Yesterday, C-SPAN broadcast a panel from the L. A. Book fair called "Profiles in Terror," featuring several authors with expertise on the Arab world. Someone in the audience asked forthrightly, "why do they hate us?" Why, she went on, were 20 militants so upset that they flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon?
The experts all said that the hijackers were motivated by the lack of opportunity in the Arab world. Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, put it in strictly materialistic terms, saying that the gross national product of the Arab world was less than that of the Nokia company, if you take out oil revenues. Al Qaeda is a "function of the despair of the Arab world." Brian Michael Jenkins said that the Arab world was hung up on its "glorious past… the caliphate," and that the onslaught of Western culture had caused young men to embrace Jihad as the only answer. Jeffrey Goldberg said that even educated Muslims who come to America are upset by the prevalence of liquor stores and disturbed to see fellow Muslims dating Americans.
Not one of the respondents mentioned the Arab Israeli conflict. Indeed, someone from the audience shouted, "what about our support for Israel?" (That’s my impression, the audio was muffled) and was shouted down.
The panel’s explanations echo the Bernard Lewis theory of Muslim despair, that Arab youth is dejected and angered by the rise of the west. Isn’t it a little pathetic that six years on, the conventional wisdom continues to offer this socio-psychological theory as the only explanation for the attack?
The strongest rebuttal of this theory is that Osama bin Laden himself cited the Palestinian issue as one motivator for the attack. Writes Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books:
Of all [bin Laden’s] themes, the notion of payback for
injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully
recurrent in bin Laden’s speeches… It has become fashionable to assert
that al-Qaeda’s attachment to the Palestinian cause is relatively
recent, and has been cynical and deliberately manipulative. That is
simply not true. As long ago as 1984, witnesses report bin Laden
shunning American goods to protest American support of Israel. His
fellow traveler Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the first assault on
the World Trade Center in 1993, testified that his sole motive was US
backing of Israel….Speaking just before the 2004 presidential
elections, bin Laden himself voiced amazement that Americans, deceived,
he supposed, by their government, had yet to understand that he had
struck America because "things just went too far with the
American-Israeli alliance’s oppression and atrocities against our
people."
And here is the former neoconservative Francis Fukuyama on the Arab-despair theory in his book America at the Crossroads (2006):
"Observers like Barry Rubin and Max boot have argued that when the Arabs say they care about the plight of the Palestinians, they don’t actually mean it; criticism of Israel or US support for Israel is a displacement of their unhappiness with their own undemocratic political systems, which they are not able to attack directly…. But [Fukuyama retorts] the seething anger against the United States in the Arab world over Palestine makes it much easier for the hard-core terrorists to operate, providing them with sympathizers, informants, and recruits. When Arabs say that they like the United States but don’t like American foreign policy, it would seem both prudent and minimally respectful to take them at their word, rather than putting them on a psychiatrist’s couch and telling them that they couldn’t possibly mean what they say.
It’s not my point that yesterday’s experts are wrong about underlying issues. (They’re smart guys, observing true aspects of modern Islam.) Nor that the suffering of Palestinians justified the 9/11 suicide bombers; it doesn’t. The point is that there is something tragically wrong with our discourse. The woman was asking a question about what motivated a stupendous crime that is at the heart of the Iraq war disaster. And a group of prominent intellectuals cannot even name what any fool knows to be a simple grievance behind the attacks.
