Leaps of logic

[gottaB]

The conspiracy theory is doing the rounds already: the Mossad's done it, or the CIA. It might even have been the two -- acting in cahoots. The thinking may be more convoluted than usual this time around, but it is no less popular for all that. There is a peculiar logic at work here, since the proponents of this and similar conspiracy theories (the 9/11 incarnation being the most widely-known) are invariably the very same people who will point out vehemently that "what goes around comes around".

They will go to great lengths to show, quite rightly, how US and Israeli violence and brutality bear the brunt of responsibility for all and any counter-violence. But they will go even further to deride those among us who would condemn such instances of "counter-violence" as being insensitive to the enormous suffering of our own people, even as we allegedly toady up to the West by expressing abhorrence for attacks on civilians, kidnappings and video-taped butchery.

One would have thought that the one line of thinking cancels out the other. Either the act of violence in question was the cynical and villainous work of insidious intelligence bodies (ˆ la Reichstag Fire), which would make it doubly repugnant. Or, it is the partially -- or wholly -- justified reaction to a much greater and much more terrible violence, which, presumably, gives it some legitimacy. Yet, the same persons seem to have patently little trouble suggesting both arguments at once.

There is logic, of a kind, in the apparent incoherence, however. For in both arguments, "we" stand blameless -- saved the onerous, distressing task of critically examining structures of thought and ways of being that are prevalent among "us". More significantly, perhaps, such thinking helps us to avoid stumbling on the potentially frightful realisation that there is no "us", in any real, ideological or political sense; that a shared cultural, national or religious identity by no means makes Arabs and Muslims an undifferentiated mass, a monolith with a single body and one mind.

Leaps of Logic....

[bemildred]

1. "And a man hears what he want's to hear, and disregards the rest"

-- The Boxer

It is always a pleasure to read someone who knows how to think,
my thanks to you.