Murat Belge on the fundamentalist mind

I had not read Murat Belge's remarkable October 4th 2001 essay on Fundamentalism and reactions to it. Murat is a Turkish public intellectual and long-time friend of openDemocracy - he regularly comes in to visit us when he is passing through London. In this essay, Murat disects the spectacle of 9/11 not only from the point of view of Islam's colonial, inferiorist grievances, not only from the resultant ability to form a cold, universalising ideology that legitimates violence, but also importantly from our reaction to it. Hawks obviously play into the hands of fundamentalists by "increasing the distance" to the other; but so do liberal democrats whose tolerant multiculturalism too easily slips into moral relativism. The essay, written less than a month after the World Trade Centre attack, is a masterful account of the bind that violence puts us into.