Rushdie's Rhetoric and Righteous Response

Let's be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions. -- Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's statement is wrong in a very obvious way. Simply, no one on the left, bien pensant or otherwise, excuses the actions of the terrorists. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of anyone in their right mind not condemning acts which led to thousands of needless deaths. If Rushdie isn't already aware of this, then he should stop speaking about things he doesn't understand. If he is aware of this, then his comments are malicious, as they equate the desire to understand a situation with its endorsement; a rather dangerous equation which shuts us off from seeking any truth but that which appears to be self-evident (as decided, evidently, by people like Salman Rushdie (news - web sites)).

However, Rushdie's comments are also wrong in a more subtle way, which merits clarification. The terrorists, he says, are responsible for their own actions, a statement that's hard to disagree with. The problem is that it ignores the context which makes their decisions and actions possible and intelligible. A context which is, ironically, analogous in many ways to the current situation in the US.

On September 10th George W. Bush (news - web sites) was not, by most measures, an especially popular president. Had he asked for an additional $40 billion for defense spending, he wouldn't have received it. After September 11th, however, procuring such vast resources for a military retaliation seemed like an afterthought. And public support couldn't be higher.

Now imagine the situation in any number of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism (news - web sites) aside, when Muslims hear of friends and family being shot in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites), starved in Iraq (news - web sites), and bombed in Sudan (news - web sites) and now Afghanistan, they are likely to be angry, and justifiably so, with the people who're responsible -- in this case, the US and UK. Many people, perhaps a majority, will support retaliation of some kind, as is presently the case in the US. Since it would be pure suicide for a small country to attack the US outright -- or, indeed, even to threaten such an act -- these frustrated, terrorized people look to other outlets for their rage.

Fundamentalist groups and terrorist organizations do not exist in isolation from the rest of the world. Their existence and their support reflect the attitudes of the people who surround them. These attitudes, in turn, stem in no small measure from US and US-sponsored terrorism.

It's not, then, hard to imagine an effective way to separate these organizations from those who support them: namely, remove the cause of the grievous outrage; that is, simply stop terrorizing them. By contrast, an attempt to "root out" the terrorists will, insofar as it further terrorizes innocent people, only serve to increase their sense of outrage and their willingess to support further retaliations.