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Petra Marquardt-Bigman is a German/Israel citizen with a Ph.D. in contemporary history with a focus on European public opinion relating to the Middle East, Islamic Terrorism, the US and Israel.
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By Petra Marquardt-Bigman
September 10, 2007
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Not all commentators were able to overlook that the transcript of Osama bin Laden's videotaped "lecture" for Americans on the occasion of the sixth anniversary of 9/11 reads in parts like lifted from some leftist blogs. You are right if you suspect that it's not politically correct to notice that.
The leftist blogsphere is incensed that some commentators --among them New York Times columnist David Brooks --have pointed out that bin Laden's recent ramblings sound as if Osama was an avid reader of their output. However, it's kind of hard to disagree with this observation after reading the transcript of what bin Laden had to tell the "People of America" for the sixth anniversary of 9/11.
So while the occasion is rather macabre, not everybody can resist a snipe such as the suggestion that the progressive Daily Kos blog better hurry to sign up bin Laden as a contributor before the Huffington Post does... But should the left be discredited just because bin Laden worries about global warming, is critical of globalization and capitalism, positively loathes the "neocons", and puts in a good word for Noam Chomsky?
No, it is not necessarily the concerns and preferences that the left and bin Laden share that should be a source of embarrassment, but rather the fact that because of these shared concerns and preferences, the left has failed to make clear what it opposes in the ideology espoused by bin Laden.
In the wake of 9/11, the left has often behaved as if it subscribed to the motto "my enemy's enemy is my friend." The anniversaries of the terrorist attacks of September 11 have turned for many Americans into an occasion to wonder ever more wistfully how the tidal wave of sympathy and solidarity, expressed so emotionally in Le Monde's famous headline "We are all Americans", could dissipate so quickly.
But the fact of the matter is that Europe's intellectual elites did not hesitate for a moment to ask whether America "deserved" to be hated and whether the obvious hate for America in the Middle East was not due to entirely legitimate resentment caused by its support for Israel.
The perhaps most cynical take on the subject was featured as the lead editorial for the October 2001 issue of Le Monde diplomatique. Under the provocative title "An enemy."
At last, the magazine's editor Ignacio Ramonet claimed: "Throughout the world, and particularly in the countries of the South, the most common public reaction to the attacks in New York and Washington has been: what happened in New York was sad, but the US deserved it."
Ramonet argued that this reaction was entirely justified considering American policies during the Cold War and the fact that, as the only superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US "has remained scandalously partisan towards Israel, to the detriment of the rights of the Palestinians."
Taking his argument a step further, Ramonet suggested that the cold war veterans surrounding George W. Bush "may have reason to be pleased with the current events, in a sense a godsend. At a stroke the attacks of 11 September restored what had been missing since the collapse of the Soviet Union 10 years ago -- an enemy. At last.
The enemy may be known officially as terrorism but everyone knows that the real name is radical Islam. And we can now expect alarming side-effects, including a modern McCarthyism directed at the opponents of globalisation. You enjoyed anti-communism? You're going to love anti-Islamism."
Of course, no self-respecting European leftist had ever "enjoyed" American-style anti-communism, since it so callously ignored that communism really was a fundamentally noble idea that had failed only because it had been put into practice so badly. And the European left had no intention whatsoever to "love anti-Islamism."
Just ten days after September 11, 2001, some 2000 people got together in London to establish the "Stop the War Coalition." As the Guardian noted in an article on "America's retaliation," the "unequivocal support for America" in Western Europe did not prevent a "deep unease in many countries about what exactly the US proposes to do", and the paper emphasized that "it is already clear that there will be no blank-cheque endorsement of military action."
Yet, one glaring exception was noted: "Many Israelis are positively lusting after an American strike, because they believe it would justify their own hardline responses to Palestinian violence. Ominously, the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has compared Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with Bin Laden."
Nothing, it seems, was too preposterous to print, and the left soon found itself on a slippery slope in its efforts to sympathize with the supposedly "legitimate grievances" of Islamists. And so much seemed to be at stake: as the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine reportedly put it shortly after 9/11: "We have to avoid a clash of civilizations at all costs" -- and "at all costs" was apparently the operative phrase. But the left's muddled thinking on Islamism was eventually challenged by critics from its own ranks.
In "Terror and Liberalism" (2003) Paul Berman argued that it was misguided to interpret Islamic extremism in terms of a clash of civilizations.
Berman contended that Islamic fundamentalism and ideologies like Iraq's Baath socialism shared key characteristics with the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, and he criticized that, just as liberals had failed to comprehend the irrational nature of fascism and communism, they again showed the same blindness with regard to Islamism and other totalitarian Middle Eastern movements.
Berman explained this tendency with the basic liberal belief that people act rationally in their self-interest, and that therefore political conflicts are about diverging interests such as military, economic, social or territorial claims. Islamist violence is thus understood as motivated by specific grievances like exploitation, domination and humiliation by the rich and powerful, or by the West.
What liberals refused to grasp was, according to Berman, that totalitarian movements cannot really be understood in these terms, because they are ultimately driven by deeply irrational impulses.
Berman also provided a thorough analysis of the writings of Sayyid Qutb, whom he dubbed "the philosopher of Islamic terror" -- and bin Laden's dismissive remarks about democracy and "man-made laws" leave little doubt that he knows his Qutb.
Two issues in particular should be highlighted in this context. The first regards the notion that if only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be settled, Islamist terror would end. However, Qutb himself emphasized that "in reality, the confrontation is not over control of territory or economic resources, or for military domination."
For Qutb, the confrontation between Islam and its perceived enemies was about one thing, and one thing only: Islam and its imaginary purity at the time of Mohammad when there were no man-made laws, but just the laws that Mohammad claimed as made by Allah. In other words, there is a reason why bin Laden suggests that if Americans want to avoid confrontation, they'd better convert to Islam.
It's also worthwhile to note that Berman emphasized that Qutb's "deepest quarrel was not with America's failure to uphold its principles. His quarrel was with the principles. He opposed the United States because it was a liberal society, not because the United States failed to be a liberal society."
The left's anti-American sentiment may stem from a different motivation, but it is clear that the left was right when it sensed that bin Laden championed some of its pet causes -- including the view that Israel was an illegitimate "colonial" enterprise established to "compensate" the Jews for the Holocaust with Muslim lands. But those on the left who are prepared to consider the enemy of their enemy a friend have precious little reason to complain about those who say "tell me who your friends are and I tell you who you are."
Views expressed by the author do not
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