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In
the not too distant future four year old Juliana McCourt
will fly from America to Ireland. It will be her final
flight. The last time she flew was over a year ago
and she was four years old then as well. Some theocratic
fascists who boarded a plane with her in Boston as
she accompanied her mother on a trip to Disneyland
decided that she would remain four forever. They,
with their self-given sacred right to kill those of
a different cultural or intellectual persuasion -
or simply of no persuasion other than Disney - flew
the fuel laden jet in which she was travelling into
the second tower of the World Trade Centre. When they
saw her boarding the same plane as themselves they
may have hated her and her mother for not wearing
the burkas. But the self-appointed morality police
would settle up with her for that. They would obliterate
her face so that a burka would be superfluous to requirements.
There would be nothing left for it to conceal.
How
the focussed murder of a four year old girl advances
any cause other than infanticide beggars belief. And
yet, occasionally, there are those to be found who
try all manner of contextualisation in order to evade
labelling it murder or a war crime - 'American imperialism
created Islamic fundamentalism and therefore American
imperialism is to blame.' A favourite amongst the
exponents of this type of argument is the context
of desperation; only those driven to desperation by
imperialist repression would take on such a course
of action. All of which conveniently forgets that
Japanese imperialism, and not desperation driven individuals,
made use of human propelled planes pounding into human
targets six decades ago. Amongst the animal species,
it is an exclusively human property to die for ideas.
And as was borne out by the Japanese experience, ideas
can be borne of oppressive fanaticism as much as are
they originate in liberationist desperation.
Such
is the ‘cultic idiocy’ that on occasion
grips elements of the Left that once I had the misfortune
to come across an ‘anti-imperialist’ who
informed me that he had no objection to the event
that caused the death of Juliana McCourt and thousands
of others; he would take his counsel on such matters
only from the people of the ‘third world’.
As if there was one third world, the collective mind
of which he had privileged access to. America, in
his world view, was so oppressive he would prefer
to live under the Taliban. British rule must somehow
be qualitatively different from its US counterpart,
however, as he still lives here and travels only,
it seems, to other countries with a history of the
imperialism that he rants against.
While
such nonsense is the exception rather than the rule
with those on the Left, many of whom can be seen working
diligently on a daily basis, there nevertheless remains
an unhealthy ethical ambivalence. Seemingly, the murders
of four year olds can often be justified, excused
or less severely criticised if they are the children
of someone else. When they are our own the double
standard kicks in very strongly indeed. And yet because
we live in a Western capitalist society that benefits
materially from exploitation of other countries, the
same logic that justifies the murder of American children
would also justify the murder of our own.
Regardless
of the justice of any cause there is no unmediated
leap from the grievance which is the raison d'etre
of the cause to the actions used to redress the grievance.
Otherwise, rape and cannibalism would, in an almost
casual manner, be justified on the grounds that
both undermine the morale of the enemy. Ethically
informed intellectual deliberations and considerations
must always constitute the medium through which cause
extends itself into action. And if such considerations
and deliberations are blind to the fate of children
it is those who hold them rather than the cause per
se which is culpable. But there is no loosing sight
of that fact that ridiculous arguments help ridicule
legitimate causes
There
are major questions that need to be addressed in the
Islamic world. The foolish alone would seem to believe
that Western intervention in that world was for anything
other than self interest. Whether governed by considerations
of realist expansionism in a security deficient world
or by the need of capital to find new markets the
urge to become global hegemon on the part of the US
has led to untold misery for those who live in the
regions whose acquiescence to the hegemony is expected.
Yet is a body such as al Qaida the answer to the woes
endured by hundreds of millions of people?
Christopher
Hitchens, his dubious but nevertheless coherent pro-war
views notwithstanding, has injected some valid reasoning
into a debate for so long poisoned and polluted by
old phraseology and rhetoric. He has described al
Qaida as:
partly
a corrupt multinational corporation, partly a crime
family, partly a surrogate for the Saudi oligarchy
and the Pakistani secret police, partly a sectarian
religious cult, and partly a fascist organization.
What does it demand from non-Muslim societies? It
demands that they acknowledge their loathsome blasphemy
and realize their own fitness for destruction. What
does it demand for Muslim societies? It demands
that they adopt 17th-century norms of clerical absolutism.
This
urge to enslave rather than any impulse to set free
is what ensured Juliana McCourt ended her short life
at four and is soon to be enveloped in the dull clay
of a Cork cemetery. She died while still in her infancy
and was cremated before she will be buried - a shroud
rather than Mickey Mouse the outcome of her innocence
which led her to board a doomed airliner. This amounts to the
sheer inversion of everything we have come to expect
for our children. Theocratic fascism and its totalitarian
theology, capable only of issuing a fatwa against
our infants, should be more thoroughly confronted
by the Left, never excused.
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