We Need to Think Clearly about Islamism

Henry Srebrnik, Canadian Jewish News

Award-winning novelist and journalist Mark Helprin, a past recipient of the National Jewish Book Award in the United States, published a powerful article, “Three Years On,” in the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 10, marking the third anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.

“We proceed as if we are fighting disparate criminals united by coincidence,” Helprin wrote, “rather than the vanguard of militant Islam, united by ideology, sentiment, doctrine and practice, its partisans drawn from Morocco to the Philippines, Chechnya to the Sudan, a vast swath of the earth that, in regard to the elemental beliefs that fuel jihad, is as homogeneous as Denmark.”

In his lengthy and thought-provoking piece in the September 2004 issue of Commentary, titled “World War IV,” Norman Podhoretz, Commentary’s former and longtime editor, expresses a related message well: “We are up against a truly malignant force in radical Islamism and the states breeding, sheltering or financing its terrorist armory.” Podhoretz provides a detailed account of terrorism, particularly in the Middle East, that in fact goes back to the 1970s.

Hardly a day now passes without a suicide bombing, a hostage beheading or the destruction of an airliner, somewhere in the world. I haven’t kept count, but the sum total of people who have been killed by terrorists around the world, on and since Sept. 11, 2001, must by now number in the many thousands.

Prior to 9/11, there were, on average, 250 terrorist incidents annually around the globe, which killed a total of 500 people. Since then, that number of dead has been exceeded in just a handful of attacks, and each year these attacks have become more frequent and larger in scale. October will see the second anniversary of the Bali bombing in Indonesia that claimed 202 victims. Next March, it will be a year since 191 died in Madrid. And those are just two of the many incidents of mass murder. The hundreds recently slain in Beslan, Russia, have now been added to the list.

And I have not even mentioned the numerous suicide bombers that have targeted Israel and killed more than 1,000 Israelis since the current intifadah began in September 2000. The number of Israeli fatalities in the current conflict with the Palestinians has now exceeded all but those in the 1948-49 War of Independence and the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

But as we know, there are none so blind as those who would not see, though the evidence literally surrounds them. Such wilful disregard of what stares them in the face, day after day, is an intellectual malady, usually contracted in university courses taught by the politically correct, and it particularly affects those on the left.

They will come up with any convoluted line of reasoning to explain away the worldwide outbreak of Islamist-orchestrated terrorism: American imperialism, Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands (or sometimes even the Jewish state’s very existence), globalization, Third World poverty, the greed of oil companies, failed states, western “Orientalism” and racism, reaction to Christian fundamentalism and a host of other “root causes.” Everything but the militant religio-fascist creed we have come to call Islamism.

The main purpose of a liberal arts education, it sometimes seems, is to ignore the principle we term Occam’s Razor. William of Occam (1284-1347) was an English philosopher whose work on logic and scientific inquiry played a major role in the transition from medieval to modern thought. He based scientific knowledge on experience and self-evident truths, and on logical propositions resulting from those two sources.

Occam stressed that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. A problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms and the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one that should be selected.

But for our learned intellectuals, trained in obfuscation and even mendacity, this would constitute being “simplistic,” perhaps even “prejudiced,” and therefore deemed unacceptable. Many professors pride themselves in the use of obscure language and technical terms that appear to enhance their prestige as “deep thinkers.” Much of this is nothing but mystification.

It is of course true that some of the other issues they raise do play a role in fostering terrorism. Those who place the main blame on Islamism are not reductionists who fail to acknowledge other problems, but they at least know who the main culprits are.

Is it a wonder that politicians and writers from George Orwell to Preston Manning have lauded “the common sense of the common people” as opposed to the theoretical pretensions of left-wing academics?