Classic example of appeasenik idiocy and moral vacuity by Max Hastings, writing in the Guardian about the Beslan massacre. Having observed that terrorism is getting nastier, he opines that the last thing that should be done is to use force against it. Those who do are guilty of 'savagery' and 'vengeance'. The idea that such actions might be designed to stop the terror is not entertained. Indeed, Hastings tells us breathlessly that the real purpose of terror is to produce a reaction from the victims that will recruit yet more to the cause. You don't say!

So what should folks who are being fried in bus bombs or whose children are slaughtered in schoolrooms do instead? Why, 'undramatic, even invisible means: intelligence, politics, diplomacy, special forces operations '. Uh huh. Like those aren't used already? And what happens when they fail to persuade the terrorists to pack up their bomb belts and go home? Hastings says force never works. But where in the world has his approach ever worked?

A little detail like that is, of course, irrelevant. For Hastings, killing terrorists is the equivalent of Nazi tactics or war crimes. And of course, Israel is branded accordingly for attempting to protect its citizens. This is described as 'venting its spleen for suicide bombings upon the Palestinian people'. As for President Bush, he 'indulges both Ariel Sharon and Putin in any means they see fit, to suppress those who use terrorist methods, without heed to the need for diverse political responses, as well as sensitive military tactics'.

Now, Putin's brutal repression of the Chechen revolt hasn't been clever at all, not least because Russia has long been supplying money and arms to the very people who promote the Islamic jihad -- of which, as Putin now realises far too late, the Chechen resistance is the North Caucasus branch office. Not that Hastings grasps this -- indeed, he expliclty rejects the obvious fact that Palestinian, Chechen or al Qaeda terror are part of the same phenomenon.

But his remarks about Israel are as spiteful as they are ignorant. He suggests that Israel has never attempted any political resolution of its conflict with the Palestinians -- thus totally ignoring the fact that the current intifada was their response to a political process in which Israel was offering them a state of their own. What hate-filled malevolence is this, that can so distort and misrepresent an issue, and make criminals out of the victims of a death cult of annihilatory totalitarianism?

The fact is, as I wrote in my article for the Daily Mail today, the single greatest incentive for acts of terrorist mass murder is the response of those who blame the terrorised rather than the terrorist, respond to every act of mass murder by signalling yet greater weakness, demoralisation and fear, and make it worth the terrorists' while to ratchet up the violence. It is this weakness and moral confusion that comprise the great goal of terrorist strategy; it is this that has characterised the west's response to Islamic terror for many decades; it is this that has brought us to where we are today. Hastings concludes that terrorism is winning. Very true -- but only when it results in attitudes like his own.

Posted by melanie at September 6, 2004