Let me bypass any doubts about yesterday’s Osama bin Laden video release (“Johnnie Cochran better go straight to the race card,” said a wag) and concentrate on a brief, less dramatic moment that even bin Ladenites might not contest. Osama bin Laden says proudly, in the translation, that he has heard that more people accepted Islam in Holland in the days since September 11 than over the past eleven years.

This is the crazed reckoning of religious fanaticism. It’s not about being or doing evil, but being blind to mundane human realities such as pain and death (of those on the “other” side and even your own), or at most using those to reach the “higher” goal of increasing the head count in the service of Allah. It’s so abstract: your focus is on getting people to verbalize faith in a supernatural being; and so hard to contradict, because it has no connections to rationality or daily reality.

This is one of the governing forces in the global politics of the twenty-first century, and not just on “their” side. This week also came the news of a plot by Jewish extremists in the U.S., one of whom grew up in Montreal, to blow up a Los Angeles mosque, proving there are dangerous meshuggeners on both, or all, sides.

A mosque may seem like small beans compared to the World Trade Center, but the web of connections is, unfortunately, intricate. Their organization, the Jewish Defense League, was founded by fundamentalist rabbi Meir Kahane, and is connected to many Orthodox settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories. Their presence makes a peace agreement there very hard to reach, since they refuse to leave on religious grounds.

ABC-TV’s John Miller (one of my journalistic heroes of recent months) said, during the bin Laden video airing, that he’d just returned from Saudi Arabia. He had met political and religious elites there. What they complained about most was the plight of the Palestinians — more than U.S. troops stationed on holy ground or anything else. These fundamentalisms don’t just mirror each other, they intersect.

As for the U.S., there’s the fundamentalist Christianity of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who opposes dancing, just like the Taliban; or the born-again version of President George W. Bush. You get a sense when he says our enemy is “evil” that he and many Americans might like to dispense with the haggling of politics and replace it with religion, as Islamic fundamentalists do when they get the chance, though in the U.S. it might take the form of a sort of political fundamentalism. They sing “God Bless America,” and sound like they mean it. There is a jihad quality to their current war. Think about the discussion of where they will “strike next,” as if this war is a force in itself, ongoing and self-perpetuating, until the entire world is conquered by its just cause. Let me add, to be inclusive, that religious fundamentalism extends beyond the monotheistic faiths to, for instance, Hinduism in India.

Now ask a naive question: Just what is wrong with religious fundamentalism in politics? Well, it hinders self-criticism, therefore it blocks renewal and change. I used to think that George Bush talks about evil all the time because his advisers decided it was the only terminology he’s comfortable with and sounds credible using. But it serves another purpose; it makes it unnecessary to even consider policy changes on your own side to defuse the situation. If you embody God’s will, and evil is the problem, why consider making moves internally? You just get out there and exterminate the devil.

I don’t think it’s time to panic. Religious fundamentalism hasn’t so much dominated the global political agenda as hijacked it. There’s still a lot of common sense available, which is the real foe of dogmatism. Did you know, for instance, that when Gallup polled internationally after September 11, majorities in all but three countries (the U.S., India and Israel) preferred the response of extraditing and trying Osama bin Laden to bombing Afghanistan?

It surprised me.

Even in places such as Palestine, where fundamentalism has growing support, there’s often a pragmatic mix. People can be fundamentalists or secular pragmatists, on various issues and from day to day, depending on where the source of hope seems to lie. Still, who would have thought that, in the early twenty-first century, socialism and communism would not be political factors, while religious fundamentalism would? It’s nice to be surprised, I guess.

Postscript: I appreciated Norman Spector’s “letter” yesterday disputing my views on the Middle East, but I’d like to register a small bristle at being lumped in with Osama bin Laden and Hamas among those who “oppose Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.” Everything I’ve written for twenty years on this topic attests my belief that mutual acceptance of the national claims on both sides is the only solution.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.