War of the Words

The real meaning of the "War on Terror."

by Michael Washburn

On Dec. 6, 1989, a 25-year-old man walked into a classroom on the urban campus of the University of Montreal. After removing an automatic rifle from his duffel bag, he ordered all of the other men in the room to leave. Then he opened fire on the women and went on a rampage through the building, killing a total of 14 women and injuring 10 more before taking his own life. A note found on his body contained blistering remarks about feminism and modern women in general.

Why bring up this horrendous episode? Aspects of it might change your perceptions of today's War on Terror. Many people simplistically regard the conflict as yet another liberal/conservative issue. The issue has certainly divided Washington along these lines, or at least along party lines.

But the case of Gamil Gharbi, described above, is a reminder that many of our foes in this conflict despise feminism and other liberal values. In the above case, the shooter's Algerian father had raised Gharbi in a strict Islamic tradition positing that women's only legitimate purpose is to serve men. Life in the modern West, with its outspoken and ambitious career women, horrified the young Gharbi.

National security is obviously a big motive in the War on Terror. But the things that contemporary liberals cherish — not conservative values — are anathema to the other side in this war. Chapter Four of the Koran, the text guiding the daily life of hundreds of millions of people from Morocco to Indonesia (not to mention London or Detroit), explicitly states that women are the weaker sex and that it's their duty to serve men. Similar attitudes permeate the teachings of many black Muslims both abroad and at home. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is widely celebrated by people who have not read it. If you read the book in its entirety, you will find passages where the narrator — speaking after his conversion to Islam — condemns women for not knowing their place anymore.

In the same regard, the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan is utterly different from Vietnam or any issue that divided the populace along liberal/conservative lines. To take just one example, look at the city of Basra, where the corpses of 15 or more women turn up in the streets every month, murdered by bands of insurgents roving around on motorbikes and cars. Their crime? They walked the streets without the hajib covering their head and body, or they otherwise acted too immodest — too Western — for the enforcers to tolerate, according to a McClatchy Newspapers report last month. There are countless other reports of women being murdered in the region for not being self-effacing.

Yet so many people feel a need to view the conflict through the liberal/conservative lens. If seen for what it is, the issue would turn the politically correct worldview on its head. The politically correct want to view the world in terms of "white male oppressors" and "people of color" who are egalitarian, pro-woman, etc. They don't want to get into the historical record and look at things like clitoral circumcision in black Africa, or the practice of suttee in India, in which newly widowed women were burned to death on a pyre. The British curtailed that practice in 1829, but it still happens. How ironic that the so-called white male oppressors had to go to the people of color and say, "Hey, women have rights, too. You can't just kill them off when you think they've outlived their usefulness to men."

The enemy of the liberals' enemy may be their worst enemy of all.

Michael Washburn is a local journalist and editor.