Commentary:

We are not in a war just against terrorism

I think there's more to this than meets the eye:

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher was hospitalized in good condition after Muslim worshipers attacked him Monday as he tried to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam's most sacred shrines.

Details of his injuries were not immediately available.

Officials said dozens of worshippers inside the mosque, said to be members of a small extremist Islamic group called the Liberation Party, threw shoes at him and shouted "Allahu Akbar" (God is great).

A spokesman for the Jerusalem police said officers stationed outside the mosque heard the commotion, and the foreign minister's entourage hurriedly escorted the disheveled Maher out.

Israeli officials said Jerusalem police took him to an ambulance waiting at the Mugrabi Gate, where he was checked, and the ambulance later took him to Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center for further examination.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Saeb Erakat said that the Palestinian Authority condemned the attack, which occurred shortly after Maher met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Islam was once ascendant, and Christian Western Europe felt under assault. A large fraction of the Spanish peninsula had been conquered by the religious empire that arose out of Islam, and at that time the technology (both "hard technology" such as making steel along with the "soft technology" of ideas in mathematics, astronomy, or sociology) in the Islamic world had exceeded that of Western Europe, which was still crawling it's way out of the chaos that followed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the invasions of the "barbarian" tribes from the east. During this period of the inferiority of the West, there was a level of internally directed violence that is not generally recognized by many because it is not explicitly taught in the general history classes.

There is a "societal inferiority complex" that arises at the time that a society realizes that another society is obviously more advanced in easily recognizable ways such as hard technology. This inferiority complex is expressed in a complex mixture of fear, shame, anger, and furious activity. The reactions are directed both inward (intercine wars, riots, strange phenomena such as the dancing frenzies that occurred in the Middle Ages) and outward (the Crusades). For the West, the ultimate outcome of the furious activity sparked by the societal inferiority complex was the Renaissance, which then put Western Civilization on a path that resulted in the ascendancy in hard technology (and some soft technology) that we enjoy today.

Islamic society is now suffering from the inferiority complex. The same complex mixture of fear, shame, anger, and furious activity exists now in the Islamic world as existed in the West before the Renaissance. The terrorism war that started years ago (the Munich Olympics, the highjacking spree in the 1970s) and reached a peak with the attacks on September 11, 2001, is the outwardly directed reaction of Islamic society. The inwardly directed reaction is exemplified by the attack on the Egyptian Foreign Minister and the terrorist bombings Saudi Arabia that were ostensibly outwardly directed but ended up killing more Muslims than outsiders because the terrorists were indiscriminate in their targeting.

This is why a purely military strategy to address the terrorism issue will not succeed unless the goal of that strategy is to eliminate Islamic society from the face of the Earth. While the initial gut reaction to terrorist attacks is "nuke all the God-damned Islamic fuckers until they glow" (go here for an excellent discussion of the likely initial reaction to another major terrorist attack), would we really want to be a member of a society that performed that act of murdering millions of innocents to get thousands of guilty? If we agree that it is unacceptable that we engage in a "final solution" against Muslims just as it was unacceptable for Germans to murder Jews, Hutus to murder Tutsis, or the general murder in post-Communist Yugoslavia, then what do we do for Western Civilization to survive and protect ourselves?

We have to engage in a long term strategy that is not exclusively military. Although the massive military buildup in the Reagan years put the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, that empire was tottering and long expected to fail from internal decay before the United States spent them to death. The Cold War was not ultimately a military conflict, although there were military aspects; it was a contest that was engaged on multiple levels. Although the enemy now is more diffuse, we are in a war that is also multilevel, and the faster we develop and engage a strategy that addresses ALL the levels, not just the military and terrorist aspects, the sooner we will win.

Thanks to the Straight White Guy for the link to the discussion of gut reactions.

Posted by Jack at 15:03 on Monday 22 December 2003 | Trackbacks (0)