By Patricia Lee Sharpe
I’ve been increasingly unhappy about teaming any variant of the word Islam with a negative qualifier. No more Violent Islamists, Radical Islamists, Islamic terrorists, etc.,etc. I’d like to drop the words Jihad and Jihadist from our vocabulary of outrage, too.
Why? Because the problem terrorism presents isn’t a matter of belief. It’s a matter of what a very few people, whatever they believe, do.
The Fantasy Factor
Lots of extremely ordinary people of all religious persuasions have absolutely horrible fantasies that have to do with violence. Anger, resentment, jealousy and countless other feelings produce such fantasies in us. Until the fear-mongering of the post 9/11 years, it was possible for an exasperated person to say, through gritted teeth, “I’d like to kill him,” and no one would run for cover or call the police, because almost all of us have thought or even have said this at one time or another. So the number of people who actually act on violent fantasies about anything is infinitesimal. But if we arrested everyone who ever, fleetingly, wanted someone else dead and gone, our prisons would be even more outrageously crammed than they now are with non-violent offenders.
You Do It, You Pay
The solution to terrorism, I’ve long thought, is banal criminalization: you do it, you pay for it. (Which does include the possibility of arresting nasties when schemes not instigated by a plant or provocateur are demonstrably moving from fantasy toward commission, a matter of sensible line-drawing.)
So I was very happy to read a recent article in Foreign Policy* which also advocates the deglamorization of terrorists: treat the bombers and plotters like criminals; let them be arrested without fanfare, like punks who’ve robbed a 7/11; try ‘em via tediously legal, ordinary court procedures. Minus grandiosity, the emulation factor in terrorism will plummet, the article says, even if the martyrdom incentive is still pushed by recruiters.
The psychology here is utterly convincing to me. Many countries treat terrorists as common criminals already. Under Gordon Brown, that’s what the UK is doing, too.
However, implementing such a policy in the U.S. is likely to run up against an interesting obstacle: the American star system itself.
In short, the bigger the fish hooked, the bigger the fisherman looks and feels. The President, prosecutors, the F.B.I., police departments around the country—they all love publicity. They love to have their pictures in the paper. They love to look like heroes. They want to be stars, the bigger the better.
Stars and Czars
Therefore, the criminal catchers have to magnify the malignity of their quarries. They need a very impressive, system-threatening enemy to justify serious chest-thumping—and garner a little hero worship. How much nobler it sounds to be fighting a War on Terror than to be arresting violent scum.
American politicians love to declare wars—Wars on drugs, Wars on terrorism, Wars on whatever. If you have a war, you can become a czar, a very big man, a star, which is almost as good as being president.
Oddly enough, however, just being president, an office often called the most powerful in the world, was not good enough for the present president. He has used a monstrously inflated War on Terror as an excuse to inflate his own powers. As Star of Stars, Czar of Czars, exercising his war powers, no one, he claims, can curb him. Not Congress. Not the judiciary. Not any treaty past or present.
Fortunately this star is about to be extinguished, but it would be good for the health of the country if we extinguished the star system (in its many malignant over-rewarded manifestations) along with its most extreme exponent.
*You can read only two paragraphs for free, unfortunately, but you don't need to bother, because my little summary is sufficient and I cited this only as further evidence that the notion is gaining ever more currency.