Via James Wolcott, I can’t say it any better than this:
“What has changed, grotesquely, is the aftershock,” Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian,
delivering a splash of cold reality. “Terrorism is 10% bang and 90% an
echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and kneejerk
executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated
as collectively responsible. This response has become 24-hour,
seven-day-a-week amplification by the new politico-media complex,
especially shrill where the dead are white people. It is this that puts
global terror into the bang. While we take ever more extravagant steps
to ward off the bangs, we do the opposite with the terrorist
aftershock. We turn up its volume. We seem to wallow in fear.“Were I to take my life in my hands this weekend and visit Osama bin
Laden’s hideout in Wherever-istan, the interview would go something
like this. I would ask how things have been for him since 9/11. His
reply would be that he had worried at first that America would
capitalise on the global revulsion, even among Muslims, and isolate him
as a lone fanatic…“In the event Bin Laden need not have worried. He would agree, as
did the CIA’s al-Qaida analyst in Peter Taylor’s recent documentary,
that the Americans have done his job for him. They panicked. They drove
the Taliban back into the mountains, restoring the latter’s credibility
in the Arab street and turning al-Qaida into heroes. They persecuted
Muslims across America. They occupied Iraq and declared Iran a sworn
enemy. They backed an Israeli war against Lebanon’s Shias. Soon every
tinpot Muslim malcontent was citing al-Qaida as his inspiration. Bin
Laden’s tiny organisation, which might have been starved of funds and
friends in 2001, had become a worldwide jihadist phenomenon.“I would ask Bin Laden whether he had something special up his
sleeve for the fifth anniversary. Why waste money, he would reply. The
western media were obligingly re-enacting the destruction and the
screaming, turning the base metal of violence into the gold of terror.
They would replay the tapes and rerun the footage ad nauseam, and thus
remind the world of his awesome power. Americans are more afraid of
jihadists this year than last. In a Transatlantic Trends survey, the
number of them describing international terrorism as an ‘extremely
important threat’ went up from 72% to 79%…“Bin Laden might boast that he had achieved terrorism’s equivalent
of an atomic chain reaction: a self-regenerating cycle of outrage and
foreign-policy overkill, aided by anniversary journalism and fuelled by
the grim scenarios of security lobbyists. He now had only to drop an
occasional CD into the offices of al-Jazeera, and Washington and London
quaked with fear. The authorities could be reduced to million-dollar
hysterics by a phial of nail varnish, a copy of the Qur’an, or a
dark-skinned person displaying a watch and a mobile phone.”
