The Weekend's 9/11 Horror-Fest, Bush Will Do Osama bin Laden's Work
for Him
This repetitious publicity glorifies terrorism as a weapon of war,
scaring us far more than the original explosions did
by Simon Jenkins
Turn on the radio this week and a ghoulish voice from the bowels of
the former World Trade Center seeks to curdle your blood and chill your
bones. It is yet another BBC trailer evoking the horror of the twin towers
and the monster of evil, Osama bin Laden. The corporation is desperate to
outdo other media outlets in their commemorations of the fifth anniversary
of 9/11. They include movies by Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass, and
American and British 9/11 specials from stars such as Harvey Keitel and
Kevin Costner called The Millionaire Widows, The Miracle of Staircase B, On
Native Soil and numerous variants on twin towers. There are comic strips and
videos and where-was-I-then memoirs. The weekend is to be wall-to-wall 9/11.
Not glorifying terrorism? You must be joking.
The favorite line from the war on terror's military-industrial complex
is that in 2001 Osama bin Laden "changed the rules of the game". (Forgotten
is that he attacked the same target in 1993, his only error being one of
civil engineering.) George Bush repeated the change thesis again on
Wednesday in confirming his secret interrogation camps and excusing the
five-year delay in bringing al-Qaida suspects to justice. Tony Blair cites
the change with every curb on civil liberty. The "new" terrorism requires a
new approach to public safety. The security industry cries amen.
Most of this is self-serving drivel. Nervous rulers have colluded with
soldiers and businessmen throughout history to cite some ethnic or religious
menace when needing more power and higher taxes. Political violence has
become more promiscuous with suicide bombing and a consequent rise in kill
rate per incident, but - as Matthew Carr shows in his book on terror,
Unknown Soldiers - the change is one of degree.
Forty years after Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite, Russian
terrorists tried to pack a plane with the stuff and fly it into the tsar's
palace. In 1883 Chicago-financed Fenians exploded bombs on the London
underground, leading the Times to wonder if the tube could ever be safe.
There has been little change in the preferred weapon of terror, the
explosive device, or in the psychopathology of the bomber. The causes remain
the same: separatism, and religious nationalism dressed up as holy war.
What has changed, grotesquely, is the aftershock. Terrorism is 10%
bang and 90% an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill
and kneejerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group
treated as collectively responsible. This response has become 24-hour,
seven-day-a-week amplification by the new politico-media complex, especially
shrill where the dead are white people. It is this that puts global terror
into the bang. While we take ever more extravagant steps to ward off the
bangs, we do the opposite with the terrorist aftershock. We turn up its
volume. We seem to wallow in fear.
Were I to take my life in my hands this weekend and visit Osama bin
Laden's hideout in Wherever-istan, the interview would go something like
this. I would ask how things have been for him since 9/11. His reply would
be that he had worried at first that America would capitalise on the global
revulsion, even among Muslims, and isolate him as a lone fanatic. He was
already an "unwelcome guest" among the Afghans, and the Tajiks were out to
kill him for the murder of their beloved leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud (which
they may yet do). A little western cunning and he would have been in big
trouble.
In the event Bin Laden need not have worried. He would agree, as did
the CIA's al-Qaida analyst in Peter Taylor's recent documentary, that the
Americans have done his job for him. They panicked. They drove the Taliban
back into the mountains, restoring the latter's credibility in the Arab
street and turning al-Qaida into heroes. They persecuted Muslims across
America. They occupied Iraq and declared Iran a sworn enemy. They backed an
Israeli war against Lebanon's Shias. Soon every tinpot Muslim malcontent was
citing al-Qaida as his inspiration. Bin Laden's tiny organisation, which
might have been starved of funds and friends in 2001, had become a worldwide
jihadist phenomenon.
I would ask Bin Laden whether he had something special up his sleeve
for the fifth anniversary. Why waste money, he would reply. The western
media were obligingly re-enacting the destruction and the screaming, turning
the base metal of violence into the gold of terror. They would replay the
tapes and rerun the footage ad nauseam, and thus remind the world of his
awesome power. Americans are more afraid of jihadists this year than last.
In a Transatlantic Trends survey, the number of them describing
international terrorism as an "extremely important threat" went up from 72%
to 79%. As for European support for America's world leadership, that has
plummeted from 64% in 2002 to 37% this year.
Bin Laden might boast that he had achieved terrorism's equivalent of
an atomic chain reaction: a self-regenerating cycle of outrage and
foreign-policy overkill, aided by anniversary journalism and fuelled by the
grim scenarios of security lobbyists. He now had only to drop an occasional
CD into the offices of al-Jazeera, and Washington and London quaked with
fear. The authorities could be reduced to million-dollar hysterics by a
phial of nail varnish, a copy of the Qur'an, or a dark-skinned person
displaying a watch and a mobile phone.
A feature of democracy is freedom of information and speech. News of
violence cannot be concealed since concealment fuels the climate of fear.
The state should not censor news of terrorist incidents. As Milan Kundera
asserted, "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting". But there are ways of not forgetting. A feature of
democracy is also to reject arrest without trial, reject the use of torture,
and reject retaliatory violence against people or groups. Democracy can
apparently sacrifice these legal principles to guard against the 10% of
terrorism that is bang. Why not restrain the publicity that fuels the other
90%, the aftershock? The boundary between news and scaremongering may be
hard to define. But so is any boundary between liberty and security. What is
so sacred about publicising terror as against habeas corpus?
Conceding the kudos of state censorship to jihadists should be as
unthinkable as conceding arrest without trial. That does not excuse the
politico-media complex from any responsibility for caution, a sense of
proportion and self-restraint. The gruelling re-enactment of the London
bombings in July and this weekend's 9/11 horror-fest are not news. They
exploit grief and horror, and in doing so give gratuitous publicity to Bin
Laden and al-Qaida. Those personally affected by these outrages may have
their own private memorials. But to hallow the events with repetitious
publicity turns a squalid crime into a constantly revitalized political act.
It grants the jihadists what they most crave, warrior status. It more than
validates terrorism as a weapon of war, it glorifies it.
The best way to commemorate 9/11 is with silence. Instead, Bin Laden
must be laughing.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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*Bill Clinton, "did a good job of stopping a second attack on the World
Trade
Center when he was president." -Chris Matthews
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