The Liberals' Collapse

Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman (Norton, 216 pp., $21)

The resurgence of Muslim political extremism, which reached its apogee on 9/11, has shocked our sense of safety and invulnerability and led to a fundamental reappraisal of the post-Cold War world. But while much of the political spectrum in the democratic West has forthrightly addressed the threats posed by terrorism emanating from the Middle East, on the political left the phenomenon represented by 9/11 has called forth a far different reaction: The Left has been busy placing blame for the terrorist upsurge on the alleged predations of the U.S. For Noam Chomsky, whose pamphlet on 9/11 is a bestseller on U.S. campuses, it is the greed and power of American corporations that is at the root of the terrorist attacks. In Chomsky's view capitalism is responsible for drenching the world in blood and misery. Missing on the left is a revulsion at and condemnation of the anti-democratic ideologies of those who wage jihad.

To be sure, European Left-liberal voices like Poland's Adam Michnik and Hungarian novelist and political critic Gyorgy Konrad have rejected such arrant nonsense and even strongly supported the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein. And in the U.S. a handful of eloquent voices on the left have dared challenge the post-9/11 leftist consensus, most notably Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, author of this book, Terror and Liberalism.

It is to the Left, both in the U.S. and worldwide, that Berman addresses his volume. He challenges the Left's "root causes" explanation of terrorism from the Middle East and argues that it must instead be understood as an ideological, totalitarian threat that resembles Fascism and Communism in significant ways.

As Berman convincingly demonstrates in his brief but rich intellectual history, the international Left attempts to explain the terrorism and brutality of revolutionary Islamism and totalitarian Ba'athism by resorting to a standard arsenal of socioeconomic arguments. According to Berman, for the rationalist mind of the leftist, it is incomprehensible that "millions of people have gone out of their minds and subscribed to a pathological political tendency"; surely, leftists argue, there must be some "unspeakable social condition that has provoked the murderous impulse." The more unspeakable the act, the more unspeakable the social factors motivating the actor.

Berman convincingly demolishes the socioeconomic explanations for jihadist terrorism; he also demonstrates that the terror isn't payback for alleged cruelties perpetrated by the U.S. and the West against Arab and Islamic populations (as many on the left argue). Indeed, Berman reminds us, the record of the U.S. and the West is hardly anti-Muslim. He recalls the broad array of military actions taken over the past decade in behalf of victims of violence and oppression in Muslim Bosnia, Albania, and Afghanistan, and in Arab Somalia. To this list one can now add Iraq. In each setting, the West's intervention has served to defend Muslims and protect the exercise of the Islamic faith. The recent scenes of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiites, openly expressing their faith on a pilgrimage to Karbala, only underscore this fact.

Berman does justice to the complexity of the origin of Mideast-based violence. He observes in his lucid discussion of Palestinian suicide bombers: "It was easy to see how young suicide terrorists had ended up agreeing to kill themselves [with innocent others]. Enormous institutions elsewhere in the Arab world, the Saudi princelings, the Iraqi and Syrian Ba'ath, some of the great institutions of Arab journalism, told them to do so, and in the Saudi and Iraqi cases, even paid [their families]." The author devotes a large portion of this small volume to the ideas of the seminal Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb, the theoretical progenitor of jihadist revolutionary Islam and the ideological father of Osama bin Laden and the suicide-bomber terrorists that menace Israel. As Berman explains, Qutb -- whom he regards as a compelling and complex writer -- posited that "a proper understanding of the Koran can be achieved only in an atmosphere of serious struggle, and only by someone who is engaged in a ferocious campaign for Islam." The ferocity that Qutb advocated derives from a worldview shaped in Egypt in the 1950s, but the same worldview is easily applied by fanatical revolutionaries to the new millennium. For them, as for Qutb, the world of Islam -- or at least their minority version of Islam -- is under siege and must be defended at all costs and by all means.

Prefiguring Osama bin Laden's jihad against "Jews and Crusaders," Qutb warned some 50 years ago that "world Zionism and the crusading Churches, as well as world Communism, are conducting a fight against Islam and the Muslim community." Conjuring up an enemy and an all- encompassing threat was a characteristic ploy of 20th-century totalitarian demagogues. Capitalism, the cosmopolitans, the Jews, and imperialists were invoked as enemies by the Nazis and Communists of Europe and the Third World; it is hardly surprising that Muslim totalitarians would appropriate them in our age.