"No excuses for terror"
Times columnist David Aaronovitch made a fine documentary shown on Channel 5 this week under the title "No excuses for terror". It deals with the perplexing phenomenon whereby parts of the Left either implicitly extenuate or actively ally with violent theocratic reaction. You can see it here; it's excellent.
Some of David's interviewees are my friends, who will forgive me for saying that the most cogent voice on the programme was one I hadn't heard before, making a point that hadn't occurred to me. Julie Nicholson, whose daughter Jenny was killed in the Edgware Road bombing on 7/7, commented on the video made by her daughter's murderer, Mohammad Sidique Khan. Khan's voice and finger-jabbing gestures, she said, indicated not courage but petulance. If you watch the video, you will see that she's right. Mrs Nicholson's point is more than an observation about personal psychology. It has political significance.
Those of us who share Tony Blair's pellucid assessment of terrorism are accustomed to arguing that the terrorist bombings in New York, Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere are what they are - brutal acts serving totalitarian and xenophobic ends - rather than code for something else. When Osama bin Laden declares (as he did in his 1998 statement "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam") that "it is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God", he is not making a rhetorical plea for a sovereign Palestine on terrority marked by the pre-1967 armistice line. (I recently tried to explain this point myself to a loud but dim demagogue on Sky News.)
But there is also a prevalent notion, sometimes argued by commentators far more intelligent than George Galloway, that the terrorists of 9/11 or 7/7 were agents - albeit destructive - of idealism or even courage. One commentator I greatly respect, the late Susan Sontag, wrote in the New Yorker after 9/11: "And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." I find this - to put it no higher - a terrible misconception.
We don't know the final motivation of the suicide terrorists; we certainly have no grounds for ascribing to them courage, selflessness or idealism. To do that - witness George Clooney's simultaneously stupid and sinister film Syriana - is to posit characteristics that might in principle be diverted into more fruitful ventures. It is one step towards the notion that our Islamist enemies represent a historical force that, for all its destructiveness, calls us to account for our sins of omission and commission in foreign policy, and might be mollified if we were to rectify them.
One of the half-dozen greatest novelists in the language, Joseph Conrad, wrote in one of his two greatest novels, The Secret Agent (page 102 of the Penguin Classics edition), far more acutely than certain modern philosophers of the terrorist bomber. The character known by his nickname of The Professor (for he uses his knowledge of chemicals to manufacture explosives) is a conventional failure possessed of:
... a frenzied puritanism of ambition. He nursed it as something secularly holy. To see it thwarted opened his eyes to the true nature of the world, whose morality was artificial, corrupt and blasphemous. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolved him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition.... He was a moral agent - that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance, he procured for himself the appearances of power and personal prestige. That was undeniable to his vengeful bitterness. It pacified its unrest; and in their own way the most ardent of revolutionaries are perhaps doing no more but seeking for peace in common with the rest of mankind - the peace of soothed vanity, of satisfied appetites, or perhaps of appeased conscience.
Jenny Nicholson's killer was not a man of courage. He appears to have been an ignorant, vain and inarticulate prig, thereby representing a constant in human affairs. His filmed statement exemplified "personal impulses disguised into creeds". Whatever political action Western governments take in foreign policy will have no effect whatever on personal impulses. Our policy must be to attack the creeds and their advocates directly - breaking up their cells at home, and inflicting catastrophic military defeats on them in Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations they threaten.
