[lit-ideas] Whose al-Qaida problem?

  • From: "M.A. Camp" <macampesq@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2005 15:22:51 -0500

Whose al-Qaida problem?
Open Democracy 
^<http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-terrorism/left_crisis_2892.jsp#>|
10/04/05 | Sasha Abramsky

Excerpt:
Much of the lefts opposition to the Iraq war and the Bush administrations
anti-terror campaigns voiced by figures like Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, George
Galloway, Naomi Klein, and John Pilger has blinded it to the need to engage
with real problems and threats, says Sasha Abramsky.

Yet reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed left in the London
papers in the aftermath of the bombings, I was struck by how ossified many
of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the cold war have
lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing
little if anything in common with that twilight conflict. While on the one
hand I agreed with their well-reasoned arguments pointing to a certain
degree of western culpability for spawning groups like al-Qaida, on the
other hand I was saddened by how utterly incapable were those same arguments
of generating responses to the fanaticism of our time.

British journalists Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and Tariq Ali, along with
British MP George Galloway, and, on the other side of the Atlantic,
commentators such as Naomi Klein have all essentially blamed Britain and the
United States for bringing the attacks upon themselves. While being careful
to denounce the bombers and their agenda, these advocates uttered variations
on the same theme: get out of Iraq, bring home the troops from all points
east, curtail support for Israel, develop a more sensible, non-oil-based
energy policy, and our troubles would dissipate in the wind.
--
Cheers,
M.A. Camp, Esq.

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