Solomonia Archive: Sleep and appease and all will be well

Saturday, September 17, 2005

The Boston Globe, unsurprisingly, was not pleased with Governor Romney's statement concerning Mosques and visiting students, but what really gave me a laugh was this bit:

...Few students come from those few nations clearly linked to terrorists. Students from friendly nations such as Saudi Arabia, with influential extremist elements, need to be treated as potential allies and intelligence sources unless they show themselves to be adversaries...

And how, pray, will they "show themselves" as such? By standing in the middle of Kenmore Square and announcing they're here to film Green Line trains and monitor security opperations for a follow-on strike? Hellooooo...Globe Editors, is anybody home?

That's the trouble with certain elements of the left that wear civil liberties like a fashion statement -- their reality interface doesn't function on all cylinders.

Fear not, brave citizens, the Globe brings us a Harvard scholar to explain that it's really past time to sit down and make common-cause with al Qaeda -- after all, they're just against "the occupation" among a few other very easily granted requests -- unmentioned in the piece is that one of the occupations that AQ is against is the Spanish occupation of Andalusia, but who's counting?

Proof in print of Orwell's statement that “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them.”

Time to talk to Al Qaeda? by Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou

...How can the war be brought to an end? Neither side can defeat the other. The United States will not be able to overpower a diffuse, ever-mutating, organized international militancy movement, whose struggle enjoys the rear-guard sympathy of large numbers of Muslims. Likewise, Al Qaeda can score tactical victories on the United States and its allies, but it cannot rout the world's sole superpower.

Though dismissed widely, the best strategy for the United States may well be to acknowledge and address the collective reasons in which Al Qaeda anchors its acts of force...

Mr. Mohamedou is "associate director of the Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research." I suppose when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Update: More on Mohamedou's piece at the The Weekly Standard (linked at Campus Watch):

...it turns out that Dr. Mohamedou's Globe op-ed is merely the condensed version of "Non-Linearity of Engagement," a 30-page treatise he produced, on Harvard's dime, back in July. And "numbskull" doesn't begin to describe the thing. It seems that Harvard University's associate director of "humanitarian policy" and whatnot believes the United States should belatedly "acknowledg[e] the logic in which terrorism is used as a method of warfare, according to a principle of indiscrimination whose rationale is negation of the notion of innocence of the civilian population, and imputation of collective responsibility." As Osama bin Laden himself has observed, American foreign policy is effected by politicians whom Americans have freely elected. And in that respect, concludes our man in Cambridge, al Qaeda clearly claims "a valid jus ad bellum case" against any and every one of us--man, woman, or child.

In the end, Mohamedou says, "these 'terrorists' are de facto combatants, and justice . . . is what they are after." Which is the true source of bin Laden's strength. And the reason that "no leading Muslim intellectual or scholar has denounced him."

Not at Harvard, anyhow.

Posted by Solomon at 11:36 AM on Saturday, Sep 17, 2005 | Comments (3)
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3 Comments

#1 will spotts | September 17, 2005 1:06 PM

"Neither side can defeat the other."

That's not strictly speaking true. Just from a strategic standpoint. We in the US lack the will to do so.

#2 kelley | September 17, 2005 8:10 PM

The Globe is really a full-fledged member of the Fifth Column. That was an apalling piece of propaganda (Mohamedou's op-ed). I wonder if the Globe published op-eds during WWII praising the Germans and the Japanese for being so "industrious and comitted." Would they have published op-eds suggesting that the Nazis had "legitimate grievances"?

Can private citizens bring charges against a newspaper for treason and sedition in wartime? I would dearly love to do that!

#3 Karridine | September 19, 2005 11:04 AM

"We are not killing you to get something from you. We are killing you TO EXTERMINATE YOU." al-Qaeda public policy declaration, circa 2002

Globe? Make peace with THAT!

I choose to take them at their word!