Alan Johnston’s homecoming is as exciting as Jill Carroll’s a year ago. BBC, CSM–they’re enlightened outlets, and both reporters have had interesting things to say about their captors.
Johnston made an effort just now to distinguish between his jihadist captors and Hamas. The jihadist Muslims believe that all westerners are bad. "They have a black and white view" of the west. Their battle is not about Israel and Palestine, it is about a war of civilizations. And these extremists have "their mirror," he said, in the westerners who believe that no Arabs can be trusted. When in truth the world is filled with shades of gray. When Hamas took power in Gaza, the jihadists realized that their three-month exploitation of Johnston’s kidnaping was near an end; and so that came to pass.
Johnston reminds us that Hamas’s issue is a local one: Israel/Palestine. It requires a local solution. Overheated minds, from Paul Berman to Norman Podhoretz, elide the difference between Hamas and the jihadists. They say that because Hamas has used terrorism in Israel, it is the same as Al Qaeda attacking the World Trade Center. Podhoretz calls it World War IV because he wants World War IV, he wants the U.S. and western powers completely engaged on the side of the militants in Israel. It is this kind of bad thinking that got us into the Iraq debacle.
Johnston’s celebration reminds us that cooler heads should prevail.
