Macho Macho Man
The driving force behind the devastating 7/7 suicide bomb attacks in London last year was not Islam but a desire by the terrorists to prove their masculinity, academics have claimed. In a controversial paper presented to the British Society of Criminology’s international conference in Glasgow last week, UK researchers argued that a major factor that led four Muslims to bomb the capital was that they thought themselves to be deficient as men…Dr Antony Whitehead, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Huddersfield, said: “The bombers have said that they are motivated by loyalty to Allah, which they may entirely believe. But if you are going to start to unpick their motivation, you need to consider their experience as young men as much as their adherence to Islam.”
Oh surely not. Surely it was all purely religious and a concern for ‘justice’. Surely masculinity-fretting had nothing to do with it. That’s just silly – isn’t it?
The audience laughs as Omar Brooks, a British Muslim convert who also uses the name Abu Izzadeen, makes fun of non-Muslims as “animals” and “cowards”…He contrasts the supposed bravery of Khan’s suicide to the “kuffar” (non-Muslims) who are characterised as debauched binge-drinkers who vomit and urinate in the street…The Sunday Times last July tape-recorded him imploring Muslims to “instil terror into the hearts of the kuffar”. On that occasion he told an audience of teenagers and young families that he did not want to go to Allah while sleeping in his bed “like an old woman”. Instead, he said: “I want to be blown into pieces with my hands in one place and my feet in another.”
Yes but that’s not about masculinity, that’s a concern for justice; can’t you tell?
The notion that, for men, there can be nothing more important than “being a man” is apparently widespread in the Middle East, and if I think about it based on what I’ve actually encountered, two meanings of “being a man” stand out. One is “not being a woman,” which includes never permitting a woman to be perceived (publicly – privately can be a completely different matter – “being a man” is exclusively about the perception of one from the outside) as in any way having one at a disadvantage. The other is the ability to shrug off anything to do with physical pain (which connects to “not being a woman”). The memory this dredges up for me is the absurd spectacle of two young men in their early twenties competing with each other to be “more of a man” than the other – by each inflicting successively deeper cuts on his own arm with a box-cutter. Completely infantile, of course, but an actual motivation for many supposed adults (and these two guys were basically good mates engaged in a “friendly” – imagine what the stakes are like when there’s an enemy around).
If you read Berman, and are convinced by his analysis, you get to the point where he shows us the terrorists are irrational. But he stops there. I have many times tried to see where the trail leads from there, and always it seems to lead in a direction like the one suggested here.
The guys are messed up in the head. Sure there’s cultural inferiority feelings projected as sueriority feelings, ditto religious ones, because in fact some people with ways somewhat different from their’s are making most of the movies and calling most of the shots.
But instead of competing as normal healthy folks do, these guys screw themselves up into strange shapes and scream how much it hurts, and then they start hurting people.
Of course they’re messed up in the head. Doesn’t matter if they can pull off complex operations or even make millions of dollars, the fact that they go out to die and kill innocent people is proof positive that they’re messed up.
They’ve been allowed, or encouraged, to wallow in every negative feeling known to man, and now they’re acting out.
Tingey may just be saying the obvious, but I think he’s also pointing out what a ludicrous situation we’ve gotten to, where it would seem that many people demand justification for the claim that there is something wrong with a religiously motivated terrorist, instead of it being absolutely inherent in the term “religiously motivated terrorist.”
The awful thing is that the major threat to a rational understanding of these irrational terrorists is not those who think their religious motivation is good but rather those — like most of the Democratic Party in the US, most of the Labour Party in the UK, all of the Liberal Democratic Party and a good portion of the Tory Party in the UK — who think the religiously motivated terrorists are _really_ working from a legitimate critique of capitalism and/or western society but just go over the top with their methods.
Juan – it’s been said often by elements of the political class you mention that terror is directly causal from US / Western Foreign Policy and Israeli ‘lebensraum’. Yet no-one has ever shown a link between these young men and e.g. UK-based Palestinian campaigning or support groups, of which there are a number, involved in fund-raising, awareness raising, nor any other non-violent political or humanitarian organisation. You would have thought, given the politically acceptable ‘sensitive’, understanding tack followed by many commentators you refer to that terror has become a last resort following the exhaustion of all – political – alternatives. But no – it’s straight into nihilistic, eternal glory for these boys. That’s another ‘disconnect’ in the assessment that global jihad is simply a symptom of the ‘disease’ of global capitalism.
While sympathetic to those skeptical of Islamism, I have to
point out that as a “liberal democrat” I have to refrain from some of the thought patterns up-thread. A bit much sympathy for the eternal “wars of liberation” used as an excuse by the Blairites and W. I don’t believe we can, as an otuside force, through violence, “liberate” the countries “benighted” by religion. Especially when our own politics is so much infomred by major competing religious belief systems (Christianity and War Profiteering).
Don’t forget, “rational” decisions can be as damaging and dangerous. War profiteering is very beneficial to a significant chunk of our ruling class. I’m not sure that an economic system that rationally needs this much war spending and periodic wars is much better than one subject to the horrors of religion.
“like most of the Democratic Party in the US, most of the Labour Party in the UK, all of the Liberal Democratic Party and a good portion of the Tory Party in the UK — who think the religiously motivated terrorists are _really_ working from a legitimate critique of capitalism and/or western society but just go over the top with their methods.”
Eh? What planet is that on?
But I think the irrational I ain’t a woman crap is way more significant, relevant, causative than most discussion allows. I said that a year ago (and got jumped on a good deal, but I just jumped back). I thought that applied to the riots in the banlieus, too. I think it’s mistaken (and probably dangerous) to overlook the very real possibility that the violence is not a method, not a regrettable forced choice when all other methods have failed, but in fact the point, because it is FUN. It’s an adventure, it’s glory, it’s fame, it’s the center of attention, it’s an orgasm of death and destruction. I think it’s bottomlessly stupid to take these acts seriously as genuinely political, reasoned, thought-out. They look to me far more like playacting, performance, living out a disaster movie, dressing up, showing off, making a noise. The effect is out of all proportion to the seriousness of the perps. That’s what I think.
No doubt we don’t like to think that four utterly trivial stupid mindless jerks can, instead of merely stealing cars or painting graffiti on walls, create the kind of horror that this particular four did. But they can. And part of the thrill of doing it is that doing it elevates them away from being four trivial jerks. But that’s what they were.
And then you’ve got the people who use the trivial jerks, a steady stream of trivial jerks, and keep themselves alive.
Would you say their’s is the same game, but one level of abstraction (or more) more sophisticated?
Ophelia: Thank you (three posts up). How many people in the United States really feel the greivances of the medievalists are all that legitimate. (Now, recognizing this medievalism as one possible reaction to, say, the utter corruption of the Nigerian state and the vicioussness of the oil companies’ actions in the delta, that’s another argument).
More sophisticated-and the “using” occurs on both side’s (the Islamist nuts and the authoritarian side of our own conservative governments). It feeds off each other, with both sides needing the other to justify their own search for power.
One thus can be against the war and against insidious Islamism.
But it is generally true that people are seen as belonging to camps. Strike one attitude and you’ll be assumed to belong to the camp in which it is prevalent and then ascribed all the other attitudes of that camp, no matter how opposed to all of them you are. The fact that too many people do unthinkingly adopt a package of viewpoints belonging to a group doesn’t make this more right. I have certainly suffered from this myself, but the Hitchens case is a little better known. Because “the left” didn’t care to look at Saddam Hussein the way Hitchens did, it couldn’t fathom a limited, strategic support for something Bush did. Independent thought baffles groups, not to mention throwing them into a crisis. Hitchens’ opposition to Saddam, who’s no religious fundamentalist, has perversely resulted in people wondering, in a convoluted fashion, whether Hitchens has given up his opposition to religion. How can you be critical of Bush and American policy and loathe Islamic fundamentalism? They’re opposed to each other! You’ll have to give your objections to one of them up! Decide! Now! Quickly!
Yes. That would also explain why so many people insist that Euston types are all supporters of the war in Iraq even though the manifesto explicitly says that they’re not.
Well, Stewart, the more I read and think about it, the more skeptical I become of “just interventionism” and just war, so I can’t really follow you (or Hitchens) in your “limited” support for “doing something” about Sadaam. I am not a 100% pacifist, but I don’t buy the arguments any more. There are too many hidden agendas, and far too much “collateral damage” when other coutries intevene. Especially when earlier Western interventions for the “good of the wogs” often laid the groundwork for the current cataclysms. Otherwise, I agree with your riposte against the “Decide One Way Right Now” argument :)
Brian,
I tend to find myself on your side of the line when it comes to Iraq, ‘too many hidden agendas, and far too much “collateral damage”‘ although I can respect Hitchens'(and Stewart’s) nuanced position.
But ‘just intervention’? wasn’t Sierra Leone a just intervention? Kosovo? And a little just intervention would not have come amiss in Rwanda. Or Darfur, come to that.
The power to intervene is held by a handful of nations, and where those nations are democracies it is down to the citizens to scrutinise the justice or otherwise of the actions.
Said power to intervene was always held by a few nations. Many of them were in fact “democracies.” Heck, the Spaniards justified genocide in the Americas because they were bringing Jesus to the natives. Heck, the Aztec Empire was not a pretty system, but does that mean the Cortez invasion and 500 years of trauma were good things? I’m not so sure. Your argument still doesn’t help, for example, the 200,000 Phillipinos we slaughtered to bring enlightenment and “democracy” to the heathen masses in those islands.
Kosovo? Perhaps. But, there are many revisionists and skeptics out there that I find increasingly convincing that bring out facts and analyses that our interventions in the Balkans were not based on realities, were in fact based on exagerations and biased claims about the situation on the ground in Bosnia, for example. Plus, look at the ethnic cleasning, the corruption, and the violence that has resulted from the UN bring the Kosovo Liberation Army to power.
Sierra Leone? Has the intervention really stabilized anything? I understand its pretty tenuous, and the underlying power struggles have not really been resolved.
What about Darfur, a true horror story? Again, what would the result of a Western intervention be? Holy war on a vastly larger regional scale, perhaps? Would that really help anything?
Heck, for that matter, the Islamist theocrats consider us in the West to be hopelessly decadent and apostate. Your argument could be adapted very easily by them (and they do) to justify terrorism and war until they “save us” from our heretical selves.
‘Said power to intervene was always held by a few nations.’
True, but the concept of unselfish intervention is relatively new. Note I said concept. I don’t deny that the Realpolitik is more cynical, particularly in the case of Iraq.
‘Many of them were in fact “democracies.” Heck, the Spaniards justified genocide in the Americas because they were bringing Jesus to the natives.’ Not exactly a democracy though. And I didn’t mean looting and slaughter with a religious veneer.
‘the 200,000 Phillipinos we slaughtered to bring enlightenment and “democracy” to the heathen masses in those islands.’
Most of my knowledge of that war comes from Twain;
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/sitting.html
So you can take it I agree with you, but commercial freebootery wasn’t my point either.
Kosovo; I doubt the motives of many of the revisionists, but admit I am not qualified to make a definitive analysis. On the whole, still come down on the side of justified, but stand to be corrected.
‘Sierra Leone? Has the intervention really stabilized anything? I understand its pretty tenuous, and the underlying power struggles have not really been resolved.’
Stopped an orgy of butchery in its tracks. Result. Tenuous peace and unresolved tensions are infinitely preferable. I think most people in Sierra Leone probably don’t resent Operation Palliser.
Darfur; Post-Iraq you may well be right that intervention might mean confrontation with religiously inspired killers. Would that make it morally wrong? and need intervention be purely western?
I don’t thinl Islamists extremists are trying to save us from anything, nor do I think their actions are analogous to a ‘just intervention’. No snide intended.
At the risk of being simplistic, do you intervene when there are screams and thuds from next door?
Of course, if you then pocket the silverware …
“Of course, if you then pocket the silverware …”
Or, if you are swooping in from three hundred miles away because their estranged drug addict son whispers to you that there are plenty of Old Masters paintings to be had, if only you “save” the residents of the house from themselves…..?
I can’t be sure of the motives of those who question the Balkans adventures, either. Were the Serbs really the only monsters is what the debate over on the (very biased) antiwar.com comes down to. Their argument (and they are Serb apologists) is that the Muslims in Bosnia were a pretty nasty lot themselves, and that much of the death and destruction was both exagerated and bipartisan.
As for Kosovo, the Serbs did behave in a beastly manner, but the problems with the KLA right now are disturbing. Were we right to intervene there? I’m less sure. I have no love for ol Slobo, of course.
I’m quite sure there were hidden agendas and quite sure that George W. Bush did not do anything of which he did not think he would ultimately somehow be a beneficiary. But none of that (even if it were, or is, way worse) should make us change our evaluation of Saddam Hussein, in either direction. Which is what I’m afraid happens way too much. And whether what Saddam did warranted intervention should also not be determined by whether or not it was good for Bush.
Nobody but a few nuts believes that Sadaam or Al Qaeda was in anyway “good,” despite repeated and rather fervent warnings about “leftists” who do so and provide “excuses” for their actions.
Can you not acknowledge the benefit of a frank, needed self examination that says, for example: “You know, we prop up dictators, our comapnies rape and pillage the landscape, etc. etc, maybe that makes people more susceptible to the blandishment of the reactionary forces. Maybe we should also change our ways, not just foment wars that we claim are about democracy” Of course, such self-examination interferes with the need to whip up war fever, so….
I’m not “blaming” the west. I am saying the Middle East (or much of the world) can certainly be justified in resisting our attempts to impose solutions upon them by force. They don’t beleive us, and of course they turn to often particularly nasty forces to oppose the invasion. After all, if you consulted Loyalist families during the Revolutionary War, they could tell you nasty stories about the excesses of American Patriots, as well.
I’m not sure why well meaning people still believe that we in the west can do things like “impose democracy” or “spread freedom” through military force from the outside. When has it worked? Why do Liberals or “leftists” have to justify themselves? It’s the War Party that will spend a trillion dollars and 100,000 lives.
“When has it worked?”
1945.
‘Can you not acknowledge the benefit of a frank, needed self examination ‘
Sorry, who were you talking to? Somebody here, or a rhetorical ‘You’?
Believe me, I’m no flag-waver and I do try to take a historical perspective, but I have to part company when you make a moral equivalence between the American Revolutionaries (deluded traitors though they were)and the Iraqi gangsters.
The sins of the West are not exactly unacknowledged and I think we are in Iraq for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time. April 1991 or earlier would have been preferable. ’88 say.
1945? Hm… So, maybe we’re not destorying enough cities or using nuclear weapons? Maybe that’s the ticket-we haven’t killed enough Iraqis yet. That’s what it would take. Ignoring the reality that Germany and Japan were both fairly advanced ethnically homogenous states, not artifical creations of colonial powers.
Don: OK. Don’t mean to be too intemperate here.
Still….is your argument, then, that we should be invading all the countries with despots? What is the definition of “despotism”? If it’s an autocracy that outlaws labor unions and allows our multinationals to set up profitable factories, do we leave them alone? What if it is our own CIA that sets up the autocrat or the political thugs in power (e.g., Haiti)? Should we be fully invading Haiti and overthrowing the thugs we currently support? Why not? Open gang warfare in Port-Au-Prince seems pretty bad for human rights, doesn’t it?
Eternal War for eternal profits? Even despots who we like and prop up with money and weapons (like Sadaam until only a few years ago). What about Pakistan, which is far more unstable and dangerous and most definitely has nuclear weapons. Are we supposed to invade them next? Why not?-the only “ally” we have in Pakistan is the current Military Dictator. Even his army fundamentally hates him and us.
How many children do you have, because we will need a lot of cannon fodder for the eternal wars to bring “democracy and peace” to the world. Quite a Crusade you are advocating, no?
I’m not really drawing a driect connection between the Revolutionaries and the Iraqi terrorists. There is, I’ll admit (I’m not a total cultural relativist) a deep pathology in Arab culture-which is why I find sticking our soliders in the middle of it is so ridiculous. (Still, if I were descended from Loyalists who were driven out in the middel of the night by Marion’s Raiders, I might not be so kind to our forefathers. Civil wars are always nasty places to be> Andersonville, anyone?)
…is your argument, then, that we should be invading all the countries with despots?
Sure, Brian. When I suggested that the concept of ‘just intervention’ had some value I was of course really advocating that ‘we’ immediately flood with troops any state we find ethically dubious. Including Vatican City. Because I really am that stupid.
If we are to parody one another’s points, are you then suggesting that inaction over Rwanda was praisworthy, and intervention in Sierra Leone was immoral?
And no doubt you see as justified resentment the actions taken against Australia for their wickedness in helping free East Timor.
But, the problem is, Don, that this exageration/distortion of YOUR views is a pretty important philosophical point of the PNAC Doctrine-the neoconservatives now running the world’s largest economy. Your argument, well-meaning as it is, plays into the ongoing propoganda war.
Do you doubt that they are absoltuely gunning for Iran, next? Or, that no matter how noxious we find the current regime, a U.S. invasion would cause a paroxism of violence and play right into the hands of the more recalcitrant elements of Iranian society?
As for Rwanda or Sierra Leone_ I have no easy answers. Would a U.S. (or U.N.) intervention have prevented the immediate atrocities in Rwanda? Undoubtedly. But, would such an intervention worsen the ongoing pattern of violence in the countries?
I seem to have gone from unreflective war-fevered crusader to well-meaning dupe. I suppose it’s a promotion of sorts.
Perhaps if I re-state my position it would help.
Justified intervention. Is it ever morally justifiable for state A to intervene militarily in the affairs of state B, if state A has a reasonable expectation of success and state B is carrying out acts of widespread and persistent atrocity.
I would say it is not only morally justifiable, but sometimes a moral imperative.
Conditions apply.
Primarily, state A must be acting from a genuine desire to prevent a humanitarian disaster. It must have a reasonable belief that no other course of action will be effective. Its actions and rationale must be open to scrutiny and it must earestly seek to minimise casualties on all sides and give priority to humanitarian relief.
Any action which doesn’t tick those boxes doesn’t come under the heading of justified intervention.
So, conquistadors no. WW2, yes.
Iraq, no. East Timor, yes.
Suez, no. Sierra Leonne, yes.
As for Rwanda;
Would a U.S. (or U.N.) intervention have prevented the immediate atrocities in Rwanda? Undoubtedly. But, would such an intervention worsen the ongoing pattern of violence in the countries?
If I stop my drunken neighbour from butchering his wife, will that really put the marriage back on track?
I would never accuse you of being a “dupe,” Don. :) Just that Neocons take arguments like yours and use them to justify things like Iraq. Sadaam was bad. I am also skeptical about states acting in a humanitarian fashion. I’m not as sure about Bosnia or Kosovo as I was a the time, for example. Still, a case like Rwanda, or Sudan, is a tough one.
What if intervention in Sudan further destabilizes the country so that you end up with another Somalia situation (Al Qaeda in charge)? Or, fifteen years of ongoing civil war and bloodshed? Or bring in all the other regional actors?
In other words, there are horrible dangers either way. One can intervene and make things worse; one can not intervene and allow a genocide to go forward. And the terrible thing is that we can’t ever know, either way. We can’t ever know afterwards if we did the least destructive thing or not. (Well – ‘ever’ – WWII seems like an exception. Still – it cost an astronomical number of people. If everyone had given in maybe the body count would have been much lower.) We can’t know for sure that we wouldn’t have made things even worse by intervening in Rwanda (though that seems very unlikely, but then hindsight is 20/20). We can never know, either before or after, what is the best thing to do. We can take the Hippocratic oath and resolve first to do no harm – but we can’t be sure how to go about that. And everyone is always fighting the last war. We learn that intervention is terrible – then we learn that non-intervention is terrible – then we learn that intervention is terrible again.
If we hadn’t acted in the Balkans to protect largely defenceless Muslims (Brian, they had about 1/50th the fire power, this is widely verifiable) we can be damn sure that UK jihadists would be using it now as yet another excuse to indiscriminately blow up civilians on British soil…
As an afterthought – if we hadn’t intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo, surely the Stalinists-Leninists in Respect would now be in a terrible pickle as to whether to continue to deny genocides perpetrated under the auspecies Milosevic, or to exagerate them and parade the ethnic exterminations as a direct outcome of Western Imperialism,further excusing acts of terror. By falsifying and reducing the vicims’ numbers (ernest balkan holocaust deniers that many of the far-left anti-war gang are) they are missing a trick in disempowering a potent symbol with which to muster near-asian bus-bombers…