Defending the indefensible? Fun-Da-Mental: All Is War

The idea that things like 9/11 happen just because people are "malformed little psychopaths" strikes me as very dangerous indeed.

I liked Marcello's review, despite the silly first paragraph (like it's impossible to be interested in both provocation *and* escapism at the same time, or that prefering escapism in your art automatically makes you apolitical or a "tory kid" in all other areas of life.)

And yet they'll entertain a scribe like Carlin whose primary aim here it seems is to not entertain but provoke.

Timberlake mentioned in second sentence - talk about your straw men (with the hearts of robots and courage of lions no doubt).

But hey we're talking about it so mission accomplished once again I suppose.

Oh, that's all right then. Time to kill 'em all, I guess.

Of course that's not the only reason, but it's the one factor that a certain group of people seemed determined to ignore.

(xposts)

Sure, but you'd have to have your head very far up your (or Robert Fisk's) arse not to see that there are some extremely evil fuckers among Al-Qaeda and the Taleban. As for kids in Beeston and High Wycombe that enter into all this, the picture is obviously far more complicated and difficult.

"C", sure, yes, there are. But the thing is, admitting that society had a responsibility in molding the 9/11 killers isn't the same as absolving them of their sins or saying they were just victims. I mean, show me a line in Marcello's review (or on the Fun-Da-Mental record, which granted I haven't heard) which actually states that Al-Quaeda or the Taliban are nice blokes, really, and then I could see your point.

Sadly, A is bollocks, unless you think 'we' have pushed 'them' into a corner by such heinous acts as allowing girls to go to school, living in multifaith societies, civil rights, etc etc.

but apart from that, the album sounds like a riot.

But frankly if you truly think that we've given the muslim world nothing but "allowing girls to go to school, living in multifaith societies, civil rights", I fear our political differences might be too vast to argue them out on a thread on an internet message board.

MC does say if we'd showed Atta some basic respect he would have been much less likely to have hijacked those planes. I'm not sure what sort of respect he means, but this strikes me as being unlikely. Like noodle vague he seems to be saying that America (or the West) is primarily to blame for what Atta did. Alienation, poverty or feelings of powerlessness are all undoubtedly important factors with many acts of terrorism, but then so is good old fashioned pathology, evil, or whatever you want to call it.

Might I suggest that if the late Mr Atta had been afforded some basic respect by the society for which Amis stands in the first place, such that he didn’t feel so alienated and so susceptible to fatal persuasion that he had to crash a ‘plane to make his “point,” things like 9/11 would have been far less likely to have occurred?

This of course is totally impossible to prove or disprove, but the point Marcello's making is that if society gave Atta some respect, he probably would've never become a terrorist in the first place. That of course is a totally rhetorical point, and I think the right way to look at it is not literally but in a wider sense - if the west treated the muslim world better, there'd be less chances of terrorism.

The problem then becomes a simple one of, how do 'we' treat the Muslim world 'better'? What specifically was it that 'we' did that 'pushed' Atta into a corner?

It would be useful to know so that we could stop doing these terrible things. (Although remember, things like supporting independence for the East Timorese, or allowing girls to go to school and become doctors, or not punishings rapists by, er, executing the victim (for, say, adultery), or not lowering the age a girl can get married to 12, or allowing supernatural beings to be depicted in the culture, or not throwing atheists in jail, etc: these things don't count unless you really do think they're things that we should be thinking twice about)

Apologies for the tsunami of sarcasm, but don't you think it's about time we stopped postulating Atta et al as perfectly rational actors in a society that has brutalised and oppressed them to the point where they have to commit mass murder - although not so oppressed that they've couldn't travel freely across America and Europe, go to University, get flight training, etc etc.

'Course the same applies backwards too. The West: means what, exactly?