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 hy
was the World Trade Center destroyed? The Left tells us that U.S.
foreign policy is at fault — specifically, our support for
Israel and our sanctions against Iraq. The reply is that mere changes
in policy won't placate the terrorists. It's America itself that
the terrorists envy and hate — our freedom, our power, our
prosperity. That sobering fact leaves us little alternative beside
the use of diplomacy, finance, and force to bring the terrorists
and the nations that harbor them to heel.
This is the
debate of the moment, and rightly so. But if it's a question of
why the World Trade Center was destroyed, why not go to the terrorists
who attacked it? The hijackers are dead, of course, and their sponsor,
Osama Bin Laden, is currently unavailable for interviews. But there
remains a way to speak with some of those who attacked the World
Trade Center. I'm thinking of the terrorists who ignited a truckload
of explosives in the World Trade Center parking lot in 1993, killing
six people. Had the amount of explosives in that truck been just
a little larger, and had the truck been only slightly differently
placed, the World Trade Center would have been destroyed, with a
likely loss of two hundred thousand lives (the approximate combined
casualty toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) — 50,000 office workers,
50,000 visitors, and 100,000 workers in the surrounding buildings
(a better-placed blast would have toppled one tower into the other,
and both towers would have crashed onto the surrounding buildings).
As it happens,
U. C. Santa Barbara professor of sociology, Mark Juergensmeyer,
interviewed Mahmud Abouhalima, a ringleader of the original World
Trade Center bombing plot, while researching his book, Terror
in the Mind of God. We also know a good deal about Sheik
Omar Abdul Rahman, the exiled leader of the Egypt's most radical
Islamic movement, al Gamaa-Islamiya ("the Islamic group"),
who authorized the first World Trade Center bombing, and who, like
Abouhalima, is now imprisoned for his role in the plot. Both Abouhalima
and Rahman seem to have had ties, if shadowy ones, to Afghanistan
and Osama bin Laden. Obviously, Bin Laden's September 11 operation
finished off what Rahman, Abouhalima, and their accomplices began
in 1993. So an understanding of Rahman's and Abouhalima's motivations
should tell us a lot about the underlying causes of the terror we
face today.
Given what
we know about Rahman and Abouhalima, what are we to make of the
claim that America's support for Israel is the root cause of the
bombing (and the accompanying implication that a slackening of our
support for Israel will bring an end to the terror)? Before assessing
that claim, the craven and self-defeating nature of this whole line
of thinking deserves comment. Everyone knows, yet too many forget,
that it is foolish to negotiate with terrorists — that giving
in to terrorist blackmail leads only to greater violence. That,
after all, is what happened at the World Trade Center. A series
of U.S. retreats in the face of terrorist attacks on our embassies,
ships, and military barracks emboldened the terrorists to believe
that a massive domestic assault on the United States would drive
us out of the Middle East altogether. So even if the recent attacks
were inspired by our foreign policy, how would changing that
policy under terrorist pressure leave us any better off? Wouldn't
such a retreat simply be inviting terrorists everywhere to manipulate
our foreign policy through a series of nightmarish domestic attacks?
For the sake
of argument, however, let's consider the claim that America's foreign
policy is the "root cause" of the disaster at the World
Trade Center. It's certainly true that Sheik Rahman vigorously condemned
the United States for its support of Israel. Does that mean we ought
to get tough with Israel, reducing our military and economic support
by, say, 50 percent, and forcing Israel to make some key concessions
to the Palestinians? I'm afraid that won't be enough, since what
Rahman objects to is not this or that policy, but Israel's very
existence.
Sheik Rahman,
after all, is the leader of the organization that assassinated Egyptian
President Anwar al-Sadat for simply recognizing Israel's existence.
So to bring this terrorism to a halt — to satisfy Sheik Rahman
and his fundamentalist allies — we're going to have to repudiate
Israel altogether.
Let it also
be noted that when addressing his terrorist followers, Sheik Rahman
inveighed against America for our role in the Persian Gulf war.
So obviously, to extirpate the causes of terrorism at their root,
we'll need to send out a signal to Saddam Hussein that Kuwait is
his if he wants it. Surely that will put a stop to the violence.
While we're
at it, let's consider that other "root cause" of the attacks
on the World Trade Center, our support for Egypt's secular government.
More than anything else, it is our support, not for Israel, but
for the government of Egypt, that turned Sheik Rahman against us.
Rahman's dream, after all, is to return to Egypt, Khomeini-like,
to stand at the head of a fundamentalist Islamic state. To that
end, Rahman authorized the murder, not only of Sadat, but also of
the Speaker of Egypt's Parliament and of the respected writer Farag
Foda, whose crime was to publish books advocating the separation
of religion from politics. And although the assassination attempts
were unsuccessful, Sheik Rahman also authorized the murder of Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak and, perhaps most infamously of all, the
murder of Egypt's beloved national icon, Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Naguib Mahfouz, whose neck was slashed, and who lost the use of
his writing hand in the attack. Rahman's only regret was that Mahfouz
had not been punished earlier, since Rahman is convinced that Salman
Rushdie would never have had the courage to write The Satanic
Verses had Mahfouz been assassinated first. So to stop the terror
at its source, we will surely need to withdraw our support from
the Mubarak government, and from other moderate secular governments
throughout the Middle East.
Then there
are those annoying Copts — all six million of them — the
Christian minority in Egypt whose very presence seems to mock Rahman's
plans for a fundamentalist Islamic state. Since the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism in Egypt, the Copts have lived in fear, victimized
by persistent discrimination. Indeed on several occasions, Sheik
Rahman has declared the wealth of the Copts to be forfeit and available
to the (Islamic) faithful. So if we really want to get at the root
causes of terrorism, maybe we ought to do something about those
Copts. (For more on Rahman and Egyptian fundamentalism, see Fouad
Ajami's superb study, The
Dream Palace of the Arabs.)
But what of
that other "root cause" of the terror — our sanctions
against Iraq, supposedly responsible for the deaths of uncounted
thousands of Iraqi civilians? Peter Beinart of The New Republic
laid that claim to rest last week when he showed that it is not
our sanctions, but Saddam's own policy of selling badly needed food
and supplies to support his military, that is responsible for the
misery of the Iraqi people.
But the problem
goes beyond the tendency of the Left to blame the United States
for what is in fact Saddam's cruel irresponsibility, or the Left's
failure to consider our sanctions in light of the fact that Saddam
is even now manufacturing weapons of mass destruction meant to be
used against America's cities. Several commentators have noted that
the United States gets no credit for having intervened to save many
thousands of Muslims from ethnic cleansing in both Bosnia and Kosovo.
It's worse than that, however. The United States is actually excoriated
throughout the Middle East for not having acted sooner to rescue
the Bosnian Muslims or the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo.
There's certainly
a case to be made that we ought to have intervened more quickly
in Bosnia and Kosovo, but it is almost unheard of for a nation to
stage such massive military action on almost exclusively humanitarian
grounds. In the perspective of history, it's remarkable that the
United States acted at all, and perhaps more remarkable still that
so many in the Muslim world, after all the complaints about American
imperialism, feel free to saddle us with imperial obligations, and
then give us no credit when we shoulder them. And how is it that
we are to tolerate collateral damage against Serbs in the course
of an attempt to stop their ethnic cleansing of Muslims, but are
not to tolerate collateral damage against Iraqis or Afghans in an
attempt to prevent the mass murder of American citizens?
And has it
been remarked that, even before September 11, almost a quarter of
Afghanistan's population was being kept from starvation by international
food relief, the vast majority of which was supplied by the United
States? In effect, the United States has been feeding the population
of a country whose government has been harboring anti-American terrorists
for years. Then there's the food aid delivered by the United States
to literally hundreds of thousands of people suffering from drought
in Syria and Jordan. Why is none of this included in the Left's
careful cataloguing of American actions in the Middle East?
Of course,
the real cause of terrorism is not United States foreign policy,
but the ease with which America can be made to serve as a scapegoat
for the profound social dilemmas of the Middle East. The life of
Mahmoud Abouhalima, the terrorist who nearly murdered 200,000 Americans
at the World Trade Center in 1993, stands as a sad testament to
the weight of those problems.
Abouhalima
fits the classic profile of the Islamic fundamentalist leadership
— urbanized, college educated, with middle-class professional
aspirations, but stymied by the weak economies of the Arab states.
Quoted in a brief 1993 profile in the Los Angeles Times,
Abouhalima's Egyptian friends say that he emigrated to Germany on
a tourist visa after college, fearing that he would never be able
to support a wife and family in Egypt. Abouhalima married a German
woman to prevent deportation, then divorced her to marry another.
Although maintaining a surface religiosity, Abouhalima's early years
in Germany were a "life of corruption — girls, drugs,
you name it." Eventually, however, both Abouhalima and his
wife (who converted to Islam) adopted a rigorous observance of Islamic
purity, and migrated to the United States.
In Abouhalima's
view, having lived 17 years in the West, and having been tempted,
and almost destroyed, by our dissolute secular values, he understands
and can judge our society. "I lived their life [i.e. the Western
life], he told Juergensmeyer, "but they didn't live my life,
so they will never understand the way I live or the way I think."
Abouhalima's
struggle is a magnified version of the difficulties faced by many
young adults in the modernizing Middle East. The family networks
and marriage arrangements so critical to Muslim social life depend
upon the maintenance of a girl's virginity. Yet increasingly, young
urbanized Muslim men and women mix in coeducational schools and
professional settings, caught between the Western-influenced models
of sexual freedom seen in television, movies, and magazines, and
the rewards and requirements of the traditional family system. For
these young people, there is no long apprenticeship in "dating"
— no training in how to be "modern" — only an
untutored giving in to temptation and chaos, or the alternative
of a self-imposed return to traditions of purity and the veil.
Western social
and sexual morality, along with America's political and economic
power, are easily seized upon as scapegoats in such a setting. The
accusation are distorted and contradictory, based not on "the
West" as it really is, for all of its (many) faults, but on
a simplistic and untutored caricature of our life. Yet the social
problems that generate the accusations are real, and not at all
unrelated to the encroachment of modernity and the ways of "the
West" on these traditional societies. Nothing is more certain,
however, than that neither tradition nor modernity will disappear
anytime soon. Nor are they altogether irreconcilable, although the
Islamic world, for complex reasons, has characteristically found
the task of blending them a difficult one.
So we must
balance the need to recognize and acknowledge the dignity, complexity
— and anguish — of contemporary life in Arab and Muslim
lands, with the need to swiftly crush the sad, but deadly and irredeemable
product of that anguish — Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
There is no placating the Sheik Rahman's and the Mahmud Abouhalima's
of the world. If we do not stop them with force, they will kill
us. The Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression were root
causes of the Holocaust, after all, but the Nazis were no less dangerous
for that.
The last word
goes to an Egyptian dentist, who has, with difficulty, rescued some
small measure of prosperity from the poverty of his land. Of his
old friend, the terrorist Mahmud Abouhalima, this dentist says,
"I love him like my brother, but if he had any relationship
with this accident (at the Trade Center), I hate him, believe me.
I want to destroy him before you."
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