{"id":66499,"date":"2015-11-16T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=66499"},"modified":"2015-11-16T06:46:20","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T06:46:20","slug":"we-remain-blindfolded-about-isis-says-the-man-who-should-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/we-remain-blindfolded-about-isis-says-the-man-who-should-know\/","title":{"rendered":"‘We Remain Blindfolded about Isis’ Says the Man Who Should Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brian Keenan was held by Shia Muslims loyal to Hezbollah in Lebanon.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Brian<\/a>

Brian Keenan was held by Shia Muslims loyal to Hezbollah in Lebanon for four and a half years REX<\/p><\/div>\n

15 Nov 2015 – <\/em>With atrocities in Sinai, Beirut and Paris (and let\u2019s keep the order in sequence here, since all those lost innocents, Russian, Lebanese and French, are equal as our brothers and sisters), I was beginning to think that our emotions were becoming as insane as the perpetrators of these crimes. An \u201cact of war\u201d, a response \u201cwithout mercy\u201d \u2013 the French response was straight out of the Isis vocabulary.<\/p>\n

So immediately after the Paris massacres, I sought for reason, clarity and wisdom from a man who spent four and a half years in the hands of Muslim kidnappers \u2013 54 months wearing a blindfold, always waiting for death.<\/p>\n

Brian Keenan was held by Shia Muslims loyal to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Had he been taken by Isis in Syria or Iraq, we would by now have been able to watch his beheading on video \u2013 yet he kept his sanity to write the only literary work to emerge from a Western kidnap victim of Beirut in the 1980s, An Evil Cradling<\/a>, a book that will live for a hundred years as a monument to humanity amid suffering.<\/p>\n

Keenan sipped his coffee in rainy Westport in the far west of Ireland \u2013 he was born in Belfast \u2013 and spoke slowly, almost philosophically. He rarely gives interviews. The Paris slaughter had happened only 16 hours earlier. \u201cThe contagion has broken out of its confinement,\u201d he said. \u201cSomeone has planned all this for a long time. There is a lot of organisation \u2013 but it doesn\u2019t take much of a commitment to kill people. What happened doesn\u2019t surprise me. What surprised me was that what happened in Beirut [24 hours earlier] spun to Paris. It\u2019s as if the culture of victimhood which is rife in the Middle East \u2026 has risen to new levels, legitimising the worst horrors.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not difficult to see that Keenan\u2019s own experience slides imperceptibly into his arguments, giving them an elliptical quality as well as a frightening immediacy. He talks as if he is still confined in a Beirut cellar.<\/p>\n

\"Lebanese<\/a>

Lebanese mourners carry the coffin of Adel Tormos, who had tried to stop the bomber from entering the Shiites mosque full of worshipers but was killed in the attempt<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhat do we need to do about this? In a global dimension, we all have to take some responsibility for this. My own thoughts \u2013 after four and a half years in captivity \u2013 is that the dispossession and the anger has to be acknowledged. These people have to be offered something more than revenge or Holy War or even this perverse Islamic apocalypse. I\u2019ve seen too many times the map of the Middle East changing \u2013 many borders are irrelevant now.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat worries me is that as these old borders and \u2018international zones\u2019 disappear, \u2018security barriers\u2019 become the new borders. We\u2019ve seen this in the Middle East and they are rapidly being erected across Europe. These worry me more than the term \u2018terrorism\u2019. They create these kinds of conceptual contours \u2013 it\u2019s not just a wall, it\u2019s a wall that defines a lot of cultural beliefs and misbeliefs. We are damaging ourselves with these walls \u2013 we are damaging our ability to think, our ability to be creative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keenan is a hard man. He has returned four times to Lebanon \u2013 on his own \u2013 since he was released by his hooded kidnappers, to discover what he calls \u201cthe stories lying about on the streets of Beirut if you just pick them up\u201d. It\u2019s a phrase used by the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, who insisted that there was more than just one narrative \u2013 the Israeli story \u2013 about the Middle East, and it led Keenan to return to those who were behind his kidnapping. To understand all this, he thought, \u201cwas the debt Lebanon owed me\u201d.<\/p>\n

So he feels extraordinary sympathy with those who lost their loved ones in Paris. \u201cI acknowledge their right to be angry,\u201d he said. \u201cEven to put no restraint on their anger. But my own feeling is that anger can be healing if you use it in a meaningful way. Elie Wiesel has written of how he came back from the concentration camps full of anger \u2013 but he turned that into something creative.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not easy. He talked about the panacea for anger and violence \u2013 he said that a country that does not build on a foundation of love will ultimately wither away with the poison it feeds off.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m about to tell Brian Keenan that all this is a bit flippant after an airliner has been blown out of the sky and a Beirut crowd blown to bits and 129 French citizens blasted and machine-gunned to death, all in two weeks, when he put a finger in the air. \u201cPart of the problem with the Middle East,\u201d he said, \u201cis that war is diplomacy. That\u2019s at the root of how you \u2018justify\u2019 and \u2018meaningfully\u2019 deal with the problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe other thing to ask is: who are the war criminals? There\u2019s a kind of skewed vision of what a war criminal or a war crime is. We need to honestly think about this if we are going to talk about justice \u2013 so that everybody feels that justice is being done. If the Nakba [the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their land by Israel in 1948] has now gone global, we need a different set of principles. I don\u2019t know that people are ready to make that profound self-examination.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure that Isis cares about the Palestinians \u2013 Isis burned the Palestinian flag because it wanted a caliphate, not another national state \u2013 but Keenan talked about something far deeper.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wore a blindfold for four and a half years, and \u2018Western democracy\u2019 tells me that justice is blind. I\u2019m not sure about this \u2013 because until we can un-blindly question how power is dispensed, then we\u2019re all wearing blindfolds.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Hollandes and Camerons and Obamas of the world will not read these words, of course. Emotion, not reason, is the policy option. \u201cWithout mercy\u201d is now our dogma as well as that of Isis. Which is why Isis is winning. But I guess you need four and a half years in a blindfold to understand that.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East and a <\/em>correspondent for <\/em>The Independent, a UK newspaper.\u00a0 He is the author of many books on the region, including <\/em>The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 independent.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So immediately after the Paris massacres, I sought for reason, clarity and wisdom from a man who spent four and a half years in the hands of Muslim kidnappers \u2013 54 months wearing a blindfold, always waiting for death. Brian Keenan was held by Shia Muslims loyal to Hezbollah in Lebanon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}