One of the most glaring hypocrisies surrounding the so-called “war on terror” has been the way that mass killings committed by non-Muslims have been treated as functions of mental illness while those committed by Muslims have been treated as functions of ideology. This hypocrisy is made explicit by a pundit [...]]]> via Lobe Log

One of the most glaring hypocrisies surrounding the so-called “war on terror” has been the way that mass killings committed by non-Muslims have been treated as functions of mental illness while those committed by Muslims have been treated as functions of ideology. This hypocrisy is made explicit by a pundit like Marc Thiessen — here as elsewhere emitting right-wing hackery in its purest form — in the wake of last week’s Aurora shooting; Thiessen is keen to insist that James Holmes’s massacre in Aurora is categorically different from Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood because “[t]he Aurora shooting was a senseless act of violence; Fort Hood was a terrorist attack.” (Never mind that Hasan’s undeniably horrific attack was directed at a military target and thus fit classic definitions of terrorism far less than Holmes’s.) Of course, the dichotomy between insanity and ideology is itself a misleading one: on the one hand, mass-murdering lunatics frequently come up with grand political theories to justify their actions; on the other, even committed ideologues are unlikely to undertake bloody suicide missions if they don’t have a screw or two loose.

The basic difference between how Muslim and non-Muslim mass killers are viewed is nowhere more obvious than in the reaction to Anders Behring Breivik’s killing of 77 Norwegians a year ago. Breivik was about as committed an ideologue as one could hope for, as is made clear by his 1500-page manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Throughout the sprawling manifesto, Breivik is explicit that he sees himself as representing the militant wing of the broader “anti-jihadist” movement — represented in the U.S. by the writers he most frequently cites, such as Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes.

Of course, no one suggests that such writers (to which we could add others like Mark Steyn, Frank Gaffney, and Andy McCarthy) would approve of Breivik’s murderous rampage. Yet their sheer refusal to recognize any commonalities between his goals and theirs was quite brazen and frequently led them into outright self-contradiction. Thus we see Mark Steyn, who in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings mocked authorities for stubbornly refusing to take Hasan’s professions of his beliefs at face value…stubbornly refusing to take Breivik’s professions of his beliefs at face value:

It is unclear how seriously this “manifesto” should be taken….As far as we know, not a single Muslim was among the victims. Islamophobia seems an eccentric perspective to apply to this atrocity, and comes close to making the actual dead mere bit players in their own murder.

But of course, Breivik was perfectly explicit that he was targeting the Norwegian elite in the belief that only by doing so could he shock European nationalists into responding to the supposed Islamicization of Europe. Citing Steyn by name on page 338 of the manifesto, Breivik makes clear that he largely agrees with Steyn concerning the existential nature of the Muslim threat to the West, disagreeing with him only in thinking that this Islamicization can be reversed through bold action by European nationalists. Compare Steyn, writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2006 (the piece is no longer online but can be found here):

That’s what the war [against Islamism]‘s about : our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”–as can be seen throughout much of “the Western world” right now. The progressive agenda–lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism–is collectively the real suicide bomb.

And here’s Breivik, invoking the same tropes in much less elegant prose on page 12 of his manifesto:

As we all know, the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural self-confidence (nationalism)…. Needless to say; the growing numbers of nationalists in W. Europe are systematically being ridiculed, silenced and persecuted by the current cultural Marxist/multiculturalist political establishments. This has been a continuous ongoing process which started in 1945. This irrational fear of nationalistic doctrines is preventing us from stopping our own national/cultural suicide as the Islamic colonization is increasing annually. This book presents the only solutions to our current problems. You cannot defeat Islamisation or halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without first removing the political doctrines manifested through multiculturalism/cultural Marxism.

Breivik’s ramblings about the threat of “multiculturalism/cultural Marxism” are relevant given the recent and rather laughable attempt by Daniel Pipes, another frequently cited source in 2083, to exculpate himself and his allies from their implication in Breivik’s worldview. Pipes — responding to a ThinkProgress graphic detailing Breivik’s reliance on various “anti-jihadist” writers — attempts to show that Breivik could equally be viewed as a leftist given his frequent references to left-wing thinkers like the Frankfurt School and liberal politicians like Barack Obama. Pipes further argues that Breivik, far from agreeing with the likes of him, Spencer, and Geller, “intentionally sought to damage and delegitimize” them by his massacre.

The flaws in Pipes’s apologia are so obvious that it feels almost superfluous to point them out, but here goes. The ThinkProgress graphic listing Breivik’s reliance on the anti-jihadist writers served some purpose in that Breivik was largely agreeing with them (on the alleged Islamic threat to the West, if not necessarily the proposed remedies.) His frequent citations of figures like Marx or Marcuse — or, for that matter, Obama or Blair — are completely irrelevant in this regard since Breivik was listing them as perpetrators or enablers of the Islamic/cultural-Marxist/multiculturalist/environmentalist attack on the West. (The basic incoherence of listing all these currents as if they were the same thing is by no means exclusive to Breivik.)

Similarly, Breivik’s criticisms of anti-jihadist writers that Pipes cites are notable primarily for how limited they are. To take the one example Pipes gives, Breivik writes:

The reason why authors on the Eurabia related issues/Islamisation of Europe — Fjordman, [Robert] Spencer, [Bat] Ye’or, [Andrew] Bostom etc. aren’t actively discussing deportation is because the method is considered too extreme (and thus would damage their reputational shields). . . . If these authors are to [sic] scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance then other authors will have to.

So, to be clear, Breivik agrees with Pipes’s allies about the threat Muslims pose to the West, and merely disagrees with them about the desirability of mass deportation, revolution, and “armed resistance” to deal with it. This is hardly of a piece with his paranoid rantings against leftism and “cultural Marxism.”

It’s been a bit of a scandal how quickly Breivik has been forgotten, and how easily his ideological inspirations have been able to shrug off his massacre. Like the Aurora shooting, Breivik is a reminder of how pervasive the double standards surrounding “terrorism” remain.

WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader [...]]]> From the wire:

WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) – In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to “immediately” prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Warning that Libya stood “on the threshold of a moral and humanitarian catastrophe”, the letter, which was addressed to President Barack Obama, called for specific immediate steps involving military action, in addition to the imposition of a number of diplomatic and economic sanctions to bring “an end to the murderous Libyan regime”.

In particular, it called for Washington to press NATO to “develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move naval assets into Libyan waters” to “aid evacuation efforts and prepare for possible contingencies;” as well as “(e)stablish the capability to disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians.”

Among the letter’s signers were former Bush deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Bush’s top global democracy and Middle East adviser; Elliott Abrams; former Bush speechwriters Marc Thiessen and Peter Wehner; Vice President Dick Cheney‘s former deputy national security adviser, John Hannah, as well as FPI’s four directors: Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan; former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor; and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman.

It was Kagan and Kristol who co-founded and directed PNAC in its heyday from 1997 to the end of Bush’s term in 2005.

The letter comes amid growing pressure on Obama, including from liberal hawks, to take stronger action against Gaddafi.

Two prominent senators whose foreign policy views often reflect neo-conservative thinking, Republican John McCain and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman, called Friday in Tel Aviv for Washington to supply Libyan rebels with arms, among other steps, including establishing a no-fly zone over the country.

On Wednesday, Obama said his staff was preparing a “full range of options” for action. He also announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet fly to Geneva Monday for a foreign ministers’ meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council to discuss possible multilateral actions.

“They want to keep open the idea that there’s a mix of capabilities they can deploy – whether it’s a no-fly zone, freezing foreign assets of Gaddafi’s family, doing something to prevent the transport of mercenaries (hired by Gaddafi) to Libya, targeting sanctions against some of his supporters to persuade them to abandon him,” said Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who took part in a meeting of independent foreign policy analysts, including Abrams, with senior National Security Council staff at the White House Thursday.

During the 1990s, neo-conservatives consistently lobbied for military pressure to be deployed against so-called “rogue states”, especially in the Middle East.

After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, many “neo-cons” expressed bitter disappointment that U.S. troops stopped at the Kuwaiti border instead of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein.

When the Iraqi president then unleashed his forces against Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia insurgents in the south, they – along with many liberal interventionist allies – pressed President George H.W. Bush to impose “no-fly zones” over both regions and take additional actions – much as they are now proposing for Libya – designed to weaken the regime’s military repressive capacity.

Those actions set the pattern for the 1990s. To the end of the decade, neo-conservatives, often operating under the auspices of a so-called “letterhead organisation”, such as PNAC, worked – often with the help of some liberal internationalists eager to establish a right of humanitarian intervention – to press President Bill Clinton to take military action against adversaries in the Balkans (in Bosnia and then Kosovo) as well as Iraq.

Within days of 9/11, for example, PNAC issued a letter signed by 41 prominent individuals – almost all neo-conservatives, including 10 of the Libya letter’s signers – that called for military action to “remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”, as well as retaliation against Iran and Syria if they did not immediately end their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

PNAC and its associates subsequently worked closely with neo-conservatives inside the Bush administration, including Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Edelman, to achieve those aims.

While neo-conservatives were among the first to call for military action against Gaddafi in the past week, some prominent liberals and rights activists have rallied to the call, including three of the letter’s signatories: Neil Hicks of Human Rights First; Bill Clinton’s human rights chief, John Shattuck; and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, who also signed the PNAC Iraq letter 10 years ago.

In addition, Anne-Marie Slaughter, until last month the influential director of the State Department’s Policy Planning office, cited the U.S.-NATO Kosovo campaign as a possible precedent. “The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan protesters,” she wrote on Twitter. “In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted.”

Such comments evoked strong reactions from some military experts, however.

“I’m horrified to read liberal interventionists continue to suggest the ease with which humanitarian crises and regional conflicts can be solved by the application of military power,” wrote Andrew Exum, a counter-insurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, about Wieseltier. “To speak so glibly of such things reflects a very immature understanding of the limits of force and the difficulties and complexities of contemporary military operations.”

Other commentators noted that a renewed coalition of neo- conservatives and liberal interventionists would be much harder to put together now than during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

“We now have Iraq and Afghanistan as warning signs, as well as our fiscal crisis, so I don’t think there’s an enormous appetite on Capitol Hill or among the public for yet another military engagement,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

“I support diplomatic and economic sanctions, but I would stop well short of advocating military action, including the imposition of a no-fly zone,” he added, noting, in any event, that most of the killing in Libya this week has been carried out by mercenaries and paramilitaries on foot or from vehicles.

“There may be some things we can do – such as airlifting humanitarian supplies to border regions where there are growing number of refugees, but I would do so only with the full support of the Arab League and African Union, if not the U.N.,” said Clemons.

“(The neo-conservatives) are essentially pro-intervention, pro-war, without regard to the costs to the country,” he told IPS. “They don’t recognise that we’re incredibly over- extended and that the kinds of things they want us to do actually further weaken our already-eroded stock of American power.”