Jews miscast as semi-apologists for world terrorists

For a moment, as I passed the rally in Dolores Park and heard them chanting "Stop the War," I thought these were other voices against the terrorist war on America. But they were complaining about the American war against the terrorists. That was disorienting enough. Then, on the car radio, I heard one of the leaders of the demonstration, and she had a familiar Jewish name. The next morning, the newspaper announced that the local "anti-war press cranks up" to criticize America's response to terrorism -- and the publisher's name was Cohen.

It is especially hard to understand why some Jews have joined the small band of semi-apologists for the terrorism that shook America. A semi-apologist abhors the terrorism but then explains its "root causes" in ways that place guilt on America's back, usually this country's blameworthy role in world poverty or its support of Israel.

Of course, a "Jewish name" may be misleading; some may have opted out of their Jewish identity, which is their right. But it is disconcerting that they have also opted out of the history lessons that their ancestors learned at such dear cost -- and out of the responsibilities of tikkun olam, healing the world.

Some of these Jews are justifying their long-held anti-American or anti-Israeli ideologies. After deploring these terrorist acts, Noam Chomsky explained that they were committed out of feelings that "the U.S. obstructs freedom and democracy as well as material plenty for others. In the Middle East, for example, the United States supports Israeli oppression of Palestinians."

In the same category, Susan Sontag wrote in the New Yorker that while the slaughter in New York was inexcusable, it should really be seen as "an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances [as with Israel] and actions."

Others just betray a deadly innocence about those "root causes." Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose Jewish identity is strong, wrote in his magazine, Tikkun, that while the terrorism was deplorable, it was partly explained by resentment about "the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in the world, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its attendant inequalities of wealth..."

America and its Jews should be actively involved in the fight against poverty as well as in the prevention of war -- and in reflective debate about how these goals can best be met. But America did not start this war, and world poverty is not the "root cause" of the kind of terrorism that Osama bin Laden and his ilk have loosed upon the world. Nor is American support of Israel.

Bin Laden has clearly laid out his "root causes," and they do not notably include either Muslim poverty, for which he offers no program, or the Palestinian cause. His purpose is to bring down the "quietist" Islamic regimes such as those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which have "corrupted" the medieval Islam he wants to restore; he sees America as the force that supports such regimes and corrupts them with its precepts of freedom and democracy.

He believes that "the enmity between us [the Muslims] and the Jews goes back far in time...and that war between us is inevitable." He stresses "the necessity of focusing on the Americans and the Jews for they represent the spearhead" against the kind of Muslim world he would like to see. His remedy: Kill Americans and Jews; no pacifist, he.

Bin Laden's doctrine may attract some angry Third World people, but their anger does not have to take his course -- any more than the anger of the hungry people of Germany had to take Hitler's course. And bin Laden-style terrorism would proceed with or without a mass following. The root cause of bin Laden's movement is the movement itself. The remedy is to root out the movement, and only militant American leadership can do that.

Very few Americans now swallow the semi-apologism, but it does sow some seductive seeds if the war against terrorism proves to be as frustrating as promised. In the hard days ahead, Jews should be active in shoring up the American resolve. Otherwise, they would not only be acting against their own interest but against the mandate of tikkun olam. If the bin Laden-style movements with their empty ideologies of wrath are not destroyed, we will see a world in tragically greater disrepair, with much more massive destruction of human life and freedom, and rising levels of poverty.