Taking a Tough Look at Terror

...Why not listen to what Adolf Hitler is saying and find the points reasonable people can agree on...

...Laqueur's expertise makes this pronouncement particularly scary...

...Here's another: "According to an old and widespread sophism, 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.' This is true in the sense that criminals and victims will seldom agree on the nature of a crime...

...After all, Germany did get a raw deal at Versailles, just as Mr...

...Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable...

...Get over the "belief that the world is, by and large, a rational place...

...Said's book profoundly influenced a generation of younger professors and professors-to-be, and helped create the discipline of postcolonial studies...

...press for cutting back on foreign coverage, and of the responsible arms of the U.S...

...terror and Liberalism is a shimmering, if sometimes uneven, polemic...

...Laqueur argues that U.S...

...He finds "grandeur" in the classic liberal idea of separating material and spiritual powers: It "held out a vision of freedom not just for one group of people and their favorite doctrine but for everyone—a society in which each and every individual might entertain religious or spiritual doctrines of his own, perhaps in harmony with everyone else's, or not, but freely either way...

...Or, to rephrase this well-in tentioned line of questioning in a somewhat caustic manner: "Why not listen to what Mr...

...It gradually becomes apparent that Laqueur is most consistently addressing Paul Berman's audience, those liberals who are philosophically or temperamentally inclined to misconstrue irrational deeds as reasoned reactions to an unjust world...

...The believers in jihad are a minority, in most countries a small minority, but they can count on a substantial periphery of sympathizers, more than sufficient to sustain long campaigns of terrorism...

...a politics of ethnic and religious tolerance...

...Ergo, the Islamic martyrs of 9/11...

...Laqueur has been writing about terrorism, on and off, since the mid-1970s...

...The term refers to Columbia University professor Edward Said's Orientalism (1979), which characterized nearly all Western scholarship on Arabs and Muslims as condescending, slanted and untrue...

...Sayyid Qutb (19061966) was an Egyptian who possessed both a devout Islamic and a secular Western schooling...

...Beyond such changes in liberal attitude, Berman advocates a "war of ideas" against the current terrorists, analogous to the one members of the non-Communist Left in the U.S...

...Liberalism," he writes, "is a doctrine that, in the name of tolerance, shuns absolutes...

...In truth, Laqueur argues, eruptions of terrorism seem immune to reasonable explanations of cause and effect: "Why did the radical Basque opt for terrorism whereas the Catalans also a minority in Spain albeit a more numerous one, did not...

...But he never pretends to have all, or even very many, of the answers: "The endeavor to find a 'general theory' of terrorism, one overall explanation of its roots, is a futile andmisguided enterprise...

...government for failing to heed clear signs throughout the 1990s that Islamic terrorists were going after Americans...

...Still, it seems fair to ask, do even the most virulent Islamicists really display an under-the-skin kinship with Western fascism and Communism...

...What is to keep them from repeating the edict of the Palestinian religious scholar and bin Laden associate Sheikh Abdullah Azzam...

...With considerable philosophical subtlety, Qutb laid out an indictment against the "hideous schizophrenia" promulgated by the West—i.e., the belief that faith can be separated from reason, that God can be pigeonholed into a limited sovereignty over humankind...

...his younger brother emigrated to Saudi Arabia and eventually became a teacher of bin Laden...

...The banners waved by true believers vary...

...but Liberalism does not shun every absolute...

...No negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues...

...The work Berman singles out for attention is In the Shade of the Qur'an, an exegesis in 30 volumes...

...he has located English translations of only three of them, but he finds that sampling sufficient to proclaim the whole "a fascinating work...

...Both before and during his confinements, Qutb wrote prolifically...

...Some readers may chafe at that description...

...Laqueur also takes effective swipes at some other received opinions, ones we've all heard and may even have uttered...

...But the scope of terrorist ambitions began expanding after World War II and shows no signs of diminishing...

...Thus Americans who asked "why" the suicide bombers and those who cheered their deeds "hate us so" began searching their own souls, not those of the haters...

...In one commentary, Qutb wrote: "The Surah tells the Muslim that, in the fight to uphold God's universal Truth, lives will have to be sacrificed...

...Self-defense ought to qualify as an absolute...

...Such a free, pluralistic society is precisely what totalitarianisms of all stripes have sought to grind under their heels, and Berman contends that it is now the target of what he calls "Muslim totalitarianism...

...The only generalization about terrorism that Laqueur signs off on is that it has been getting steadily and more indiscriminately violent...

...Walter Laqueur's No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Continuum, 288 pp., $24.95) is a less impassioned survey of where things stand at the present time, although the author does swerve into some feisty arguments toward the end of his book...

...Who besides arms manufacturers would benefit from that...

...Terrorists in Ireland, protesting British rule, and in Russia, seeking to overturn the feudal reign of the Czars, scrupulously avoided the murder of innocent bystanders...

...his cultural and political writings have come from a left-of-center perspective, and he alludes in Terror and Liberalism to "my own American social-democratic heart...

...waged against the Soviets during the 1940s and beyond...

...The rise of fundamentalist violence in the Middle East did not strike the Orientalists and postcolonialists as ominous...

...And some of the antiwar Socialists wound up serving in the Vichy government of Field Marshal Henri Petain...

...Laqueur notes that one of the most fervid Islamic clerics, Sheikh Omar Bakri, who openly called for the murder of Jews and Christians from his London mosque, "received social welfare payments of about $2,000 a month, for himself and his five children...

...Yet even if Iraq evolves into a true democracy and a beacon of hope to millions of the oppressed in other Arab states, how likely are the terrorists to change their minds about the Great Satan...

...In fact, John L. Esposito of Georgetown University in The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality...

...And so, in Berman's analysis, it seems...

...As it happens, Berman listens quite carefully, not to Osama bin Laden, whose ongoing existence among the living remains in doubt, but to the man who most profoundly shaped the philosophy, the animating mythology, espoused by bin Laden's AI Qaeda and its network of terrorist cells...

...He has harsh words, too, for the liberal governments of Europe that allowed fundamentalists to preach hatred and criminal acts with impunity in the mosques...

...but reading them will help those who may be in need of some toughening up...

...This journal was a notable enlistee in that cause...

...Azzam's motto: "Jihad and the rifle alone...

...Islamic terrorists are plotting to kill us not for our deeds but because of our deepest, most cherished values...

...And what must true liberals do now...

...the first steps in this direction have been made...

...But Berman lays a much heavier stress on "totalitarianism" than on "Muslim...

...Back in Egypt after earning an MA in education at the University of Northern Colorado, Qutb eventually ran afoul of Gamal Abdel Nasser's government, whose pan-Arabism and flirtation with the Soviet Union he, as an Islamic fundamentalist, vehemently and vociferously opposed...

...Shibboleth Number 1: Terrorism is a response to political brutality from above...

...The anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries targeted the powerful...

...In the midst of all the Prufrockian dithering—"And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions"—France fell easily to the invading Nazis...

...This story is recounted in Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism (Norton, 214 pp., $21.00) and comes with a moral: The antiwar Socialists in France who made the rapid descent from high-minded idealists to Fascist stooges were undone by "a philosophical belief, profound, large and attractive, which was reassuring instead of terrifying...

...Surely, they argued, simple humanity cried out for a better resolution of the present uneasiness than mass slaughter...

...There were a few attempts to kill Hitler and Mussolini (none to assassinate Stalin), but these were the actions of individuals and not systematic terrorism...

...Berman's main answer can be summarized: toughen up...

...Berman is well-positioned to understand liberal scruples of this ilk...

...Even nomenclature remains in doubt: "After 30 years of hard labor there is still no generally agreed definition of terrorism...

...if anyone qualifies as an expert in this bloody field, he does...

...Indeed, he saw concrete evidence of this dread invasion all around him in secularized Egypt...

...Whether Chomsky was disappointed when this slaughter failed to occur and when, instead, Afghan women joyously resumed the schooling the Taliban forbade them, remains unknown...

...quite frequently people do not agree about a traffic accident...

...Francis and Mother Teresa had many admirers, but so had Hitler and Stalin and that therefore there is not really much to choose between them...

...1992) answered the question posed by bis title in the negative: a myth...

...Berman comments: "Every page of In the Shade of the Qur 'an can be seen as a commentary on the single affirmation, 'There is no God but Allah.' Every new theme and topic offered Qutb a fresh opportunity to demonstrate that nature, man, and man's obligations come from a single source, which is God...

...As the last century taught us, or should have, sanguinary dreams of world domination require an animating mythology, be it the final triumph of the Aryan race or of the proletariat or of, in the current case, militant Islam...

...The burden of Berman's coolly reasoned but blisteringly written book is that contemporary liberals are deluded by the same "philosophical belief" when they confront the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism...

...It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason...

...foreign policy "had always been wrong and evil" led him to predict, on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan, "that America was about to kill between 3 and 4 million Afghans...

...it is not considered polite or even permissible to say unkind things about someone else's religion...

...But those who die in such a cause, Qutb added, "continue to live...

...Berman's book went to press before the war in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein...

...After the 9/11 attacks, he writes, "there was the same reasoned insistence that nothing unreasonable was taking place, the same argument that everything was rational, the same claim that it was foolish to be shocked, the same affirmation that ordinary explanations of normal human behavior could account for every last amazing development, if only we would open our eyes...

...Laqueur notes in passing that Lenin, Marx and Engels all opposed terrorism as counterproductive to revolutionary reform...

...That doesn't, on the face of it, leave much room for conversation...

...Others of Qutb's persuasion left Egypt...

...bin Laden is saying...

...It is only a question of time," Laqueur warns, "until radiological, chemical, or biological weapons will be used more or less systematically by terrorist groups...

...Qutb worried that Western ideas were seeping into and corrupting the Muslim world...

...academic departments of Middle Eastern studies failed to detect the growing menace of Islamic terrorism because they had been "taken over" by the post-Orientalists...

...The academics were not the only ones who got it wrong...

...Laqueur's response: "But in the 49 countries currently designated by the United Nations as the least developed hardly any terrorist activity occurs...

...These antiwar Socialists wanted no replays of the carnage at Verdun and the Somme...

...Berman wants, borrowing a term from Leon Blum, "a Third Force devoted to a politics of human rights and especially women's rights, across the Muslim world...

...a politics against racism and anti-Semitism, no matter how inconvenient that might seem to the Egyptian media and the House of Saud...

...Having acknowledged this conceptual muddle, Laqueur proceeds to demonstrate that much of what people think they know about terrorism is wrong, or at least unsubstantiated by the facts of the matter...

...their impervi ousness to logic or sweet reason, their willingness, eagerness to use any means, however violent, to achieve their diverse apocalypses vary not a whit...

...He mentions Noam Chomsky (so does Berman, scathingly), whose belief that U.S...

...Here's one: "It has been endlessly repeated that the majority of Muslims want to live in peace with their neighbors, a statement that is as correct as it is irrelevant...

...Laqueur's response: "If terrorism is the result of intolerable oppression, one should have expected terrorism in the most oppressive regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union...

...A significant bloc of Blum's own party, led by Secretary General Paul Faure, demurred...

...People do not, of course, need to read these books in order to learn that times are tough...

...What must true Muslims do to halt the tide...

...And Islam is the acknowledgment ofthat one overwhelming reality.'· Qutb did not simply condemn the West for its errors...

...Aren't we dealing here with people from a totally different culture, and doesn't it behoove us to learn about that culture so we can better understand what's making these people so angry...

...Hitlerclaims...

...what happens in that nation during the months and years ahead may demonstrate how effective a "war of ideas" can actually be in the Middle East...

...It is also unsettling when Berman, in Terror and Liberalism, states that "Islamism in its radical version of the present poses every imaginable danger...

...Laqueur ladles out criticisms of the U.S...

...Why did the Chechen engage in violent actions, but not the Tatars or other Muslim minorities in Russia...

...SUMMER BOOKS Taking a Tough Look at Terror By Paul Gray During the 1930s, France's Socialist prime minister, Leon Blum, grew alarmed at the rants and rumblings emanating from Germany and urged his nation to prepare militarily for a possible attack from the east...

...Shibboleth Number 2: Terrorism is a response to poverty...

...It is as true as saying that St...

...Qutb himself stubbornly stayed behind and endured years of prison before he was hanged in 1966...

...He maintained that those errors posed a mortal threat to Islam: "But in reality world Zionism and the Crusading Churches, as well as world Communism, are conducting the fight against Islam and the Muslim community, first and foremost, on ideological grounds and with the sole aim of destroying this solid rock which, despite their concerted and sustained efforts, they have not been able to remove...