The “root cause” explanations for terrorism advanced by supposed “experts” in the Middle East – hapless congressmen, gullible journalists and even some “experienced” presidential candidates – are undermining our intellectual and moral clarity in the confrontation with the most reactionary and oppressive movements within Islam. These are the Islamists, in general, and the overtly violent Islamists, the jihadis, in particular. It is worth noting that while all jihadis are Islamists, not all Islamists are jihadis.
Some go so far as to deny there even is a war beyond our making, or an enemy, beside ourselves. Sept. 11, the Madrid and London bombings, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto – everything, it seems, is “blowback,” or “chickens coming home to roost.” If only the U.S. didn’t have bases in Saudi Arabia pre-9/11, the attack would never have occurred. If only the U.S. wasn’t allied with Israel and (better yet), if only Israel didn’t exist, there would be no terrorism. It’s just that easy; change the policies and all our troubles will go away.
The fallacious presumption at the very core of these arguments is that the jihadis don’t really mean what they say or, put another way, mean only part of what they say. The religious motivations, the narrative that they give themselves when, say, declaring war on everyone – Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, secularists and fellow Muslims – are ignored in our popular discourse in favor of their political, social and economic grievances.
When considering these grievances, three things should immediately become obvious: They are vast, nonnegotiable and being demanded at gunpoint. Jihadis want nothing less than acquiescence to their own imperialism and genocide, the subjugation of women and minorities, and the imposition of every other provision of their peculiar definition of Shari’a (Islamic law) everywhere, in order to remake the world in their own image. If this sounds irrational (not to mention evil) that’s because it is. Commenting on the pathology of Islamists, Egyptian playwright Ali Salim found that theirs is a “culture of death a culture of irresponsibility. It is a culture in which a person considers all the ‘others’ to be his enemies.” Regardless of what we may think, however, these are their beliefs; they cannot merely be ignored or explained away and they certainly cannot be appeased. As Winston Churchill once observed, “a fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Ultimately, no concession short of total capitulation or, as they understand it, the victory of “truth” over “falsehood” would be acceptable to their sensibilities anyway.
Their “truth,” then, must be rejected unequivocally. First and foremost, this requires acknowledging that there is not a clash of civilizations between the West and Islam; it is a civil war within Islam into which the West has been deliberately drawn. The war now is between the West and moderate Muslims (civilization) and Islamism (barbarism). Blurring that distinction is disingenuous and has dangerous implications. For instance, Islamists do not speak for all Muslims. Yet far too many on both the left and right (the only difference being whom they wish to hate) have embraced “root causes” and/or the “clash,” and thus turned a relatively small number of extremists into the only Muslims – the arbiters of what it means to be Muslim. This, of course, is profoundly wrong and insulting to the Muslim world and is extremely detrimental to the cause of Muslim moderates and reformers everywhere who are on the frontlines in the struggle against Islamists.
Second, (and, needless to say), this requires a repudiation of violence no matter what the “explanation.” This would be true even if the jihadis only harbored revanchist tendencies, no less the imperialistic aims that they openly affirm.
Third, we must admit that some of the grievances the jihadis cite are real. And it is likely that addressing them will be to their detriment, albeit how much so is usually exaggerated. For example, Middle East peace would not result in an end to terrorism. While it is a widespread belief that the Israeli-Palestinian or, more broadly, the Arab-Israeli conflict is the “root cause” of “root causes,” responsible for all evil in the region and all terrorism abroad, this is nothing more than a pernicious falsehood. In point of fact, there were Islamists many centuries before the advent of the modern Jewish state, America and almost every other given “root cause.” Their prime motivation then, as now, is intransigent theology which makes the very concepts of tolerance, co-existence and peace abhorrent to them. Thankfully, working to advance peace, supporting the nascent movement for individual rights, opposing the rampant violations of human rights and helping build free societies from the ground up to replace the corrupt and repressive Middle Eastern regimes of today requires neither the argument from or against jihadis, the justness for doing so are reason enough in and of themselves.
Fourth, we must have the courage of our convictions and stand in solidarity with the embattled Muslims who share them. The cultural relativists’ argument that liberal democracy is only superior to theocracy in the West is (as French philosopher Pascal Bruckner has aptly put it): “a racism of the anti-racists.” These Westerners claim for themselves the inherent and inalienable rights to “bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality” while they condemn Muslims to the life envisioned for them (and eventually us too) by the Islamists with all the “joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy” which that entails. These same misguided Westerners claim that freedom, democracy, peace, equality and human rights are just a matter of “perception.” Apparently, there is no difference between jihadis and those who fight them, or between liberated and exploited women.
To euphemize and justify such vile notions by way of rationalization and moral equivocation is to excuse the inexcusable.
Jason Guberman-Pfeffer is in his third year in the Thomas More Honors Program at Sacred Heart University (Fairfield, CT). He is majoring in political science and pursuing minors in Middle East Studies and history. Guberman-Pfeffer is currently a 2007-2008 Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Fellow and a Civil Rights Fellow for HAMSA (The Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance). Jason Guberman-Pfeffer is a student participant in the SPME Network.
