The Second Plane by Martin Amis. (2/2)
Title: The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom.
Author: Martin Amis.
Genre: Non-fiction, fiction, essays, short stories, 9/11, politics.
Country: England.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2001-2007 (this collection 2008).
Summary: A collection of 12 essays and 2 short stories. (Essays 8-14 in this post, refer to PART 1 for essays 1-5 and 2 short stories.) In What Will Survive of Us (2006), using the phone calls coming from United 93 shortly before it went down in a field, and reviewing Paul Greengrass's United 93, the author makes an argument that love is the last emotion of the dying. Conspiracy Theories, and Takfir (2006), examines the horrific coincidences that enabled Osama bin Laden’s progress from down-and-out cave-dweller, to the chief symbol of Islamist terrorism. Bush in Yes-Man's-Land (2006) is a review of the book State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward, which is extremely critical of Bush's conduct around 9/11, and Iraq invasion. Demographics (2007) is a review of the book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn. On the Move with Tony Blair (2007) is an essay that the author wrote about following Tony Blair on his Farewell Tour, from England to Germany to the White House to Iraq. In An Islamist's Journey (2007) is a review of the book The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left by Ed Husain. September 11 (2007) talks about the naming of the disaster, and its symbolic meanings.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ The plane, too, was traveling at 580 mph when it crashed, nose first and upside down, forming a crater 175 feet deep in an empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Of the three thousand who died on that day, only those on board the fourth plane had no doubts about the fate intended for them. The director of United 93, Paul Greengrass, is right: they were "the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world." We may strongly identify with one passenger, an earnest Scandinavian, who cannot accept the new reality: he argues for full cooperation with the hijackers, hoping, one assumes, for a leisurely siege on some sweltering North African tarmac. The others know, from cellphones and airphones, that it isn't going to be like that. They rise up, and the plane comes down. United 93 took off at 8:42; the hijack began at 9:28; the passengers and crew started making their calls at about 9:35; the revolt was launched at 9:57; United 93 hit the ground at 10:03:11-one hour (to the second) after the crash of United 175.
♥ The New York Times called United 93 "the feel-bad movie of the year." This description is trivial. The distress is something you can taste, like a cud, returned from the stomach for further mastication the ancient flavor of death and defeat. You think: this is exactly what they meant us to feel. And your mind will cast about for something, a molecule, an atom of consolation; and what you will reach for is what the passengers reached for.
Those that go through mortal fear also experience a fierce adoration of life-just as the prisoner on death row finds water delicious, finds air delicious. And before battle a soldier's heart is said to be full of love. This somber, end-time love is not usually articulated; its articulation, on the planes of September 11, was made possible by that gigantic contributor to our daily reality, the mobile phone. Like the victims on the other three planes, but unlike them (because they knew that many, many hundreds of their compatriots had already died on that morning), the passengers called their families and said that they loved them. In retrospect it feels like an extraordinary validation, or fulfillment, of Larkin's lines at the end of "An Arundel Tomb" (1956):
...to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
♥ At Newark International there was a routine-indeed wholly predictable-delay on the ground, caused by weight of traffic. It is likely that those twenty-five minutes changed everything. If United had left on time, the chances are that there would have been no passenger revolt. Instead, there would have been horror at the White House or horror at the Capitol. Osama bin Laden wanted the White House; Muhammad Atta, the operational leader, vaguely argued that the approach to Pennsylvania Avenue would be too difficult, and wanted the Capitol. Interestingly, the President was not in the White House (he was puzzling his way through "The Pet Goat" in Sarasota, Florida), but the President's wife might well have been in the Capitol (pushing No Child Left Behind). In any case, both buildings were being evacuated by 9:30-two minutes after the hijack of United 93.
♥ "What's happening?" Well, you see, my child, the men with the bloodstained knives think that if they kill themselves, and all of us, we will stop trying to destroy Islam and they will go at once to a paradise of women and wine." No, I suppose you would just tell him or her that you loved them, and he or she would tell you that they loved you too. Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can't tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it's the last thing to go.
~~What Will Survive of Us.
♥ Readers should now prepare themselves for an orgy of credulousness. Asked in a recent survey to explain their presence in Iraq, 85 percent of American soldiers said that the "main mission" was "to retaliate for Saddam's role" in the September attacks. About two-thirds of American civilians, it's true, share that misapprehension; but it is implausible that front-line troops are so incuriously risking their lives. This near-consensus on the question cannot be due to ignorance. It comes from the same wishfulness that fortifies that majority belief, among Muslims, that September 22 was the work of Mossad (and that July 7, 2005, was the work of the French-incensed by losing out to Britain in their bid for the Olympics).
Although few Americans think the Israelis were responsible for September 22, nearly half of them (42 percent) think the Americans did it. This means that the average American is slightly more distrustful of the U.S. government than the average Pakistani (in Pakistan a mere 41 percent consider that the attacks were not carried out by Islamic terrorists-as against 59 percent of Turks and Egyptians and 65 percent of Indonesians). American "skeptics" hold that the collapse of the Twin Towers was caused by expert demolition. They hold that the explosion at the Pentagon was consistent, not with a crashed 767, but with a cruise missile. In other words, Washington wounded itself.
..The American death toll in the war will soon exceed the death toll in the original assault; and for the Iraqi people, now, that figure is exceeded every three weeks. Nor are the losses merely actuarial: they are also to be seen in our enfeebled hold on the high ground of morality and reason. It is as if September 212 brought about a net increase in suggestibility, and at every level. At the top, a president who assigns himself the unusually bold project of "remaking" the Middle East, and thus the world; at the bottom, a citizenry haunted by rudderlessly cruising suspicion. The fact is that America didn't wound itself in September 2001, as the fabulists claim. It did that in March 2003, and thereafter.
♥ ..but on the front where terror and boredom march in step, the illusionists' first loyalty is to tedium. "We just want you to weigh the evidence," they say. In other words, they just want you to sit still and listen to an epic of futile pedantry. The bored, and the terrorists, are alike confessing to impotence. If realpolitik is all smoke and mirrors and supercynicism, then why not embrace marginality, and exclude yourself from the political and the real?
Psychiatrists call it fabulation. The rest of us call it the conspiracy theory-or the masochistic lust for chicanery and compound deceit. Fabulation may more simply be the failure to assimilate; and we concede that September 11 sill perhaps never be wholly assimilable.
♥ Bin Laden's contribution is his image, and nothing more: omnicidal nullity under a halo of ascetic beatitude. His personal deformation remains mysterious. Zawahiri was jailed and tortured. Qutb was jailed, tortured, and executed. Nobody traumatized bin Laden; unlike his mentors, he was not internally rewired by the whips and the electric cables. Almost alone among a shifting crew of mono-eyed mullahs, tin-legged zealots, blind sheikhs, and paralyzed clerics, bin Laden did at least have the wit to stay in one piece.
♥ Seventeenth out of fifty-seven [children] is a notoriously difficult slot to fill; and if the polygamous father is also an illiterate billionaire, then an appetite for conflict, among his older sons, should not surprise us. In fact, Osama [bin Laden]'s vehemence is cultivated, worked-up.
♥ At the time of his Declaration of War against America (1996), bin Laden was moldering away in a cave in Tora Bora-stateless, penniless, and half-starved. His achievements were a matter of myth, of fabulation; he was a funk-ridden and incompetent ex-jihadi (a mere pepperer of the Red Army); and he was a serial business flop. In short, he was a terrorist financier who had run out of cash; and he was now entirely at the mercy of the local Islamist power, the village-idiot vigilantes known as thew Taliban. Very soon, Zawahiri would be in a Russian jail, and bin Laden would be subsisting on stale bread and contaminated water. At this stage al-Qaeda's survival looked unlikely; and its chances of mounting an operation the size of September 11 were infinitesimal. The "declaration," then, was little more than a deathbed whimper.
How, then, did the cornered troglodyte of 1996 become the radian Mahdi of 2001? Bin Laden's fame was lucrative: in 1998 the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, started taking bribes from Riyadh as a down payment for Osama's extradition and delivery to the Americans. But Omar and Osama were soulmates-and business partners. The same summer saw the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In Nairobi, al-Qaeda killed 206 Africans and wounded 4,500 (150 were blinded by flying glass); it also killed a total of twelve Americans; the half-bungled attack in Dar es Salaam killed no Americans at all. Although the Islamic reaction, worldwide, was one of near-unanimous disgust, it was, definingly, the American reaction that empowered bin Laden.
Of the sixty-six U.S. cruise missiles fired at the camps around Khost, in Afghanistan, a certain number failed to detonate. According to Wright (his source is Russian intelligence), "bin Laden sold the unexploded missiles to China for $10 million." In al-Qaeda's next attack, on the USS Cole in 2000, the symbolism was rather more finely tuned: a futuristic fighting ship crippled by a dinghy. Established as the global champion of the anti-American cause, bin Laden was now the recipient of fresh recruits bearing Samsonite suitcases stuffed with petrodollars from awed admirers in the Gulf.
♥ Expert opinion, in the West, is now largely persuaded that al-Qaeda, as we knew it, is more or less finished. The "base"-justly so called in the adjectival sense-has become, we hear, "a state of mind." And what is that state of mind? One convinced that it is possible, simultaneously, to be a random mass murderer and a good Muslim. A death-brimmed bog of circular gullibility and paranoia, it is the state of mind of the weaponized fabulist. The conspiracy being detected here is the infidel campaign to obliterate the faith. It all began with the retreat of the Turkish armies from Vienna and the confirmation of Islamic decline. The year was 1683 and the day was September 11.
~~Conspiracy Theories, and Takfir.
♥ Is Bush "upset with this"? Or is he the only human being in the Western world who is "happy with this"? As I have already said, psychohistorians point to two internal mechanisms that allow us to live, for a while, with an unendurable truth: "numbing" (whereby the self is drained of affect), and also "doubling" (whereby the self divides into the ventricle that knows and the ventricle that doesn't). Bush isn't "doubling." What he seems to be doing is "bubbling": isolated from all discordant counsel, he was swaddled himself in "unshakeable conviction." The best reason for going into Iraq, in 2003, was to help bring about the healing of its people-a people often referred to in these pages as "an abused child," "a traumatized child." And what have we done to that child? As its new guardian, Bush can't not know what he has done to that child.
One of the many deranging consequences of September 11 was the reification of American power. Until that date, "U.S. hegemony" was largely a matter of facts and figures, of graphs and pie charts. Thereafter it became a matter of options and capabilities, of war plans cracked out on the President's desk. We can understand the afflatus, the rush of blood, in the White House: overnight, demonstrably, and palpably, a tax-cutting dry drunk from West Texas became the most powerful man in human history. One wonders, nowadays, how it goes with Bush, in his glands and his sinews. From September 11 to the autumn of 2003, he had the body language of the man in the bar who isn't going anywhere till he has had his fist fight. Now he looks washed, rinsed, bleached, his flat smile an awful rictus; that upper lip has lost all its lift.
Students of history are aware that illusion-or, if you prefer, psychopathology-plays a part in shaping world events. It is always a heavy call on human fortitude to acknowledge that such a thing is happening before our eyes, in broad daylight and full consciousness. On the opposing side we see illusion in its rawest form: virtuous and murderous fanaticism. On ours, we see a vertiginous power rush followed by a vacuum, and then a drift into helplessness and paralysis. That vacuum was itself reified after the fall of Baghdad, when the plunder began and the soldiers stood and watched, and it slowly emerged that there was no policy for the peace. Then came a dual disintegration, like that of the Twin Towers: the collapse of the authority of the state, and the collapse of the value of human life.
♥ Two misleadingly comical anecdotes reveal the abysmal depths of Coalition unpreparedness. Having allowed the dispersed Iraqi army to stay dispersed, the American viceroy started building a new one, catchily called the NIC (or New Iraqi Corps). It was pointed out, after a while, that this was the Arabic equivalent of calling it the FUQ. Similarly, when Frank Miller of the National Security Council joined a Humvee patrol in Baghdad (March 2004), he was heartened to see that all the Iraqi children were giving him the thumbs-up sign, unaware that in Iraq the thumb (shorter yet chunkier) does duty for the middle digit.
~~Bush in Yes-Man's-Land.
♥ Any acknowledgement of the fear of being out-bred inevitably reminds us of eugenics and forced sterilization and the like; and many good modern Westerners, reading Mr. Steyn, will feel the warm glow of righteousness that normally precedes an accusation of "racism." As Mr. Steyn patiently insists, however, "it's not about race; it's about culture." If every inhabitant of a liberal democracy believes in liberal democracy, it doesn't matter what creed or color they are; but if some of them believe in sharia and the Caliphate, and so on, then the numbers are clearly crucial. Later in the book, he makes the same point from the other direction. A one-time white-supremacist called David Myatt has changed his name to Abdulaziz ibn Myatt; and Abdulaziz ibn Myatt is a ferocious jihadi. "A lot of his fellow 'white supremacists,'" writes Mr. Steyn, "will find it's not the 'white' but the 'supremacist' bit they really like." Islamism, obviously, will attract the violent. The violent, the pathological, and-needless to say-the anti-Semitic.
♥ In the U.S., with some Hispanic assistance, the birth rate is 2.1. If we look more closely we see that it's Alabama and Wyoming we have to thank for that, not California or Massachusetts: the red states are 12 percent more fertile than the blue. According to Mr. Steyn, the "progressive agenda," the culture of rights and entitlements, is "a literal dead end." The unspoken corollary, then, is that societies now need to be more reactionary: patriarchal, churchgoing, majoritarian, and philoprogenitiv. America Alone is not a long book, and this is just as well: it winds down, about halfway through, into iteration and circularity, without following up on its numerous and grimly riveting implications-among them the completely unsuspected laxity of the urge to reproduce. A practiced sayer of the unsayable, Mr. Steyn nonetheless fails to ask the central question. Will the culture of choice be obliged to give ground to the culture of life?
♥ After the startling census of 1936, Stalin immediately abandoned the progressivist social agenda. His new measures included mass kindergartenization, the introduction of maternity medals, the legalization of inheritance, the solemnization of the marriage ceremony, the prolongation and complication of the divorce process, and the recriminalization of abortion. It worked for a while. In the twenty-first century, deprived of totalitarian invigilation, Russia is losing Russians at the rate of about a million a year.
~~Demographics.
♥ We are talking about Islamism in Britain, and Tony, when on the move, has this much in common with British Islamists: he habitually jumps red lights. Islamists do it to show contempt for the law of the land (and contempt for reason). Tony does it to thwart Islamists.
♥ When it comes to the consumption of alcohol, George Bush, of course, makes Tony Blair look like Boris Yeltsin. But in truth Blair hardly touches the stuff.
♥ "Germany is obsessed by transparency," I had said to him. "Some think it's because what it fears most is itself."
"That view's old-fashioned," said Blair.
♥ Because there it stood on the front page of The Independent: the shadowy photograph (making him look haunted, hunted-from England to Germany to the White House to Iraq, isolated, above all) and the banner headline, "BLAIRAQ." "An exclusive poll reveals that 69 percent of Britons believe that, when he leaves office, his enduring legacy will be..." But it was, of course, laughably inexperienced of me to think that this was the shock Toby hoped to discuss. He's not about to raise the subject of Iraq. Everyone else on earth can be depended on to do that. It is impossible to exaggerate it: the white-lipped and bloody-minded persistence of the subject of Iraq.
♥ At the Point Conference Center in Edinburgh, during another lull, Tony strolled over once again and said, "What have you been up to today?"
"I've been feeling protective of my Prime Minister, since you ask." For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming mildly but deplorably flirtatious.
♥ "The ageing process on screen," he said. It wasn't a before-and-after such as Abe Lincoln's-the handsome frontiersman completely desiccated by the Civil War. Whatever way you look at it, though, ten years is a long time, and not just in politics.
"There's also an ageing process within," I said. "You don't get tougher. You get tenderer. And certain phrases come into your head. Like 'life's work.'" Yes, or like "legacy."
♥ "Tony," a staffer told me, "is a great non-belittler." Downing Street, after all, is presided over by a man who answers to a diminutive (and will go down in history with that forename). This may have been notionally true under Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan, but not under, say, Dai Lloyd George, Andy Bonar Law, Stan Baldwin, Nev Chamberlain, Winnie Churchill, Harry Wilson, or, for that matter, Tony Eden.
♥ Power has been described as a drug, an aphrodisiac, a "filthy venom" (in the words of Maxim Gorky); it is also, for much of the time, carcinogenically boring. Like all politicians, Tony has seven or eight kinds of smile. Smiles two and three would do for the bishops (and for the convocation of bishops, I thought, well, he has his religion to help him through it). More generally, when he is making the rounds of a crowded room, his smile, toward the end, is a rictus, and his eyes are as hard as jewels.
All the boredom is what the world doesn't see-the hidden toil of dosing and humoring, of giving face and jollying along. It is this that keeps politicians halfway honest, and impedes the process that Bob Geldof alluded to, up in the White Room: "It's a bit naff, isn't it? What happened? The politicization of celebrity or the celebritization of politics?" And the question arose: What will Tony be, when he quits? An ex-politician?
"No," he said. "I'll be a former celebrity."
♥ Blair went on, "Alastair was sympathetic, but he said, 'Look. This isn't America. Religion and politics don't mix.'"
"And when religion and politics mix?"
"You start saying things like 'God made me do it.'"
♥ Pretty well everyone, from the semi-literate windbags of the blogosphere ("So! The poddle of Downing Street once again feel's the tug of his masters leish!") to King Adbullah of Saudi Arabia (who has started defying the Americans because he "doesn't want to be known as the Arab Tony Blair"), pretty well everyone agrees that the P.M. has vitiated his premiership by cleaving too close to George Bush-an association described as "tragic" by Neil Kinnock and "abominable" by Jimmy Carter. And Blair himself, I thought, was arrestingly forthright when he said, in a recent interview on NBC, that "at one level... it is the job of the British Prime Minister to get on with the American President." This is a tradition that goes back, with certain fluctuations, to Churchill and the termination of Britain's imperial sway. One should not pretend that it is a frictionless business, saying no to America. It is one thing to be "a leading member of the EU." It is quite another to be what Clinton called "the world's one indispensable nation."
♥ When Blair goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of thirty (and five bodyguards). When Bush goes somewhere, he relies on a staff of 800 (and 100 bodyguards); and if he visits two countries on the same trip, the figure is 1,600; three countries, and the figure is 2,400. Having reached his destination, Blair will throw in his lot with whatever transport is made available. Using military aircraft, Bush takes along his own limousine, his own backup limousine, his own refueling trucks, and his own helicopters. "Mm," murmurs a chastened Brit. "You make our lives seem very simple." This, shall we say, is the diplomatic way of putting it.
♥ I am also allowed a couple of minutes in the Oval Office as the principals take their seats. And there is an incident.
"Did you hear that?" a Blair liaison officer later asks me.
"Yes, I did."
"Do you intend to put it in your piece?"
"Yeah, I thought I might."
"Don't."
"Why not?"
"Don't."
And I obeyed-though of course I have no compunction about slinging it in here. Bush was saying, of something or other, "I've never seen so much bullshit in my life." Then, much more interestingly, he jerked to his feet, yelling at the cameraman, "Give me the tape! Give me the tape!" That is to say, the President was going to confiscate the evidence-the evidence of his profanity. Blair's people didn't want to add to Bush's problems. No headlines saying, "Prez in 'Bullshit' Storm." No month-long frenzy of bullshit about the "bullshit." Every little helps-what with the 30 percent approval rating, the dead-duck second term, the double-or-quits "surge" in Iraq.
♥ The P.M., for his part, gave a passionate restatement of his crystallized rationale: after September 11, the West had no choice but to unite against a planetary enemy; and he did what he did because he believed it was right. While the two men spoke you could hear the distant bawling of the protestors on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was as if an incensed but microscopic goblin was off in the bushes somewhere, down by the ornamental lake, his voice strained to the maximum yet barely louder than the endless miaows of the cameras.
♥ Here's something that I bet Tony's people didn't dare tell George's people. The plane we're flying in (an executive jet with three classes and a little bedroom for the P.M.) was chartered, on the open market, from a company based in the Middle East.
♥ Tony rode in the cockpit, and spiffily disembarked, at Baghdad International, in suit and tie. At no point, so far as I saw, did he encumber himself with the neck-ricking head-gear or the snarling Velcro of the flak jacket. And I remembered that first journey when, in rather more agreeable surroundings, he disdained the use of the seat belt in his armor-plated Jag. What is this prime-ministerial trait? The rest of us, by this stage, were carapaced in sweat and grit. But not Tony. Rumor predicts that on his retirement Blair will seek solace, along with his wife, in the bosom of Rome. But surely he is Calvinism incarnate-the central doctrine being that your salvation us secure by your confidence in it. In Iraq, Tony crossed the runway like a true exceptionalist: one of the chosen, the redeemed, the elect.
♥ We shunted on to Maud House, HQ of the British Support Unit, just in time for another alert. General David Petraeus-Wolfowitzian in appearance, with a nervous, wincing laugh-barely blinked as the sirens took up their weary and long-suffering squawk.
"It's Apocalypse Now meets Disneyland": this was the twinkly verdict of a British staff colonel. And there came an interlude, on the helipad (like a drained swimming pool of gray concrete, the size of a city block), where you could find some shade and try to bring order to the skein of impressions and the vague, persistent tickle of the unreal. The Green Zone resembles the embassy district of a minor South American capital after a period of immiseration and collapse, where the powers that be, or the powers that remain, are exhaustedly girding themselves for the chaos and butchery of revolution. I found myself staring at a discarded ornamental armchair (its symbolism all too cooperative), which grimly presided over a heap of undifferentiated rubbish. Then it was wheels up, nose down, and we clattered over Baghdad, the apartment blocks like low-rise car parks, with trash everywhere, and greenmantled standing pools.
♥ "This is Downing Street and there's nobody home," runs the joke. "Please leave a message after the high moral tone."
♥ Except at odd moments, though, in corridors and anterooms, you never are person to person with Tony Blair. There is always the photographer, the documentarist, the aide with the tape recorder and the stopwatch. There is also the professionalized superego of the P.M., schooled in caution, incessantly aware that his airiest word can double back on him and look like a Saturn. It is not the case, as the dulled phrase has it, that what you see is what you get: he is more physically impressive, more sensitive, and much more playful than the man on your TV screen. But it remains true, with Blair, that what you hear is what you hear.
♥ "What's it like, power? Lenin said it made the head spin. Is it heady?"
"Yes, but you're stabilized by the responsibility. I like to think I can do without it. You have to be able to risk it, and leave some room for instinctive judgement. You have to face the possibility of losing it. In order to use it."
.."So how does it feel, now that it's ebbing from you? Power."
"All right so far. When the day comes I'll probably be clinging to the door knocker. 'I'm homeless!' But so far I think I can just... let it go."
~~On the Move with Tony Blair.
♥ An ideology is in the business of aggrandizing those who subscribe to it, and Husain was soon assured that he was vastly superior to pretty well everyone, all women ("women are the plague"), all Jews (of course), all kafirs (or koofs), and all "partial Muslims," like his mother and father (soon to be jettisoned). Endearingly, though, the tenor of Husain's teenage years goes on seeming reasonably teenage. Whereas other boys smuggled pornography into their rooms, "my contraband consisted of books written by Islamist ideologues." Turning to a more radical mosque, he can pray bareheaded without messing up his hairstyle. Islamist chicks, in their jilbabs and niqabs, are far more alluring than all those kafir nudists. Spurning both promiscuity and arranged marriages, Islamists tend to elope; and divorce rates among them, Husain reveals, are un-Islamically high. The more common pattern-Husain's pattern-is to keep your sexual tension stoppered, and work it off with religious rage.
♥ In organizational terms, Islamism is Leninist. The radicals, with their advanced consciousness, form a vanguard, and seek power in the name, not of the supernational proletariat, but of the umma, the supranational community of believers. Reliant on cadres (halaqahs), fiercely destructive in debate, and desperately alert to "deviation," the Mawdudis, Wahhabis, and Nabhanis are as fissiparous as the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and the Socialist-Revolutionists of 1917.
♥ He also did something that may be recommended to all British Islamists: he spent time in Islamic lands. Not a long weekend in some Waziristani boot camp (where, one gathers, it's car bombs all morning, poisons and acids all afternoon, and maniacal misogyny all evening), but extended stays in Syria and Saudi Arabia. Husain comes to love Damascus, despite the sexism, racism, homophobia, and the heroization of such questionable figures as Hitler and Saddam. But he can do nothing with the "loss, mayhem, perversion and hypocrisy" of Riyadh and Jeddah. His wife is continuously accosted and propositioned with hisses and whispered obscenities. And when they visit the Prophet's tomb-dicing with shirk (polytheism, idolatry), which is haram (forbidden)-"[we] risk being kicked in the face by the Wahhabi guards if we so much as bow our heads." By now we are used to the idea of sexual tension and religious rage in counterbalance within an individual psyche; in Saudi Arabia, tension and rage are the twin predicates of an entire society.
♥ When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout, "God is great!" When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?
~~An Islamist's Journey.
♥ In fact, "September" alone may eventually prove adequate-just as every Russian, ninety years on, knows exactly what is means by "October." But the naming of September 11, that day, that event, naturally fell to America. And America came up with something pithier: "9/11."
♥ I don't really care which way around they go: my principal objection to the numbers is that they are numbers. The solecism, that is to say, is not grammatical but moral-esthetic-an offense against decorum; and decorum means "seemliness," which comes from soemr, "fitting," and soema, "to honor." 9/11, 7/7: who or what decided that particular acts of slaughter, particular whirlwinds of plasma and body parts, in which a random sample of the innocent is killed, maimed, or otherwise crippled in body and mind, deserve a numerical short-hand? Whom does this "honor"? What makes this "fitting"? So far as I am aware, no one has offered the only imaginable rationale: that these numerals, after all, are Arabic.
Meanwhile, in Great Britain, nearly all our politicians, historians, journalists, novelists, scientists, poets, and philosophers, many of them deeply anti-American, have swallowed the blithe and lifeless Americanism, and go on doggedly and goonishly referring to September 11 as November 9. Why? For the LCD reason: everyone does it because everyone does it; it is the equivalent of a verbal high five. But the cunning of history, the cunning of Clio, that satirical muse, has already made a firm reckoning. September 11, 2001, is the most momentous event in world history since the end of the Cold War. And the Cold War ended when the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier, otherwise known as the Berlin Wall, was decisively breached-on November 9, 1989. That is to say, on 9/11.
♥ But in politics it is surprisingly easy to move from side to side while staying in the same place; and the middle ground, I discovered, was not where it used to be.
♥ We are drowsily accustomed, by now, to the fetishization of "balance," the ground rule of "moral equivalence" in all conflicts between West and East, the 100 percent and 360-degree inability to pass judgment on any ethnicity other than our own (except in the case of Israel).
♥ Was Ladies' Night at the Tiger Tiger discotheque a legitimate target for Dr. Ahmed's "anger" about Iraq? Were the morose North Africans of July 21 "desperate" about Palestine? And what do all the U.K. jihadis have in common, these brain surgeons and jailbirds, these keen cricketers and footballers, these sex offenders, community workers, ex-boozers and drug addicts, primary-school teachers, sneak thieves, and fast-food restaurateurs, with their six-liter plastic tubs of hairdressing bleach and nail-polish remover, their crystalline triacetone triperoxide and chapatti flour, and their "dockyard confetti" (bolts and nuts and nails)? And the answer to that question seems to be slowly dawning. What they have in common is this: they are all abnormally interested in violence and death.
♥ With the twentieth century so fresh in our mind, you might think that human beings would be quick to identify an organized passion for carnage. But we aren't quick to do that-of course we aren't; we are impeded by a combination of naïveté, decency, and a kind of recurrent incredulity. The death cult always benefits, initially at least, from its capacity to astonish and stupefy.
♥ And here we approach a pathology that may in the end be unassimilable to the non-believing mind. I mean the rejection of reason-the rejection of the sequitur, of cause and effect, of two plus two. Strikingly, in their written works and their table talk, Hitler and Stalin (and Lenin) seldom let the abstract noun "reason" go by without assigning a scornful adjective to it: worthless reason, craven reason, cowardly reason. When those sanguinary yokels, the Taliban, chant their slogan, "Throw reason to the dogs," they are making the same kind of Faustian gamble: crush reason, kill reason, and anything and everything seems possible-the restored Caliphate, for instance, presiding over a planetary empire cleansed of all infidels. To transcend reason is of course to transcend the confines of moral law; it is to enter the illimitable world of insanity and death.
.."Reason," moreover, is one of our synonyms for realism, and indeed for reality; without it, as Islamism will soon find, the ground turns to mire beneath your feet. Death cults are in the end obedient to their own logic: what they do is die.
♥ September 11 means September 11, 2001-the day the towers came down. It was also the day when something was revealed to us. Do we now know what that was? Much of our analysis, perhaps, has been wholly inapposite, because we keep trying to construe Islamism in terms of the ratiocinative. How does it look when we construe it in terms of the emotions? Familiar emotional states (hurt, hatred, fury, shame, dishonor, and, above all, humiliation), but at unfamiliar intensities-intensities that secular democracy, and the rules of law and civil society, will always tend to neutralize. There is religious passion too, of course, but even the bruited, the roared fanaticism seems unrobust. It may even be that what we are witnessing is not spiritual certainty so much as spiritual insecurity and spiritual doubt.
Islamism has been with us for the lion's share of a century. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, and within a decade there was an offshoot in what would soon become Pakistan. But the emotionally shaping event, one is forced to deduce, was the establishment of the Jewish Homeland. In the war fought to bring that about, Israel, occupying 0.6 percent of Arab lands and with a proportional population, defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Transjordan, together with the supplementary forces of Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
In the other 99.4 percent of Arab lands, this event is known as al-nakba: the catastrophe. And that epithet hardly overstates the case. The "godless" Soviet Union, after a comparable reverse, might have fallen into troubled self-scrutiny; but what does it mean for peoples who sincerely believe that omnipotent deity is minutely attentive to their desires and deserts? Having endured several centuries of Christian prosperity, global power and reach, and eventual empire, the Islamic nations were vanquished by a province the size of New Jersey. In the Koran, the Jews are portrayed as cunning and dangerous, yet they are never portrayed as strong: "Children of Israel... Dread My might." We in the West have ceased to understand the meaning of the word "humiliation," and we use it, in descriptions of our daily struggles, with the lilt of comic hyperbole. Now we must further imagine how it feels to be humiliated, not only by history, but also by God.
This was surely a negative eureka for the Muslim idea. Following the defeat of 1948, and following the defeat (in six days) of 1967, Islam, or its militant vanguard, was finding that it had arrived at a crossroads-or a T-junction. The way to the left was marked "Less Religion," and meant a journey to the future. The way to the right was marked "More Religion (Islam is the Solution)," and meant a journey to the past. Which direction would lead to the return of God's favor? On their left, a stretch of oily macadam, perhaps resembling one of the unlovelier sections of the London orbital, scattered with windblown trash, and, of course, choked and throttled with traffic. On their right, something like a garden path at the Alhambra, cleaner, simpler, and-thanks to the holy warriors and their "smiting of necks"-much, much emptier. In Al-Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, John Gray reminds us that Islamism, in both its techniques and its pathologies, is on the crest of the contemporary. But the emotions all point the other way; they speak of retrogression and revanchism; they speak of a vehement and desperate nostalgia.
Sayyid Qutb, like someone relaying a commonplace or even a tautology, often said that it is in the nature of Islam to dominate. Where, though, are its tools and its instruments? The only thing Islamism can dominate, for now, is the evening news. But that is not nothing, in a world of pandemic suggestibility, munition glut, and our numerous Walter Mittys of mass murder. September 11 entrained a moral crash, planet-wide; it also loosened the ground between reality and delirium. So when we speak of it, let's call it by its proper name; let's not suggest that our experience of that event, that development, has been frictionlessly absorbed and filed away. It has not. September 11 continues, it goes on, with all its mystery, its instability, and its terrible dynamism.
~~September 11.