Thus, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a recent Salon interview, these critics equate Ashcroft's attempts to hold secret trials of captured Taliban fighters with the atrocity of the terrorist attacks. Recently, in the Village Voice, Richard Goldstein wrote that progressives who are in favor of the war against terrorism ("neo-hawks" in Goldstein's newly minted locution -- catchy isn't it? -- a category apparently broad enough to contain Hitchens, Greil Marcus, Dan Savage and Ron Rosenbaum) fail to realize that the menace of an America that vows to track down the people who are determined to destroy us should be considered "as ominous as the threat posed by terrorists."

Really? Even assuming that the shrinking economy and the expanding cost of fighting al-Qaida eat away at funding for education, healthcare and the environment, and even if we make the mistake of thinking that attacking Iraq will protect U.S. citizens, how will an economically pinched, conservatively governed America really be "as ominous" a threat (and to whom?) as terrorists willing to die to perpetrate mass killings as big as or bigger than those of Sept. 11 -- or for that matter, a ongoing series of smaller attacks?

You see this inability to weigh distinctions on the left in those who compare the war in Afghanistan and the ongoing fight against al-Qaida to Vietnam or Reagan's incursions into Central America. Or, reaching further back, to the slaughter of the Native Americans. The message is that American culture -- Western culture as a whole -- is rotten. I say Taliban, they say Crusades. I say al-Qaida, they say the Inquisition.

The most insidious form of current antiwar rhetoric can be found in the arguments that begin along the lines of "Yes, Sept. 11 was a tragedy and a crime but ..." But what? How can there be any qualifier to the murder of nearly 3,000 of your fellow citizens? I understand that those words indicate a wish to be smart and not indiscriminately brutal in our response. But what is lacking is a sense of outrage, any acknowledgment of the ugly reality that being attacked demands a response and any understanding that we are still in danger (and maybe more so now than at any time since Sept. 11, with Osama bin Laden apparently still alive and al-Qaida reconstituting itself).

Goldstein and his ilk do not deny Hitchens' characterization of Islamic militants as fascists, or the danger we are now in. But he is living in a fantasy land if he thinks that terrorists are open to "a sound moral case for standing down." Anyone who thinks that brutalists operating from a medieval mindset can be persuaded by diplomacy is fooling himself. Some people understand only force. As Lee Harris argued in a stunning piece called "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology" in the August/September issue of "Policy Review," there is something pitifully beside the point in cautioning against dehumanizing people who have already dehumanized themselves. And they have dehumanized themselves, he argues, by making themselves figures in a fantasy of holy war.

Here it seems appropriate to quote Paul Fussell from his book "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War." Fussell writes, "It was a war and nothing else, and thus stupid and sadistic, a war, as Cyril Connelly said, 'of which we are all ashamed ... a war ... which lowers the standard of thinking and feeling ... which is as obsolete as drawing and quartering'; further, a war opposed to 'every reasonable conception of what life is for, every ambition of the mind or delight of the senses' ... It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning." Fussell fought in World War II and considers it justified and necessary. He doesn't ever say that it was ennobling. His is exactly the sort of honesty that seems beyond the comprehension of the current antiwar left.

And yet how can the left not be for this war? The goals of Islamic militancy, and the reality in many of the countries where shariah (Islamic law) rules, show a world that is the essence of everything the left should despise. In fact, it's everything the left does despise when the same values are touted, in much, much milder form, by the American Christian right.

In the current Village Voice, Thulani Davis has a piece about the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, who has been under a fatwa since 1994. Her crime? Protesting the persecution and torture of women in Bangladesh -- for example, a teenage Muslim girl killed after being lashed 101 times for having sex with a Hindu boy, a divorced woman stoned and her parents flayed after she remarried, a woman burned at the stake for adultery, the burning of schools that teach girls, medical care denied to pregnant women. Earlier this year the press reported that Saudi girls escaping from a school fire were sent back into the burning building by clerics because they were not properly covered. As a matter of everyday practice, women in Saudi Arabia have to keep covered in public, cannot drive, cannot practice any profession that brings them into contact with men.

And this is just the persecution of women. Add to it the persecution of homosexuals, and the oppression of a theocratic state that denies freedom of the press and of scientific inquiry (this in a culture with a rich heritage of scientific and mathematic discovery). In her (altogether too chipper) "Islam: A Short History," Karen Armstrong details how Islam envisions no secular social realm, that the Muslim idea of religion was inseparable from the idea of community. Bernard Lewis, an eminent scholar of Arab culture, notes that Islam contains nothing akin to the imperative in Matthew 22:21 "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things which are God's."

So how is it that, to much of the American left, a Christian fundamentalist who wants to get Darwin out of the schools is the devil incarnate, but a society in which the concept of the separation of church and state doesn't even exist is merely another culture that we must not judge? In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas D. Kristof dared to suggest that Saudi women who scorn the idea that they are repressed are wrong. The extraordinary letters he received chastised him for daring to "criticize behavior of others according to their cultural traditions." The most amazing of the lot said, "If every woman in America feels trapped in a body that she doesn't feel is good enough to be on display, are we really free?" It took me a minute to absorb what I was reading: a feminist defense, based on the theory of self-esteem, of a culture that persecutes women. This is the idiotic voice of someone who has left judgment and common sense behind. And it's the type of nonthinking that explains why Fallaci rails against "those supposed liberals who profane and desecrate the meaning of the word liberalism."

The thrill of "The Rage and the Pride" is that Fallaci is having none of it. "By God!" Fallaci writes (in her sometimes shakily self-translated English): "Don't you see that all these Osama Bin Ladens consider themselves authorized to kill you and your children because you drink alcohol, because you don't grow the long beard and refuse the chador or the burkah, because you go to the theater and to the movies, because you love music and sing a song, because you dance and watch television, because you wear the miniskirt or the shorts, because on the beach and by the swimming pool you sunbathe almost naked or naked, because you make love when you want with whom you want, or because you don't believe in God?"

Look at the smallness, the ordinariness of the things that Fallaci lists there. This is a concept of sinfulness that surpasses anything the Christian right has dared propose since the days of Calvinism. For all of her extremism, all of her bigotry, it is a threat of which Fallaci seems to have taken the full measure. And I confess to being stirred by the self-dramatization with which she places herself on the barricades. "What logic is there in respecting those who do not respect us? What dignity is there in defending their culture or supposed culture when they show contempt for ours?"

The two taboos that Fallaci goes after here are the taboo of one culture presuming to criticize another, and the deeper taboo of criticizing a religion.

The first seems to me ridiculously easy to dismiss. Does respecting another culture's traditions and customs mean excusing barbarism, like those who defend clitoridectomy on the basis that it is a cultural practice? Doesn't any culture, any person, any system of beliefs, first have to earn respect before it can be respected?

Recent Stories