Terrorist Mayhem in America

These ominous days are a time of mourning for our civilization. Much that is precious has been lost. Our sense of trust has been grotesquely violated. Horrors beyond our worst nightmares have been visited upon unsuspecting innocent people. A wicked act by 18 individuals bent on suicidal vengeance may well define the appalling horrors to come of this century. We mourn the loss of loved ones. And we mourn the loss of the sense of innocence that Americans had come to take for granted. Welcome to the 21st century.

We know what we have lost. What can the terrorists chalk up in their favour? In fact very little. As yet no one has had the courage to come up and claim the infernal act in their name. Even the often-mentioned Osama bin Laden has apparently denied involvement. This is significant. It was obviously an act of blood revenge, a subject about which anthropologists have long written about in terms of the tribal codes of the Middle East. There is, regrettably, nothing very surprising in this. There had been too much murder going on in Israel and the West Bank for no extreme reprisals to take place. Many of us writing about this area had warned of the terrible dangers, the uncontrollable anger that was being unleashed for many years. But now surely everyone has lost. If this was done in the name of Palestinians, surely their burden which was very heavy yesterday is even more intolerable today. If it was done in the name of some weird interpretation of Islam, all Islamic states, including the shadowy figures of the Taliban, have condemned it. Some groups may be shedding crocodile tears but the sense of shame and disgust at attacking innocents hangs heavy over them anyway. Israel, too, is not any safer.

So what is the meaning of this wickedness? It says, We are very, very angry at you, Americans, for your smug arrogance in the face of our desperate suffering. That is all. American military and financial might is certainly not even dented. The worldwide network of overwhelming U.S. power continues to pulsate with precision. What have these desperate people achieved apart from wanton murder? It is not only Americans they have killed. So many have perished from all kinds of diverse backgrounds who had come to work in those beautiful buildings which represented some abstract future. They have put the entire world on edge. But they may have distanced sympathetic people away from their cause. They may even unwittingly have provided some unexpected justification for the brutal Israeli occupation of Arab lands. That is the law of unpredictable results in history.

One of the greatest leaders of the past century, Mahatma Gandhi, had foreseen all of this in the equally murderous relations between communities in India before partition. He knew the awful logic of violence. His view was that the Communists had it all quite wrong. The ends did not justify the means. On the contrary, it was the character of the means used that determined the nature of the ends achieved. Violence will result in further violence. The infernal spiral must be turned back by any means possible. And by holding on to truth, satyagraha.

There is a message in this for President Bush as well. At a time when the world is teetering on the brink of further violence, it is vital to strengthen all those institutions for peace. The law of unpredictable results means that violence may produce untold further violence in the future. This is particularly true in connection with the military strikes naturally being contemplated at the moment. If we were to spend even a fraction of the sums spent on defense budgets both in the U.S. and in the Middle East on serious peace initiatives, we would get much better dividends.

We are condemned to use mental categories: the concepts Middle East, Fundamentalist, Arab, appear to mean something, when in fact they mean very little. The categories that we commonly use can be quite misleading. We will need history and geography lessons quickly. The category Middle East which has come into common use in the past century includes all kinds of diverse people, Christians as well as Jews and Muslims, Arabic speakers, Turks, Greeks and Armenians, Circassians, Georgians, Kurds and many others besides who may have very different ideas about all these events. And in terms of states, what do Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, let alone NATO member Turkey have in common? Much the same can be said of the category Arab which includes all those from quite diverse origins who happen to speak Arabic, many of whom are Christians of diverse denominations. Many in the great cities of the region would have used the term for camel-herding tribesmen.

So what is to be done? We must define the enemy precisely. The individuals who perpetrated these infernal acts must be brought to justice. Their networks must be brought to light. So much is clear. Beyond that we must be careful not to use too broad a brush to accuse persons simply on the basis of mere suspicions. It is natural at a time of disaster to look for culprits, but all persons wearing turbans are not to blame. The New York Times reported that a poor Sikh was arrested on an Amtrak train on Friday. He was even discovered to be hiding a daggeractually a symbolic weaponin his shirt. A woman wearing a sari was nearly run down by a man outraged that he had been stopped by the cops. These are isolated instances of a sense of paranoid McCarthyism which we had thankfully left behind us. We must not allow it to resurface at a time when we need careful analysis and effective action.

The enemy has to do with the way the actions of the U.S. are viewed abroad by a broad range of people. It is sympathetic public opinion outraged by some of the policies of the most powerful nation that feeds and nourishes extremists. The greater the passion and the anger, the greater the support for martyrs. It is this sense of public outrage that allows marginal individuals to begin to think of the meaning of their lives being fulfilled by an act of extreme violence. U.S. diplomats have reported this sense of public outrage about American policy in the region for many years. It is evident that it has been particularly strong in all Arab countries, more evident as you get nearer to ground zero of the problems: the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.

It cannot be denied that the problems which had their origin in the historic Anti-Semitism of Europe and the resulting Holocaust have been solved at the expense of the Palestinian population. The total number of refugees is in the many millions. The refugee camps are places of hopeless squalor where deep resentments fester among a doomed people with no future. They have been left there for the last 50 years to stew in their fury by governments local and far away, large and small, with little cynical regard for their lot. The massacres in the regfugee camps in 1982 are still a vivid memory. Recent actions by the Sharon government in Israel have made Palestinians on the West Bank virtually prisoners in their own settlements. The U.S. standing behind Israel is inevitably associated with these policies by these large and resentful populations. There may be other problems which are sometimes mentioned, such as the sanctions against Iraq, which are pursued with particular vehemence by the U.S. and Britain, the large numbers killed in Iraq during and after the Gulf War, or the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but none of these, in my opinion, have the force and the gut-wrenching immediacy, the sense of dishonour surrounding the Palestinian predicament for Arab public opinion. So it is around these issues that we must look carefully and analytically to dismantle terrorist networks.

There is talk at the moment of military action against Afghanistan. There may well be justification to extract Osama bin Laden from his mountain fastness. It may be possible to use bases in Pakistan for this purpose.

However, we must remember that Pakistan herself, a country of 140 million, is quite unstable. Our actions in Central Asia must not end up in destabilizing the entire South Asian subcontinent with nuclear weapons at issue. We must recall that Afghanistan has been wracked by civil war of the most ferocious kind for the last 30 years. According to a BBC report, there are not many men left alive in that unfortunate land. Most of the population consists of women and children. They are facing famine this winter. Much of the placeincluding the magnificent Buddha statues of another erais already destroyed. It brings no honour to us to bomb ruins further into ruins. In any case, this is a side issue. The main question lies in and around Jerusalem, both in myth, in history, and for the present.

American presidents Carter, Clinton, and Bush Sr., as well as Kissinger and others, had taken the desperate issues of the Middle East seriously. President Clinton tried especially hard in the waning days of his presidency to bring the feuding sides together. He had nearly succeeded. In retrospect it seems such a shame that he had not had a little more time. This disaster could well have been avoided.

As we go forward in coming to terms with this tragedy, we must be mindful of what America stands for in the world. This is and must remain a country of liberty, of human rights, a land with a rational and intelligent constitution which has been a beacon to the rest of the world. It is the country of hope and the future where all the most diverse cultures of the world have found fertile and nurturing soil to develop themselves and contribute to the well-being of mankind. It is a land where the unusual creativity of individuals is rewarded, where laws are made by the people and taken seriously. We must not give in to insecurity, a false sense of paranoia, a reversion to weak-kneed McCarthyism to break the promises of generations of gifted and humane thinkers who have created this extraordinary republic as a symbol of freedom for the entire world.

Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies Nur O. Yalman, a native of Turkey, teaches Foreign Cultures 17: Thought and Change in the Contemporary Middle East.