The Final Move Beyond Iraq: The Final Solution While the World Sleeps (39 page)

MDE:

Why is it that you seldom hear the word
Islamofascist
among liberal Democrats?

Prof.Dershowitz:

You certainly hear it from me. I’m a liberal Democrat and I strongly believe that “Islamofascist” is an appropriate term to describe one small group of Islamic radicals. I think one of the reasons why you have some hesitation is you don’t want to have a word that has a religious context being used broadly. I have many, many, many associates, friends, colleagues—people who I admire and respect enormously—who are Muslims by their religious faith and background. They’re a wonderful people and a peace-loving people, and they would love to see a two-state solution. So I don’t want to ever generalize about Muslims—members of the Islamic faith—but there is an element within the Islamic faith that has hijacked the faith, and I think they are aptly called Islamofascists. They are Fascists without any doubt. Hezbollah is a Fascist movement and has all the elements of a Fascist movement, including educating youth and providing social services.
People forget that the reason Germans voted for the Nazi Party the first time the Nazis were up for office was not because of their anti-Semitism, but often despite their anti-Semitism. They voted for the Nazis because the Nazis had youth programs, because they had social welfare programs, because they had approaches to unemployment—and by the way, they were also anti-Semites. And Hezbollah has managed to use the same approach. Many people in Lebanon support Hezbollah because of their social programs, because of their educational programs—and by the way, they’re also anti-Semites. They hate Jews and they hate Israel, but we can live with that as long as they’re providing the social services.
So one has to look beyond the social services at the core—at the core of Hamas and Hezbollah—who will use these social services to seduce people to get them to join their mission, and the core of the mission is the destruction of Israel, the destruction of the Jewish people, the destruction of Western values, the destruction of Christianity, and the destruction of everything other than radical Islam.

MDE:

In your book
Why Terrorism Works,
you’ve laid out some strategic principles relating to how it could also be stopped. Can you speak on that subject?

Prof.Dershowitz:

Terrorism can be stopped. Terrorism succeeds because it succeeds—that is, it’s self-perpetuating. The way to make terrorism stop is never to reward it and always to hold the terrorists responsible, but we don’t do that. The UN doesn’t do that, the international community doesn’t do that, even the United States and Israel don’t always do that. Every country in the world submits to terrorism. The old joke that I love to tell—because my mother is ninety-three years old—is, “What’s the difference between a Jewish mother and a terrorist?” The answer is, “With a terrorist you can sometimes negotiate.” And tragically, I think too many democracies have negotiated with terrorism and have strengthened the hands of terrorism.
Were I a national leader, I would take a no-negotiation posture—would’ve from the beginning of time—a no-reward posture. Terrorism has to be dealt with the way piracy was dealt with in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally we were able to abolish piracy for the most part because pirates were regarded as international criminals that no country would give quarter to. If terrorism were treated that way—if we never would’ve permitted Yasser Arafat to set foot at the United Nations, if we would never have considered giving him a Nobel Prize, if we would never have recognized terrorists’ organizations—I think terrorism would’ve disappeared of its own force.
Terrorism doesn’t work against tyrannies because tyrannies don’t in any way tolerate terrorists and they turn off their sources for support and they don’t allow the media to be used by the terrorists. It’s easy for tyrannies to defeat terrorism. It’s much harder for democracies because democracies have to preserve our values, our morals, and our civil liberties—so it’s a real challenge, but it’s doable.

MDE:

What is the worst-case scenario for the West if a decade goes by and the West sleeps—if Iran gets the bomb? What are we faced with?

Prof.Dershowitz:

Well the worst-case scenario would be Iran getting a bomb and proving their strength by dropping it on Israel and counting on Israel’s morality—counting on the fact that even if a bomb were dropped on Israel, the Israelis would be very reluctant to counterattack by bombing the city of Tehran and killing ten million people. The fact that Israel has such a higher morality than Iran and the terrorist enemies it faces is one of the great weapons that the tyrannies and the terrorists have. That wasn’t true in the Second World War. In the Second World War, the United States was willing to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were willing to, with Great Britain, firebomb Dresden. They were willing to firebomb Tokyo. Israel is not prepared to do that, and the United States today is probably not prepared to do that, and with the elevated morality that some countries have and other countries don’t have, the combination of the elevated morality of the United States and Israel with the reduction in morality by terrorists and tyrannical organizations creates an asymmetry, which is going to be very, very hard to deal with when we face nuclear annihilation.

MDE:

What can we do to protect the United States in light of this crisis?

Prof.Dershowitz:

The United States has to look much further into the future. It has to have a long-term strategy for dealing with a potentially nuclearized terrorist state like Iran, which has surrogates. It has to be ready to act proactively, preemptively, preventively when necessary. It has to be ready to act with powerful deterrent force when necessary. It has to use all of its resources available to it—diplomatic, economic, political, moral, military—and it has to understand that this is a long-term war, which will not be won in my lifetime, maybe even in my children’s lifetime, and it has to be ready to change the rules of engagement and adapt them to the new threats that it faces. In the end I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist.
I’d like to be an optimist, but I was born in 1938—and had I been born in Europe, I would be dead today and I wouldn’t have children and grandchildren. The world stood by idly while the Jewish communities of Europe were totally destroyed. So nobody who has lived through the years of the Holocaust can ever be a complete optimist. I have to be a pragmatist. I have to be somebody who is willing to look hard at the options that are available to prevent ultimate destruction.
Benjamin Franklin was wrong when he said, “Those who are willing to compromise a little bit of liberty to obtain a little bit of security deserve neither.” I don’t believe that. I think the most important and fundamental right that a human being has is the right to live, the right to have children, the right to be free of threats of tyranny, and sometimes compromises in other values and other liberties have to be made in order to secure that ultimate liberty. We have to be prepared to make economic and material sacrifices, but also sacrifices of other natures in order to prevent the bringing about of a cataclysmic event—which is not beyond the realm of human possibility, because we’ve seen it once—and the motto of “never again” has to clearly resonate with all of us. And it can’t be just a motto. It has to be a pragmatic, realistic approach to the threat of cataclysmic destruction, which is a realistic possibility for the future.

MDE:

One more question. The Israeli ambassador yesterday referred to this cult of death—this Islamofascist crisis, as he called it—World War III. Do you see it that way?

Prof.Dershowitz:

I see the threat posed to the United States and Israel as the beginning of a one-hundred-year war. You can call it World War III. You can call it the beginning of a new type of warfare. I wouldn’t want to call it World War III because there are no analogies to World War I and World War II. This war has to be fought very, very differently, and we have to be creative. It was Santayana who said, “Those who forget the lessons of the past are destined to relive them,” but those who focus only on the past are destined to miss what the future holds. I think the past has a vote but it doesn’t have a veto, and we have to look at the future and what threats are posed to us in the future. So I would rather not use analogies to World War I and World War II and just think of this as a new kind of warfare that the West is clearly disadvantaged by. The asymmetry of morality makes it very hard for us to fight groups that have no morality.

MDE:

Please talk to me about how the terrorists use the media.

Mr. Zuckerman:
Well, in the first place, they understand how important the media is. For example, Zawahiri, who was the number-two guy to Osama Bin Laden, wrote a famous letter to al-Zarqawi when he was still alive in Iraq and pointed out to him that this is a battle in the media, and that’s more than half the battle.
And he was talking to him in those terms because al-Zarqawi was attacking the Shia, and he said, “You’re losing public support, and the media gave you a bad coverage on that,” so understand how important the media is.
Now, it’s also understood because there was a cable network, like
al Jazeera
, as a platform from which they can propagate their various ideologies and the way they present the facts. The war between Hezbollah and Israel is an example.
A number of the pictures are doctored. They control the access of even the correspondence from CNN, never-mind
al Jazeera
, to those particular scenes with their own statistics. They would never, for example, indicate in their stories that Hezbollah was using various sites as launching pads for the rockets against the Israelis, putting the Israelis in the quandary as to what to do, because if they go after the rockets—they were deliberately building these and hiding these in the homes of civilians—and so there were innocent civilians whose lives were at risk.
They would never mention, for example, that the Israelis called these people—or gave notice by dropping leaflets—which eliminated the issue of surprise, which is an important element in these things. So they understand that the media is a way of shaping political opinion, and they use the media with the idea of arousing world opinion to go against Israel, for example.
So they’re very much aware of that—frankly, much more than even the Israelis and the U.S. government—which is always astonishing to me.

MDE:

When you look at the media and you see Muslims, and they call them dead civilians, there almost seems to me a litmus number of the count that creates a repulsion of the world. Is that all planned?

Mr. Zuckerman:

Well, I don’t know that it’s all planned, but, for example, they sent the pictures, where they deliberately doctored the pictures to make them darker and look more menacing, as if this was a Dresden in World War II. So they try and create and maximize the sense that these are innocent civilians, when, in fact, this wasn’t the war between Israel and Lebanon or innocent civilians—it was a war between Israel and Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was using women and children as shields. One of the great dilemmas of the modern world is how do you find some way to prevent people from using innocent women and children as shields. There is a principle for civilized countries that you always separate the combatants from the noncombatants, but generally that requires a uniform.
When you have a group that deliberately hides themselves and their efforts behind civilians, that’s when you have the problems and the complications coming up. And when the pictures, therefore, become pictures that, while in one sense, they may tell the truth in fundamental terms, they distort the truth because they leave out the fact that these people are deliberately hiding in the civilian areas in order to deter them from being attacked.

MDE:

The American people are hearing a lot of threats coming out about Iran wanting to go nuclear, and many of them think that this is no threat to America. Is this a threat to America?

Mr. Zuckerman:

Well, if they think this is no threat to America, it is only because they do not hear or have access to the speeches and to the writings of the leadership of Iran. Iran is the most radical, extremist, religious, religiously motivated group in that part of the world. They have been since 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini took over that country.
They were the founders of Hezbollah, and they positioned Hezbollah not just in Lebanon but also in Europe to kill Iranian dissidents. In fact, there are twenty members of Hezbollah in European jails that are there for attacking and assassinating Iranian dissidents.
They are totally hostile to the West. They really do believe it is their mission to reinstate the caliphate to have a return of what they call the Mahdi, or their version of the messiah, which requires a battle between the believers and the infidels, which they are literally trying to provoke.
This is a religious extreme that we have never encountered, and it is compounded by the fact that they do not have a culture of life as we do, but, if anything, it’s a culture of death. The president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, is a part of a group called the Basige. The Basige were a group of people that the Ayatollah Khomeini inspired to, in a sense, become martyrs, as they call them, in the war between Iran and Iraq.
He had them literally walking across minefields—they were human landmine discoverers—and they would literally blow up. He had them throwing themselves with grenades and explosives on their bodies against tanks. There are now ten to twelve million of them in Iran, and this is the power base of Ahmadinejad. We have never been up against a group of people who believe that there is a higher calling by dying for their religion, not for living for it.

MDE:

What do they hope to achieve in all of this?

Mr. Zuckerman:

What they hope to achieve—and I have been exposed to them, really, for fifteen or twenty years—they literally hope to achieve what they believe is a part of what, in the covenant of Hamas, is called the Muslim WAQF, or the Muslim endowment.
What is the Muslim endowment? It is that every bit of land, which at one point was controlled by the world of Islam, should return to the world of Islam, going all the way to Spain and Andalusia and Spain to India. In 1990, I met with the leaders of the Islamist party in the Jordanian parliament, and they told me that back in 1990. So this goes back a long, long time, and for various reasons this kind of belief system has been spread (a) by Iran on one part, and (b) by the Wahabi sect in Saudi Arabia.
After Iran was taken over by Khomeini, the Saudis, for various reasons, got very worried about the support from their own religious extremists, and so they began providing huge funding to them, and those are Sunni and Shia who are both spreading the same message—that the world of Islam must become ascended once again. The caliph—the caliph means the successor to Muhammad—must come back. We must reestablish a Muslim world, a world of Islam, all of one country, all controlled by the caliph—and that is what they believe in, and it is an extraordinarily powerful force in their lives.

MDE:

New York City, and obviously 9/11, is very close to you. Could you talk about where you were the day of 9/11, and could you also talk to the American people about the possibility of nuclear material ending up in this country and endangering the city or any other city?

Mr. Zuckerman:

That is certainly the greatest danger because it would literally, if it exploded in a city like New York or any major city, render the city uninhabitable in huge portions, and for twenty or thirty years, before the radiation, in this sense, would have gone away. But, to my mind, that’s not the only risk.
I just ask you to think about the possibility that the Islamists from England, who were just recently found attempting to blow up nine or ten airplanes flying over the Atlantic—if they had succeeded, it would have changed our whole way of life.
If you were to have two or three attacks on the United States—and in the United States we are such an open society; our whole tradition is being an open society, such that it is impossible for us to foreclose every possible source of danger—it will change our way of life. The pressure of the American public to be protected, the pressure on the American government to protect the American public is going to be so acute, the government will be forced to institute all kinds of changes in our lifestyle that could literally change what America has been all about.
That, to me, is the greatest [threat]—it doesn’t have to be an atomic bomb. It doesn’t have to be a chemical or biological agent. It could be something, for example, as what happened—almost happened—with these airplanes—anything that really made it clear that we were still under great attack. And sooner or later, because we’re such an open society, this may very well happen. And therefore it is critical that we all appreciate that this is a danger and why it is we must go after them before they come after us—because there’s no way in a world as open as we have in this country that we can find a way to protect ourselves totally and hermetically against them.

MDE:

The concept of proxies was completely hidden from the world during the Lebanese war, even in spite of the fact that people like you spoke very loudly about the connection between Hezbollah and Iran. Iran suffered nothing from it. Is America in danger of proxies—Palestinian or any kind of proxies—in this country?

Mr. Zuckerman:

Absolutely. That is one of the great unknowns of the danger that we face: the ability of a country like Iran, which has always operated through proxies. They set up Hezbollah. They set up Hamas. They set up the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They are the principal funder [and] the principal supplier of weapons, the principal trainer of these people—I mean literally thousands of Hezbollah people went to Iran from Lebanon to be trained in terrorist activities.
And, through Syria, they were not only trained, but they were rearmed as Iran used Syria as a gateway to rearm them. So these are all proxies whom they use in order to put, in effect, something in between them and the perpetrator of the crime—but they are the puppeteers in all of this—and these are the groups, and in effect, are the puppets.
And you see this when Hamas was elected. The first place they went to was Iran, and Iran promised them money, and Iran promised them support in addition to what they had already been giving them. Iran, after all, you recall, was the supplier of a huge boatload of weapons [aboard the]
Karine-A
, even to the Palestinian Authority, but that’s a secondary source of proxy for them.
The Iranians have said in a speech, including Ahmadinejad, “Hezbollah is Iran and Iran is Hezbollah, and we will stand by them, and they will be for us and we will be for them.” So there is no question about who they are, who they represent, and what they are about. They’re both—Hezbollah’s Shia, and so is Iran—their purpose is a desire to literally obliterate Western values and Western civilization—and for them, Israel, in a sense, is at the cutting edge of Western civilization.

MDE:

The president of Iran wrote President Bush an eighteen-page letter, and what he said in it, “Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the Liberal democratic systems,” as if referring to the World Trade Center towers attack. Should the president of Iran be taken seriously when he makes statements like this?

Mr. Zuckerman:

Without question. I mean, you know, it is for us, who have a different sense of civil values that permeates not only our lives, but our religions—to hear somebody speaking like that, it almost sounds as if this is sort of almost a cartoon, that it’s something you can’t take seriously.
But in fact, these people are absolutely serious, and we have never encountered people like this is our lifetimes. A level of extremism that is motivated by their version of their God, which is Muhammad, to literally go out and destroy the West and to demolish their civilizations and to reassert the ascendancy of the world of Islam against the world of, in their minds, “the unbelievers,” “the faithful versus the unbelievers.”
The Christians and Jews are referred to as the “immies.” These are second-rate citizens who, by the sufferance of the world of Islam, can live in their community, but not as equal citizens. That’s their vision of the world and their version of the world, and, for various reasons, a whole complex number of reasons, it has become ascendant in more and more parts of the world of Islam.
There are many, many millions and tens of millions of people who are not that extreme and are much more moderate and want to, in a sense, improve their own lives, but these are people who don’t care about life as we understand it, as I said. It is a culture of death, and we have yet to figure out how to deal with it. But that threat is absolutely fundamental to the possibility that we all can continue to live the kind of life that we have been blessed with in this country and in many other liberal democracies.

MDE:

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations described Islamofascists, and he used that term, and he used the term that this is a World War. Do you agree with him, and, if so, can you explain?

Mr. Zuckerman:

Well, without question, it is a World War. I mean, if you think about it in terms of where the violence has taken place, it hasn’t only taken place in the United States, although we suffered 9/11. It has taken place in Bali, it is taking place in Indonesia, it is taking place in India. They just blew up a couple of trains in India, and, I don’t know, 202 people died and hundreds were injured.
They blew up a train in Spain. The cartoons, which I might add were not even cartoons—all of which were published—were spread throughout the Muslim world and caused riots all around the Muslim world against Scandinavia. You’ve had these terrorist attacks in England. So there are [attacks in] country after country after country.
All over Africa, you’ve had these attacks, so what you are dealing with is a huge worldwide community, and not just the Muslim world, but there are Muslims all over Europe and all over England. And as we can see, even second- and third-generation Muslims—some of the youth never get connected into the countries that they are living in, and they only connect through the Internet, I might add, with these radical Muslim ideas and ideologies—they get caught up in it, and they too become willing to lose their own lives, to sacrifice their own lives, to become martyrs in the service of this vision of destroying and demolishing and diminishing the Western world and the civilized values that we all represent.