By Jeff Jacoby
Friday, May 24, 2013
Broadcasting from Boston the day after the Marathon
bombing, a correspondent for the French-Canadian TV channel LCN explained why
Americans shouldn't be surprised when such atrocities occurred. It's the price
they have to pay for being a superpower, Richard Latendresse told his viewers.
It may be "un peu tragique," he conceded. But hey, that's what
happens when a nation takes so much pride in its military power – and has
inflicted similar suffering on others.
Writing in The Guardian the same day, Glenn Greenwald
noted that so far there was "virtually no known evidence regarding who did
it or why." Yet one paragraph later, he was railing against "attacks
that the US perpetrates rather than suffers" and calling the bombings
"exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US
has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and
over."
Then there was Richard Falk, a UN human rights
investigator and professor emeritus at Princeton, who attributed the bloody
mayhem in Copley Square to "our geopolitical fantasy of global
domination." The marathon bombings, Falk suggested in an article for Foreign
Policy Journal, were afitting "retribution" for US actions abroad.
He pointedly quoted poet W. H. Auden's "haunting" line: "Those to
whom evil is done/do evil in return."
Truly, there is something grotesque about people whose
first instinct after something as awful as the Patriots Day terror attack is to
parade their moral superiority by indicting America's culture, society, or
foreign policy. Yet there never seems to be a shortage of such paraders,
particularly in academia, the media, and the arts. Back in 2001, The New
Republic ran a feature in the weeks following 9/11 called "Idiocy
Watch," in which it catalogued the barrage of bitter and fatuous comments
being made about the attacks by well-known intellectuals for whom ideology
apparently trumped everything, decency included.
"We in America are convinced that it was blind, mad
fanatics who didn't know what they were doing," said Norman Mailer, to
cite just one of many examples. "But what if those perpetrators were right
and we were not?"
To reread those words 11 years later is to be disgusted
all over again that one of the nation's leading literary figures could have
proposed that Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda hijackers were "right"
to plan and carry out their ghastly slaughter. On the one-month anniversary of
the Marathon bombings, the suggestion that four people died and scores were
maimed because of America's global iniquity is no less revolting.
Yet that didn't inhibit London's former mayor Ken
Livingstone, who went on Iran's English-language TV channel to explain that the
terrorists detonated those pressure-cooker bombs because "people get
incredibly angry about injustices" such as "the torture at Guantanamo
Bay" and "lash out." It didn't stop Mark LeVine, a University of
California history professor, from advising Americans "to admit that as a
society they produce an incredible amount of violence," which in turn
"helps produce people like the Columbine, Newtown or Boston
murderers." It didn't deter former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who wrote
a blog post headlined "US leaders' fingerprints are on the
detonators," since it is "blatantly obvious" that what motivated
the terrorists was American policy in the Middle East.
There have always been Westerners quick to see the United
States as culpable or contemptible in every crisis – the urge to "blame
America first" was well known long before Jeane Kirkpatrick excoriated it
in a famous speech in 1984. In the abstract, of course, there is nothing wrong
with thoughtful self-criticism. For both individuals and societies, it is a
mark of health to be able to look inward and acknowledge fault; no society can
progress if it cannot be honest about its shortcomings.
But it is no part of constructive self-criticism to make
excuses for those who commit acts of terrorism, or to explain why their
victims, as citizens of the United States, had it coming. You don't demonstrate
sensitivity to other cultures by treating willful savagery against ours as
something less than savagery. Terrorism is never justified. Perpetrators are
not victims.
In the wake of a bloody atrocity like the one in Boston
last month, the first duty of civilized people – regardless of politics or
ideology -- is not to start asking why the evildoers hate us, or how they
became so angry.
It is to call their actions evil, and denounce them
without equivocation.
No comments:
Post a Comment