It's not what the West does or doesn't do that infuriates the Muslim world's fanatics…

Paul Greenberg on the Nature of Terror:

Those two French journalists are still missing in Iraq, where they're being held by still another band of terrorists. Following Spain's lead after Madrid's rail system was bombed and scores of innocents killed, the French will now doubtless seek to appease the kidnappers by announcing that French troops will be withdrawn from Iraq at once.

Oops. Unlike the Spanish, the French never sent any troops to Iraq in the first place. There are none there to withdraw.

Indeed, the French have done their best to undermine coalition efforts in Iraq. So why would these terrorists do anything to embarrass France?

Even to ask such a question is to misunderstand the nature of terrorism. It is to assume that terrorists need a reason to terrorize.

If terrorists were rational, of course French citizens would be immune to such attacks. Few countries were as supportive of Saddam Hussein's regime as France. It was one of Saddam Hussein's major trading partners, money lenders, and arms suppliers, even building him a nuclear reactor — the one the Israelis took out in 1981. French officials helped undermine the economic sanctions against Saddam's regime, and they played a leading role in the United Nations' oil-for-food scam. Even after that regime was toppled and Saddam himself jailed, the French have held back from the coalition trying to build a stable, democratic Iraq.

What could these kidnappers demand that the French have not freely given them? To quote the New York Times' correspondent in Paris, who sounds as if she's got this thing figured out, "what animates the French and their Islamic adversaries is not a battle over the future of Iraq. The Muslim militants make no distinctions in their war against the West."

…Whether in Baghdad or Beslan, there doesn't have to be any reason for the terrorists to act, only victims ready to be slaughtered. In a part of the world where fanaticism rules, the most fanatic tend to win out, and so the pressure is on to commit ever more outrageous atrocities.

By now suicide bombings have become old hat. So we get attacks on schools full of children and beheadings in front of the cameras. Each new outrage trumps the last in this grisly competition for the allegiance of the hate-filled street. Every time you believe terrorists have done the unthinkable, they think of something else.

The moral of the story: It's not what the West does or doesn't do, or any policy it does or doesn't adopt, that infuriates the Muslim world's fanatics, but that the West dares exist. Which is why France, a nation that has opposed American policy in Iraq, is still considered fair prey. [Emphasis added]

…Yes, the kidnapping of the French journalists, and the wide variety of responses to it, offer all kinds of lessons about where appeasement leads, but it's unlikely Paris will learn them. In charming, picturesque Old Europe, it's still 1938.

(Thanks to Joe N)

For some reason, what Paul Greenberg said about Muslim fanatics reminds me, in turn, of what Pascal Bruckner said about a group of knee-jerk critics in Europe: for them, “the worst crime of [a dictator like] Milosevic … can never equal the fundamental crime of America — simply existing”.

(Or, extrapolating in order to paraphrase Greenberg: The moral of the story: It's not what the United States does or doesn't do, or any policy it does or doesn't adopt, that infuriates the European world's humanists, but that the United States dares exist.)