Amidst the hundreds of articles that analyzed the horrible murder of Benazir Buhtoo in Pakistan last month, there was one by Beirut-based journalist Rami Khouri that deserves special attention, for it points to a recurrent phenomenon we might well call “the Cult of the Superficial”.

Entiled “Who Killed Benazir Bhutto?” (Algazeera.com 12/31/07) the article places Bhutto’s murder in the wider context of region-wide proliferation of political violence and puts the blame on the fact that, “in the life of ordinary people in the vast region from North Africa and the Middle East to South Asia political violence has become an everyday fact of life.”

The essence of Khouri’s article shines through its concluding paragraphs:
“They kill as they have been killed. Having been dehumanized in turn, they will embrace inhumanity and brutality.

Who killed Benazir Bhutto? We all killed her, in East and West, Orient and Occident, North and South. We of the globalized beastly generation that transformed political violence from an occasional crime to an ideology and an addiction.”

My Western upbringing resonates strongly with Khouri’s ending: “We all killed her,” which I take to be a poetic call for self-examination and social action. I am sure many in the Judeo-Christian tradition will echo this call with, “Indeed, let us work on ourselves first” — it is in the nature of our cultural reflex.

But my moral instinct tells me something different. It tells me that what the world needs during this state of social upheaval are distinctions, not generalizations; clarity, not equivocation. To say “we are all guilty” is paramount to saying “no one is guilty,” like that bully who excuses himself with the rejoinder, “They all do it.”

Sweeping generalizations that spread guilt too broadly, tend to obscure the anatomy of violence; they drive attention away from critical factors and pivotal players, and hamper our ability to take corrective actions.

I became particularly sensitive to this logic of overgeneralization in the weeks following the murder of our son, Daniel, when Jihadi websites began ranting:”What’s all the fuss about one Jewish journalist when so many Muslims are being killed in Palestine and Afghanistan?”

It is pointless, of course, to explain to Jihadis that terrorism earns its ominous and morally reprehensible character not through body count but through “intent,” i.e., the intent of perpetrators to harm the innocent — Jihadis refuse to get it.

One would expect, however, that modernity-minded thinkers should grasp this defining distinction and use it to tell a good guy from a bad one — they, too, refuse to get it.

Time after time, in my lectures before mixed Muslim-Jewish audiences I get the question:
“Isn’t the US operation in Iraq a state-sponsored terrorism?” or “Isn’t Israeli targeted killing morally equivalent to Palestinian suicide bombing?” Even after admitting that suicide bombers aims to maximize, and Israel aims to minimize civilian casualties — it is, after all, bad for public opinion — the questioners refuse to accept the distinction.

Symmetry is so seductive, and the idea that every strife has two equivalent sides so deeply entrenched in our culture, that even well meaning intellectuals fall into its trap.

Michael Winterbottom, for example, the director of the movie A Mighty Heart, compared Daniel’s murder to the conditions in Guantanamo, and wrote: “There are extremists on both sides who want to ratchet up the levels of violence and hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this.”

Khouri is thus in good company when he falls into the trap of body count and states: “It makes little difference, if this is the work of democratic or dictatorial leaders: Dead children and war-ravaged societies do not value such distinctions.”

What is dangerous in this tendency to generalize and symmetrize violent acts is that it actually helps spread the ideology of political violence, for it permits angry youngsters to reason thus: “All forms of violence are equally evil; therefore, as long as one persists, others should not be ruled out. ” This is precisely the logic used by Muhammed Siddiqui Khan, one of the London suicide bombers, in his post-mortem video tape on Al Jazeera.

But no less dangerous is the destructive influence of ideologues who, armed with the halo of non-violence advocacy, preach hatred and bigotry. Typical among them is Arun Gandhi, grandson of India’s legendary leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who just last week published an article in the Newsweek/Washington Post website entitled “Jewish Identity Can’t Depend on Violence,” in which he states that “Israel and the Jews are the biggest players” in the creation of a “Culture of Violence that is eventually going to destroy humanity.” Such wreckless twistings of reality, soaked in apocalyptic pontification, spring abundantly from the cult of the superficial and its lazy logic of body count.

Saying, “We all killed Benazir Bhutto” means that violence is so hopelessly symmetric, chaotic, and all-pervasive that we do not know where to begin our effort to contain it. But we do know where to begin, because some acts are violence-reducing while others are violence-producing — the two are *not* equivalent and we should obviously begin with the former.

For example, Israel’s military operations in Gaza are not equivalent to the firing of Qassam rocket into Sderot. The former will cease if the latter does, but not the other way around. This causal asymmetry is so glaring that only minds like Gandhi’s can mindlessly ignore. We have a similar asymmetry in Iraq, where one side sees cessation of hostilities as an achievement, the other as defeat. In such cases, the asymmetries should be noted, analyzed and acted on, rather than dismissed with, “We all killed her?”

And this brings me to the role of the media in this web of violence, counter-violence and broken symmetries. The statement: “They kill as they have been killed,” is poetic, compassionate, even noble, but not very accurate and not very helpful. No, the murderers of Benazir Bhutto did not “kill as they have been killed,” they killed because they were taught to believe that they are the helpless victims of an evil oppressor of which Bhutto is a symbol and, once a victim, so the teaching goes, tantrum rules.

The thousands of Saudis recruited for suicide bombing in Iraq are a more familiar example. They kill because they were told that Islam is being attacked by America, that America kills Iraqis out of pleasure and that the sole reason for the US presence in the Middle East is to subjugate Muslims, steal their resources and humiliate them for fun. This is, sadly, what an increasing majority of Muslims now believe, and Rami Khouri knows how twisted a perception this is. He knows it because he spent time on fellowship at Harvard University and surely noticed that Americans have many worries on their plate — humiliating Muslims is not one of them. He knows that America is genuinely trying to transport democracy to the Middle East — if not for the love of humanity, then out of a selfish preference for regimes deemed less likely to wage wars.

No less important, they kill because they have been given a religious license to do so by clerics such as Egyptian-born Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most prominent Koranic authority in the Sunni world, who issued a fatwa authorizing suicide killing of American civilians in Iraq.

Put more generally, hardships and grievances in themselves do not breed political violence of the type that killed Benazir Bhutto. For a grievance to turn into an act of terror, two additional ingredients are necessary, each non-violent in isolation: a twisted prism of reality and a twisted license to kill — e.g., an Arun Gandhi and an al-Qaradawi.

Sadly, the media in the region has not done its share to minimize these two perceptual ingredients. On the contrary, it did a lot to promote and propagate them. We rarely find an article in the independent Middle Eastern press that attempts to dispel the myth of America being the enemy of Islam. Al Jazeera, for example, choreographs a worldview in which an irreconcilable struggle rages between an evil-meaning Western oppressor and its helpless, righteous Arab victims. This twisted worldview does more to fuel the sense of helplessness, humiliation and anger among Arab youths than the physical presence of American troops in the region. (Let’s not forget that in the absence of such propaganda, the Japanese managed to develop a thriving democracy while benefiting from the presence of American troops).

And what has the media done to curtail the production of twisted religious licenses like the fatwas issued by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi? Al Jazeera, again, has graciously granted the learned Sheikh two hours every week to spew his Koranic teachings in a program called *Sharia and Life*; it is broadcast to tens of millions of viewers, including Hamas operatives, Al Qaeda recruits, schoolteachers and impressionable Muslim youths.

More distressing yet, liberal newspapers such as the *Daily Star*, of which Khouri is an Editor-at-Large, have yet to call Al Jazeera management to task for spreading Qaradawi’s ideology and thus committing Arab society to another century of helplessness.

I wish I could enjoy the poetry of “Who killed Benazir Bhutto? We all killed her.” It is unfortunately factually wrong and strategically misleading. There is much we can do to curtail the banalization of violence, I agree, but this requires well-reasoned distinctions, not poetic equivocation.

Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, named after his son. He is a co-editor of “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Jewish Light, 2004).