September 11 and the end of ideology. (Culture).(intellectuals comment on War on Terrorism)

THE VIETNAM WAR was known as the first television war. The current war against terrorism deserves to be recognised as the first internet war. here is so much material available on the internet--news, information, comment, opinion--that you could literally spend twenty-four hours a day on the events of September 11 and their aftermath, and never read the same thing twice.

Anyone who has been seriously foraging through all this will have found that, among English-speaking countries, the worst single response to the terrorist attacks was made by an Australian. In his column in the New Statesman, the London-based expatriate journalist John Pilger said the real terrorists were not Muslim fundamentalists but the Americans themselves. Pilger wrote:

 
   If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can 
   be surprised? ... Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic 
   peoples have been its victims--that is, the victims of American 
   fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and 
   economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth. 

What made this especially reprehensible was not so much what it said--similar sentiments were subsequently expressed by a number of Western intellectuals in the days that followed--but its timing. The statement was published on September 13. New Statesman is a weekly magazine and on weeklies the copy deadline, especially for regular columnists like Pilger, is not the day before publication but the day before that. This means Pilger must have written these words on September 11 itself, while the horror of the events was still unfolding on television. The fact that he offered no gesture of sympathy for the victims, and refused to condemn their murderers on the very day itself, displays a complete lack of moral principle. It destroys the credentials of all the appeals he has made over the years on behalf of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Palestinians, appeals purportedly made under principles of universal humanitarianism, and reveals his motivation as mere anti-Americanism.

Pilger was soon joined by a number of other leading leftist intellectuals. Noam Chomsky took a similar line. On September 12 he wrote:

 
   The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale they may not reach 
   the level of many others, for example, Clinton's bombing of the Sudan with 
   no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and 
   killing unknown numbers of people. 

In short, now matter how bad the attacks of September 11 might seem, America had done worse, However, for Chomsky to portray the 1998 Sudanese attack in the same terms is not to compare like with like. That attack was in retaliation for the bombing of two American embassies in Africa. The factory was suspected of making biological weapons, and the missile was fired at night, so that no one would be there and the loss of innocent life would be minimised. A week later, Chomskv repeated his charge, adding a number of assaults on Palestinians by Israel that he put in the same league, as if the Israeli government was the moral equivalent of the plane hijackers. Because Israel was a client state of the USA, Chomsky said, that made September 11 understandable.