“Why Don’t Muslims Condemn Terrorism?”

As I write, my part of the country is on “Orange Alert,” waiting more or less fatalistically for a repeat performance of September 11, 2001. We all hope that it won’t happen—that it’s a false alarm, or an attack averted by foreknowledge—but bluffing aside, no one knows what will happen, or if anything will, when it will. And there is a sense in which an attack is, and always has been inevitable: Al Qaeda is not defeated, and has not given up. Given all that, it may be worth revisiting an old question, unresolved since 9/11 itself: Why is it, Americans invariably ask, that Muslims have been so reticent about criticizing terrorism?

William Bennett makes the complaint succinctly in his book Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (2003):

It is no doubt a measure of how adroitly Muslim Americans have adapted to our general ethos of entitlement that they and their representatives should so uninhibitedly denounce even the most timid expression of concern about the Islamist danger as ‘Islamophobia’ or as an infringement of their ‘rights.’ But they do, and this has proved an effective tactic of intimidation. Considering the lengths to which our country has gone to accommodate Muslim requirements, it is also sheer effrontery. (p. 108)

If, as we have been assured, moderates really do outnumber extremists in the Muslim world…then they will have to stand up and begin the arduous work of reconstruction from within by criticizing, criticizing, criticizing: wresting the souls of their children from the clutches of self-pity and resentment, taking on the extremists at every point, defining their patrimony anew, and trusting to their convictions, their faith, and the God of history for a vindication that may yet be theirs. (p. 111).

I have a certain sympathy for Bennett’s complaint (though not for his book as a whole). But what explains the attitude he criticizes?

The answer, in my view, lies in the psycho-politics of civil war. It’s an underappreciated fact that the current terrorist episode is most fundamentally a civil war, a war of Muslim against Muslim over the soul of Islam, which for a variety of reasons has spilled out of the Muslim world and into the rest of it. Wars of this sort lead inevitably to euphemism, reticence, and rationalization intended to paper over the reality of the conflict: brothers find it hard to admit that they really are making war against each other. It’s a futile, inexcusable pretense, but Americans ought to stop pretending to incomprehension of it, as though they themselves were innocent of the vice. To see what I mean, consider some ways in which the same denial crops up in American attitudes toward the American Civil War, the one that supposedly ended at Appomattox Court House some 140 years ago.

Start, for instance, with the place where the war began: Fort Sumter, and turn to the website of the National Park Service’s Fort Sumter National Monument, where you’ll find the following account of the fateful events of April 12, 1861:

History provides us with defining moments from which we judge where we are with where we have been. The Civil War provides the United States with one of its critical defining moments that continues to play a vital role in defining ourselves as a Nation. Fort Sumter is the place where it began.

America's most tragic conflict ignited at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, when a chain reaction of social, economic and political events exploded into civil war. At the heart of these events was the issue of states rights versus federal authority flowing over the underlying issue of slavery.

Fueled by decades of disagreement and confrontation, South Carolina seceded in protest of Lincoln's election and the social and economic changes sure to follow. With Fort Sumter as an unyielding bastion of Federal authority, the war became inevitable.

A powerful symbol to both the South and the North, Fort Sumter remains a memorial to all that fought to hold it.

Reading this, one find oneself wondering: does it describe a historical event or a chemistry experiment gone awry?

The first paragraph starts out unassailably enough: history, it tells us, provides us with defining moments that it is our obligation to judge. But we can only judge individuals who, being responsible for their actions, make decisions of their own free will. And oddly enough, every subsequent paragraph in this passage occludes who those individuals were, how they decided, what they did, what the consequences were, and who was to blame for the aftermath. Instead, the conflict “ignited.” A “chain reaction…exploded.” The fuse was lit. The stage was set. Mistakes were made. Snap, crackle, pop: and the war came.

Granted, we get the unavoidable one-line reference to moral and political issues: states rights, federal authority, slavery. But no sooner are these issues mentioned, they are blotted out, and we revert once again to mechanistic metaphors: South Carolina, gassed up on a contention-causing “fuel,” more or less drove into secession like a driver who’s lost control of his vehicle, quite possibly hydroplaning on the issues that were “flowing over” slavery.

Reflecting on this mealy-mouthed abdication of moral judgment (paradoxically issued in the name of moral judgment), consider what Abraham Lincoln had to say about the same situation in his first Inaugural Address of March 4, 1861:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."

Agree with Lincoln’s interpretation or not, here at least we return to the scene of history as made by human agents as opposed to “chain reactions.”

The contrast between the nineteenth century speech and the twenty-first century website couldn’t be clearer. The website treats the aggression against Fort Sumter as though it were a chance event that just happened to happen. Despite the pro forma references to judgment, its narrative is an act of evasion: it goes as far out of its way as possible to avoid, even to subvert, the task of judgment by pretending that we can somehow understand what happened at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 in a value-neutral way, standing outside all judgments about what should have happened. But Lincoln—in line with the contemporary school of moral philosophy known as “moral realism”—knows better. The what of a human event is inherently tied to its could have, would have, and should have. Dissociate the one from the other and you cease to understand what the event was about.

Now, you could say that a national park is a park for all Americans, Unionist and Confederate alike, and thus ought to respect all opinions about the war, pro-Lincoln or pro-Davis, pro-Anderson or pro-Beauregard. But that’s precisely the cheap “inclusive” thought that facilitates the Muslim whining that Bennett opposes.

Imagine that we apply the preceding “inclusive” logic not only to Fort Sumter but to the memorial which is to be erected at the site of the new World Trade Center. In fact, most Americans regard what happened at the WTC on 9/11 as an unmitigated act of aggression by Al Qaeda. But not all do. According to the Washington Post (quoting the Jersey City Police Department), some Muslims in my hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey celebrated the 9/11 attacks from their rooftops (see Serge F. Kovaleski and Frederick Kunkle, "Northern New Jersey Draws Probers' Eye: Many in Area Feel Wrongly Targeted," Washington Post, September 18, 2001, p. A6).

Let me emphasize, as I have on previous occasions, that these celebrants were a tiny, tiny minority even of the Muslims of Jersey City, and that by far the majority of rumors about Muslim American celebrations of 9/11 have been false and malicious hoaxes. But the fact remains that if the Jersey City PD and Washington Post are to be believed, those handful of Muslims did celebrate 9/11, and if they are a minority, so are Confederates. If the National Park Service can placate the Confederates, why not placate Muslim American celebrants of 9/11 to the following tune?

History provides us with defining moments from which we judge where we are with where we have been. The 9/11 attacks provide the United States with one of its critical defining moments that continues to play a vital role in defining ourselves as a Nation.

The conflict ignited when a chain reaction took place that led several jet planes to careen toward the Towers, crashing into them, knocking them down, and leading to a tragic loss of life—killing thousands in the towers, hundreds of rescuers, the passengers and crew on the aircraft, and nineteen others caught in the maelstrom.

A powerful symbol to all, the World Trade Center remains a memorial for all involved in the events of that day—those who mourned, and those who cheered; those who fell victim, and those who victimized them.

Is the comparison of Al Qaeda to the Confederacy really so far off? Al Qaeda managed to kill a few thousand Americans—certainly more than bad enough. But if Lincoln was right about whose “hands” led to the Civil War (and I agree with him), Jefferson Davis, P.T. Beauregard, Robert E. Lee & Co. were responsible for starting and conducting a war that killed 600,000 Americans—twenty times what Al Qaeda has so far managed. And yet a taxpayer-funded national park devoted to the “memory” of the Civil War is willing to manufacture excuses for the Confederates that no one would dream of manufacturing for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Lincoln’s “divisive” take on the events is for official purposes to be relegated to the memory hole. Can people who play such games with their own history really demand that others make assiduous judgments about theirs?

Consider a second, initially trivial-sounding example. Not long ago, I was driving down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, when I decided to stop for a snack at a service plaza near Gettysburg. Browsing the postcards on sale there, I had trouble believing my eyes. Here I was, a few miles from Gettysburg—site of the most climactic battle ever fought on American soil, site of a Southern offensive stopped by the tenacity and heroism of Northern arms, and site of carnage that for the length of the casualty list, simply dwarfs 9/11 by comparison. So how did the postcards depict this battle?

I’m looking right now at one of those postcards. It depicts three Gettysburg monuments with a Civil War cannon superimposed over them. The cannon is flanked on its right by an American flag, and on its left by… the Confederate flag. Looking at this juxtaposition, you get the impression that Gettysburg was some kind of friendly football scrimmage between rival schools— Union U. versus Confederate State. You also get the lamentable impression that the game ended in a tie. Since it obviously wasn’t a military tie, the implication seems to be that it was a moral tie. And the lesson is that both sides fought as “bravely” as the other, so that both sides deserve our respect.

That suggests another fruitful Pennsylvanian analogy. If what happened at Gettysburg was just a friendly—if competitive—scrimmage, why not say the same of United Flight 93? Our side won the scrimmage, to be sure, but Al Qaeda, our worthy adversary, played good and hard—and you have to respect that. Maybe someone can start marketing postcards with a crashed plane surrounded by an American flag and an Al Qaeda logo.

If you think that’s an outlandish analogy, you’ve probably forgotten that Pickett’s charge was after all a suicide mission, differing only by degrees from Mohammed Atta’s. And if you find yourself nauseated and bewildered at the Muslims who cheered 9/11 from the West Bank and Gaza (or Jersey City), maybe you’ve forgotten William Faulkner’s description of Pickett’s charge from his 1948 novel, Intruder in the Dust:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances.…This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....

The operative words are “desperate and unbelievable.” No one could reasonably have believed that Pickett’s charge could have succeeded at any earthly goal. Nothing was going to be gained by it, except in a notional and fantasized universe essentially indistinguishable from the Islamist paradise of the “72 virgins.” But if Faulkner is to be believed, a whole generation of Southern lads grew up admiring Pickett to the point of interiorizing and wishing to emulate his suicidal desires. How different is that, really, from the kids in Pakistan or Nigeria or wherever touting their Osama bin Laden T-shirts?

Examples of this sort should make us pause to think about the ways in which the iconography of the Confederacy lives essentially uncontested in the American landscape and imagination. Drive west or south across the country—or for that matter, down into south Jersey (since southern Jersey is debatably south of the Mason-Dixon line, southern Jerseyans fought for the Confederacy, and New Jersey was the only northern state Lincoln didn’t carry in 1860)—and you see the Stars and Bars defiantly littering the landscape. No one is ostracized for flying it or sticking it on anything, as they certainly would be if they painted or stuck “Go Al Qaeda!” on the side of their barn or the back of their pickup.

In Richmond, you can visit the Museum of the Confederacy; in New Orleans, there’s the Confederate Civil War Museum. Nothing untoward about either place, right?

And why should there be? Not long ago, the Stars and Bars fluttered proudly over the South Carolina statehouse (as it did in Georgia and I believe, still does in part in Mississippi), and it took the longest and loudest of protracted battles to induce its champions to take it down. A blast from the past of the nearly-forgotten South Carolina conflict reminds us of its tenor:

Inflammatory remarks by state senator Arthur Ravenel made national headlines in Jan. 2000 when he defended the flying of the Southern Cross, referring to the NAACP as the "the National Association of Retarded People." He then apologized to "retarded people" for associating them with the NAACP. At the time of the February Republican presidential primary, party differences on the issue were thrown in sharp relief: the Republican contenders declined to take a stand except to say that the issue was a state matter; the Democrats were outspokenly against the flag remaining.

They call it the Party of Lincoln.

But then, we have in the Republican Party an Attorney General who admires the “heritage” of the Confederacy in Southern Partisan magazine, praising the “patriots” Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. And Ashcroft was in good Republican company there, appearing in Southern Partisan alongside such moral luminaries as Trent Lott, Jesse Helms and Dick Armey. It’s funny how conservatives never seem to notice the cultural relativism involved when Southern traitors magically become “patriots” and when their treason is justified in the name of specifically “Southern values.”

Meanwhile, we have state forests devoted to the loving memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest (a founder of the Ku Klux Klan), schools named after Robert E. Lee, honor societies named after Jefferson Davis, and a historical society devoted to the praise of the mass murderer William Clark Quantrill. And don’t get those Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy mad by suggesting that we do away with any of these embarrassing archaisms. That would hurt their feelings, and when Confederates climb aboard the multiculturalist bandwagon, that’s the last thing you want to do.

As various right-wingers manufacture increasingly desperate and embarrassing excuses for the “right to secession,” Lincoln-bashing has come back in vogue. And while people are willing to debate whether Ronald Reagan belongs on Mt. Rushmore, no one much cares to remember that Mt. Rushmore was itself the creation of an ardent member of the Ku Klux Klan (see Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory). As for Reagan’s views on the Botha government in South Africa, or on the ANC or apartheid generally, let’s not go there. Why should we try to remember what his eulogists have so assiduously induced us to forget?

Reflecting on all this, I think I have an answer to the “Why don’t Muslims condemn terrorism?” question that is snappier than most. Let’s try it in Letterman format.

Muslims don’t condemn terrorism for the same reason that:

10. Americans can’t condemn the firing on Fort Sumter 140 years after the fact.

9. Americans think Gettysburg was a tie.

8. So many Americans proudly fly and defend the Stars and Bars.

7. Americans open museums in praise of the Confederacy.

6. Americans have an Attorney General who is an admirer of the Confederacy.

5. Members of the so-called Party of Lincoln defend a flag of treason and spit in the face of its founder.

4. Americans still admire Confederate traitors and outlaws like Lee and Quantrill.

3. Mt. Rushmore still exists.

2. Ronald Reagan was able to find excuses for apartheid in “African tribalism,” while his eulogists have now chosen, en masse, to forget that moment and dozens like them.

But the real #1 reason that Muslims don’t condemn terrorism is that moral evasion is not a uniquely Muslim trait, but a human capacity practiced everywhere by everyone--especially by those at war with themselves, unable to admit it, and unable to come to resolution about it. If Americans looked harder at their own Civil War, I suspect, they might see that more clearly. But, despite the vast profusion of books, articles and pamphlets on the topic, despite the popularity of Ken Burns’s Civil War film, despite the pious lectures we hear about the evils of racism and the value of “multiculturalism,” Americans cannot seem to stare the facts of the Civil War (what to speak of Reconstruction) directly in the face even after 140 years, without swathing it in euphemism, rationalization, and outright lies. That is why their criticisms of Muslim euphemism, rationalization and dishonesty ring so hollow.

“There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war,” said Frederick Douglass, thirteen years after the fact, on “Decoration Day” (what we now call Memorial Day),

which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while to-day we should have malice toward none, and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right and wrong, or loyalty with treason. If the observance of this memorial day has any apology, office, or significance, it is derived from the moral character of the war, from the far-reaching, unchangeable and eternal principles in dispute, and for which our sons and brothers encountered hardship, danger, and death. [“There Was a Right Side in the Late War,” speech delivered at Union Square, New York, May 30, 1878, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed., Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted by Yuval Taylor, p. 632.]

It’s futile to expect Muslims to come to terms with their past if we can’t come to terms with ours. We can’t demand “the arduous work of reconstruction from within” (William Bennett’s phrase) from a position of moral ambivalence about our own Civil War and Reconstruction. Nor is there any sense to blustering about “taking on the Muslim extremists at every point,” when the Attorney General of the United States holds his office after literally confounding “right and wrong” and “loyalty with treason.” Ultimately, “the moral character” of our Civil War and theirs is the same: The key to understanding why Muslims don’t criticize terrorism is to ask why we don’t criticize the historical equivalent; the key to understanding why we fight is to understand why we fought.