To Know The Enemy

As an invited speaker and the sole representative of Israel, Arnold Roth addressed a conference of the French anti-terrorism organization Mouvement Pour la Paix et Contre le Terrorisme, at a special memorial event to commemorate the events of 9/11. The conference took place in Paris on 11th September 2007.

To Know the Enemy: Observations on the Sixth Anniversary of 9/11

Arnold Roth

Earlier this summer, my wife and I were stunned to see a photograph of a young woman staring at us from the website of the New York Times. There was an article – a review of a film about Palestinian Arab terrorists who are in Israeli jails. It was illustrated by a glamorous picture of an unusually attractive young woman, nicely dressed and with a gentle, lovely smile. She is a sweet-faced woman of 27. She is in the picture because she was the engineer of a massacre in which a man with a guitar case on his back walked into a restaurant in the center of the capital city of my country and exploded. His guitar case, which she acquired for him, was not for music but for death. It was filled with explosives.

The young man went to his 72 virgins happier than at any other moment in his life. And the young woman, who was 21 years old, went from the scene of the massacre in which fifteen people died, mostly children and babies, and rushed back to her job as a news reader for Palestinian television. There, she calmly reported on the carnage and destruction in Jerusalem without mentioning her role.

She is the murderer of my daughter. She is today serving multiple life-sentences in jail and, as the article makes clear, she is confident she will be released soon as part of a deal between the Palestinian Authority and the government of Israel. She may be right.

My wife and I found the picture, the smile, the glamour to be unbearable. We tried to explain our feelings to the New York Times and to the company which produced the film but they were not very interested. We wrote letters to our friends and articles in blogs. We said that it is not possible to see her face and then understand that she is a monster, but she is. My daughter’s face – the face of a beautiful girl of fifteen with music in her soul, who played classical flute in the Jerusalem Youth Orchestra and composed songs, who devoted all her free time to being a youth leader for girls in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, who volunteered as a helper for children with serious disabilities – the face of my daughter was not shown in the New York Times.

Something I wish the editors of the New York Times would understand is that when you humanize the terrorists, you cause a chain reaction which leads to doubt and ambivalence about matters that require great determination. In addition, you turn the victims into statistics. You dehumanize them and you marginalize their families and their society.

The struggle to reverse the global successes of terror involves many factors. The challenges are complex. They have a large number of political, sociological, economic and cultural components. This matter is even more difficult when we take account of the confusion existing among our neighbours and leaders on the very basic elements of the problem. Questions which deserve simple answers – like who are the terrorists and what is to be done to stop them – remain unanswered. They are debated in our shopping centers and schools, in parliaments, on television and at the United Nations. Although this debate is literally a matter of life and death, there remains very substantial disagreement about the objectives and the methodology.

The draft manifesto of this conference says that the condemnation of terrorism must be "absolute, universal and unconditional”, no matter how just the cause, no matter how severe the provocation.

We can readily agree that those who mastermind, perpetrate and promote acts of terrorism have to be condemned. Their voices and their actions deserve no place in the society of civilized, cultured and free nations.

Yet it is necessary for gatherings like this one, of people who are angry, appalled and deeply worried about the failures of the international community, to call for steps that deal adequately and effectively with terrorism. Some of us are here because we have experienced terrorism in our flesh. The lives of our families have become profoundly affected by the terrorists and their supporters. We are motivated to act. But we find ourselves not only powerless but, to a very great extent, voiceless.

In the last three years, I have personally taken part in several meetings related to terror and its victims. I have learned to appreciate the elements which connect victims of terror to each other. It is striking to see how the differences among us are many, including such matters as language, religion and outlook. And yet we have much in common – most strikingly, a deep sense of injustice and frustration.

I have also met with officials from various governments and public bodies to talk about the things which terror victims have learned. There are many matters that we wish our leaders would hear from us and learn from them for the benefit of the communities in which we live. Our own lives have been profoundly hurt by the practitioners of terror. Our closeness to these issues gives us insights that need to be heard and acted upon.

I sat some months ago in a small, closed room with a man who has an unusually long and serious job title. In French, he is called “Rapporteur spécial sur la promotion et la protection des droits de l'homme et des libertés fondamentales dans la lutte antiterroriste". In English: Special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.

Some months ago, he came to Jerusalem where I live. I asked him about the title on his business card, because – as I told him in a frank way – it seemed so odd to me. He told me the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations had created his job in 2005 and he has held the top role since then. His position is intended to have a life of three years, which means he has been doing this job for more than two-thirds of the life-span allocated to it.

He told me he is mainly busy these days with the first part of his role: the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The second part, countering terrorism, is not yet his focus. This is not entirely surprising, given that the United Nations has so far been unable to come up with an agreed definition of terrorism after many years of trying. Unfortunately the same group of member countries of the United Nations, year after year, keeps blocking every attempt at an agreed definition.

Why was my meeting with this public official so upsetting to me? He is pleasant and intelligent. He has access to resources, to a staff, to a traveling budget. He can publicize his findings and speak with leaders of countries from every continent. His is a position of potentially great influence. Yet he has a job title which sounds like a United Nations resolution – the fruit of some committee’s work, and probably a compromise decision of some kind. This is sad and worrying because it means a solution is further away and not closer.

When counter-terrorism measures are put in place by international organizations, we who are so concerned, must advocate for several outcomes.

• They must not turn into a process for merely collecting reports or for studying “best practices”. There is an urgent need for practical action.

• Fundamental building blocks, like a definition of terrorism, must not be permitted to be watered down in a search for consensus. This is especially true in the struggle to develop a comprehensive global convention against terrorism.

• Intelligent and determined steps have to be adopted so that the democratic processes which are fundamental to our lives are not, and cannot be, abused by terrorists and their sophisticated advocates. Today they use democracy to attack our societies from inside. They abuse our devotion to human rights in order to protect their inhuman actions. It is imperative that we find ways to safeguard our core democratic principles and protect our lives and those of our children.

None of this is easy. Terrorism throws dilemmas and challenges at us which are not simple. In thinking about what needs to be done, we can consider lessons that have been learned from other situations. I want to offer one today.

There is a famous study in which students at Yale University in the United States had to be persuaded to volunteer for a tetanus inoculation. A social psychologist divided the students into two groups. Both groups were given a booklet which explained how dangerous tetanus is to their health, and notified them of the possibility of free inoculation at a nearby clinic.

The booklet came in two different forms. One version presented the case for inoculation by using the language of high fear. It showed frightening pictures of a child having a tetanus seizure, photographs of tetanus victims in hospital with surgical wounds and with tubes coming out of their noses. A second version contained the same facts but used scientific and medical language without emotion. It left out the pictures and used milder words.

The research showed that both booklets were effective in conveying the facts and explaining the danger. But the students who were given the high fear version had a clearly deeper understanding. They were more convinced that they should go and get the injection. We can understand this process – it makes sense.

But the researchers went further and investigated how many of the students took action – in other words, how many members of the two groups actually turned up at the clinic to get inoculated. And here we see something interesting. Within thirty days of receiving the booklets and being exposed to the education campaign promoting inoculation, the more deeply convinced students who had been exposed to the high fear explanation went to the clinic and got the injection... in exactly the same percentage as those who were shown the low fear version. That percentage was close to zero – 3% to be precise.

The language of the booklet and its tone was irrelevant. The message simply did not get through.

If we had been there to watch this study, most of us would think that the booklet was not effective. We would have understood that the urgent need to convince students to take active steps to protect their health needed to be expressed in a different way. But the point of this study is in what happened next.

The researchers created a new version of the booklets. The new version had the same content... but had some additional information as well. It included a map of the campus with a circle around the health building. It listed the times when a student could go there and get the injection. This is a subtle and small change which did not persuade or explain. Those were not needed because almost everyone knows the dangers of serious illness, and no one wants it. The information was probably not very practical since most students knew where to find the health center even without the map.

Here is what happened. The students who got this action-oriented version of the booklet responded by going and getting the inoculation at a rate of 28 percent. It was nine times more effective because it helped the students understand how to fit the information into their lives, and it made no difference whether the language was low fear or high fear. The dangers went from being abstract and impersonal to being practical and memorable. That was what it took.

That terrorism is dangerous to us and our societies is known to everyone. But not everyone seems to understand that we can take measures to protect ourselves. Even fewer know that they can help this process by their own actions. The American writer Malcolm Gladwell describes this Yale experiment in a recent book, and points out that the students were intelligent and relatively well informed. But they acted only when the message was personalized and action-oriented, even if they did not actually need the information. He wrote: “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”

It is clear to me that you do not reason with terrorism. You do not engage in dialogue with its practitioners for the same reason that you do not have a dialogue with tetanus or with cancer. You identify the steps that have to be taken to stop them, to prevent them from destroying the body, and you make intelligent calculations about how to achieve your strategic goal with the smallest possible damage. The organism which is being defended is healthy. We do not wish to compromise its good aspects. But if we do not attack and remove the sickness, the pathology, then we run the risk that we will lose everything. To succeed, we must understand the size of the danger, the viciousness of the enemy, and the price of defeat. We must also know there will be some damage, even if we do not want it. This is true in my country, in your country and in every country.

Today, 9/11, is the sixth anniversary of the day on which my family and I created the Malki Foundation in our daughter’s memory. The legal document which certifies its registration was issued on the morning of that day in 2001, some hours before the jihadist attacks in the United States. Today, in Malki’s name, we raise money from donors all over the world in order to give practical help to families in my country who have a child with special needs. There are thousands of such families in Israel and the Malki Foundation supports them because we are determined to counter the hatred and viciousness of the death-cultists through constructive and life-affirming actions.

One third of the families who get this support are Moslem and Christian Arabs. This is a factor which is surprising mainly to people who do not live in my country. Most Israelis have learned that an open and democratic society can and must find ways to fight the darkness of the practitioners of terror while protecting and defending its own soul. It is a life-and-death fight.

My wife’s name is Frimet. She is at home today in Jerusalem, caring for our youngest child who suffers from blindness and severe developmental problems. Frimet wrote an article which she will publish today in connection with the lessons of 9/11. She calls it “The Dangers of Historical Amnesia”. In it, she writes how societies, perhaps as a way of coping with deep trauma, have wiped the recollection of terrorism from their collective consciousness. This is a phenomenon that seems to affect people who were not themselves, personally, or via their loved ones, affected. Memory is much more powerful when it is personalized.

I told her that I will mention this in my speech to you today so that her voice, too, can be heard among those who care deeply about the imperative of stopping the terrorists.

Thank you.

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Click for French translation