The Roots to 9/11

It is a dangerous game to take the rantings of lunatics at face value and yet, this is exactly what some historians do when they search for the cause of the Arab Terrorist Anger. Many accept as prima-facie the grievances expressed by a culture which has grown progressively self-destructive every year without assessing the value of the grievances on their own merit.

I wonder if these same historians might have lent some support to Nazi actions prior to World War II. Were they ideologically akin to those who sought appeasement based on Nazi grievances, a policy that ultimately cost millions of lives? Even today, we might worry that a just cause drove James Bird’s killers to commit that hideous crime. Wasn’t Timothy McVeigh driven by the US governments’ mistakes at Waco? What about Matthew Shepard’s killers? Perhaps they had a righteous grievance that drove them to do that unspeakable act?

Nope. Sorry. Mass murderers do not have righteous causes. These causes are merely symbolic of an internal struggle. For such monsters, their need is not to redress past wrongs but to garner attention, to assuage their feelings of self-hatred and insignificance.

Just look at the average Saudi terrorist that climbed on board those ill fated flights. What was the most troubling thing in their lives? That Palestinians are mistreated by Israelis? If that were justification, couldn’t we all find some connection to some mistreated people and start our own jihad. Couldn’t the US feign common cause with Maronite Christians in Lebanon and start our own holy war against the infidel? Could not the Balkans have been ethnically cleansed with this reasoning? Would we so easily excuse Americans with Irish heritage blowing up buses in London?

Violent mass movements, as explained in Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, typically spring from a national feeling of humiliation, of insignificance. “Power corrupts the few, but weakness corrupts the many.” The German people were led down the Nazi path to destruction not because of any great concern for the Sudetendeutsche but because of their psychological desire to overcome their national humiliation in WWI. And as is similar with the Arabs, the German people never endorsed whole-heartedly the actions of the Nazis but rather the distraught majority apathetically went along with the minority whose weak psyches wanted violence.

Similarly, the average Saudi has no real concern for Palestinians except as a cover for their own weakness. If they cared for them, they would have absorbed them into their own populations long ago like Israel did for all the Jews that were evicted from their homes in Arab lands. They certainly wouldn’t have policies that treat the Palestinians as second class citizens. They would have objected to the eviction from Kuwait of all Palestinians after the 1st Gulf War. Are you starting to get a picture of the Arab Terrorist mindset?

If not, let’s look at the particular terrorist, Mohammed Atta. Dr. Ruth Stein gives a detailed and disconcerting picture of the mind of Atta. We do not see a person who seeks to attack his enemy but rather a sick young man whose victims are symbolic. What we should be concerned with are not the distant struggles of others but with a local culture that breeds such sickness in the minds of their youth, that makes them fodder for the sick minds of others.

Ali Salem, an Egyptian playwright, penned a missive about this culture which creates “dwarfs” of their children. Within, you find echoes of Stein’s analysis. The pain of life causes them to seek a shortcut to death (and peace) through suicide. Once the course is decided, “they search for a way to ennoble it in the eyes of ordinary people who do not share their holy delusion but whose admiration they crave.” To ennoble it, they turn to the national obsession, Israel. It is no small detail that when told of his son’s participation in 9/11, Atta’s father, a father who Atta so desperately wanted to please, replied that a Jewish agent must have been responsible.

Which is why I’m so adverse to the analysis of Juan Cole who seems to ennoble this obsession. Foreign occupation, to him, is the cause of terrorism and he then legitimizes modern Arab Terrorists by associating them with historical movements. “You want to end terrorism? End unjust military occupations,” he says. But Mohammed Atta and his group were not occupied. And many of the terrorists in Iraq chose to come in from neighboring lands. Cole even goes further by railing against “Indian enormities against Kashmiri Muslims” and Chechnya. I don’t refuse Cole his right to analyze; I just wish that he would recognize the risk he takes by taking the rantings of mass murderers at face-value. He gives them, in essence, their reason to kill, a righteous cause in the eyes of the world.

Cole and I certainly agree on his last sentence: “Humiliation is what causes terrorism.” We differ on what causes that humiliation.

For that we need to find the roots of that humiliation which I touched on above. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times and frequent traveler to the Middle East, produced a documentary on the roots of 9/11. Friedman paints a disturbing picture of Arab culture by quoting from the UN Arab Human Development Report 2002. Arab culture, from Morocco to Yemen, has come to a grinding halt in terms of economic growth, technological advancement and political freedom. The entire Arab world has a GDP less than Spain (while having 8 times the population). 5 times as many books are translated into Greek than are translated into Arabic. Most telling, in a country like Saudi Arabia where their per capita income was almost as much as the United States in the 70s, purchasing power has fallen by over half. By contrast, Israel, a small country, which has very few natural resources and has to expend a large amount on self-defense, has seen their per capita income increase dramatically over the same period to twice that of oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

This failure cannot be seen as caused by relatively small conflicts that touch the lives of very few Arabs directly. And one cannot even suppose that these conflicts are primary in their lives when so many problems exist locally. Is it Israel that has crushed economic development in Saudi Arabia or is it an insistence on imprisoning and terrorizing half of their potential workforce? Every Arab country has laws protecting “honor” crimes, where a relative has the right to kill a woman for humiliating the family. When a culture views rape as a crime by the victim and a humiliation born by the male relatives of the victim, are we really to trust any other “cause” for humiliation? And while Arab apologists may cite that honor crimes are rare and typically a phenomenon of the lower class, we have to remember that honor crime legislation is something recent, enacted by the same elites who dismiss it.

Are we surprised then when we find out that Atta insisted in his will that no women, including his mother, be present at his funeral, or that Osama bin Laden grew up with a distant father and a mother who was just one in a long line of discarded brides? Is it unusual that American troops were able to coax Saddam's Fedayeen out of hiding by playing tapes in Arabic of a woman ridiculing their pensises.

The situation is apparent to those who travel and it is of no coincidence that most of the Arab terrorists were not created until they had some direct interaction with the West. The perpetrators of 9/11 were not created in Arabia, where they supposedly suffered under occupation, but rather in Europe. Coming from a hyper-macho society, they were suddenly thrust into an atmosphere where they have to compete and are often out performed by women. The more chilling aspect of this is that whereas few Arabs interacted with western culture, satellite TV has brought the clash of cultures to homes and coffee shops all across the Arab world. Everyday, Arabs are reminded of how behind they are, of how little they have changed, and of how the modern world, encroaching into their lives each day, includes powerful women and alternative lifestyles.

Yes. Terrorism is caused by occupation, not by foreign forces, but by the refusal to grow, to change. As Thomas Friedman said on Tim Russert, Arab culture has been digging itself into a hole for 50 years, if we can just get one group to stop digging, they may see the light above and not the darkness below. That digging will not stop until historians stop harping on the past. I have full faith that the Arab people when no longer shackled by bitterness will flourish like none other in the history of man.