You are a sociologist. Do you really maintain that criminals are just criminals that there are no explanations for criminal acts. Or just that they are morally unexplainable whatever that means. Insofar as it makes any sense to me at least some criminal acts are morally explicable. Some may steal food or money because they havent the means to feed their family. A woman murders her husband becasue she feels that he may attack her or her children and on and on and on.... The perpetrators of these criminal acts have what they believe to be moral reasons for their acts. Most regard feeding their family as a moral obligation, and self defence and defence of ones children is morally justifiable. Of course this is not to deny that these were criminal acts, and as such the perpetrators are criminals. Of course it is true that sometimes criminals are just criminals in the sense that they act out of pure selfishness or at least not for any obvious moral reason. But this is hardly the case with these terrorists. Criminals who are just criminals are not likely to commit suicide as part of their criminals acts. It is possible but not likely I shold think. Anyway you surely must have heard of jihad and know about the extreme forms it takes among some groups. Are you saying that it is impossible to understand and explain the terrorist acts in terms of this doctrine that certainly contains both a religious and moral component that allows both suicide of warriors in the cause as an exception to the Islamic prohibition of suicide, justifies responses to attacks on Islam, and also considers both military and civilians as "guilty" and hence subject to attack. To understand this is not to agree with it, or justify. I understand the doctrine of collateral damage and can even see that it has a certain degree of justification but it can never justify direct attacks on non-combatants such as happened in Serbia, or destruction of civilian infrastructure as in Iraq, Serbia, and wherever by the US. So understanding that a moral explanation could be given by the terrorists and others is not to justify the acts at all.
Perhaps the US is simply just a criminal state. How else can you make sense of a policy that supports criminals, funds them and lauds them, and then later claims a special resposnbiility to hunt them down--a la Hitchens? At the same time the US adopts into the family a new group of criminals, members of the Northern Alliance. Criminals so bad that enough people in Afghansitan supported the Taliban in driving them to the borders. And how can you explain that the fight for freedom, peace, and democracy involves lifting sanctions from a Pakistani regime that overthrew an elected government and developed nuclear weapons. These are exactions are inexplicable morally Seems to me that we must say: Sometimes there are simply criminal states. The US is one. ( This is meant ironically and as a reductio at the same time) .
Cheers, Ken Hanly
> Hitches is not equating opposition to Bush's war to sympathy for the
attack.
> He is equating excuses and "explanations" for the attack with sympathy for
> the attack. Plenty of people do oppose the war without making such
> "explanations."
>
> Unfortunately, those who insist on such explanations of the morally
> unexplainable cheapen and disgrace the anti-war movement. Sometimes
> criminals are just criminals- large numbers of people globally, including
> the Palestinian leadership, have little problem recognizing that. Why
some
> American leftists feel a need to besmirch the Palestinian cause by even
> linking this act to them is beyond me.
>