My attention was drawn today to an extract from La Nouvelle
judéophobie, by Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a book written between the
invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq:
http://watch.windsofchange.net/themes_43.htm
The author takes a basically Schmidtian line: "Not knowing how to
recognize the enemy, not being able to distinguish him, not daring to
mobilize against him... this is the absolute zero politics. It is also
the absolute zero of geopolitics." He observes that the project of one
wing of the pacifist movement has been to criminalize the response of
the victims of terror, to refuse all legitimacy to any mobilization
against the totalitarian enemy. This perspective makes both moral and
strategic criticism of that response irrelevant, since no better
alternative can be acknowledged: the only acceptable response is no
response at all, beyond perhaps a protracted spate of self-criticism
and penitent alms-giving.
The only thing Israel, for instance, could possibly do that would
satisfy the extreme anti-Zionists is simply to *go away*: to fuse
itself into a multi-national entity with no distinctly Jewish
character, and thus repudiate the Jewish nationalism (recast as
"racism") that is the unique moral blemish from which all its criminal
behaviour is alleged to derive. It is thus the extreme anti-Zionists,
rather than the Zionists, who truly obstruct all criticism of the
policies of the state of Israel, since they does not acknowledge the
legitimacy of the object of criticism itself.
I was pleased by the Juan Cole article because it seemed to me to
refuse the temptation of demonizing the US and UK (and, by what seems
to have become an inevitable extension, Israel) and instead outlined a
moral and strategic criticism of their actions - which implies that
there are standard to which those powers could meaningfully be held.
Cole is under no illusions about the nature of the jihadist threat; he
quite rightly concentrates on the inadequacies of our response to it,
not in order to paralyse our resistance but in the hope of seeing it
mobilized more effectively.
Dominic
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