An Inquiry into The Nature of Terrorism
Since September 11, 2001, America has become cogently aware of a new global threat to its stability which has been termed terrorism. The source and nature of this threat is, however, far less clear. What might drive a person to hijack and fly an airliner into a building full of civilians is something foreign to our psychology. To Americans, it is madness, and a madness which begets violence against us and demands justice.
On the one hand, Americans have realized that peace and stability in part depends upon the very reaction to this threat. On the other hand, it has become clear that seeing things in terms of an “Axis of Evil,” wherein we can clearly draw the battle lines and say “these are our enemies,” and deal with them as such is an insufficient strategy. If it were so simple then Afghanistan could be abandoned shortly after its infrastructure was crippled. The ousting of Saddam Hussein, as an act of justice, could be left at that.
The conflict itself, as a full scale “War on Terror,” never fit into the clothing of justice alone. It was necessary for it to wear the clothing of a greater cause. Quickly after the reaction to the incident which took place on September 11th, it was reinterpreted as something more than a quest for justice. It was a quest to bring democracy. It became a quest to solve the problems which had allowed this threat against the U.S. to incubate in the first place. It was seemingly decided that what had driven these men to fly a plane into a building full of civilians was, then, a lack of democracy, and the true justice might then be to depose of these enemies of democracy, which, in their lack of it, had misunderstood the nature of American society as a threat to their way of life.
Before examining too closely the American understanding of the incident however, one should first examine the statements of Bin Laden, the so-called mastermind of the September 11th attacks regarding his understanding of America and the motivations of Al Qaeda.
“For over half a century, Muslims in Palestine have been slaughtered and assaulted and robbed of their honor and of their property. Their houses have been blasted, their crops destroyed. And the strange thing is that any act on their part to avenge themselves or to lift the injustice befalling them causes great agitation in the United Nations which hastens to call for an emergency meeting only to convict the victim and to censure the wronged and the tyrannized whose children have been killed and whose crops have been destroyed and whose farms have been pulverized.”
– Osama bin Laden, May 1998
“We swore that America wouldn’t live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel’s interest above its own people’s interest. America won’t get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel.”
– Osama bin Laden, October 2001
For the moment, set aside the question of whether or not Bin Laden had a hand in masterminding the efforts of the hijackers, for it is clear that regardless of whether he set the particular plan into motion, he is an ideological face of American opposition. Now, Bin Laden has made the nature of his anti-American sentiments clear enough. However, there is a certain disconnect between the motivations that Bin Laden himself clearly possesses, which is to end the violence against the Palestinian people began by the warfare waged in the creation of the nation of Israel which persists to this day, backed by Western military and financial support, and the motivation of the attackers that was described to the American people by George W. Bush and the American media. In 2001, George W. Bush stated that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon of freedom and opportunity.”
Bush’s motivation for making such a statement is clear enough to characterize the foes of America with a broad stroke. It is not anything specific that the attackers demand, the attackers are opposed to freedom and opportunity. The very idea seems ridiculous, but it is still oft-mentioned to this day that the perpetrators of terrorism are primarily motivated by their religion, or by some hatred of American ideology, rather than opposition to American actions on the world stage.
The question is then how was this piece of rhetoric turned into a justification for things like anti-Muslim sentiments, and turned into a justification for the Iraq war? The answer lies in a proper understanding of two ideas around which America has oriented its foreign policy: The “War on Terror,” and the “Axis of Evil.” The two terms lay in bed together at night, and both fundamentally rely upon a super-nationalist self-understanding of the American worldview. That is to say, the reaction against the terrorist threat which brought the deaths of several thousand Americans was characterized in such a way that in order to support a national response to it, it seems that one must buy into an idea that America, itself, is inherently just in all its actions, and opposition by foreigners with regard to its policies itself constitutes being an enemy of freedom and justice altogether. An attack with pragmatic motivations, to fight back against American oppression of the Palestinian people, was interpreted as something that was done out of purely ideological interest – opposition to American identity itself.
America is now many years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what has been accomplished? Finally, the death of Osama Bin Laden has been brought about. He, as a person, has been brought to justice. But what does this mean in terms of the War on Terror? As a codex of the enemies of freedom and justice, it would seem that the idea of the Axis of Evil has already failed us, evidenced by virtue of the fact that it is rarely even mentioned today. It has become clear that American ‘enemies’ and their motivations are not so black and white, though in the reception of news of the death of Bin Laden, this has again been momentarily forgotten. For its part, it seems like a small victory in what has been a long and difficult road.
Was the U.S. truly victorious in its fight against Bin Laden though? What seemed clear to the American people – support for the democratic nation of Israel, and opposition to the enemies of democracy who oppose it, the Palestinians, no longer seems clear at all. Anti-Israeli sentiment is on the rise in the U.S. and over time Bin Laden’s actual statements regarding U.S. policies have risen to the surface. Without the context of an inherently racist viewpoint — that the fundamentalist Muslims are driven by hatred of American identity — it would almost seem that Bin Laden makes sense and never operated from such a distance from an almost American sense of justice as was originally implied. Like the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the attackers were motivated, in part, by a sense of justice, a sense that the American people in the broad sense were the enemies of the Palestinians.
Although the terrorist sect known as Al Qaeda is most likely much weaker today than it was at the beginning of the U.S. war against it, anti-American sentiment itself has not at all subsided and the U.S. has painted itself a host of new enemies. It has become clear that what America labels enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan are not so much fundamentalist haters of American identity or even political radicals, but the desperate casualties in what has become a drawn out, American-led occupation of those countries.
In bringing matters of culture and conflict into scrutiny, it is important to avoid the temptations of suggesting first and final causes. It would be naive to simply blame Bush for post September 11th bloodlust, it is not as if politicians in democratic societies (as corrupt and unlikable as they may be) are wholly unrepresentative of the interests of their constituents. In the aftermath of September 11th, there was certainly a sort of unity displayed by both Congress and the American public. The time for political scapegoating and opportunism was ripe, so long as one built one’s case upon the common-sense supposition that “we are right and our enemies are wrong.”
As David Hume, one of the fathers of modern skepticism and empiricism notes, with regard to ethics that no “is” necessarily justifies an “ought.” Science, even if it is a superior methodology for describing and investigating what is, cannot logically form the basis of our suppositions of what ought to be the case. This is not to say that science does not play a role in informing action, it’s that it informs action in accordance with existent social mores, rather than forming the basis of those social mores. Outlawing murder, for example, within a society is not based upon a scientific determination of the wrongness of murder, it is based in fears and desires which are circumstantially informed, and thus necessarily built upon what came before.
The neoconservative religious right should not be left out of the equation either. Their reaction to the incident was admittedly predictable. What is worth noting, however, is how fundamentally similar it turns out to be to the atheistic reaction. Each makes the same normative argument (rational Americans are fundamentally better than the savage/fundamentalist/inherently violent/radicalized ‘others’) and seeks the same ends.
Sam Harris writes, “as a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not.” Unfortunately, experience proves that not to be the case. The ideology at work in Bin Laden’s blurring of the line between enemy and innocent seems to work just as well in developed society as it does in what is ultimately made out to be savage society. Each side seems to endorse torture and murder of one’s enemies, and seems to view itself as the innocent victim.
It is important to remember that Bin Laden was an advocate of Sharia Law and a devout Muslim, he was partially informed in his practices by his Muslim identity just as American atheists and rationalists are not immune to having their notions informed in practice by their American identity. The question with regard to Americans, however, is whether Muslim identity inspires, by nature, terroristic conflict with Western society.
I intend no defense of Sharia law or Bin Laden’s actions or beliefs. However, it is only when all pretensions of divine notions of cultural or ethical superiority are thrown out the window that the issues of terrorism, nationalism, and imperialism on a macro-logical scale can begin to make sense. Ideologically each culture is similar in the way in which it regards its enemies on an ethical level, and similar in the means by which it casts them. What is different between the two cultures, what leads them into opposition with one another, is not rooted in American love of reason and democracy nor is it rooted in Palestinian or Muslim hatred for it. In order to understand the processes which have resulted in each party’s ideologies it is necessary to observe the historical circumstances in which they arose.
The Arabic disdain for the Western powers stems largely for the West’s hand in the creation of Israel and its unilateral military armament of it, a disdain that would feed into elements of the rise of Islamism in the late 20th century. The initial creation of the modern state of Israel was something that occurred largely as a by-product of British colonialism at the end of World War I. The recently conquered Ottoman Empire was in British hands, and it was deemed appropriate to allow Jews to settle in what was decided to be their historical homeland. Between then and now what has occurred was a declaration of independence from Palestine on behalf of the Jewish settlers and the creation of the nation of Israel. The West has assisted Israel financially and militarily in its colonization of the Middle East.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, the population of Israel is approximately 7,718,600, counting only those who live in permanent housing. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, there are approximately 4.8 million registered Palestinian refugees existent from the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Roughly 30% of these people currently reside in refugee camps, representing a people who were stripped of both opportunity and freedom in large part by Western indifference.
From the beginning, the creation and support of Israel has been sanctioned and assisted by Western policies of asymmetrical warfare – a foreign policy stance which necessarily pits the powerless against the powerful. The failures of the policies of asymmetrical warfare have been viciously apparent since the Vietnam conflict. While Iraq and Afghanistan are far from being “another Vietnam,” they do engender similar attitudes on the part of Americans. The attitude which underlies the notion of asymmetrical warfare is fundamentally imperialistic in nature, in that it presumes that it is America’s place to determine, by right of wealth and force, the course of affairs in weaker nations to its own benefit. It is clear that at its source, this conflict is not one in which religion or even ideology can be said to be at the core, these attitudes are for their parts simply along for the ride.
At its bottom, this is a conflict born in the contradiction between the economic interests of the powerful and the powerless. Western imperialism is, by virtue of its policies of asymmetrical warfare, primarily opportunistic in nature. It is a virtue of capitalistic relations of production and procurement that the wealthy have economic leverage to exploit misfortune and poverty, whether through sheer purchasing power, bribery, or simple military force. The powerful have these powers, and the powerless do not.
While the West has in its Arsenal the legitimate, normative powers of exploitation and corruption (it can afford to put soldiers on the ground in military uniforms and call it an official war), the Palestinian people are not afforded this right or ability. As a group, the Muslim community simply does not have this power in proportion to the West. Any means of struggle against Western expansion of power, justified or not, is necessarily retroactively considered illegitimate in accordance with Western society’s mores. In Western society, the normative, moral path to take when one has been wronged is to appeal to authority to correct the problem. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have no authority to appeal to as they are violently brutalized by the predominant authority.
Here we find the core of the “terrorist problem.” Terrorism is, by definition, violence which is enacted by those whom do not wield any formally recognized authority to commit that violence, and do not have the economic means to wage full scale warfare. These conflicts are not born out of culture or religion per-se (though each can play a part in reinforcing the cycle of violence), but in the marginalization of the powerless by the powerful. What the War on Terror thus represents is the formalization of a military mode of oppression against the displaced.
It would be naive to say that Bin Laden is simply an anti-imperialist who happens to be a Muslim. He, too, co-opted religion and cultural norms within the Muslim world to violent ends. The point is, however, that neither he, nor the majority of his supporters, nor the Palestinian people are motivated in their hatred of the West in particular by some desire to force their way of living upon the West. It is the West’s, intentional or not, forceful deprivation of their power to determine the course of their existences that primarily motivates anti-Western sentiment.
Written by Ross Wheeler, a young working class Marxist who believes in the necessity of letting suffering speak.
