Murder, He Wrote. posted by Richard Seymour

Christopher Hitchens , in a tone that has become characteristic of him, takes time out of his busy drinking schedule to spew venom at his old haunt, The Nation - part of his ongoing project of prosecuting old comrades. I am not particularly interested in decoding his fraudulent slurs on the Left (or "what is left of the left"). Naomi Klein and Tariq Ali can defend themselves. I just want to make three points.

1) Hitchens discusses something called "jihad" as if it were a unitary global phenomenon, unfailingly "fascist" and invariably "murderous". No such thing exists, of course. There are groups and goals, and sometimes those two combine to produce the most obscene outrages (as in Beslan). Other times they produce resistance and revolt of a relatively restrained manner (as in Najaf - no civilians were targeted by al-Sadr's Mahdi Army as far as I know). In talking like this, Hitchens gives the impression that he doesn't know better - a brief scan of his CV suggests that he does. Support for insurrections involving sometimes bloody actions has not been absent from his political career (although, to avoid a fatal misunderstanding, I am not suggesting that he or anyone else should therefore endorse the actions in Beslan. Thus ends my detour into the obvious).

2) Hitchens appreciatively cites an article by Abdulrahman al-Rashed which expostulates - "The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!" Now, this cannot be described as "euphemistic". Hitchens is quite right about that. But it is the most abject pile of crap to have been written on this topic. That sort of hysterical, puffed-up twaddle does not become respectable or accurate simply because the general manager of Al Arabiya television says it.

3) His opening statement:

Not to exaggerate or generalize or anything, but in the past week or so it seems to have become very slightly less OK to speak of jihad as an understandable reaction to underlying Muslim grievances. The murder of innocents in a Russian school may have been secondarily the result of a panic or a bungle by Vladimir Putin's "special forces," but nobody is claiming that the real responsibility lies anywhere but on the shoulders of the Muslim fanatics. And the French state's policy of defending secularism in its schools may have been clumsily and even "insensitively" applied, but nobody says that the kidnapping and threatened murder of two French reporters is thereby justified. As for the slaughter of the Nepalese workers in Iraq … you simply have to see the video and hear the Quranic incantations in the voice-over. (I use the words "murder" and "slaughter" by the way, and shall continue to do so, as I hope you will, too. How the New York Times can employ the term "execution" for these atrocities is beyond me.)

Quickly, two points. First, I am glad to see that Christopher suffers from no verbal constipation when describing the actions of groups who use terrorism, and I hope he will find the time to release anything he was retaining on the matter of bombing Iraqis in their homes, in their streets and in their market-places. Second, the French state's policy on the hijab and the skull-cap is not a matter of secularism. Freedom to practise one's religion is a sina qua none of liberalism and secularism - the policy of banning religious gear in school is a sop to common prejudice and nothing more than that. More pressing, however, is that first sentence.

I come across the word 'understandable' quite a lot, and usually it connotes something redemptive. For instance, if one said that the behaviour of a man who had been beaten up by his neighbour and then took a crow bar to his neighbour's windows was understandable, few would bat an eyelid. But if he had then set fire to the house in the dead of night thus killing the neighbour and his family, the word 'understandable' would seem out of place. Much rests on the elision between the literal meaning of the term 'understandable' and the implied meaning - between what it connotes and what it denotes.

So, if the objection is that "jihad" is not an acceptable response to oppression, my answer is that it depends on what you mean by "jihad". Fighting American troops is one thing; killing children another. If, however, the true objection is that one should not, say, attribute partial responsibility for the attacks in Beslan to the Russian state because of its disgraceful policies in Chechnya, my response is: tough shit. I said it, I meant it.

No volume of hysterical nonsense from the volumous and voluble Christopher Hitchens can detract from what is unmitigated fact. This attack was a moral disgrace and a disaster for Chechnya. But it was also a reaction to oppression (as well as other things), and one can - oh dear - "understand" it, without endorsing it or attenuating the force of outrage about it, in that context. These stupid attempts at enforcing a denkverbot by manipulating one's natural sense of decency and justice should be sneered at, dismissed, laughed out of court.

Case closed.