The New Manichaeans

Since September 11, the same urgent question has been posed almost everywhere, from classrooms to grocery check out lines, from playgrounds to office elevators, from newspapers to radio: why do they hate us so much? While this question seems plain and simple, the answer, or even the outline of an answer, is neither. One might well argue that the naiveté of the question is itself a kind of answer, as it discloses a privilege of power too often unseen: the luxury of not having had to know, a parochialism and insularity that those on the margins can neither enjoy nor afford.[1]

Yet in this context, the question often reflects an almost painful need to understand, a curiosity borne of a fear and genuine bewilderment only intensified by the daily disclosure of yet another arena of American vulnerability. There is no doubt that the events of recent months have, perhaps irreversibly, revealed the sheer fragility of our lives and institutions, both to Americans and those who call themselves America’s enemies. Yet answering the question — let alone ascertaining the most effective long range course of action in response — requires stepping back from the press of day to day events, and resisting the reflexive anger and fantasies of revenge that so often accompany real fear. Such distance, in turn, makes possible keen self-examination and critical skepticism about what we believe and are told, not only about those said to inhabit a cultural wilderness distant from our own, but also the shibboleths constitutive of the fiction of a homogeneous, historically and culturally continuous Western identity.

Such doubled examination is extraordinarily difficult to ask of American citizens — or any citizens, for that matter — after an event in which so many innocents died, and even more difficult to do. Many people, in their justified fear, grief and anger, regard a call for self-examination as “blaming the victims,” a sentiment most recently expressed by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in his address to the United Nations on October 1:

Let those who say that we must understand the reasons for terrorism come with me to the thousands of funerals we’re having in New York City — thousands — and explain those insane, maniacal reasons to the children who will grow up with out fathers and mothers and to the parents who have had their children ripped from them for no reason at all...[2]

Yet inasmuch as self-understanding and understanding of others depend upon one another, such examination is crucial to rendering such senseless death less likely in the future. Those we call terrorists are, after all, not made in a single day; these nineteen men did not wake up September 11 and decide to destroy the World Trade Center. Their actions required careful planning, of course. But the context of social fragmentation and violence from which such people emerge, as well as the grievances, both domestic and international, that drove them to do such horrific things have been years in the making — and those grievances are shared by millions of Muslims and non-Muslims both at home and abroad who would never dream of killing anyone.[3]

A timely case in point is the sneaking suspicion by many that the United States calls the violence it supports the “fight for freedom” and the violence it dislikes “terrorism.” So, for example, when Saddam Hussein facilitates the containment and isolation of Iran, he is on the side of justice, but when he invades Kuwait, he is an outlaw. When Osama bin Laden and other Afghani mujahidin help us in our proxy war against the Soviet Union, they are freedom fighters, but now terrorists. When Israeli tanks invade West Bank villages or detonate cell phones to assassinate Palestinians they are practicing self-defense, not terrorism. Finally, when the United States bombs the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan it is fighting terror, not engaging in it. Yet Dr. Idris Eltayeb, chairman of the board of the factory, sees it otherwise: “...this was just as much an act of terrorism as the Twin Towers — the only difference is we know who did it.” [4] Security Council Resolution 1373...