Author: Edward Alexander
Publication: American Spectator
Date: June 26, 2003
Of the variegated forms of murderous
assault that the Palestinian Arabs have unleashed against Israel since
they began the Al-Aqsa Intifada - the Oslo War - in September 2000, none
has proved so cruel or lethal, or so perfectly embodied absolute evil,
as suicide bombings. Certainly none has exercised so hypnotic a spell upon
the "learned classes." Since the beginning of Arafat's campaign to "soften
up" Israel up for concessions even more far-reaching than those of the
Oslo accords, 292 suicide bombers have succeeded in detonating themselves-in
crowded buses and cafes, in university cafeterias, at a Passover seder,
and almost anyplace where children could be found in sizable numbers. They
have killed 330 people and maimed thousands.
These human bombs, most of them
teenagers inculcated from kindergarten with Jew-hatred, act out of a superabundance
of hope: hope of driving the Jews out of Israel; hope of making their families
wealthy with the enormous bonuses formerly guaranteed by Iraq and Arafat,
now by other Arab (and Iranian) benefactors; and above all, hope of heaven.
And so, of course, professors imprisoned in Marxist cliches of socioeconomic
determinism have concluded-on the basis of no evidence whatever-that the
suicide bombers, mostly products of upper middle class families, act out
of poverty, hopelessness, and despair. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz
has observed that the "root cause" of suicide bombings is "money, education
and privilege." Islamic Jihad has itself declared: "We do not take depressed
people [to become suicide bombers]."
This particular form of atrocity
has not only failed to disturb the equanimity of our heavily petted professors,
but has elicited from many of them a stream of rhapsodic admiration, sympathetic
identification-with the murderers, not their victims-and high-toned apologia.
A few examples from among many-a philosopher, a literary critic, and a
theologian-will illustrate the pattern.
Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher
who became a British subject and spent his career in England, has been
a popular speaker on North American campuses, where he seems to appeal
powerfully to the new bloodlust among the learned-especially where it is
Jewish blood that is in question. Although his speciality is "Mind and
Logic," Honderich's itch to be clever has often led him to stentorian pronouncements
about politics, especially violent politics. In 1980 he published an "ethical"
defense of violence and mass murder called Violence for Equality, a title
that calls to mind Dickens' encapsulation (in A Tale of Two Cities) of
revolutionary France's Reign of Terror: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,
or Death."
Not long after 9/11, Honderich decided
to shine the light of pure reason and moral philosophy upon that day's
horrific massacres in a book called After the Terror. The essence of his
argument is that there is no moral distinction between acts of omission
and acts of commission. The West, having failed to eliminate the poverty
that its capitalist system brought to the world, was collectively responsible
for 9/11. "Is it possible," Honderrich asks, "to suppose that the September
11 attacks had nothing at all to do with...Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and
Sierra Leone?" He stops a hair short of saying that bin Laden and his fellow
idealists were justified in murdering thousands of people in order to feed
millions.
The philosopher is far less cautious
about the "moral right" of Palestinian Arabs to blow up Jews, a right he
defends vigorously: "Those Palestinians who have resorted to violence have
been right...and those who have killed themselves in the cause of their
people have indeed sanctified themselves." In an interview, the eminent
logician explained the distinction between suicide bombings in Manhattan
and in Jerusalem: "The likely justification depends importantly on the
fact that the suffering that is caused does have a probability of success."
In other words, if Palestinian terrorists should succeed in their goal
of destroying Israel, mass murder will have been justified; if they fail,
it will not.
Upon finishing After the Terror,
Honderich - a socialist millionaire - offered to donate 5,000 British pounds
from his advance on royalties to Oxfam. But to his astonishment - and indeed
that of many who have observed England's moral debacle of recent years
- the charity refused the money, which it viewed as morally tainted by
what old- fashioned people call incitement to murder. "Oxfam's purpose,"
said a spokesman, "is to overcome poverty and suffering. We believe that
the lives of all human beings are of equal value. We do not endorse acts
of violence."
But Honderich's North American audiences
have been far less squeamish. Palestinian Arabs, he told a receptive crowd
in Toronto in September 2002, have a "moral right" to blow up Jews, and
he very much wanted to encourage them to exercise that right, i.e., to
do still more. "To claim a moral right on behalf of the Palestinians to
their terrorism is to say that they are right to engage in it, that it
is permissible if not obligatory."
Honderich spent his academic career
at University College in London. Those familiar with that institution know
that it houses the nicely- dressed skeleton (and Madame Tussaud wax head)
of Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher who measured morality by the quantity
of pleasure delivered: if the greatest happiness of the greatest number
of citizens could be arrived at by 29 of them deciding, because they had
the power to do so, to feast upon citizen number 30, then it was right
and proper to do so. If Dostoevsky's idealistic utilitarian Raskolnikov
was Bentham with an axe in his hand, then Honderich is Bentham with a bomb
in his brain.
Nor is he the only academic luminary
whose lucubrations on suicide bombing demonstrate the explosive power of
boredom. There is also Columbia University's Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
What philosophy has become in the hands of Honderich, the opaque pseudo-jargon
of literary postmodernism has become in the hands of Spivak. George Orwell
wrote in 1946 that in our time "political language is designed to make
lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind." Orwell's crowning example was "a comfortable English
professor" defending Soviet totalitarianism and mass murder with polysyllabic
gibberish and Latinized euphemism. Already in 1989, Spivak had "explained"
Edward Said's call for the murder of Palestinian Arab "collaborators" as
"words for Palestinian solidarity." But in June of 2002, speaking at Leeds
University, this celebrated tribune of "international feminism" outdid
even herself:
"Suicide bombing - and the planes
of 9/11 were living bombs - is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation
between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing
oneself as other, in the process killing others....Suicidal resistance
is a message inscribed on the body when no other means will get through.
It is both execution and mourning...you die with me for the same cause,
no matter which side you are on. Because no matter who you are there are
no designated killees [sic] in suicide bombing...It is a response...to
the state terrorism practiced outside of its own ambit by the United States
and in the Palestinian case additionally to an absolute failure of hospitality."
This is what Lionel Trilling called
the languag of non-thought, employed to blur the distinction between suicide
and murder, to obliterate the victims-"no designated killees" here!-metaphysically
as well as physically.
By bringing America into the range
of her imperial intellect, Spivak goes beyond Honderich. Although he blamed
America itself for the Arab massacres of 9/11, he stopped short of moral
justification for the attack; like many other English academics he is hesitant
about biting the hand he hopes will feed him. But Spivak, already comfortably
ensconced at Morningside Heights, has no such compunction.
The third member of my trio of academic
apologists for suicide bombing is Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun
who specializes in comparative religion, has written a best-selling book
called Understanding Islam, and played a key role in the scandalous recent
PBS series celebrating the life of Muhammed. In a lengthy interview with
Al-Ahram Weekly last July, Armstrong recounted how, during her time in
Israel in the mid-eighties working on a documentary about St. Paul, she
herself had a revelation: she heard some Israelis refer to "dirty Arabs"
and instantly recognized that today's Israelis are to today's Arabs what
Nazis were to Jews in the thirties and forties, and that "the Israelis
can do what they want because America will always support them." Vigorously
insisting that there is "nothing...anti-Western" about Islam, she calls
for a reinvigorated jihad by her Muslim friends, whom she advises to "march
down the street at Ground Zero in New York." Palestinian suicide bomber
are motivated not by religion, because "this is not how religion works"-QED-but
by "absolute hopelessness." Armstrong's justification for suicide bombing
grows out of her fine sense of equity in military struggle. These poor
people, she complains, "don't have F-16s, and they don't have tanks. They
don't have anything to match Israel's arsenal. They only have their own
bodies." In other words, murdering innocent people is a permissible, indeed
praiseworthy grab for equality by an "occupied" people.
It goes without saying that Armstrong,
like all of Arafat's professorial apologists over the years, overlooks
the troublesome facts that it was Arab hatred and aggression - in 1967
as in 2003 - that led to "occupation" and not occupation to hatred and
aggression (or indeed, that Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories
has invariably led to greater Arab violence and extremism). She also has
failed to notice that Arafat, Abu-Mazen and Co. are backed militarily,
financially, and politically by 1.2 billion Muslims, by 21 Arab nations
(as well as the non-Arab nation of Iran), and by the European Union. Not
to mention just how powerful and "equalizing" a weapon in the hands of
radical Muslim Arabs is the total disregard for the sanctity of human life,
as a result of which 19 technically competent barbarians could attack two
American cities, killing thousands of people and causing billions of dollars
of property damage. But for Armstrong the only thing 9/11 revealed was
the "intolerance" of Western society, and perhaps - now I'm stretching
her argument - the need to create strategic equity for disadvantaged Muslims
by giving them nuclear bombs.
Armstrong has for years taught Christianity
and comparative religion at London's Leo Baeck College. As if mindful of
the irony that she should be employed by a school named after a scholarly,
mild-mannered Jew who was forced into a tragic leadership role during the
Nazi period, she has bared her teeth in a gesture of mean spite towards
her occasional employers, alleging that Jews who kick up a fuss over the
resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe and the Arab world are "stuck in
the horrors of the Nazi era." Armstrong's only qualm about suicide bombings
is that they may tarnish the glorious image that Palestinian Arabs currently
enjoy in England. For ethical temperaments like Armstrong's, it is detection,
not sin, which is criminal.
Honderich, Spivak, and Armstrong
all offer variations on a single theme. But they all treat the dead and
mangled bodies of innocent people as if they were so much fertilizer to
fuel diseased imaginations. If these professors of terror looked upon the
victims as human beings they could not possibly justify the mass murder
of Israelis and others using speculative arguments and licentious moral
equations, based upon political and historical ignorance so vast that they
would shock an ordinarily attentive sixth-grader.
Hitler's professors were the first
to make anti-Semitism both academically respectable and complicit in crime.
They have now found their successors in Arafat's professors, whose grotesque
antics serve as a reminder that knowledge is one thing, virtue another.
If you expect moral nourishment from professors, you should try getting
warmth from the moon.
