Ideological zeal achieves moral blindness by treating enemies as categories, not persons

Evidence

To put one’s faith in religious or nationalist dogma requires a kind of moral blindness to human suffering—something that David painfully learns when his youthful U.S.-centered political certainties crumble in the face of the conflicting demands of love. His early position is replicated in the new generation by James Palantine, son of an erstwhile friend for whom ideology outweighs the personal: he berates David for not being able to bury his personal feelings in the interests of America’s strategic priorities (387). Palantine acts as Casa’s opposite number in terms of uncompromising zeal. He comes to personify the U.S.-led war on terror, investing fully in the American nation and its symbols and seeing himself as defending it against a rampaging monolithic Islam with designs on the homeland: “Al Qaeda hiding in the mouth of the Golden Eagle.… They want to do to the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore what they did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan” (380–81, ellipses in original). Later on, when Palantine has captured Casa and is torturing him for information, he tells an appalled David, “It’s nothing personal against this man.… It’s not between him and me. It’s between them and us” (411). His view of the Islamic enemy demands a dehumanization that, in his willingness to employ “enhanced interrogation techniques,” reflects his own limited conceptions of what is human and inhuman. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 408

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Changez’s dynamic in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — the enemy as category, ‘them and us’. Sharper lens for reading Hamid’s book. — connects to: Religious polemic uses enemies’ moral example as a mirror for self-criticism; the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• DEFINE: Defines the distinguishing move Morey wants: fiction contests fear when it forces the reader to see the ‘them and us’ collapse into a particular, suffering person.
• QUESTION: Does Palantine’s explicit symmetry with Casa (opposite number in zeal) mean the novel is contesting the symmetry claim — that both sides are equally ideological — or advancing it?