A Power of Love

This DoubleQuotes is another supplement to my recent series on Decommissioning Terror.

I have chosen these two quotes because each of them cropped up in my reading in recent days, and each in turn has something profound to say about the mindsets of hatred and love.

The first startled me with that powerful phrase, a heaven-hell binary. which exactly captures the mindset in which onself is right to the point of certainty and the other is wrong to the point of demonization. In this case, it's the conflict between western and Islamic versions of human rights that is at stake, and Shadi Mokhtari's article on the topic is worth reading in full. But what does it take to cure that dichotomy? Judge Hitar's dialogue is suggestive, but again, I've already used it in a previous DoubleQuotes -- and I also wanted to use a reference to James Aho's excellent book, This Thing of Darkness.

In his book, Aho tells the story of a KKK Grand Wizard, Larry Trapp, who was "turned" by the respectful attitude of a Jewish cantor, Michael Weisser, and renounced the Klan, hatred and racism -- a story that is also told in Kathryn Watterson's Not by the Sword: How a Cantor and His Family Transformed a Klansman. This story, which Cantor Weisser himself describes as a "love story", is about the only other story I know of to compare with Bruce Hoffman's story of the Black Septembrists and Judge Hitar's tale of dialogues with the jihadists of Yemen, as illustrating a method of "curing" terrorism in those afflicted.

The particular quote I've used here does not tell that story, but immediately prefaces it in Aho's book, acting as a definition of the kind of transformative story that is about to be told. As an analyst with an interest in policy-making which has just this kind of transformative potential, I am of course particularly moved by that final, simple statement:

How such significant others are to be generated, assuming they can be, is perhaps the most challenging policy question of all.