Mick Hartley

Hitchens says it best. Monday's article in Slate has been published in today's Sunday Times (£), slightly altered but essentially the same:

The proper task of the public intellectual might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity to the argument: the reminder that things are rarely as simple as they seem. But what I learnt from the events of September 2001 was this: never, ever, ignore the obvious. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shi’ite Muslims and unbelievers, and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

To me, this remains the main point about Al-Qaeda and its surrogates. Many of the attempts to introduce complexity strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks on the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression.

Underlying these attempts to change the subject is a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy. Either that, or — to recall the comments of the “Reverends” Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson — a punishment from heaven for American sinfulness. There was always some intellectual, however, to argue that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the root cause of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.  […]

The battle against casuistry and bad faith has been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin Ladenism as its shield against reality. There turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, Al-Qaeda defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.

In these cases, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any simple solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But some stout simplicities deservedly remain.

Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and “free speech fundamentalism”. The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of ancient hatreds but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called “evil”. And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.