism, preferring to excuse, minimize and appease. During the Cold War, Western democracies, and most especially students, preferred to avoid demonizing Soviet Communists. Progressives rolled their eyes when in 1976 Ronald Reagan called Communism “a form of insanity, a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature.” Until the Soviet Union imploded, defeated by American resolve and internal decay, most academics deemed Reagan’s words unnecessarily provocative.

Of course, today’s situation is more complicated than CNN headlines or Reaganesque sloganeering suggest. Local conditions vary, and affect the situation.Still, it is easy to connect the dots. The Washington sniper seems to have been inspired by the Muslim murderers of September 11, just as many of the terrorist groups drew inspiration, training and financing from the toxic Taliban-Al Qaeda web centered in Afghanistan until the American and allied counterattack.

Even more disturbing is a deep hatred against Westerners and Western mores. This nihilism poisons much of the rhetoric: “I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living,” a Chechen kidnapper proclaimed, echoing one Hamas leader who called the Jews weak because they love life too much.

It is all too easy, amid these crimes, to succumb to anger, hatred, despair, paralysis. Such reactions risk giving the terrorists a moral victory.It is also too easy to bury our heads in the sand. It sounds mean-spirited and cliché but it is probably true that many of the intensely secular, pathologically open-minded campus apologists for the terrorists would be the fundamentalists’ first victims.

One need not be a warmonger, or a Republican, to respond effectively to this scourge. We need to learn from the Israelis, who continue to work and play – all while remaining vigilant against terrorism. Israelis are fighting aggressively against terrorism, even as they engage in a soul-wrenching internal debate about how to resolve the Palestinian conflict.

We need to learn from those courageous Iranian students who have been protesting the death sentence meted out to Hashem Aghajeri, an Iranian war veteran and historian accused of blasphemy by Tehran’s mullahocracy. These students recognize the Islamicists for what they are and are demanding reforms. It is a scandal that American campuses have not mobilized to echo these calls, to support these students, and to defend the principles on which Aghajaeri has staked his life.

More than a decade before the Soviet Union collapsed, Reagan sighed, “I wonder how much more misery it will cause before it disappears.” That troubling question resounds throughout the world these awful days, uniting mourners from Maryland to Melbourne – and even those of us who have so far not suffered directly. We must make it clear that we have zero tolerance for terrorism against everyday innocents, whatever the cause, wherever it strikes.And we should be looking to our campuses for clarity and leadership on this question, not obfuscation and apologias.

The second printing of Gil Troy’s latest book, “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today” (Bronfman Jewish Education Centre), was recently released.