G'Day All,

Have you seen Christopher Hitchens
take on the comments of Chomsky et. al.
on S11 ?

Hitchens despises US Foreign Policy,
thinks Kissinger should be arraigned on war crimes
and yet supports war against the Taliban.

Regards,

Craig

================
Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism
http://thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=hitchens20010924

Not all readers liked my attack on the liberal/left tendency to
"rationalize" the aggression of September 11,
or my use of the term "fascism with an Islamic face,"
and I'll select a representative example of the sort
of "thinking" that I continue to receive on my screen, even
now. This jewel comes from Sam Husseini, who runs
the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC:

    "The fascists like bin Laden could not get volunteers
     to stuff envelopes if Israel had withdrawn from Jerusalem
     like it was supposed to--and the US stopped the sanctions
    and the bombing on Iraq."

You've heard this "thought" expressed in one way or
another, dear reader, have you not? I don't think I
took enough time in my last column to point out just
what is so utterly rotten at the very core of it.

So, just to clean up a corner or two:

   (1) If Husseini knows what was in the minds of the
   murderers, it is his solemn responsibility to inform us
   of the source of his information, and also to share it
   with the authorities. (2) If he does not know what
   was in their minds--as seems enormously more
   probable--then why does he rush to appoint himself
   the ventriloquist's dummy for such a faction? Who
   volunteers for such a task at such a time?

   Not only is it indecent to act as self-appointed
   interpreter for the killers, but it is rash in the
   highest degree. The death-squads have not favored
   us with a posthumous manifesto of their grievances,
   or a statement of claim about Palestine or Iraq, but
   we are nonetheless able to surmise a fair amount
   about the ideological or theological "root" of their
   act (Husseini doesn't seem to demand "proof" of bin
   Laden's involvement any more than the Bush Administration
   is willing to supply it) and if we are correct in this,
   then we have considerable knowledge of two things:
   their ideas and their actions.

   First the actions. The central plan was to maximize
   civilian casualties in a very dense area of
   downtown Manhattan. We know that the killers had studied
   the physics and ecology of the buildings and the
   neighborhood, and we know that they were limited only
   by the flight schedules and bookings of civil aviation.
   They must therefore have been quite prepared to
   convert fully-loaded planes into missiles, instead of
   the mercifully unpopulated aircraft that were actually
   commandeered, and they could have hoped by a combination
   of luck and tactics to have at least doubled the
   kill-rate on the ground that they actually achieved.
   They spent some time in the company of the families they
   had kidnapped for the purpose of mass homicide. It was
   clearly meant to be much, much worse than it was. And it
   was designed and incubated long before the
   mutual-masturbation of the Clinton-Arafat-Barak "process."
   The Talibanis have in any case not distinguished
   themselves very much by an interest in the Palestinian
   plight. They have been busier trying to bring their own
   societies under the reign of the most inflexible and
   pitiless declension of shari'a law. This is known to
   anyone with the least acquaintance with the subject.

   The ancillary plan was to hit the Department of Defense
   and (on the best evidence we have available) either the
   Capitol Dome or the White House. The Pentagon, for all
   its symbolism, is actually more the civil-service bit
   of the American "war-machine," and is set in a crowded
   Virginia neighborhood. You could certainly call it a
   military target if you were that way inclined, though
   the bin Ladenists did not attempt anything against a
   guarded airbase or a nuclear power-station in
   Pennsylvania (and even if they had, we would now
   doubtless be reading that the glow from Three Mile
   Island was a revenge for globalization). The Capitol is
   where the voters send their elected representatives--
   poor things, to be sure, but our own. The White House
   is where the elected President and his family and staff
   are to be found. It survived the attempt of British
   imperialism to burn it down, and the attempt of the
   Confederacy to take Washington, DC, and this has hallowed
   even its most mediocre occupants. I might, from where I
   am sitting, be a short walk from a gutted Capitol or a
   shattered White House. I am quite certain that Husseini
   and his rabble of sympathizers would still be telling me
   that my chickens were coming home to roost. (The image
   of bin Laden's men "stuffing envelopes" is the perfected
   essence of such brainless rhetoric.) Only the
   stoicism of men like Jeremy Glick and Thomas Burnett
   prevented some such outcome; only those who chose who
   die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such
   a further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth
   death squad. One iota of such innate fortitude is worth
   all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the
   plan of September 11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid
   by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998.

   I speak with some feeling about that latter event, because
   I wrote three Nation columns about it at the time, pointing
   out (with evidence that goes unrebutted to this day) that it
   was a war crime, and a war crime opposed by the majority of
   the military and intelligence establishment. The crime was
   directly and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked
   President to avoid impeachment (a conclusion sedulously
   avoided by the Chomskys and Husseinis of the time).
   The Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant was well-known to be
   a civilian target, and its "selection" was opposed by most
   of the Joint Chiefs and many CIA personnel for just this
   reason. (See, for additional corroboration, Seymour Hersh's
   New Yorker essay "The Missiles of August"). To mention this
   banana-republic degradation of the United States
   in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to
   inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon
   every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination
   possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most elementary,
   at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of
   passengers. (How are you doing, Sam? Noam, wazzup?)

   So much for what the methods and targets tell us about the
   true anti-human and anti-democratic motivation. By their
   deeds shall we know them. What about the animating
   ideas? There were perhaps 700 observant followers of the
   Prophet Muhammed burned alive in New York on September 11.
   Nobody who had studied the target zone could have been in
   any doubt that some such figure was at the very least a
   likely one. And, since Islam makes no discrimination between
   the color and shade of its adherents, there was good reason to
   think that any planeload of civilians might include some
   Muslims as well. I don't myself make this point with any
   more emphasis than I would give to the several hundred
   of my fellow Englishmen (some of them doubtless Muslims
   also) who perished. I stress it only because it makes my
   point about fascism. To the Wahhabi-indoctrinated sectarians
   of Al Qaeda, only the purest and most fanatical are worthy
   of consideration. The teachings and published proclamations
   of this cult have initiated us to the idea that the tolerant, the
   open-minded, the apostate or the followers of different branches
   of The Faith are fit only for slaughter and contempt. And
   that's before Christians and Jews, let alone atheists and
   secularists, have even been factored in. As before, the deed
   announces and exposes its "root cause." The grievance and
   animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone
   the occupation of the West Bank. The gates of Vienna would
   have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm
   could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds.

   And this is precisely, now, our problem. The Taliban and its
   surrogates are not content to immiserate their own societies
   in beggary and serfdom. They are condemned, and they
   deludedly believe that they are commanded, to spread the
   contagion and to visit hell upon the unrighteous. The very
   first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition
   of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we
   have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else.
   Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I think,
   not possible. (I say "fortunately" because I am also
   convinced that such coexistence is not desirable).

   But straight away, we meet people who complain at once that
   this enemy is us, really. Did we not aid the grisly Taliban
   to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed "we" did. Well, does this
   not double or triple our responsibility to remove them
   from power? A sudden sheep-like silence, broken by a bleat.
   Would that not be "over-reaction"? All I want to say for now is
   that the under-reaction to the Taliban by three successive
   United States administrations is one of the great resounding
   disgraces of our time. There is good reason to think that a
   Taliban defeat would fill the streets of Kabul with joy.
   But for the moment, the Bush Administration seems a hostage
   to the Pakistani and Saudi clients who are the sponsors and
   "harborers" the President claims publicly to be looking for!

   Yet the mainstream left, ever shuffling its feet, fears only
   the discomfort that might result from repudiating such an
   indefensible and humiliating posture. Very well then,
   comrades. Do not pretend that you wish to make up for
   America's past crimes in the region. Here is one such crime
   that can be admitted and undone--the sponsorship of the
   Taliban could be redeemed by the demolition of
   its regime and the liberation of its victims. But I detect
   no stomach for any such project.

   Better, then--more decent and reticent--not to affect such
   concern for "our" past offenses.

   This is not an article about grand strategy, but it seems to
   me to go without saying that a sincere commitment to the
   secular or reformist elements in the Muslim world would
   automatically shift the balance of America's engagement.
   Every day, the wretched Arafat is told by Washington, as a
   favor to the Israelis, that he must police and repress the
   forces of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. When did Washington last
   demand that Saudi Arabia cease its heavy financing of these
   primitive and unscrupulous organizations? We let the Algerians fight
   the Islamic-fascist wave without saying a word or lending
   a hand. And this is an effort in which civic and social
   organizations can become involved without official permission.
   We should be building such internationalism whether it
   serves the short-term needs of the current Administration or
   not: I signed an anti-Taliban statement several months ago and was
   appalled by the eerie silence with which the initiative was greeted in
Washington. (It ought to go without saying that the demand
   for Palestinian self-determination is, as before, a good
   cause in its own right. Not now more than ever, but now as
   ever. There are millions of Palestinians who do not want the
   future that the pious of all three monotheisms have in store
   for them.)

   This is another but uniquely toxic version of an old story,
   whereby former clients like Noriega and Saddam Hussein and
   Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban cease to be our
   monsters and become monstrous in their own right. At such a
   point, a moral and political crisis occurs. Do "our" past
   crimes and sins make it impossible to expiate the offense
   by determined action? Those of us who were not consulted
   about, and are not bound by, the previous covert compromises
   have a special responsibility to say a decisive "no" to this.

   The figure of six-and-a-half thousand murders in New York
   is almost the exact equivalent the the total uncovered in
   the death-pits of Srebrenica. (Even at Srebrenica, the demented
   General Ratko Mladic agreed to release all the women,
   all the children, all the old people and all the males above
   and below military age before ordering his squads to fall
   to work.) On that occasion, US satellites flew serenely
   overhead recording the scene, and Milosevic earned himself
   an invitation to Dayton, Ohio. But in the end, after
   appalling false starts and delays, it was found that
   Milosevic was too much. He wasn't just too nasty.
   He was also too irrational and dangerous. He didn't even
   save himself by lyingly claiming, as he several times
   did, that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Bosnia. It must be
   said that by this, and by other lies and numberless other
   atrocities, Milosevic distinguished himself as an enemy
   of Islam. His national-socialist regime took the line on
   the towel-heads that the Bush Administration is only
   accused, by fools and knaves, of taking. Yet when a stand
   was eventually mounted against Milosevic, it was Noam Chomsky
   and Sam Husseini, among many others, who described the
   whole business as a bullying persecution of--the Serbs!

   I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully
   and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism.
   No political coalition is possible with such people and,
   I'm thankful to say, no political coalition with them
   is now necessary. It no longer matters what they think.