[This post continues the one directly below.]
So was there, has there been, since the the London bombings, apologetic advocacy or not? Let us see, shall we?
The explanatory models offered by some of those now urging on us a need to understand why Britain has become the target of terrorist bombings are not very complicated. People have been blown up in London because of anger (sometimes, alienation) among young Muslims, which is due to Britain's role in the war in Afghanistan and/or the war in Iraq. Now, the people who say this either think that the anger itself justifies the terrorist acts motivated by it or they don't. If they do think this, they're not merely apologists for terrorism but open supporters of it. There are such, unfortunately, but they are not the object of this analytic exercise. The case we're interested in is that of people who think, or purport to think, that the anger (over Afghanistan and/or Iraq) is justified but the act (bombing civilians on trains and buses) isn't - and who urge upon us the need to understand, to understand the atrocity as rooted in the anger. Not everyone in search of understanding and explanation is an apologist for what they want to understand and explain. This should go without saying; otherwise there could be no historians of fascism, or genocide, and no sociology of crime. But as everyone knows from daily life, lame excuse-making under cover of understanding also happens. This is, so to put it, a theoretical possibility, and one that is sometimes empirically instantiated.
Was any of the post-July 7 commentary apologia? This isn't settled by the deployment of logical platitudes: 'To understand is not to condone'. For these can be met with equal facility: 'To understand is not necessarily to condone'. It all depends on the balance, the proportion, or lack of it, and on the precise inflections in the piece of commentary in question. Whether the appeal to Muslim anger in discussing the London bombings (and comparable episodes) is of apologetic nature or not is, consequently, a matter of interpretative judgement and not of simple logic. The logical structure of apologetic and non-apologetic discourses can be the same: the act of murder is said in both not to be justified, while the anger thought to be behind it is invoked as a contributory cause. However, is there forthright condemnation of the act, or is the unjustified nature of it pushed to the very margins of what is said or written, crowded out by the appeal to the putatively justified anger? Are the direct perpetrators of atrocity situated front of stage in the assigning of responsibility and blame, or are others than they given pride of place? To decide, I repeat, is not a matter of simple logic; it is a matter of literary and moral judgement.
A few days after the London bombs, the Guardian, as is now notorious, carried an opinion piece by Dilpazier Aslam. This managed to rise to the level of saying that July 7 had been 'a sad day' and 'not the way to express your political anger'; but what followed all but excused this very mode of expression. For, according to Aslam:
OK, the streets of London were filled with anti-war marchers, so why punish the average Londoner? But the argument that this was an essentially US-led war does not pass muster. In the Muslim world, the pond that divides Britain and America is a shallow one.... [T]he young get angry with that breed of Muslim "community leader" who remains silent while anger is seething on the streets.... The don't-rock-the-boat attitude of elders doesn't mean the agitation wanes; it means it builds till it can be contained no more.Note the way the 'average Londoner' is tied in, via 'shallow pond', with guilt for the war Aslam evidently opposed - the war, just to remind people, that put an end to decades of mass-murdering tyranny (but we'll have to let this pass). And note the way 'anger' is deployed, first 'seething on the streets', then becoming altogether uncontainable. But, of course, if it cannot be contained, then those moved by it are not fully answerable for expressing their anger in an inappropriate way. I say that that is an apologia for the London bombings. From a young hot-head only? No.
In the same newspaper on the following day there was a piece by Madeleine Bunting, in which, reporting on reactions to July 7 amongst Muslims, she relayed this:
But alongside the heartfelt self-criticism, another issue repeatedly cited is just as important; British foreign policy is a cancer in our community, corroding trust in the British political system and poisoning our youth: "You cannot ask us to contain the anger within our community caused by this country's foreign policy."No note of critical distance is struck by the journalist reporting this sentiment; rather the contrary, it figures in a piece largely empathetic towards what it is reporting. But there is a short answer to what Bunting's interlocutor has said - namely, that one precisely can expect that anger to be contained if what not containing it involves is the murder and maiming of your fellow citizens.
Another couple of days later, and we had Mundher al-Adhami - for whom one of the killers is, like the people he killed, 'a victim of religious madness'. I interrupt for a thought from Primo Levi:
... to confuse them [the murderers] with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.And now back to Mundher al-Adhami:
The war of revenge and collective punishment has arrived in London. And it has its own rationality... As other suicide bombers have said, they may regret the loss of innocent lives in their political, murderous acts - but they atone with their own lives and hope God forgives them.Its own 'rationality', perhaps. But so does anything, not excluding genocide. One does not have to make oneself the spokesperson of such rationalities.
There is much more of the same. Like from those who, immediately after the London bombings, could find no word of condemnation for the people who encouraged or planned them and the people who carried them out, but only for... well, you know for whom, while speaking of young Muslims being 'pushed' towards 'mindless violence'. Or others again for whom 16 words in more than 1100 was the quota devoted to the responsibility of the bombers, the rest being reserved for the very same you-know-for-whom. It is, in any case, enough with the examples.
The anger either doesn't justify the act or it does. We have ruled out the case that it does; people who think so aren't apologists for terrorism, they're open supporters of it and not the object of the present discussion. But there are those who say that terrorist bombing isn't justified but the whole emphasis of whose comment is either to minimize the responsibility of the perpetrators and their 'managers' and supporters, or to deflect the consideration of this responsibility on to other targets. Here are a couple of questions for such people.
First - a question already posed in my original piece on this - if understanding and not justifying or condoning is what it is really all about, why is this 'understanding' discourse never deployed by the same people when racist thugs, angry about immigration, carry out hate crimes? It might be said, well, because their anger is unjustified, whereas Muslim anger over Afghanistan and Iraq is justified. But it's understanding, remember, and not justification, that this has just been said to be about, so the fact that the anger of the racists is unjustified is neither here nor there. It could still be a contributory cause and in need of being understood as such. You don't, however, read hand-wringing pieces in the Guardian or the Independent about that. It suggests that the apostles of (apologetic) understanding are caught between two places. They don't want to say that terrorism is justified because... they don't want to say it. But they do want to dwell on the anger which feeds it, not merely as cause, because they don't do this in pleading on behalf of white racists, or on behalf of those who, angered by acts of terrorism, attack Muslims. It looks like something else, both psychologically and in terms of subtextual meanings, must be going on - as if they felt that some of the justification for the anger might just seep over towards the act, even though they profess to believe that the act isn't justified.
Second, most of those who opposed the Afghan and/or Iraq wars, though some amongst them did let us know how very angry they were, have not resorted to the bomb and the wrecking of other lives. The vast majority of them, in truth, haven't even engaged in civil disobedience over it. They have remained within the framework of standard democratic procedure: of protest, argument, use of their votes, and so on. Since these people do not invoke anger on their own behalf towards explaining why they might (one day) violate the usual democratic norms as well as other human beings, why are they so ready to indulge others with this type of understanding? If anger is not a sufficient cause in the way they themselves react, how do they judge it such a mammoth cause of what the bombers do?
After due reflection, therefore, I think I want to say - there are apologists among us. Even though to understand is not necessarily to condone, there are those who, during the last month - to say nothing of before that, in relation to other atrocities - have been condoning acts they shouldn't have, under the plea of 'understanding'.