Western Resistance

Labeling their victims -- calling them "infidels," the Islamist term for non-Muslims or Muslims who do not share their hatred; "bacilli," a Nazi term for Jews; or "bourgeois reactionaries," a Communist term for any who opposed their violent revolution -- is but one way in which some human beings strip others of their protected status as noncombatants or, even more radically, of their very humanness. Such rhetoric is endemic to terror that knows no limit and traffics in strategies of exculpation and denial. Islamist fanatics tell themselves that the infidel is a lower order of being and a menace, and they are doing a good deed by eliminating a threat to the purity of their faith and all the faithful. -- Chapter One, What Happened On September 11? From Just War Against Terror by Jean Bethke Elshtain.

This is not a new book, it was published in 2003. Just War Against Terror is not an attempt to analyze in depth the psychology behind Islamic fanaticism, rather, Elshtain first explained in brief the mentality of the Islamists and then in length what Western responses should be. She made it clear from the Introduction that the West is "…to defend who we are and what we, at our best, represent." Elshtain starts with the concept of a just war, jus ad bellum, and lead into the question whether an armed response to terrorism can be considered "just" under jus ad bellum. In doing so, it was inevitable that Elshtain would meet the arguments of Islamic fanatics, Muslim apologists and self-loathing Westerners, especially the Western intellectuals. One particularly odious analogy cited by Elshtain was from the Princeton theologian Mark Taylor, who associated the World Trade Center towers, a financial district, with the temple of ancient Jerusalem where the Jewish moneychangers have made the temple their place of business, and Osama bin Laden with Jesus as the latter did struck out against the moneychangers.

Elshtain pointed out a fact known by Muslims but never addressed in popular media by Islamic apologists is that Islam's prophet, Muhammad, was a war leader many times over in his life. It is the popular media arena that the average Westerner is defeated, and defeated by refusing to make moral judgements not only of what we are but also of we are not. Muhammad was a military general, Jesus was not.

The book is more of a rebuttal to the many anti-West and anti-US choruses from the Islamic world and from within the West than it is intellectually vigorous in the manner of classroom dialectics about war and justice. Nevertheless, Elshtain does forces the reader to reexamine his or her own opinions about the many issues related to Islam, Muslims, religious fanaticism and the responses from the West when we are threatened and attacked. Highly recommended.