Useful Idiots

The success of the global Islamisist Jihad only partially reflects its terrorists and suicide bombers. They are aided by some reluctant seriously to debate and address the issues, and legions of apologists who--though they claim not to side with violent extremism--make Jihad seem almost acceptable. The latter sort have been especially prevalent in the current debate about the definition and uses of torture. Guardian and BBC journalist Simon Jenkins is one:

The massacres in New York, Bali, London, Madrid and Mumbai were horrible but politically insignificant. They lacked even the IRA's policy-changing programme. They were a howl of rage from a deranged fanaticism, threatening lives and property but not the security of any state. They are best treated as accidents of globalisation.

This justifies Jihad while labeling any armed response as mere jingoism. I agree with Norm Geras:

Objectify and minimize: terror to be treated as an 'accident' of globalization, as mere rage and derangement. He could equally treat torture as an accident of the war on terror or, by tracing out causal continuities, as itself an accident of globalization; he could see it as rage and derangement. But Jenkins wouldn't. He wouldn't dream of writing of the use of torture by Western governments in such terms, and rightly not.

For a section of the Western commentariat, real threats, carrying the weight of moral responsibility, only ever come from (loosely speaking) 'us'. Those attacking 'us', on the other hand, can be objectified and minimized. New York, Bali, London, Madrid and Mumbai -- Jenkins himself begins a list of infamy that could be extended -- but 'politically insignificant'. The lives taken, the bodies broken, the families bereaved -- 'politically insignificant'. So you say. It is good that not all the friends of democracy think so.

BTW, Democrat lawyer/journalist Stuart Taylor is one of better sort of friends of democracy, and his current National Journal column is a useful antidote to the view of the war from Jenkins' ear (historical pun).