RUTHFULLY YOURS

Preserving and defending what the West has built requires a sense of purpose and shared public morality. Sadly, of the literary fictions inspired by and following the 9/11 attacks, none goes beyond an agnostic predilection to equivocate
After 2001, the Library of Congress introduced a new category. “September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001—Fiction” identified a genre of political novels that now includes inter alia: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days (2009). The category also includes European and Australian novels like Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2003) and Submission (2015), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2007), Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). By 2011 newspapers and journals published lists of the best post-9/11 novels, and US universities, such as Berkeley, offered undergraduate courses in post-9/11 fiction. What does the new genre tell us about the modern liberal character adrift in an interconnected world confronted by the apocalyptic certainties of the Islamic zealot?

That the contemporary novelist would derive inspiration from terrorism is unsurprising. As it evolved, modern terrorism cultivated the drama of the violent act. Consequently, the great early twentieth-century novelists found it a suitable fictional case for treatment. In The Princess Casamassima (1886) Henry James perceived in the anarchists of the time an emerging European revolutionary character that was a “strange mixture of anguish and aestheticism”. Joseph Conrad also dissected the revolutionary fanatic’s addiction to violence. Through characters like “the incorruptible Professor” in The Secret Agent (1907), Conrad depicted the morally challenged inhabitants of a bohemian underworld preoccupied with revolution, betrayal and conspiracy.

After 1945, Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Arthur Koestler, Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell explored the corrupt demi-monde of Cold War totalitarian terror. Novelists like Orwell and Conrad clarify the moral and political dilemmas that confront the liberal political conscience. Given that the political novel, at its best, offers insight into the motive for violence, what political and moral possibilities do the novels of September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001—Fiction evoke?

A disenchanted modern cityscape inhabited by a cast of middle-class characters forms the setting for most 9/11 fiction. It is a cosmopolitan, secular city of commercial transactions, sexual infidelity and status anxiety. The denizens struggle with anomie, financial and emotional need, and a city which sustains only a minimal sense of civil association. Before any terror attack occurs this is a world that lacks moral purpose.

Murray Walters is a Brisbane psychiatrist
Once more we are treated to sermons by those who demand we ponder the grievances behind the Brussels slaughter. For them, the unthinkable truth that Islamists hate us must be always obfuscated. In this regard they match those bishops who could not fully grasp the evil of pederast clerics.

Another insane act of mass murder, followed hot on its heels by the usual piffle about disenfranchisement, powerlessness, and other exculpatory historicisms. The “minimisers” were keen to get their camera time, barely waiting for atomised human flesh to be scraped from an airport’s bomb-shattered departures hall before demanding that this latest slaughter be contextualised and their simple “truth” accepted as gospel. There is a mad futility to doing anything about it, they say, other than drawing maudlin pictures, lighting candles, singing “Imagine” and exchanging empty slogans about “standing with Paris”. Sorry, that was the last massacre, this time it was Brussels. It’s getting hard to keep up these days.

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian was amongst the first to occupy the apologists’ lectern, reminding us that “political terror is as old as war,” and that “…what is not stupid is seeking to alleviate, or not aggravate, the rage that gives rise to acts of terror, and then to diminish the potency of the incident itself”. Re-iterating a well-worn theme, he mouthed the purported wisdom that “a response to terror requires patience and restraint.” In other words, do nothing, mouth pieties and hope Allah’s suicide bombers go away. Or at least find someone else to terrorise.

Call me a callous, cynical sort if you will, but isn’t it funny how no one has urged “alleviating, not aggravating” or “patience and restraint” during the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. Cardinal George Pell might have had a darn sight easier time of it if the same logic had been applied. After all, paedophilia is also as “old as war”. In fact, like old-fashioned rape, it’s often an integral aspect of it.

Here’s Jenkins again:

There is no way any community can make itself immune to terror attacks. Since they are random, no protection can defend that community from them. No amount of police work or surveillance, no deployment of armies or navies, let alone of missiles or nuclear weapons, can guard against them. Intelligence and surveillance can go so far, but the bombers and killers will get through any net.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 24, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.

Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.

One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.

I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?

The enemy, we are told again and again, is not Islam but ‘radical Islam’. There is comfort in that appellation, certainly, but unless and until the West acknowledge that violence is enshrined in the Koran, the soft pillow of such delusions will smother us

lamb shadow smallZuhdi Jasser is a self-proclaimed devout Muslim and, I believe, an all round good guy. He is a medical doctor and a former lieutenant commander in the US Navy. He founded and heads the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He rejects what he calls political Islam. He is a regular media commentator. After the attack in Brussels he correctly pointed out that the problem lies within Islam, as he always does. And again, par for the course, he argued that Islam needs a reformation. At the same time, he expressed “love” for his religion.

I will guess (without too much risk of being wrong): the religion Dr Jasser loves is about moderation, peace and tolerance, and exists separately from the state. But what is his religion? That to me is the mystery. Religions need a scriptural base. Islam has the Koran (the very words of God) and the Sunna and canonical Hadiths (the instructions, doings and reported sayings of Muhammad). I imagine Dr Jasser’s scriptural base is a subset of this Islamic scripture from which all of the nasty bits have been excised. For example, this nasty anti-Semitic bit from the Bukhari Hadith 52:177:

The Hour will not be established until you fight with Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

Dr Jasser and others of like mind do not express themselves on this point. On this point we hear only platitudes.

What do radical Israeli groups have in common with their European funders?

Last Thursday, Channel 2 broadcast candid camera footage of Breaking the Silence members gathering classified information on IDF operations. The footage was taken by Ad Kan activists.

Breaking the Silence claims to be an organization dedicated to collecting testimonies from IDF soldiers documenting ill-treatment of Palestinians. Posing as soldiers with information to share, Ad Kan activists were interrogated by Breaking the Silence investigators.

Yet rather than question them about how their units treated Palestinians, Breaking the Silence members asked them about troop movements, weapons platforms, IDF cooperation with foreign militaries. The investigators asked what sort of guns an unmanned combat vehicle carried, who controlled the vehicle and whether it was in operational use.

They wanted to know how the IDF discovers Hamas tunnels. They wanted to know when tanks were used in battles and how.Breaking the Silence’s intelligence operations didn’t stop with post-operational debriefs.

A Breaking the Silence employee named Frima Bobis is filmed telling Ad Kan activists how when she was still in high school, a Breaking the Silence worker advised her where to serve during her military service.