KRISTOL ON JIHAD

Posted at 7:10 a.m. ET

It doesn't take long after an event like Mumbai for the usual suspects to make their way into the marketplace of bad ideas.  I wrote here earlier that the American journalism we saw during the awful siege was actually pretty good, in some cases excellent.  But now the "scholars" are weighing in, each one more profound than the next.  You know what to expect.  Bill Kristol provides the answers:

Consider first an op-ed article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times by Martha Nussbaum, a well-known professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. The article was headlined “Terrorism in India has many faces.” But one face that Nussbaum fails to mention specifically is that of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamic terror group originating in Pakistan that seems to have been centrally involved in the attack on Mumbai.

This is because Nussbaum’s main concern is not explaining or curbing Islamic terror. Rather, she writes that “if, as now seems likely, last week’s terrible events in Mumbai were the work of Islamic terrorists, that’s more bad news for India’s minority Muslim population.” She deplores past acts of Hindu terror against India’s Muslims. She worries about Muslim youths being rounded up on suspicion of terrorism with little or no evidence. And she notes that this is “an analogue to the current ugly phenomenon of racial profiling in the United States.”

So jihadists kill innocents in Mumbai — and Nussbaum ends up decrying racial profiling here. Is it just that liberal academics are required to include some alleged ugly American phenomenon in everything they write?

And...

Jim Leach is also a professor, at Princeton, but he’s better known as a former moderate Republican congressman from Iowa who supported Barack Obama this year. His contribution over the weekend was to point out on Politico.com that “the Mumbai catastrophe underscores the importance of vocabulary.” This wouldn’t have been my first thought.

No, mine neither.  But we don't teach in the Ivy League.

But Leach believes it’s very important that we consider the Mumbai attack not as an act of “war” but as an act of “barbarism.”

It's something, Leach says "that can occur anywhere, anytime..."

Just folks.  Just ordinary folks.  Oh, yes, Leach does concede that "it may be true" that the murderers saw themselves as justified in their attacks, that they may have had a rationale for killing people of different nationalities.  Kristol replies:

But Leach doesn’t want to discuss that rationale — even though it’s not hard to find. Ten minutes of Googling will bring you to a fine article, “The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups,” from the April 2005 issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology. It’s by the respected journalist and diplomat Husain Haqqani, who, as it happens, is now Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, Haqqani explains, is a jihadi group of Wahhabi persuasion, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services.” He notes that “Lashkar-e-Taiba has adopted a maximalist agenda for global jihad.” Indeed, the political arm of the group has conveniently published a pamphlet, “Why Are We Waging Jihad?,” that lays out all kinds of reasons why the United States, Israel and India are “existential enemies of Islam.”

And...

But if terror groups are to be defeated, it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India (and the United States), governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan, the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit. This can happen if those nations’ citizens decide they don’t want their own country to be dishonored by allegiances with terror groups. Otherwise, other nations may have to act.

Kristol lays it out directly, and clearly.  His argument is in the real world not the academic world.  It will not get him dinner invitations in Cambridge or Princeton, but he is correct.  The last thing we need now is for the punditocracy and the academics to overintellectualize what has happened, and we fear that this is what might occur, just as it occurred in the universities after 9-11.  Former Congressman Leach has been captured by the academic mentality.  That mentality, as it is currently expressed, will not serve the nation well.

December 1, 2008.