Al-Megrahi

We were at breakfast with a friend of ours and Martha began talking about the news. Specifically, she was angered at the Scots for releasing Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Libyan agent convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. You’ll recall that in that attack 270 innocent people died in the sky. Al-Megrahi has never expressed remorse. Yet, he is being released as an act of compassion. He is dying of cancer—or so, anyway, we are told.

Martha was furious. Why should the Scots demonstrate compassion when this man had shown none for his victims? But, our friend gently rebuked us. It was the Christian thing, she said, to release the terrorist that he might spend his final days at home. All the more Christian since it required real emotional effort. One had, that is, to look into the twisted face of the murderer and still perceive the features of suffering humanity.

I suppose she’s right.

Yet, what concerns me is not so much what happened to al-Megrahi in Scotland, but afterwards. Upon arrival in Tripoli, he was greeted as something of a hero. High officials, including Gaddafi’s son, met him at the airport. “Several thousand” young men cheered him from the tarmac.

The pundits who cover such things write that one shouldn’t take this too seriously. The return of al-Megrahi was actually, they say, a low-key affair. The Libyan government might have easily made the man’s return a national celebration. The fact that it didn’t shows that Gaddafi and his heirs are working hard not to antagonize the West. Thus, they say, it is All Good. If anything, the release of al-Megrahi, who is going to die anyway, may have been an excellent trade. It cost the West nothing and betters our relations with Libya.

Which is all probably true. But I’m troubled by those “several thousand” young men at the airport. They came, it seems, quite without prompting. It was not their government’s idea to assemble on the runways, but their own. And that makes sense. For decades now, leaders throughout the Arab World, and the Islamic world beyond, have used Anti-Americanism as a conscious part of their statecraft. It, along an orchestrated hatred of Israel, has been the ever-effective means by which political elites distracted their subjects’ attention from their own corruption and incompetence.

Today, that popular loathing of all which we represent is as much a part of the political psyche of the Middle East as are national flags and monuments to fallen liberators. It has been long nourished, and now flowers energetically.

Thus, I worry. Even if Gaddafi and his imitators want to better their standing with the West, is it too late? Have they done their work too well? So that, no matter what governments may want and Fearless Leaders decree, we will still have to confront someday the people who so energetically danced and sang when the Towers fell…and thousands died in horror and flame?


Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker