Seldom has a national double standard been laid so completely bare as it was
in the coverage of the Moscow hostage crisis a couple of weeks back. While Western officials -- and journalists -- rushed to condemn Chechen terrorism,
they almost all also made criticizing Russia for bringing this mess upon itself an immediate priority.
In the view of most of the major Western dailies, as well as the television networks, the Moscow hostage crisis was borne of a deeply ambiguous political situation, one in which both sides shared blame. Terrorism of the sort practiced by the Chechens was almost universally described as having an understandable, if not supportable, cause: It was said to have been a response to Russian brutality in what was often called the "occupied territory" of Chechnya.
This is a far cry from the response to the 9/11 attacks, when Osama bin Laden and his followers, with very rare exceptions, were described as murderous zealots blindly "bent on destruction" who simply "hated our freedom," for some mysterious and probably adolescent reason never clearly articulated.
Not once in our media -- though I have seen it in the Russian press -- have I seen the obvious parallels between anti-American terrorism and Chechen anti-Russian terrorism drawn anywhere. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, where a hugely unpopular U.S. military presence is forced upon
a population by an idiotic authoritarian regime propped up by the United States. Other anti-American terrorist acts find their motivation in the Israeli occupation of Palestine, for decades roundly condemned by every member of the UN except for the United States and Israel itself; images of Palestinians massacred by Israeli troops brandishing American weapons have served as the primary fuel for terrorist recruitment in the Middle East for many years. Islamic terrorists are not blowing up McDonald's franchises or David Hasselhof concert venues (although maybe they should); they're attacking embassies, warships, the Pentagon and, finally, the center of U.S.
financial power in lower Manhattan.
Not to say that this is right or commendable; it's just a fact. Anti-American terrorism is in response to something, just as Chechen terrorism can certainly be said to be in response to something. But you'd never know that by reading our newspapers. The New York Times, in its Oct. 8 editorial "The Slaughter in Moscow," made this explicitly clear when it went out of its way
to insist that there are no parallels between the two brands of terrorists:
"The international war against terrorism, and strong evidence that some Chechen rebels have received training and support from al-Qaida, has emboldened Mr. Putin to equate his struggle against the guerrillas with America's campaign against Osama bin Laden and his followers. While there are common elements, the Chechens have some legitimate grievances about a long history of harsh Russian rule. Mr. Putin should recognize that he cannot end
their insurrection through force alone. If the United States wants to be helpful, it should not give Mr. Putin a pat on the back after this debacle and tell him we are all fighting the same enemy."
Then there is the response by the British paper of record, the Times of London. An Oct. 29 editorial by Libby Purves, "Putin Is Forced into Human Rights Limelight," goes as far as to make the primary response to the hostage crisis an examination of Putin's human-rights record in Chechnya:
"Every cause embracing violence will always have these people among them. But that does not excuse us from looking at the cause of their rage, and the history which led men and women to strap explosives to themselves in a crowded theatre, and shoot at fleeing childrenâ€| Mr. Putin may have committed crimes last week against Muscovite theatergoers; but long before that his federal troops were committing far worse crimes in the villages and towns of
Chechnya."
Purves certainly has a point, and there's certainly nothing objectively incorrect about anything she wrote. But what is amazing is how quickly these
quite sane voices rose to the surface when the West was looking at terrorist
acts against Russia. It took far longer than that in the United States after
9/11, and even those few that did speak out were quickly marginalized.
The typical, actually the penultimate, explanation of "Why They Hate Us" back then was a massive Oct. 15, 2001, feature in Newsweek, a full 11 chapters long, whose first segment was titled, ridiculously, "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?"
It's worth noting that even this question contains the answer to the question of why Americans thought they'd been attacked. I doubt the North Vietnamese asked why we "hated" them; the Russians certainly didn't ask why the Germans
"hated" them in 1941. Hate is an emotion; wars have reasons. Right from the start, Americans cranked up an incredible series of psychological justifications for the 9/11 attacks and scarcely ever mentioned our military
presence abroad, our lust for control over the world's oil, our meddling in the internal politics of Middle Eastern puppet states over the years. A typical explanation was that Muslims were "afraid" of the modernization our culture represented, as explained in Chapter Three of the Newsweek spread:
"This disillusionment with the West is at the heart of the Arab problem. It makes economic advance impossible and political progress fraught with difficulty. Modernization is now taken to mean, inevitably, uncontrollably, Westernization and, even worse, Americanization. This fear has paralyzed Arab civilization. In some ways the Arab world seems less ready to confront the age of globalization than even Africa, despite the devastation that continent has suffered from AIDS and economic and political dysfunction. At least the Africans want to adapt to the new global economy. The Arab world has not yet
taken that first step."
Later on, the article goes on to quote a Muslim who sneers at Asian progress
because cities like Singapore are pathetic "copies" of places like Houston. In other words, the murderous hatred of America has it roots in a fear of --
looking like Houston.
Compare this with the response of Moskovsky Komsomolets in the days after the hostage attacks:
"It defies belief that in his Saturday address to the nation, President Putin declined to mention Chechnya at all, as if the war there has nothing to do with what happened. If you refuse to accept the truth, if you treat the consequences of the disease and not its cause, you will never be cured."
Sure, that's only one newspaper talking. But in the United States, even one would have been nice after 9/11. On the eve of a new war in Iraq, we're still waiting.