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the Alfred P. Murrah building and 167 people were blown to bits
by McVeigh in 1995, President Bill Clinton and many of his allies
immediately suggested that radio talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh
and other ''purveyors of hatred and division" were partly to
blame. In a planned speech, disseminated by a compliant media, Clinton
claimed that "they spread hate.... [and] leave the impression,
by their very words, that violence is acceptable."
To some extent,
and not without the aid of some mistaken conservatives, liberals
are repeating this smear in the aftermath of the September 11 slaughter.
This time, however, the smear is only that right-of-center advocates
are domestic versions of the Taliban, not that they created the
Taliban. Often enough, the smear is casual, even accidental, as
if the perpetrators didn't quite realize they were saying that mainstream
Republicans are just another form of the murderous Taliban and al
Qaeda lunatics. Another common smear is the unqualified use of the
term "religious Taliban," which puts all believers —
from the Adventists to the Zoroastrians — in the same basket
as the kooks from Kandahar.
Even aside
from fairness to citizens and political rivals, it is important
that Americans get a correct word association for the Taliban and
Osama bin Laden. The wrong word associations hinder an understanding
of our enemy, and hinder efforts by us and moderate Muslims to agree
on a common strategy against our enemy, which is radical Islam.
The importance of this word association is made obvious by President
Bush, who frequently describes this as a war against "terrorism,"
thus diverting attention from the broader political and military
campaign against Islamic radicalism and its allies.
Hopefully,
Bush has a good Realpolitik reason to use this circumscribed "terrorist"
term — but pundits don't have such excuses for their mistakes.
Peter Bergen, author Holy War Inc., says bin Laden's early
education by radical clerics was "as if Ronald Reagan and Milton
Friedman's brother had taught him about capitalism." U.S.
News & World Report kept secret the identity of a "prominent
Democrat" even as he smeared GOP leaders as a "Republican
Taliban." In the New York Times, Tom Friedman says the
war is against "religious totalitarianism" and that religions
— including U.S. churches — should give up their claim
to a monopoly on the truth. In Slate, David Plotz informed
his readers that "conservative clerics are pressuring Pakistan
to adopt Taliban-style government." In a strategy paper by
three leading lights of the Democratic party, James Carville, Stanley
Greenberg, and Robert Shrum made a crude effort to tie the Taliban
to the GOP, saying "we [Democrats] are defending freedom of
choice and religion. Religious fundamentalism and fanaticism are
uncomfortable with the life choices and gender roles at the center
of American life." A search of the Nexis database for media
reports over the last 90 days shows 60 articles that associate the
Taliban with the right wing or with conservatives.
Consider a
comparison of U.S. conservatives and economic right-wingers against
the Taliban and bin Laden. Both the Taliban and bin Laden hate the
free market, political caution, social moderation, personal autonomy,
and new technologies that might distract their warriors from bloody
warfare. They seek to destroy other religions, political balances
of power, or any portions of civil society that are not under their
sway, all so they can impose their radical, bearded utopia on a
very unwilling populace. There's nothing there that a mainstream
conservative or right-winger, nor a mainstream liberal, could support.
One can tie
American mainstream conservative or right-wing political movements
to bin Laden only by using a very weak and essentially dishonest
standard — for example, that if some people on the Right disapprove
of some of the same things that bin Laden wants to wipe out, then
they must be political cousins. The unfairness of this standard
is easily demonstrated by unfairly applying it to liberals, left-wingers
and environmentalists. "The environmentalist Unabomber showed
bin Laden's supporters the potential for mail delivery of deadly
terrorist attacks"; "New Left activist Sara Jane Olson
vigorously opposed U.S. foreign policy, as does Mullah Omar";
"Like many liberals, bin Laden believes that ideology trumps
human nature"; "To avoid spiritual pollution, the Taliban
bans entrepreneurs from selling items such as Britney Spears CDs.''
The occasional
comparison of the Taliban and al Qaeda with fascism is somewhat
easier, but still distant. I don't care which of the injured parties
feels more insulted when bin Laden and the Taliban are compared
to Hitler and the Brownshirts, but the differences are important
— bin Laden has an ideology that goes far beyond his Arab ethnic
group, and the radical Islamists have a fierce religious fervor,
thus cleaving any significant connections to the religion-hating,
ethnically obsessed Nazi party (despite their shared hatred of Jewish
people).
Moreover, there
are some connections between bin Laden, the Taliban, and the left
side of the spectrum. Like the authoritarian Left (and the fascist
Right), they want to impose central rules that trump myriad property
rights and the right to earn a living. Writing in The Weekly
Standard, Waller R. Newell, a professor of political science
at Carleton University in Ottawa, argues that the European postmodern
Left from the 1950s steered the nascent Islamic political movement
toward a radical opposition against America and capitalism, rather
than against corrupt local autocrats. Bin Laden is also willing
to ally with Saddam, who sees himself as the Stalin of the Union
of Socialist Secular Arabia. Like the Left, the radical Islamists
are trying to win utopia in a different dimension — for them,
heavenly paradise; for the Communists, future Communism with shared
property and Socialist Realist art. Amusingly enough, both of these
utopias prominently feature free sex — although the Islamists'
is post-martydom sex with doe-eye virgins, who, I assume, get centrally
subsidized birth control.
Of course,
such connections range from the influential to the ridiculous —
but even the weakest meets the same standard that liberals have
used to tie conservatives and right-wingers to the Taliban and bin
Laden. Under this weak standard, any author could justify grotesque
comparisons such as "bin Laden, the communitarian dissident,"
or perhaps, "the theocratic socialist Mullah Omar," or
maybe, "Al Qaeda's call for a simpler, more spiritual life
matches the yearning of many Western liberals for an escape from
high-tech society."
The second
type of casual smear by liberals is the broad association of the
Taliban with religion. Consider the appropriate word-association,
and then apply the antonym: Religion is to the Taliban as secularism
is to... the Nazis and the Communists.
Like Nazism
and Communism, the Taliban's agenda is unique, bloody-minded, and
widely reviled. Just as there are secularists who do not want to
be associated with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, there are several billion
Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and others who really have
very little in common with the radical Islamists. Secular liberals,
considering their frequent breast-beating on the subjects of profiling
and discrimination against groups, should understand this concern.
Indeed, liberals have a personal incentive to prevent the rise of
such lazy ideological smears, as they otherwise might find other
pundits writing such unfair phrases as "The secular Nazi forces
killed another million Russians that month," or "Stalin
and Mao — both of whom championed a high wall of separation
between church and state — murdered roughly 80 million peasants
between them." That, as we well know, would be using guilt-by-association
to suggest that ordinary secularists — Bill Moyers for example
— are in cahoots with those three Christian-hating butchers
of the 20th century. Indeed, this type of smearing could go far
beyond religion. For instance: "Like the Sierra Club and Zero
Population Growth, the environmentally-minded Heinrich Himmler sought
to reduce the world's population" — or perhaps, "Lenin,
a prominent supporter of science, was busy that day signing execution
orders."
It is not clear
why liberals — and even some non-liberals — associate
the Taliban and bin Laden with the Right and with all religion.
To some extent, it is doubtless because fascists are a more reviled
enemy than the more murderous Communists, and some pundits and media
editors like to label their enemies as fascists. Also, certain liberals
habitually and crudely view all religious people as cut from the
same backward cloth. Or maybe it's because post-Sixties American
liberals want to link authoritarian extremists to all religion so
they can avoid dealing with each religion as an independent political
force — and a very powerful, very democratic, and very popular
obstacle to their secular arguments for moral autonomy. Perhaps,
as with Clinton's 1995 statement, it is simply a desire to smear
their political rivals as enemy sympathizers. But this mocha caffe
McCarthyism, unlike Tailgunner Joe, has no evidence of nuclear spies,
shared organizations, secret pumpkins, and terrorist stipends linking
domestic conservatives and right-wingers with the radical Islamists.
Of course,
my little effort to help pundits distinguish between the Taliban
and mainstream ideologies is not helped by the noted religious conservatives
Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. I don't want to defend Falwell's
gyrations or Robertson's comments and unsavory business dealings
— nor should I even have to explain the vast difference between
the Taliban and the two conservatives from Virginia. But liberals,
often eager to demonize the two, should try to remember that whatever
the quality of their theology, moral reasoning, and political astuteness,
they do not incite slaughter, warfare, or the political isolation
of women.
The good news
is that the media is not greatly magnifying the liberal smear. Perhaps
the most accurate descriptions of the Taliban and bin Laden —
that they are "radical Islamic" or "extremist Muslim,"
or variations on these — are widely used in the media. A Nexis
search of the last 90 days shows those terms were used together
almost 900 times, just as often as the Taliban was mis-associated
with "religious." Moreover, that "prominent Democrat"
quoted in U.S. News did not want to appear on the record,
and some left-of-center pundits reject the smear entirely. Chris
Hitchens, for instance — who judges the Taliban to be Islamic
fascists, or feudal Islamists — has said publicly that it would
be foolish to associate them with conservatives or right-wingers.
America will
win this war against radical Islam. But the price will be cheaper,
and the victory will come sooner, if we recognize our enemy for
what it is, and disassociate it from what it is not. Understanding
allows us to recognize our strengths and allies: the free market,
ordinary Muslims, and moderate Muslim clerics alike — as well
as the West's wonderful balance of political power among the self,
moral communities, and a tiered government.
But misunderstanding,
especially deliberate misunderstanding, will only help the enemy
escape, and so delay the arrival of a prosperous peace.
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