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A call to "burn out" the Palestinians: more filth from the Wall Street Journal
By Joseph Kay
13 April 2002
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There are certain articles that find their way into the American media that deserve to
be noted simply for what they reveal about the character of the American ruling elite.
Something extremely rotten is festering in the summit of American society. More and
more a fascistic tendency is rearing its ugly head, particularly on the editorial pages
of the Wall Street Journal.
Such is the case with a commentary written by Reuel Marc Gerecht and published in
the Journal April 8, entitled “They live to die.” The essence of the article is fairly
simple: the suicide bombings carried out in Israel by Palestinians stem from an
incurable religious fanaticism with which it is impossible to negotiate. This
fanaticism
(Gerecht uses the Arabic term istishhad, or martyrdom) can only be “burned out” of
the Palestinians by “carnage,” that is, by war and mass killings. The article is a
political justification for an all-out assault on the Palestinian population—foreign
policy by means of expulsion and extermination. Change a few words and one has a
document strikingly reminiscent of Nazi propaganda.
Gerecht starts from the assumption that the fault for the current violence in the
Middle East lies entirely with the Palestinians. Israel’s actions are wholly justified
as
an appropriate response to suicide bombings. At one point he denounces the Bush
administration, and particularly the State Department (that is, Colin Powell), for even
admitting the obvious truth that “Israel’s military response to terrorism actually
provokes further terrorism.” The real cause for the current crisis in the Middle
East—the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian population by Israel and its backers
in Washington—is swept aside and ignored.
This paves the way for Gerecht to construct an explanation for the violence based on
religious and psychological proclivities of Muslim people. “Martyrdom— istishhad —is
an old and esteemed idea in Islam.” This martyrdom concept has created men who
have “eagerly slaughtered themselves” in the name of religion. This religious
sensibility must be taken into account, or else “American policy in the region will run
aground on secular illusions.”
The point of this line of reasoning is to create a civilizational antagonism between
the
Arab world and the “West” that can not be resolved by rational means. “The idea of
jihad against Israel has extraordinary appeal even to secularized Muslims, who can
feel the shame of Islam’s long slide from glory and superiority over the West as
acutely as any practicing Muslim.” This is a mode of thinking that has become more
and more popular within American intellectual and political circles, ever since Samuel
Huntington first set them out systematically in his book The Clash of Civilizations.
In this clash, the Palestinians are clearly considered a lesser race. They are
irrational, with a youth “not at all conversant with traditional ethics.” Gerecht
paints a
picture of a rational and modern West, in which he includes Israel, confronted with
opponents consumed by blind hatred. The Bush administration is therefore wrong “to
believe that there is some rational switch inside the Palestinian national movement,
which has now elevated holy-war kamikazes to iconic status, that if flipped would
make it a committed convert to the sober Western gradualism inherent in the Tenet,
Mitchell, and Oslo peace plans.” On the contrary, the “engagement” policy of Powell
and the like “is premised on a political culture among the Palestinians which simply
does not exist.”
So what should be the response of “civilization” to this assault? Here Gerecht’s
barbarism comes out most clearly. “An Iranian parallel is illuminating,” he writes. “By
late 1987, the carnage of the Iran-Iraq war had burned out the martyrdom syndrome
among young Iranian men.... It is only war—not the well-intended but meaningless
Tenet and Mitchell plans—that can now burn out istishhad among the Palestinians....
If the administration tries to ‘negotiate’ with this syndrome, it will only fuel the
fire and
make America, not just Israel, look weak.”
The Iran-Iraq war was instigated by the US, which encouraged Saddam Hussein to
invade Iran after the revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The US supplied
military intelligence to Iraq, and later provided weapons to Iran, in an effort to
extend
the mutual slaughter of Iraqi and Iranian youth for as long as possible. At the most
critical moments in the war, the Iraqi military used chemical weapons to beat back
suicidal assaults by Iranian volunteers, mainly youth.
The right-wing propagandist thus has it both ways: the same event, the mass killing
of Iranian youth, is praised as a model for the treatment of the Palestinians, and
cited
as a crime of Saddam Hussein’s which justifies the US policy of targeting Iraq for
military assault because of the alleged danger of “weapons of mass destruction.”
Gerecht is an establishment figure, a frequent contributor to the New York Times,
Foreign Affairs and other publications, in addition to the Wall Street Journal. He has
been featured on NPR, CNN and other radio and television stations as an expert on
Middle Eastern affairs. Currently, he is a fellow at the prominent right-wing American
Enterprise Institute (AEI) and for over a decade he served as a Middle Eastern
specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2001 he became the director of the
Middle Eastern Initiative at the Project for a New American Century, a right-wing
cabal that includes Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick
Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Bush’s new special envoy to
Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Over the past decade he has consistently voiced the orientation of this extremely
militaristic and reckless section of the American ruling class. He was one of the early
champions of the Northern Alliance, the tribal grouping that the American
government relied on for much of its campaign in Afghanistan. He has called for the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein as well as the Islamic fundamentalist government in
Iran. In 1998, he advocated a policy of assassination, writing, “In the war against
terrorism—against those who are killing Americans—the U.S. must be willing to kill
terrorist chiefs.”
The Bush administration has wholly embraced these policies. More and more, the
United States seeks to dominate the world by direct military control, by brute force,
by new and more barbaric forms of colonialism. Gerecht and his co-thinkers are
developing the political ideology, steeped in racism and chauvinism, to justify such
methods.
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