Some beliefs — simple matters of detail — have almost no factual support but refuse to die, probably because they serve to support deeply held beliefs. William Dalrymple puts his understanding of the origins of terrorism on display for our edification. Theodore Dalrymple then explains why William’s theory is absurd.
“Mumbai atrocities highlight need for solution in Kashmir“, William Dalrymple (historian, bio), op-ed in The Observer, 30 November 2008 — “Jihadi groups will exploit Muslim grievances unless peace can be brought to the troubled state.” Bold emphasis added. Excerpt:
I thought back to this conversation last week, when news came in that the murderous attackers of Mumbai had brutally assaulted the city’s hospitals in addition to the more obvious Islamist targets of five-star hotels, Jewish centres and cafes frequented by Americans and Brits. Since then, the links between the Mumbai attacks and the separatist struggle in Kashmir have become ever more explicit. There now seems to be a growing consensus that the operation is linked to the Pakistan-based jihadi outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose leader, Hafiz Muhammad Sayeed, operates openly from his base at Muridhke outside Lahore.
This probable Pakistani origin of the Mumbai attacks, and the links to Kashmir-focused jihadi groups, means that the horrific events have to be seen in the context of the wider disaster of Western policy in the region since 9/11. The abject failure of the Bush administration to woo the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan away from the Islamists and, instead, managing to convince many of them of the hostility of the West towards all Muslim aspirations, has now led to a gathering catastrophe in Afghanistan where the once-hated Taliban are now again at the gates of Kabul.
… India meanwhile continues to make matters worse by its ill-treatment of the people of Kashmir, which has handed to the jihadis an entire generation of educated, angry middle-class Muslims. One of the clean-shaven boys who attacked CST railway station – now named by the Indian media as Mohammad Ajmal Mohammad Amin Kasab, from Faridkot in the Pakistani Punjab – was wearing a Versace T-shirt. The other boys in the operation wore jeans and Nikes and were described by eyewitnesses as chikna or well-off. These were not poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the villages, brainwashed by mullahs, but angry and well-educated, middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively.
Once we have eliminated legitimate grievances we these well-educated, middle class kids will not long be furious at the gross injustices they perceive being done. Of course, as Bill Ayers explains, that might take quite a while — as even the US has a long way to go. I recommend reading “The Real Bill Ayers“, op-ed in The New York Times, 5 December 2008 (nice of the Times to wait until the election was over before publishing Ayer’s despicable attempt at self-justification).
The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices – the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious – as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
If their small bombs “accidentally” maimed or killed someone (e.g., a cleaning lady or security guard), their apology would have been first rate.
A bit more about this from “Mumbai’s The Word“, Theodore Dalrymple (pen name of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels), New English Review, December 2008 — Excerpt:
It would take an entire book, perhaps, to disentangle all the assumptions and misconceptions that this {Dalrymple’s} passage implies, or on whose connotations it depends for its force.
In the short space available, let me refer first to the surprise that it should be educated, middle-class young men who perpetrated such acts. The assumption underlying this surprise is that there is some direct connection between poverty and ignorance on the one hand, and extreme political violence or terrorism on the other. Well-to-do people are not driven to the desperation of terrorism. And this view, it seems to me, genuinely implies an almost total absence of knowledge of world history, to say nothing of an inability to make fairly obvious connections.
Although I am not an historian, it has long seemed to me that some acquaintance with the history of Nineteenth Century Russia is absolutely crucial to understanding the modern world, for it was there that the various forms of modern revolutionary terrorism, and politics as the pursuit of an ideological end, first developed. And the first terrorists were certainly not downtrodden peasants brainwashed by religious or other leaders: they were either aristocrats suffering angst at their own privilege in the midst of poverty, or members of the newly-emerged middle classes, angry that their education had not resulted in the influence in society to which they thought themselves entitled by virtue of their intelligence, idealism and knowledge.
This pattern has been repeated over and over again. Latin America is a very good example. Castro was the spoilt son of a self-made millionaire who had a personal grudge against society because he was illegitimate and sometimes humiliated for it; in other words, he was both highly privileged, with a sense of entitlement, and deeply resentful, always a dreadful combination. Ernesto Guevara was of partially aristocratic descent, whose upbringing was that of a bohemian bourgeois, who was too egotistical and lacking in compassion for individual human beings to accept the humdrum discipline of medical practice.
The leaders of the guerrilla movement in Guatemala (a country, oddly, with many parallels to Nineteenth Century Russia) were of bourgeois and educated origin; one of them was the son of a Nobel-prize winner, not exactly a true social representative of the population. The leader and founder of Sendero Luminoso of Peru, a movement of the Pol Pot tendency (and Pol Pot himself, of course, studied in Paris), was a professor of philosophy, and his followers were the first educated generation of the peasantry, not the peasants themselves. Peasants are capable of uprisings, no doubt, even very bloody ones, but they do not elaborate ideologies or undergo training for attacks on distant targets.
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