Making insupportable charges of bias

GOOD MUSLIM, BAD MUSLIM

By Mahmood Mamdani

REVIEWED BY BRUCE FEIN

Mahmood Mamdani, a politically correct academic, occupies a debased moral and intellectual planet. In “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University rails against the United States as the moral equivalent of Al Qaeda, as guilty of crimes against humanity, including genocide in Iraq, and as the greatest threat to peace and liberty in the universe. Outlandishness climbs, chapter by chapter, to thrilling new peaks of delusion.

In the penultimate and last pages, the reader is startled to learn or deduce from Mr. Mamdani that left-wing regimes, from the Soviet Union and China, have generated flourishing democracies from within; that Iraq was on the cusp of a democratic revolution against Saddam Hussein before the United States intervention; and, that North Korea will soon dance and twinkle with democracy and human rights if left undisturbed in its sovereignty.

Mr. Mamdani’s gross distortions and twisted logic highlight the sharp limits of dialogue without a common intellectual and moral foundation, like the futility of communicating about economics and free markets with members of the SocialistWorker’s Party.

The United States should, nevertheless, desist from taking up arms except to defeat or thwart great evil. War inevitably entails death and disease for innocent civilians. But America should equally resist the blithe belief that more speech and dialogue will alter adversaries abroad in the foreseeable future.

According to Mr. Mamdani, the September 11 abominations unleashed a wave of anti-Muslim bigotry and suspicion throughout the United States. The central message of the discourse encouraged by President George W. Bush was that “every Muslim was presumed to be ’bad,’” and could disprove that stereotype and become a good Muslim only by “joining in a war against ’bad Muslims.’”

Isolated ugly crimes against Muslims were committed and punished in the aftermath of September 11. But to maintain that Muslims have become second-class citizens in the United States oppressed under the equivalent of Jim Crow laws is sheer fantasy.

The president himself has spoken forcefully against anti-Islamic prejudice. He has celebrated Muslim holidays. A special FBI unit has been created to investigate anti-Muslim hate crimes. Muslims regularly criticize the United States for the war in Iraq or support for Israel fearless of retaliation.

Mr. Mamdani frightens by insisting that neither Muslims, Christians, Jews, nor other religious group can be divided based on their political identities: “There are no readily available ’good’ Muslims split off from ’bad’ Muslims, which would allow for the embrace of the former and the casting off of the latter, just as there are no ’good’ Christians or Jews split off from ’bad’ ones.”

But there is the same difference between Muslims, Christians, and Jews who champion the rule of law, government by the consent of the governed, and inalienable human rights shielded from majority transgressions and those of like faith who incite terrorism, advocate rule by mullahs, and deplore freedom of speech and religion as there is between day and night.

Indeed, civilization would be crippled if the difference escaped notice and punishment. The Weimar Republic paid a lethal price for making no political distinction between National Socialists, Communists, and Social Democrats.

Mr. Mamdani pontificates that United States sanctions (with humanitarian aid exceptions) and no-fly zones to protect Kurds and Shiites from Saddam Hussein “was nothing short of an officially conducted and officially sanctioned genocide, primarily of children, most under five.”

In other words, the professor convicts Presidents George

Bush #41, William Jefferson Clinton, and George Bush #43 of intending to exterminate Iraqis because of their nationality by economically isolating Hussein, who himself was daily brutalizing the population.

The dictator had keenly relished employing chemical warfare against the Kurds and Iranians and destroying Shiite marshland in the south. He no less exulted at stealing the nation’s oil and other wealth for personal opulence and the Baath Party and inflicting merciless privations on the Iraqi population. And Hussein had sparked the economic sanctions by aggression against Kuwait in 1990 and chronic flouting of his disarmament obligations accepted to avoid an end to his regime.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the morally obtuse do not distinguish between the firefighter and the fire. The Government of Iraq provoked the sanctions by its war crimes and genocide of Kurds and Shiites, every bit as much as Hitler provoked sanctions by declaring war against the United States. Economic sanctions are a morally acceptable and commonplace tool for seeking to contain or defeat evil on the international stage, even if the inescapable indirect effects inflict hardship or worse on innocent civilians. To do nothing would customarily cause even greater human suffering by enabling wretched regimes to strengthen and endure.

Thus, Nelson Mandela championed an economic boycott of South Africa’s apartheid regime despite a short-term plunge in health care or nutrition in Bantustans.The morality of action in international affairs pivots on intent.

The United States intended the isolation of Saddam Hussein to topple the Ba’ath regime and alleviate the misery of the Iraqi people. Those objectives were morally praiseworthy. Saddam intended the oppression and killing of political opponents, support for terrorism, and the conquest of neighboring nations. Those objectives were morally loathsome.

Is fruitful communication possible with an author who absolves the arsonist of moral responsibility for the unintended civilian hardships occasioned by the firefighter in extinguishing the conflagration?

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant with Bruce Fein & Associates and The Lichfield Group.