where's our solidarity?

  1. 5,748 Posts.
    Sep. 4, 2004 22:21 | Updated Sep. 4, 2004 22:24
    Where's our solidarity?


    It is the nature of terrorism that every time one thinks there is a limit to the depths to which terrorists can sink, they contrive even baser atrocities. By holding hostage and ultimately killing hundreds of Russian schoolchildren, Chechen terrorists have managed to set a low not seen since Palestinian terrorists took over a school in Ma'alot in 1974.

    We, who have been guarding every school – from nursery to university – for the past four years, watched events in North Ossetia with horror and sympathy. The tactics that Russia has used against Chechnya do not obviate the need to crush such terrorism, which is not as isolated as it is sometimes made to seem.

    As one US-based scholar of the conflict, Michael Radu, put it, "The extent to which Russian brutality and clumsiness have radicalized many Chechens could be debated, as could Moscow's often-exaggerated claim that all Chechen resistance is Wahhabi and attributable to non-Chechen mercenaries. What is not arguable is the fact that the most effective, violent, and well-trained elements in Chechnya are indeed Islamists, part and parcel of the Qaida nebula, whose methods are imports from the Middle East."

    It has been widely reported that some of the terrorists in the school were Arabs imported from outside Chechnya. A Qaida-affiliated group called the Islambouli Brigades (named after Anwar Sadat's assassin) claimed responsibility for the airplane and subway bombings over the last few days. Islambouli's brother, Radu points out, is a Qaida operative and a member of the Egyptian Islamic Group, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now Osama bin Laden's second-in-command.

    None of this is to say that anything Russia now does in Chechnya bears the stamp of freedom and democracy, or that an independent Chechnya would necessarily become, like Afghanistan under the Taliban, a satellite of al-Qaida. What it does illustrate is the seamlessness of the global war against militant Islamism, and the error of pretending that different fronts are utterly disconnected conflicts.

    The Arab-Israeli conflict, for example, is even today widely treated as independent from the war against Islamist jihad. When the two are connected, it is sometimes to blame American support of Israel for Islamist fury. The truth, as Arabs will sometimes admit, is the opposite.

    In his recent opus in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz quotes Ab'd Al-Mun'im Murad, an Egyptian columnist writing in Al-Akhbar just before 9/11, "The conflict that we call the Arab-Israeli conflict is, in truth, an Arab conflict with Western, and particularly American, colonialism. The US treats [the Arabs] as it treated the slaves inside the American continent. To this end, [the US] is helped by the smaller enemy, and I mean Israel."

    To Islamists, Americans, Israelis, and Russians are all infidels to be fought. In some places, they may piggyback on local conflicts and grievances. The Islamists also show a remarkable ability to transcend geographic and even religious boundaries in prosecuting their war. The Iranian mullahs are Shi'ites, Osama bin Laden is Sunni, and Saddam Hussein was ostensibly secular, yet they all consider themselves, and should be considered, allies in the same jihad against the West.

    The question is whether the West will show a modicum of solidarity in its own defense. To say that Israel, under attack for almost four years in an strikingly brutal Islamist-led offensive, has not enjoyed Western solidarity is to dramatically understate.

    But neither has the United States, once the initial sympathy over 9/11 dissipated. What is stopping the US, France (which at this writing is struggling to free two hostages in Iraq), and Russia from using their power in the UN Security Council to impose draconian sanctions on Iran?

    We can and must continue to fight Islamist-backed terrorism piecemeal, but we cannot hope to win the war as a whole if we, the Western nations, do not confront the most open national symbol of Islamism, the mullahcracy in Iran. This must be pursued, first and foremost, by using the ample economic and diplomatic tools at the West's disposal, and with the express goal of forcing Iran to verifiably forswear both its nuclear weapons program and its support for terrorism, as Libya has done. The European refusal so far to impose economic sanctions is quickly forcing a choice between the unacceptable – a nuclear Iran – and highly unpalatable military options.

 
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