September11/Salman Rushdie

Let's get back to life
Saturday October 6, 2001

The Guardian

In January 2000 I wrote that "the defining struggle of the new age would be between terrorism and security," and fretted that to live by the security experts' worst-case scenarios might be to surrender too many of our liberties to the invisible shadow-warriors of the secret world. Democracy requires visibility, I argued, and in the struggle between security and freedom we must always err on the side of freedom. On Tuesday September 11, however, the worst-case scenario came true. They broke our city. I'm among the newest of New Yorkers, but even people who have never set foot in Manhattan have felt its wounds deeply, because New York is the beating heart of the visible world - tough-talking, spirit-dazzling, Walt Whitman's "city of orgies, walks and joys," his "proud and passionate city - mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!"

To this bright capital of the visible, the forces of invisibility have dealt a dreadful blow. No need to say how dreadful; we all saw it, are all changed by it. Now we must ensure that the wound is not mortal, that the world of what is seen triumphs over what is cloaked, what is perceptible only through the effects of its awful deeds.

In making free societies safe - safer - from terrorism, our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised. But in return for freedom's partial erosion, we have a right to expect that our cities, water, planes and children really will be better protected than they have been. The west's response to the September 11 attacks will be judged in large measure by whether people begin to feel safe once again in their homes, their workplaces, their daily lives. This is the confidence we have lost, and must regain.

Next: the question of the counter-attack. Yes, we must send our shadow-warriors against theirs, and hope that ours prevail. But this secret war alone cannot bring victory. We will also need a public, political and diplomatic offensive whose aim must be the early resolution of some of the world's thorniest problems: above all the battle between Israel and the Palestinian people for space, dignity, recognition and survival.

Better judgment will be required on all sides in future. No more Sudanese aspirin factories to be bombed, please. And now that wise American heads appear to have understood that it would be wrong to bomb the impoverished, oppressed Afghan people in retaliation for their tyrannous masters' misdeeds, they might apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq. It's time to stop making enemies and start making friends.

To say this is in no way to join in the savaging of America by sections of the left that has been among the most unpleasant consequences of the terrorists' attacks on the United States. "The problem with Americans is..." "What America needs to understand..." There has been a lot of sanctimonious moral relativism around lately, usually prefaced by such phrases as these. A country which has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told, heartlessly, that it is to blame for its own citizens' deaths. ("Did we deserve this, sir?" a bewildered worker at "Ground Zero" asked a visiting British journalist recently. I find the grave courtesy of that "sir" quite astonishing.)

Let's be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was mass murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming US government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions.

Furthermore, terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate complaints by illegitimate means. The terrorist wraps himself in the world's grievances to cloak his true motives. Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better world was part of it. The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. These are tyrants, not Muslims.

(Islam is tough on suicides, who are doomed to repeat their deaths through all eternity. However, there needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains. If the west needs to understand its Unabombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its Bin Ladens.)

United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for, but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no-brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide- bodied aircraft into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the above list - yes, even the short skirts and dancing - are worth dying for?

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war, but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorised. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

Excellent article in "The Age" by Salman Rushdie -- http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000127/A47638-2000Jan26.html -- written in January 2000 (after the millenium celebrations and accompanying security concerns), but very apropos the aftermath of 01.09.11 events. If anyone knows what living under shadow of fatwa really means, and can explain how to do it with courage and grace, it is Salman Rushdie. Highly recommended. |/|/

A new battle begins
By SALMAN RUSHDIE

The Age, 27 January 2000

NOW that the party is over, I find myself thinking a great deal about the significance of the covert worldwide battle that took place on and around millennium night. Behind the images of a world lit up by pyrotechnics and united for one evanescent moment by gaiety and goodwill, the new dialectic of history was taking shape. We already knew that capitalism versus communism was no longer the name of the game. Now we saw, as clearly as the fireworks in the sky, that the defining struggle of the new age would be between terrorism and security.

I was one of the 10,000 gathered in London's Millennium Dome, that same dome off which James Bond bounces while fighting the forces of terror in the latest 007 film. The audience knew - after hours of waiting to be frisked on a cold railway platform - that a mammoth security operation had been launched to safeguard the showpiece event. What few of us knew was that a bomb threat had been made, using an IRA codeword, and that the dome came close to being evacuated.

For days, it seemed, the world had been hearing about nothing but terrorism. The United States had spoken the current bogyman's name - Osama bin Laden - to frighten us children. There were arrests: a man with bomb-making equipment found at the US-Canada border; a group in Jordan. Seattle cancelled its celebrations. One of the leaders of the Aum Shinrikyo cult was released, and Japan feared a terrorist atrocity. President Chandrika Ranatunga of Sri Lanka made history by surviving a suicide bomber's attack. There were bomb hoaxes at a British racetrack and at a soccer stadium. The FBI feared the worst from apocalyptic groups and lunatic-fringers.

But in the end - apart from poor George Harrison, wounded by one such lunatic - we got off relatively lightly. Almost all of us, that is, because there was also the Indian Airlines hijack. The events at Kandahar airport have left no fewer than four governments looking pretty bad. The Nepalese authorities, proving that Katmandu deserves its terrorist-friendly reputation, allowed men with guns and grenades to board a plane. The Indian Government's capitulation to the terrorists was the first such surrender to hijackers that I can remember for years; what will they do when the next aircraft is seized? And, finally, terrorists trained in Taliban camps and holding Pakistani passports disappeared from Afghanistan into, very probably, Pakistan. Thus was a largely defunct form of terrorism given a new lease of life.

Some knees jerked predictably. An Islamic journalist, writing in a liberal British paper of the sort that would certainly be banned in Islamic countries, complained that the "terrorist" tag demonises members of freedom movements struggling against violent, oppressive regimes. But terrorism isn't justice-seeking in disguise. In Sri Lanka it's the voices of peace and conciliation who are getting murdered. And the brutal Indian Airlines hijackers cannot be said to speak for the people of peaceable, vandalised Kashmir.

The security establishment rightly regards the non-explosive millennium as a triumph. Security is, after all, the art of making sure certain things don't happen: a thankless task, because when they don't happen there will always be someone to say the security was excessive and unnecessary.

In London on New Year's Eve, the security operation was on a scale that would have made citizens of many less fortunate nations convinced that a coup was in progress. But none of us thought so for an instant. This was security in the service of merrymaking, and that is something we can be impressed by, and grateful for.

And yet there is cause for concern. If the ideology of terrorism is that terror works, then the ideology of security is based on assuming the truth of the "worst-case scenario". The trouble is that worst-case scenarism, if I may call it that, plays right into the hands of the fear-creators. The worst-case scenario of crossing the road, after all, is that you'll be hit by a truck and killed. Yet we all do cross roads every day, and could hardly function if we did not. To live by the worst-case scenario is to grant the terrorists their victory without a shot having been fired.

It is also alarming to think that the real battles of the new century may be fought in secret, between adversaries accountable to few of us, one claiming to act on our behalf, the other hoping to scare us into submission.

Democracy requires openness and light. Must we really surrender our future into the hands of the shadow warriors? That most of the millennial threats turned out to be hoaxes only underlines the problem; nobody wants to run from imaginary enemies. But how, in the absence of information, are we, the public, to evaluate such threats? How can we prevent terrorists and their antagonists from setting the boundaries within which we live?

Security saved President Ranatunga, but many others died. The security at George Harrison's fortress home didn't stop the would-be assassin's knife; it was his wife's well-swung table lamp that saved him. In the past, security didn't save President Ronald Reagan or the Pope. Luck did that. So we need to understand that even maximum security guarantees nobody's safety.

The point is to decide - as the Queen decided on New Year's Eve - not to let fear rule our lives. To tell those bullies who would terrorise us that we aren't scared of them.

And to thank our secret protectors, but to remind them, too, that in a choice between security and liberty, it is liberty that must always come out on top.