[iwar] [fc:How-Islamic-World-Learnt-To-Hate-The-US]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-13 18:35:10


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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:How-Islamic-World-Learnt-To-Hate-The-US]
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London Times
September 13, 2001
How Islamic World Learnt To Hate The US
Michael Binyon On Dances Of Jubilation
Who hates America? What peoples, nations or governments are so twisted by
loathing that they can concoct such an atrocity, plan its execution and
dance in jubilation at the murder of thousands? As they grope through the
debris of normal life, Americans wonder why their country - prosperous,
peaceful and lawful, a symbol since its founding of freedom and opportunity
and a beacon for the oppressed and huddled masses - should have become the
target of so much hatred. 
No government has expressed anything but horror and grief at the carnage. No
group has dared take responsibility, for fear of immediate retaliation. But
the streets tell the story: rejoicing on the West Bank and in Palestinian
refugee camps, "happiness" in the mountains of Afghanistan, praise to Allah
among Muslims in northern Nigeria. 
Overwhelmingly it is among the poor, the dispossessed and those who see
themselves as victims that the rejoicing is heard. More ominously, such
sentiments are largely confined to one religion and one region: the Muslim
world. 
This is, for the West, a bitter commentary: it would seem to justify those
who see Islam as the new enemy of America, those who conclude that the
Islamic world has demonised the West, and America in particular. 
Certainly there are others who are anti-American, who denounce world
capitalism and see the United States as an arrogant superpower that deserves
to be attacked for its oppression of the poor. They include the political
radicals and intellectual revolutionaries of the European Left, the
disaffected of the Balkans, especially the Serbs, and a dwindling band of
hardline Marxists. But they do not have the cultural, religious and
political fanaticism to take them beyond conventional low-scale terrorist
attacks to suicidal mass terrorism. 
Besides, most of those who hate America politically would be happy to move
there, enjoy its wealth and live in its society. Soviet Russians, who before
the collapse of Communism resented being called "the evil empire", saw
America as a challenge for world supremacy and directed their efforts into
thwarting American power politically and militarily. But they never had a
personal burning hatred for the United States. It was political rivalry, not
messianic demonisation. "I want to emigrate to New York," Russians would
tell me in the 1970s. "We like Americans - they think big, like us." 
Serbs also, embittered as they were by the bombings during the Kosovo
conflict, share a Christian, Western culture with the United States,
understand its motivations and recognised that the military action was an
attack more on Slobodan Milosevic than on the Serb way of life. With the
ousting of Mr Milosevic, Serbian hatred has faded as daylight has streamed
into the country. 
It is very different in countries from Nigeria to Indonesia. Even in
Nigeria, far from the Middle East conflict, they were grieving for New
York's victims in much of the Christian South, while the Muslim North
rejoiced in the blow against America. 
The Muslim world has an old and proud culture, but one that has felt under
assault from the West for the past century. The modern Islamic revival has
been in contradistinction to the West and its overwhelming influence. 
This has coincided with a feeling of political powerlessness across much of
the Islamic world - a feeling that America dictates the agenda by which the
world lives and that Western assumptions now order the affairs of nations.
That feeling fuelled the Khomeini revolution in Iran and its virulent
denunciation of "the Great Satan." Often I have sat in Palestinian refugee
camps or the homes of ordinary, moderate Arabs and heard accusations not
just of British responsibility for the creation of Israel but of America's
unstinting support for Israeli occupation and Israeli settlements. 
Islamic radicalism draws its strength from a burning sense of injustice. Any
glance at the history of the Middle East and the Muslim world beyond shows
that, since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, barely a decade has passed without
some Muslim area in Asia or Africa being lost to the Western Christian
powers, or Muslims fighting against the encroachments of these powers. The
campaigns of the past century in Central Asia, the East Indies, North Africa
and India and more recent interventions in Iran, Turkey and the Arab world
add up to more than 250 years of combat. Muslims see them as wars of
religion, waged not only in defence of territory but also of Islam. 
The West is often blithely unaware of this. If we think about the havoc the
West has caused in the Muslim world, we think mainly of what we have given
to the area: education systems, transport links, technology, agriculture,
political structures, satellite television and the Western way of life. We
do not think of what we took away, what we destroyed, consciously or
unconsciously: Koranic education, a sense of community, social coherence,
the old religious legal system; above all, respect for Muslim culture and
values. 
The West has never understood the umma - the sense of community within
Islam. Nationhood in Western history is based on ethnic and linguistic
foundations, not on common spiritual assumptions. Nationalism is the force
the West developed, and a bacillus that has also produced a fever in the
Middle East. But Muslims look back on a glorious past a thousand years ago
and know they have been left far behind. 
America is the model now. It is not just envy that motivates those who say
that Islam is the answer and turn back to their roots and their past. It is
a rejection of the sort of success that they see as as corrosive and
intrusive - bringing pornography to the Internet, the atomisation of
families, the neglect of religious values. 
The crisis has been gathering pace and bitterness. It has led to mutual
incomprehension. The West looks at Muslim political systems and shakes its
head in despair. In few countries is there a functioning model based on the
rule of law, human rights, democracy and political legitimacy. The closer a
system comes to such a model, in Malaysia or Morocco, the less the
anti-Western virulence. But the more repressed the population and the
greater the sense of injustice - in Iraq, Pakistan or Sudan - the more the
ordinary person sees a conspiracy of the powerful, led by America, to keep
them in misery. 
The result can be a zeal bred in the alleyways of Gaza or the slums of
Tehran that sees hope only in the elimination of the enemy, the crushing of
the "Great Satan". This is the hope that is perverted into terrorism, the
promise achievable only with the destruction of America's monopoly of power
and influence. It is the deadly force that has brought mayhem to Manhattan's
streets.

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