Ever since members of the U.K. Labour Party in
September elected Jeremy Corbyn as party leader by
a landslide, British political and media elites have acted as though
their stately manors have been invaded by hordes of gauche, marauding serfs.
They have waged a relentless and undisguised war to undermine
Corbyn in every way possible, and that includes — first and foremost —
the Blairite wing of his party, who have viciously
maligned him in ways they would never dare for David Cameron and his
Tory followers.
In one sense, that’s all conventional politics:
Establishment guardians never appreciate having their position and entitlements
threatened by insurgents, and they are thus uniting — Tory and Labour
mavens alike — to banish the lowly intruders from their Oxbridge court
(class and caste loyalty often outweighs supposed
ideological differences). Corbyn’s reaction to all of this is also
conventional politics: He quite reasonably wants to replace
his Blairite shadow ministers who have been vilifying him as a Terrorist-loving
extremist with those who are supportive of his agenda, a
perfectly rational response that the British media is treating as
proof that he’s
a cultish
Stalinist tyrant (even though Blairites, when they controlled the
party, threatened
to de-select left-wing MPs who failed to prove sufficient loyalty to
Prime Minister Blair). In response to the dismissal
of a couple of anti-Corbyn ministers yesterday, several other Labour
MPs have announced their protest-resignations with the gestures of
melodrama and martyrdom at which banal British politicians excel.
Rather than wallow in all that internal power
jockeying of a former world power, I want to focus instead on one specific
argument that has arisen as part of Corbyn’s cabinet “re-shuffling” because it
has application far beyond Her Majesty’s realm. One of the shadow ministers
replaced yesterday by Corbyn is a total mediocrity and non-entity named Pat
McFadden. He claims (plausibly
enough) that he was replaced by Corbyn because of remarks he made
in the House of Commons after the Paris attack, which the British media and
public widely
viewed as disparaging Corbyn as a terrorist apologist for
recognizing the role played by Western foreign policy in terror attacks. (Can
you fathom the audacity of a Party leader not wanting ministers who malign
him as an ISIS apologist?)
Other Labour MPs resigning from their positions
today in protest of McFadden’s dismissal have expressly defended the substance
of McFadden’s remarks about terrorism; one of them, Stephen Doughty, tweeted this
today, with the key excerpt of McFadden’s statement about terrorism:
I agree
with everything @patmcfaddenmp
said in these comments. Shocked if this why he's been sacked.
— Stephen Doughty (@SDoughtyMP) January 6, 2016
This claim — like the two ousted shadow ministers
themselves — is so commonplace as to be a cliché. One hears this all the time
from self-defending jingoistic Westerners who insist that their tribe in
no way plays any causal role in what it calls terrorist violence.
They insist that those who posit a causal link between endless Western violence
in the Muslim world and return violence aimed at the West are “infantilizing
the terrorists and treating them like children” by suggesting that
terrorists lack autonomy and the capacity for choice, and are forced by
the West to engage in terrorism. They bizarrely claim — as McFadden did before
being fired — that to recognize this causal link is to deny that
terrorists have agency and to instead believe that their actions are controlled
by the West. One hears this claim constantly.
The claim is absurd: a total reversal of reality and
a deliberate distortion of the argument. That some Muslims attack the West in
retaliation for Western violence (and external imposition of tyranny)
aimed at Muslims is so well-established that it’s barely debatable. Even the
2004 task
force report commissioned by the Rumsfeld Pentagon on the causes of
terrorism decisively concluded this was the case:
Beyond such studies, those who have sought to bring
violence to Western cities have made explicitly
clear that they were doing so out of fury and a sense of helplessness over
Western violence that continuously kills innocent Muslims. “The drone hits in
Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They
kill women, children, they kill everybody,” Faisal Shahzad, the attempted
Times Square bomber, told
his sentencing judge when she expressed bafflement over how he could try to
kill innocent people. And then there’s just common sense about human nature: If
you spend years bombing, invading, occupying, and imposing tyranny on other
people, some of them will want to bring violence back to you.
There’s a reason the U.S. and NATO countries are
the targets of this type of violence but South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico are
not. Terrorists don’t place pieces of paper with the names of the
world’s countries in a hat and then randomly pick one out and attack that
one. Only pure self-delusion could lead one to assert that Spain’s
and the U.K.’s participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq played no causal
role in the 2004 train bombing in Madrid and 2005 bombing in London.
Even British intelligence officials acknowledge that
link. Gen. David Petraeus frequently
described how U.S. policies — such as Guantanamo and torture — were
key factors in how Muslims become radicalized against the U.S. In June, Tony
Blair’s former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, made
this as clear as it can be made when he admitted the Iraq War was “wrong”:
Can that be any clearer?
Obviously, none of this is to say that Western
interference in that part of the world is the only cause of
anti-Western “terrorism,” nor is it to say that it’s the principal cause in every
case, nor is to deny that religious extremism plays some role.
Most people need some type of fervor to be willing to risk their lives and
kill other people: It can be nationalism, xenophobia, societal pressures, hatred
of religion, or religious convictions. But typically, such dogmatic
fervor is necessary but not sufficient to commit such violence; one still
needs a cause for the targets one selects.
In its statement
claiming responsibility for the attack on Paris, ISIS invoked multiple
ostensibly religious justifications for the violence but also said the
targeting of the French was due to “their war against Islam in France and
their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets”
(France had been bombing ISIS in Iraq since January 2015 and in
Syria since September). In the same month, ISIS claimed responsibility
for an attack on a Russian jet as retaliation for Russian airstrikes in Syria,
as well as an attack on Lebanon as a response to Hezbollah’s violence. Here’s
beloved-by-the-D.C.-establishment Will McCants of the Brookings Institution telling
Vox why ISIS attacked Paris:
Even in those cases where religious extremism rather
than anger over Western violence seems to be the primary cause — such as the Charlie
Hebdo murders, done to avenge what the attackers regarded as blasphemous
cartoons — the evidence
is clear that the attackers were radicalized by indignation over U.S.
atrocities in Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib. Pointing out that Western violence
is a key causal factor in anti-Western terrorism is not to say it is
the only cause.
But whatever one’s views are on that causal question,
it’s a total mischaracterization to claim that those who recognize a causal
connection are denying that terrorists have autonomy or choice. To the
contrary, the argument is that they are engaged in a decision-making
process — a very expected and predictable one — whereby they conclude
that violence against the West is justified as a result of Western violence
against predominantly Muslim countries. To believe that is not to deny that
terrorists possess agency; it’s to attribute agency to them.
The whole point of the argument is that they
are not forced or compelled or acting out of reflex; the point is
that they have decided that the only valid and effective response to Western
attacks on and interference in Muslim societies is to attack back. When asked
by a friend about the prospect of “peaceful protest” against U.S. violence and
interference in Muslim countries, Shahzad, the would-be Times Square
bomber, replied: “Can
you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets
are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?”
One can, needless to say, object to the validity of
that reasoning. But one cannot deny that the decision to engage in this
violence is the reasoning process in action.
By pointing out the causal connection between U.S.
violence and the decision to bring violence to the West, one is not
denying that the attackers lack agency, nor is one claiming they are
“forced” by the West to do this, nor is one “infantilizing” them. To recognize
this causation is to do exactly the opposite: to point out that some human
beings will decide — using their rational and reasoning faculties
and adult decision-making capabilities — that violence is justified and even
necessary against those who continually impose violence and aggression on
others (and, for the logically impaired, see the update
here on explaining — yet again — that causation is not the same as
justification).
It’s understandable that self-loving tribalistic
Westerners want to completely absolve themselves and their own violent
societies of having any role in the terrorist violence they love to denounce.
That’s the nature of the tribalistic instinct in humans: My tribe is not at
fault; it’s the other tribe to which we’re superior that is to blame. But
blatantly distorting the debate this way — by ludicrously depicting recognition
of this decision-making process and causal chain as a denial of agency or
autonomy — is not an acceptable (or effective) way to achieve that.
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