September 22, 2001

CAUSES OF TERRORISM ARE NOT ROOTED IN AMERICA

Some loony-left outfit with the preposterous title ``Institute for Public Accuracy'' is all the time sending out faxes to journalists, proffering a roster of useful idiots available for interviews.

The Sept. 11 attacks spurred it to unwonted levels of activity, with list after list of so-called ``analysts'' who appear to have only one thing in common: They blame America for everything wrong in the world.

Howard Zinn is on their list.

Zinn is a professor emeritus at Boston University, author of a textbook, A People's History of the United States, which has enjoyed an undeserved success in the nation's high schools. And yes, that's ``People's'' as in ``The People's Republic of Tyranny,'' wherever it happens to be.

``We need to decide that we will not go to war,'' Zinn wrote, ``whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media.''

It is not politicians or the media who conjured up our reason to go to war: it is the terrorists who attacked us.

But idiocy of this tenor is Zinn's stock in trade. Not long ago I happened across an op-ed he wrote about the execution of Timothy McVeigh.

Now that McVeigh has been put to death, Zinn wrote, ``we can begin to think calmly of how he learned his twisted sense of right and wrong from the government that executed him.''

And he didn't even mean Waco; he meant the Persian Gulf War, in which McVeigh served.

Along with half a million other people who didn't come home and start bombing day-care centers.

I call it the chicken salad fallacy. Some guy goes to a church picnic, eats the chicken salad, and a few hours later becomes violently ill. Because there are bits of undigested chicken in his vomit, he blames the chicken salad.

But health investigators go and talk to a hundred other people at the church picnic. If they all ate the chicken salad and only one or two got sick, then it is irrational to blame the chicken saled. Those who get sick must have something else in common.

War, Zinn says, ``is terrorism magnified a hundred times,'' and he defines terrorism as ``the killing of innocent people in order to send a message.''

But we go to war to defend ourselves or our allies from unprovoked attacks, not to send messages. Actions convey messages, but that is not their purpose.

Zinn believes that if we kill innocent people in a war against terrorists we will simply create more terrorists. But that -- chicken salad again -- is quite simply untrue.

In World War II, Zinn was a bombardier; he ought to know better. During that war, to speak bluntly, the Japanese bombed us and we bombed them, twice with nuclear weapons. The Germans bombed everybody they could reach and we bombed them, to considerably greater effect. None of these actions, which killed uncounted numbers of innocents, moved the survivors to become terrorists.

We armed Osama bin Laden when he was fighting for the independence of Afghanistan against an unprovoked Soviet invasion, and so we should have done, whatever he became later. But that cannot be what made him a terrorist, because we armed a great many people to fight the Nazis, and when the war was over most of them put their guns away and devoted themselves to peaceful pursuits. If the Soviets did otherwise, it is not because we helped them, but because they were ruled by a madman in the grip of a murderous ideology.

If the Middle East is a breeding ground for terrorists, and it is, we commit the chicken salad fallacy by assuming the cause is that its people are Arabs or because they are Muslims. We are not going to war against Arabs or Muslims, not abroad and certainly not in America. We are at war only against those infected with a virulent strain of Islamic heresy and those who deliberately host and spread it.

Such as the odious Yasser Arafat, who for decades has dripped poison into the minds of Palestinians and others in the Middle East. He gave blood, and he told his soldiers not to shoot, but will his Palestine Authority broadcasts now preach reconciliation with Israel, instead of revenge? And if so, for how long?

Those who sow terror will reap war, and innocents die in both. Only those as willfully blind as Howard Zinn can fail to tell the difference.

(730 words)