Return-Path: <sentto-279987-1869-1000449521-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.1.0) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 13 Sep 2001 23:40:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 26228 invoked by uid 510); 14 Sep 2001 06:39:03 -0000 Received: from n7.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.57) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 14 Sep 2001 06:39:03 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-1869-1000449521-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.4.53] by fj.egroups.com with NNFMP; 14 Sep 2001 06:38:41 -0000 X-Sender: fc@big.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_1); 14 Sep 2001 06:38:41 -0000 Received: (qmail 49540 invoked from network); 14 Sep 2001 06:37:16 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 14 Sep 2001 06:37:16 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO big.all.net) (65.0.156.78) by mta2 with SMTP; 14 Sep 2001 06:37:15 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by big.all.net (8.9.3/8.7.3) id SAA19848 for iwar@onelist.com; Thu, 13 Sep 2001 18:35:10 -0700 Message-Id: <200109140135.SAA19848@big.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL1] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 18:35:10 -0700 (PDT) Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Subject: [iwar] [fc:How-Islamic-World-Learnt-To-Hate-The-US] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 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. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Secure all your Web servers now: Get your FREE Guide and learn to: DEPLOY THE LATEST ENCRYPTION, DELIVER TRANSPARENT PROTECTION, and More! http://us.click.yahoo.com/k0k.gC/nT7CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-09-29 21:08:43 PDT