McEwan Misses the Point

Having succumbed to the hype surrounding the overrated soapie based on Ian McEwan's novel, Atonement, I wasted an afternoon watching the film. So perhaps I should have passed over the Sydney Morning Herald's interview with this alleged "literary giant" (Morality man 23/2/08). I didn't, however, and came across this:-

"September 11 changed McEwan...The hijackers would never have done what they did had they been able to put themselves in the place of their victims, he wrote. 'Imagining what it is like to be someone other than oneself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion and it is the beginning of morality'. Al-Qaeda also looms in a discussion of the militant atheism of...scientist Richard Dawkins and others. Asked for his view, he says, 'I am entirely in their camp. I think it helps to recognise that the instigators of September 11 operated out of immense faith. Faith is not a virtue...What is faith but ungrounded certainty, without evidence'."

To call McEwan's views shallow is an understatement. The words "September 11 changed McEwan," reveal the man's hardwired Eurocentric mindset and suggest that two centuries' worth of life-shattering rape, pillage and plunder of the Middle East (& elsewhere) by the likes of imperial Britain, France, Israel and America have simply passed him by. It took an attack against his own kind on the other side of the Atlantic to engage him, but the best he can come up with, by way of probing thought, is platitudes about empathy on a par with The Beatle's All you need is love.

However, it was the reductionist ignorance of equating the terrorist acts of 9/11 exclusively with the "faith" of their perpetrators that really pulled me up. Assuming that Osama bin Laden was the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11 (he claimed direct responsibility for it in October 2004), then it behoves the likes of McEwan, who presumes to speak so dogmatically on the subject, to do a little research. What does bin Laden himself say about 9/11? Here's an excerpt from his video-taped message delivered to al-Jazeera not long after the attack. The rhetoric is, of course, that of the believer, but it's clear that what motivates him are more earthly concerns:-

"God has struck America at its Achilles heel and destroyed its greatest buildings, praise and blessings to Him. America has been filled with terror from north to south and from east to west, praise and blessings to God. What America is tasting today is but a fraction of what we have tasted for decades. For over 80 years our umma has endured this humiliation and contempt. Its sons have been killed, its blood has been shed, its holy sanctuaries have been violated, all in a manner contrary to that revealed by God, without anyone listening or responding. So when God Almighty grants success to one of the vanguard groups of Islam, He opened the way for them to destroy America utterly. I pray to God Almighty to lift them up to the highest Paradise. When these men retaliated on behalf of their poor, oppressed sons, their brothers and sisters in Palestine and in many other of the lands of Islam, the whole world cried out. The infidels cried out [in protest at 9/11], and the hypocrites followed them. Until this point, a million innocent children have been killed in Iraq, although they had done nothing wrong. But we do not hear anyone condemning this, ... As I speak, Israeli tanks and bulldozers are going in and wreaking havoc and sin in Palestine - in Jenin, in Ramallah, in Rafah, in Beit Jala - and other parts of the domain of Islam, and we do not hear anyone protesting or even lifting a finger to stop it. But when after 80 years the sword comes down on America, the hypocrites rise up to lament these killers who have scorned the blood, honor, and holy places of Muslims." (Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, edited by Bruce Lawrence, 2005, p 104):-

IOW, without this history of prior and present Western imperial aggression against the peoples of the Middle East, no amount of "faith" on bin Laden's part would have motivated him or his comrades to wage an armed jihad against the West.