I’m late getting to this (don’t shout at me, it’s been a week full of impediments) but it’s worth not filing under “too late” because it’s so eloquent – James Kirchick at Index on Censorship tells Bruce Crumley why he’s such a weasel. I have little or nothing to add, I just want to quote the juiciest remarks.
As Christopher Hitchens wrote about the death warrant put out for his friend, “I thought then, and I think now, that this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning. The civil war in the Muslim world, between those who believed in jihad and Shari’a and those who did not, was coming to our streets and cities.”
Over the past decade, that civil war has intensified on the streets of Western cities; Amsterdam, (where the artist Theo van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight for a film which criticized misogynistic Koran verses), Nyhamnsläge, (the Swedish village where the home of cartoonist Lars Vilks, who drew images of Mohammed, has been repeatedly attacked), Aarhus (the Danish town where fellow prophet-image-maker Kurt Westergaard had to hide in a “panic room” after an axe-wielding Muslim broke into his home).
And London, where the house of Martin Rynja of Gibson Square publishing was firebombed over a romantic novel about Aisha, and Seattle, where the cartoonist Molly Norris had to go into hiding after she drew a Motoon, and Birmingham, where Sikh protesters managed to get the play Behzti stopped.
It has thus been heartening to see this fundamental understanding among writers — that, no matter our political disagreements, we are all colleagues in a vitally important element of the free society — flower in response to a truly vile little excrescence by Bruce Crumley, the Paris correspondent for TIME magazine.
…Crumley, who would make an excellent propaganda commissar in Uzbekistan or Iran, chided French politicians for “denouncing the arson as an attack on freedom of speech, liberty of expression, and other rights central to French and other Western societies,” which is exactly what it was.
The original title of Crumley’s piece, still viewable in the website URL, was “Firebombed French Paper: A Victim of Islam, Or Its Own Obnoxious Islamaphobia?” If a reader, so offended by Crumley’s excuse-making for theocratic nutcases, bombs TIME’s Paris Bureau, would that make Crumley a “victim” of his own obnoxious cowardice? If there was ever cause to deport someone from the Republic of Letters it would be Crumley’s article, for in it he committed treason against his trade by showing himself to be a man eager to rat out his fellow writers and sell them down the river in a heartbeat.
Though he fashions himself a bold truth-teller, Crumley’s justification of violent extremism isn’t new. It’s just the latest iteration of a tired excuse for terrorism, expressed by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ron Paul, which is that the victims of terrorism have it coming. What made Crumley’s entry into the genre singularly poisonous, and what I believe elicited the widespread disgust from journalists of all political stripes, is that it was written by a working journalist, not an academic, politician, or anti-“Islamophobia” activist.
There. I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any of that.
Crumley sounds vile indeed (I’d never heard of him before), but it’s worth noting that we don’t know that the fireboming was the work of Muslims at all. AFAIK there have been no claims of responsibility, no demonstrations against Charlie Hebdo, and no French Muslim leaders denouncing the magazine. The other obvious possibility is a provocation by elements of the far right. Let’s remember how quick many people were to assume that Anders Brehvik’s atrocities were the work of Muslim extremists.
… a tired excuse for terrorism, expressed by everyone from Noam Chomsky …
Eh? Example, please.
Pierce,
I thought the same thing about Chomsky. He is pretty clear about his opinion that most of the problems the West faces vis-a-vis terrorism comes up in reaction to Western action in the various affected regions. The Right likes to paint this as excusing terrorism rather than as outlining the roots of discontent which lead to it.
I don’t think that Chomsky has ever excused the bombing of a newspaper for any reasons. It’s an extrapolation of the mischaracterisation the Right likes to draw of Chomsky’s arguments.
Amazing, no one of the commenters at the Index on Censorship post had asked for specifics regarding either Chomsky or Paul (until I got there a few minutes ago).
Chomsky has consistently been against terrorism, but he has always maintained, as far as I can tell, that any comprehensive definition of terrorism will include state actions, such as that of the U.S. government. Rather than excluding islamist terrorism, his argument is that it is result of state-sponsored terrorism. If it’s acceptable for the state to terrorise, than it is very hard to argue that it is not acceptable for non-state actors.
This essay, from 1991, sets his position out most clearly, in my opinion: http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112–02.htm
Paul and Chomsky, in my opinion, understate the role of jihadist doctrine in terrorism. But to say that this is an “excuse for terrorism” is to (a) miss the distinction between a fact claim and a moral judgement and (b) miss the fact that one can think an act sprang from real grievances but was nonetheless a terrible reaction to those grievances. It’s surely no coincidence that Kirchick is enthusiastic about US militarism.
It’s a shame because the rest of the piece is good. Here’s another bit…
…which I quote only because I love Gore Vidal’s reaction to being decked by the author of The Naked and the Dead. Looking up, he calmly said, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again“.
Great!