Despots & dictators: Why are there Middle East thugs?

Micah Halpern is fascinated by evil — so much so that his latest book is devoted exclusively to that timeless subject.

The book in question is entitled Thugs, a title not particularly beloved by its own author, who preferred Despots, Demons & Dictators.

However, in a rapid fire interview just after he addressed a Denver luncheon of the Jewish National Fund, Halpern grudgingly admitted that the final title is indeed apt.

The word “thug,” he explained, derives from Sanskrit, and was originally applied to a well-organized band of professional assassins who once plied their deadly trade throughout India.

Assassins — not to mention despots, demons and dictators — are certainly included among the practitioners of evil whom Halpern profiles in Thugs.

“Every chapter is filled with piquant stories about very interesting characters,” says Halpern, a man whose quick wit, rapier humor and extensive knowledge are put to regular use in an amazing array of speeches, radio shows, television commentaries, newspaper columns, websites and university classrooms in places like Yale, Brandeis and Hebrew University.

Imelda Marcos is among those profiled in Thugs. Halpern takes full account of the former Filipino first lady and later strongwoman, noting not only her corruption and draconian leadership, but her manic obsession with security, illustrated by a custom bulletproof bra.

King Farouk, Egypt’s last monarch, also gets his share of the author’s disdain.

Halpern depicts him as a master pickpocket, who once stole Winston Churchill’s watch during a diplomatic encounter. Farouk also had what was reputed to be the world’s largest pornography collection and became so obese in his later life that Egyptians took to calling him “a stomach with a head.”

Nor do Jews totally escape Halpern’s poison pen. King Herod gets his own considerable nod.

“Herod is another example,” he says. “He was a great builder — built the Temple, for Pete’s sake. But you could not question him. The joke was that it was better to be Herod’s slave than to be a citizen of Jerusalem. And being a family member was really bad.”

Although peppered with humor and plentiful bizarre anecdotes, Thugs spins around a very serious center, Halpern says.

“They are evil, don’t get me wrong,” he says of his subjects, “but I humanize them and explain how important it is for us to engage them.”

While Halpern does play around a bit with philosophical and theological takes on evil, he is most interested in the human response to it.

“We as a society, and Jews as a people, struggle with the challenge of evil. We can’t just assume it’s just a straw man who will be easily brought down. We have to realize that it’s our responsibility to confront it. If we don’t confront it, we become, for lack of a better expression, part of the problem. We have to engage them, to know about them, to know the people themselves.”

As to whether evil can be inherent or incarnate, Halpern doesn’t go there. He is confident in judging the actions of individuals as good or evil, but not the motivations or psychological dynamics that lead to those actions.

“There are actions which are evil,” he says simply. “It’s up to courts and juries to determine punishments of individuals.”

It strikes him as significant that American jurisprudence seems to be evolving to a place where “guilty by reason of insanity” is increasingly being viewed as legitimate grounds for prosecution.

“There’s no such thing as being not responsible. There might be a different punishment for it, but you can’t assume it didn’t happen because you’re claiming insanity.”

Like all adept conversationalists and raconteurs, Halpern is a master of repartee.

It’s both challenging and fun following the dips and turns, the divisions and subdivisions, of his thinking process.

For example, his ponderings on evil segue seamlessly into terrorism, which seems to be the subject on which the eclectic Halpern devotes the majority of his speaking, writing and thinking.

The act of terror is undeniably evil, he says, even though the perpetrators might think they are justified in perpetrating it.

“Justification does not make what they do right,” Halpern says. “It’s important to say and articulate that the purpose of terrorism is to affect change through fear — to take or threaten people’s lives in order to change political issues.

“When people say one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, it’s a misunderstanding. It’s a justification and it’s wrong. Fundamentally, taking innocent human lives is wrong.”

There is a distinct difference between terrorism and military aggression, he says.

“It’s an issue of objectives,” he says.

“When Hamas takes a rocket — which by definition cannot have a guidance system or else it would be called a missile — and they shoot it so that wherever it lands it lands, that is deliberately an act of terror.

“But if they were to take a force and attack an Israeli army base, or even kidnap Israeli soldiers, they’re no longer terrorists. That is an act of war. They’re fighting warriors. But to blow up people in the middle of a city in cafeterias or on buses, or to shoot rockets, is by definition acts of terror.”

In the recent Israeli attack on Gaza, innocent civilians were killed, Halpern says, but one cannot ignore the fact that Israel made thousands of cell phone calls to warn Palestinians that strikes were impending.

The difference is all-important, Halpern says. It’s precisely the difference between good and evil.

On the subject of Hamas and Gaza, Halpern peers through the smoke and rubble, the international condemnations and Israeli defensiveness, to find what he believes to be at the core.

“The importance of this operation to Israel — and the importance of this to the Arab world, especially Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — is that the Palestinian Authority has to start now taking charge and oust Hamas, or at least usurp their role in Gaza.

“Without that, you have a situation where Hamas has not just the veto vote, they have the total vote over any development that might take place. It’s a three-state solution, not a two-state solution, and that’s unacceptable to everyone. Egypt certainly doesn’t want that and Israel can’t tolerate it.”

Hamas, of course, has no interest in forming any sort of unity government with Fatah, their arch-rivals and — as Hamas knows only too well — a useful, if ironic, ally of Israel during the Gaza operation.

“There’s no love lost here,” Halpern says of the Palestinian factions, predicting that even though there has already been one virtual civil war between the two, another one might remain a vital necessity.

“Civil war?” he responds when asked about the likelihood of such a clash. “Not unless Fatah and Abbas take it seriously and right now they’re not. Right now, they’re satisfied staying out of Gaza. But in order to bring this to a conclusion, they’re going to have to take over Gaza again.”

Asked to deliver a “state of terror” analysis in this post-9/11 era, Halpern delineates:

“From the point of view of the Islamic terrorist, 9/11 was the zenith, but is not their future zenith,” he says without skipping a beat. “One of the reasons the United States has not suffered an attack similar to 9/11 is because the terrorists couldn’t replicate the size of the 9/11 attack. A lot of it had to do with planning and luck — a lot of luck.

“There is no doubt in the terrorists’ mind that this was a great victory. Some believed that actually it was the end of the great demon — the United States.

“But reality says the opposite. They thought that this was a death blow to America. They chose those targets for a reason — the World Trade Center, the Pentagon —classic targets. They have great symbolic value, not for what it would do for America but because of the way it would resonate across the communities that they want to get more advocates from. It’s a huge message to those advocates and those people who are supporting them.”

Halpern believes that the primary intended audience for the 9/11 horror show was not the US itself, but the Islamic world.

“It’s not only about us,” he says. “Yes, we were the target, but we were only one element in the communication process. Hitting the World Trade Center said to their world, ‘See, we can hit America with impunity. See what we can do.’”

The attacks on 9/11, however, may have been more self-destructive to the terrorists than to the obvious victim who, until then, had more or less accepted the idea of sustaining a “modicum” of terror, as evidenced by the first World Trade Center bombing, the attack on the USS Cole and strikes against US embassies in Africa.

“What the terrorists don’t seem to understand is that their success was actually part of their downfall. Suddenly, the sleeping giant awoke. That’s a cliché, but it succinctly describes what happens next, which is that an entire bureaucratic mechanism was put in place . . . to fight terror for the first time. A deployment of assets, resources, people, agencies — incredible.

“So the United States changed. Before 9/11, the US wasn’t even in the park, playing the game. Now they’re at the plate swinging. They’re hitting and they’re missing, but they’re playing the game.”

Much of the credit for the effective mobilization of the US against terror goes to recently departed President George W. Bush, Halpern says.

“The first thing is the reality that the US has not been struck (since 9/11), which is kudos to George Bush on that level. He got all these mechanisms working, which is very important.

“We now have enemies, on our side, fighting terror. There are people who we don’t know — are they a friend or are they not? — also working on that level. Saudi Arabia is a classic example. Saudi Arabia is building a 900-mile fence, modeled on Israel’s fence, to protect themselves from religious extremists.”

That significant sea-change, Halpern opines, is also largely Bush’s doing.

As to President Barack Obama, recently inaugurated, he admits to a degree of skepticism.

“I’m always skeptical,” he says. “It’s my job to be skeptical. My instincts are that Obama is aware of issues, is a quick learner and he’s getting his briefings, and those briefings are humbling.”

This is how Halpern envisions such briefings:

“You start your day in the morning, finding out how many people want to strike American people, institutions and agencies, and America itself, at home and abroad, and how many are moving in that direction, and what you have to do to try to stop them, and what your friends are saying and doing, and whether your friends can be relied upon or not relied upon to help protect America.”

Still, Halpern’s skepticism looms, at least when it comes to the new administration’s relations with Israel.

“I do not believe that Obama is an anti-Semite or that his administration is anti-Israel or any of that stuff — that’s hogwash. I do know full well that the perspective of even-handedness is problematic from the point of view of lovers of Israel. Even when you level the playing field, the relationship is in question. And there’s a very special relationship with the US.”

Halpern isn’t worried that the US-Israel relationship is in serious trouble, “but you’ve got to realize that friends can hurt you, too. There will be some tough love, I’m sure. Israel has to learn to adroitly say no. They have to realize that their interests are not necessarily American interests.”

Halpern wasn’t very impressed that Israel ended its Gaza operation on the day of Obama’s inauguration. It was throwing Obama a bone, and not necessarily one in Israel’s best interests, he feels.

But he reminds that Bush also never really give Israel carte blanche either. While Bush routinely played the good cop, Condoleezza Rice often played the bad cop.

“It’s too simple to see this as slipping from one pendulum swing to another,” Halpern says. “It’s much more subtle.”

At the epicenter of much of today’s terrorism and East-West confrontation is the master weaver of webs — Iran.

Characteristically, Halpern takes a non-conventional approach to Iran, emphasizing how Iran seldom acts in a directly offensive manner. For thousands of years, he says, Iran has tended to operate from a defensive strategy. Its preference is to use proxies to do much of the dirty offensive work, with today’s surrogates being Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria.

“Iran is very, very dangerous because we can’t always interpret their understanding of things,” Halpern says. “They speak in a language that is unique to themselves, and that we do not understand well.

“We don’t know what they’re going to see as an attack. The Straits of Hormuz is a very dangerous area. A third of the world’s oil goes through it and they are right on top of it. Will they see world sanctions as an attack against them? Will they see a surgical missile strike as an attack against them?”

Iran’s ability to manipulate and mobilize international terror is considerable. It is entrenched in universities across the world, spreading a message of extremist Islam.

Most important, it remains dedicated to developing a nuclear weapons program, one which, under the right circumstances, it might be willing to use.

“It’s very much a threat against Israel,” he says.

Neutralizing that threat, however, will be far from easy, says Halpern, who feels that Israel would likely have to go it alone if it came to armed confrontation with Iran.

Leaving all-out nuclear war — “just wiping them off the map” — out of the equation, Halpern says effectively striking Iranian missile sites would be very difficult.

He worries about this: Could Israel hit Iranian launching sites hard enough to obviate a counter-attack which, even with conventional weapons, could cause massive Israeli casualties. Halpern cites Israeli estimates that 100,000 could die in such a scenario.

“Israel will not even begin to contemplate a strike unless it can get that number down to 7,000 or 8,000,” he says in the grim militaristic language of casualty counts.

Taking all that into account, internal change within Iran remains the best hope for avoiding such hard choices, he feels.

In Halpern’s view, Iran’s leadership is “frightened terribly” of its own increasingly discontented population.

“Eighty percent of Iran is under the age of 30, which means that you’ve got kids all over the place. Kids like three things — music, sex and friends — and the youth of Iran hate, despise, their religious leadership. They love Western culture. They don’t particularly like American policy, but that’s not a deal-breaker. In a certain amount of time, something is going to happen there.”

That doesn’t lessen the present danger, Halpern warns.

“Might it come to a point where a military strike is inevitable? Yeah, it might. One thing for sure is that it can’t ever be taken off the table.”