JANA WENDT: Welcome to 'Dateline'. You assert that there is a moral equivalence between those who flew planes into buildings housing civilians and the Government of the United States. How do you justify that view.
TARIQ ALI, AUTHOR: Well I don't assert that there's a moral equivalence. I assert two things - there is individual terrorists, acts of individual terror carried out by groups of individuals and there is state terror, carried out by groups of individuals, and there is state terror carried out by states and it's state terror, far from being equivalent is far more dangerous. I mean, the United States, for the last 50 to 60 years has been bombing countries on every single continent and has killed infinitely more civilians than have any group of individual terrorists. That's the point I'm making and it's a point which we have to remember - that the real threat to the world still comes today from state terror and not from individual terror - whether it's the United States or someone else.
JANA WENDT: Just let me take you back to that term, 'moral'. You are saying that there is a moral equivalence or that the evil of the United States outdoes the evil of those who flew the planes?
TARIQ ALI: Without any doubt. I don't like talking in terms of good and evil because essentially these are religious concepts and I'm a deeply secular person, but I think that if one is judging actions, then one has to say that what the United States has done on a global scale for the last 50 years is much, much more serious than what the atrocities carried out by the al-Qa'ida on September 11. I know it's not popular to say so, but I think it is a fact.
JANA WENDT: Okay, well let me raise the spectre of your colleague on the political left, Christopher Hitchens, who says that you've adopted this position not out of a principled anti-imperialism but out of a pathological anti-Americanism. What do you say to that?
TARIQ ALI: Well, the first point I'd make is that Christopher Hitchens used to be a friend and he was once on the left, but I think he no longer is, nor does he regard himself as such. It is not a pathological hatred of all things American. That's crazy. I speak also on behalf of a lot of American citizens. I have just returned from a 4-week tour of the United States with very large meetings in bookshops, university campuses, at the Los Angeles 'Times' book fair and American dissent is alive is well. It's like, you know, saying that whenever you attack the United States Government that's anti-Americanism. It's not. It's an opposition to US policy, which is because America now is the only empire left in the world and imperial police and many citizens oppose that policy as well. So, what are you going to call people in the United States who oppose that? Self-hating Americans?
JANA WENDT: Okay, well let's leave the citizens aside and talk about US institutions and culture. What do you find to admire there?
TARIQ ALI: Well, I mean one of things I do admire in the United States is that there has been for centuries - from Mark Twain onwards - a very strong tradition of dissent, of opposition, of challenging authority, which has existed in that country. And this is what makes me very nervous about the new empire loyalists is that they want to question dissent and they say, "If you dissent, you're anti-American." It's not on this sort of thing. There are many aspects of American culture which I have admired. I mean, I'm a great fan of jazz music. How can you admire that and be anti-American? I mean it's just grotesque. I am deeply hostile to the United States as an imperial power because I believe that this is not an emancipatory power. This is a power which acts in its own interests.
JANA WENDT: But let me ask you for instance, do you admire the emancipation of women in the United States?
TARIQ ALI: Without any doubt. But I would say to you that this emancipation came because there was a gigantic movement from below in the '60s and '70s and that this movement was inspired by the revolt of the Vietnamese.
JANA WENDT: Well, leaving that issue to one side, nonetheless, that is a product of US culture, is it not?
TARIQ ALI: I don't accept that. US culture is fighting it. The current government is deeply hostile to women's liberation. Bush himself is a born again Christian. Ashcroft is a religious maniac who starts every morning with prayers, prayer meetings at the ministry of justice. The goddess of liberty has had her breasts covered because he can't bear to look at them. This doesn't seem very pro-women to me. But obviously American women have moved forward, as have women in large parts of the world because of the women's liberation movement, because of the fights they wage.
JANA WENDT: So your assertion is they have moved forward despite the United States and its government?
TARIQ ALI: Yeah, and Christian fundamentalist groups and large numbers of Republicans to this day are trying to reverse gains on abortion and contraception.
JANA WENDT: Okay, let me put you another issue. You sound as though you want to make an accommodation for those forces that ploughed into the World Trade Centre and into the Pentagon.
TARIQ ALI: This is a total slander. My view has been that that was an act of individual terror. I am deeply hostile and have been to individual terrorism and to this particular group that carried it out, which is not a group that has anything to do with the left, but these are people who were trained, armed, aided, funded by the United States in the '80s and the '90s to fight with them. These are acts carried out by people who worked for the United States. I accept no responsibility for them.
JANA WENDT: Nonetheless, there does seem to be at the heart of your argument some absurdity that seems to shift towards these people more than it shifts to the victims of their crime.
TARIQ ALI: Look, there are victims of most crimes, you know, the state terror, the Americans went and bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki - millions died. I mean what are we talking about? Let's keep this thing in proportion. In order to explain what happened, you don't justify what happened. You try to explain it so it isn't seen as groups of animals acting like this. You know, the initial thing as Susan Sontag pointed out - when an American newspaper said "a cowardly act" and she said "The one thing they weren't was cowards." She said "Do try and understand that. So one just has to keep a distance from state propaganda on these occasions, and that's what I'm doing. I'm horrified by what they did. I've written a book attacking them.
JANA WENDT: There are folks, as they would say in the US, who have joined you in the broader sense in this view. That is fundamentalists like Pat Robertson, neo-Nazi groups in Europe. Do you wonder why you have that company?
TARIQ ALI: I don't have that company. I completely challenge and reject this view. These are people...I've always been opposed to religious fundamentalists of any hue. I'm actually quite shocked to hear you say that these people have anything to do with me or anything associated with me. They don't.
JANA WENDT: They claim that they have a view that the United States in a sense had it coming because it behaves the way you claim it behaves in the world.
TARIQ ALI: No, no they don't. Pat Robertson claims the United States had it coming because they've pushed through abortion rights and because women have more rights and because homosexuality is rife. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I believe in. I have argued, as has Chalmers Johnson, a very, very distinguished American historian, that the way the United States used a whole number of groups and the word 'blow-back' after all was invented by the CIA, not by anyone on the left, and the CIA has been worried for years that some of the things they've been doing in the other parts of the world might come back and hit them and I'm afraid that's what's happened.
JANA WENDT: Tariq Ali, I'm afraid we're out of time. Thank you very much for joining us.ee