The Enemy At Home (12 page)

What puzzles and frustrates Muslims is that they see America acting
against
self-interest in repeatedly and unbendingly allying with the state of Israel. Muslims of all stripes profess amazement that a country would make enemies of people who have oil in order to make friends with people who have nothing. “It would be one thing if these Jews had the same ancestry as Americans or if they practiced the same religion as you do,” one Muslim lawyer complained to me. “You have nothing in common with them. Yet you risk American lives and give them billions of dollars and endanger your position in the whole Arab world on their account. You refused to reexamine your support for Israel even when faced with an oil embargo that severely injured your economy. Why do you give up so much for the Jews? What are the Jews giving you in return?” The man said he wished America would act more selfishly and less idealistically. “We understand your interests,” he said. “We don’t understand your ideals.” It is this sort of thinking that leads to theories of Jewish conspiracy that abound in the Muslim world.

They’re angry because American actions have killed so many Muslims.
Actually America has actively fought on the side of Muslims in several recent conflicts. During the 1970s the United States supported the Afghan mujahedin and their Arab allies in driving the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. In 1991 the United States assembled an international coalition of countries, including many Muslim countries, in order to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and restore the sovereignty of that small Muslim country. Later in the decade, President Clinton ordered American bombings and intervention to save Muslim lives in Bosnia and Kosovo. True, many Muslims hold America accountable for Israel’s military actions in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories. And Muslims frequently deplore the civilian lives lost in the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. These deaths, however, are small in number compared with the devastation that other invading armies, including Muslim armies, have wrought through the centuries right down to the present day.

For instance, when the Mongols stormed through Iran and Iraq—already having laid waste in China, India, and Russia—they massacred all the men in sight, enslaved the women and children, and looted, pillaged, and burned. Muslim histories record the devastation that ensued when the Mongols in 1258 killed the last Abbasid caliph and sacked Baghdad. Compared to the Mongols, the American invaders of the early twenty-first century seem like amateurs, jeopardizing their own soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq to minimize civilian casualties, even distributing food to Afghan families in the course of getting rid of the Taliban. Muslims are fully aware that when the Mongols sped across Muslim lands they did not seek to ameliorate the sufferings of Muslim families by handing out bowls of Mongolian beef.

Moreover Muslims have demonstrated their own skills at invasion, conquest, and killing. Recall that Constantinople used to be a Christian city, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. When Mehmet the Conqueror captured Constantinople in 1453, he rode his horse into Hagia Sophia and proclaimed that the cathedral would henceforth become a mosque. Mehmet then gave his soldiers permission to loot the city for three days.
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In Iraq, by contrast, the American soldiers who put up an American flag were ordered to take it down and put up the Iraqi flag instead. No mosques were converted into churches. The only looting that followed Saddam Hussein’s ouster in Iraq was carried out by Iraqis, while many American liberals blamed the American government for permitting it to occur.

More recent Muslim wars, such as the Iran-Iraq war, have also produced unbelievable horrors and casualty lists. Over the eight-year period of the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, between five hundred thousand and 1 million Muslims were killed. Several hundred thousand Muslims have been killed by the Sudanese regime as the result of civil strife in Darfur. All of the conflicts involving Israel and the Muslims, including the Palestinian struggle and all the Arab-Israeli wars, have not come close to this level of slaughter. Despite the vaunted power of American “shock and awe” technology, America simply cannot keep pace with the mass killings that Muslim nations have inflicted on one another. Islamic radicals know all this, which is why one cannot find in their literature the kind of indignation over America’s killing of Muslim civilians that one routinely finds in liberal magazines, radio shows, and Web sites. Liberal apoplexy over American actions appears to be sustained mainly by omitting any historical context and by ignoring how Muslim nations themselves have acted, both against Christians and against one another.

They’re outraged about America’s treatment of Muslim prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib
: Historian Bernard Lewis has pointed out that compared to prisons throughout the Arab world, Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are like Disneyland. Certainly in terms of cleanliness, food, and amenities, America’s prisons are comparable to the accommodations in midlevel Middle Eastern hotels. Many on the left, no doubt, will protest such comparisons. In the liberal view, Muslim prisoners—even if they are not American citizens—are entitled to their basic rights, such as the right to a lawyer, a right to know the charges against them, a right to a speedy trial, and so on. But Islamic radicals of the Al Qaeda stripe are unaccustomed to these rights in their own countries. They can hardly expect from America any treatment other than what they would mete out to American prisoners that fall into their captivity. Their own methods for dealing with American captives include torture and decapitation.

Consequently it is doubtful that Muslim fighters and insurgents are outraged about being tortured—they expect to be tortured. If Muslim fundamentalists are enraged by American abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, it has to be for reasons other than legal deprivation or even torture. When I raised this point in a recent speech a liberal professor angrily responded, “What infuriates them is that America holds itself to a higher standard!” My answer was: Why should Muslims care whether America lives up to its standards or not? It makes no sense for a Muslim to say, “Yes, America’s prisons are probably some of the best places in the world for Muslims to be held captive, but we continue to be outraged at America because America’s high standards demand even more lenient treatment.” For radical Muslims to say this would be to concede America’s moral superiority—something they will never admit, and do not believe in.

My conclusion is that the main reasons that liberal scholars and activists give to explain the antagonism of the Islamic radicals toward America are fallacious.

THE PROBLEM OF
ethnocentrism—and the distortions it produces—is not restricted to liberals. Let us now consider some errors generated by conservative ethnocentrism. In particular, I want to refute the notion, popular on the right, that radical Islam can be understood as the latest incarnation of totalitarian movements that the West has seen before, such as the Nazis and the communists. Since Islamic radicalism seems to have succeeded those movements in threatening the West, some conservatives seek to understand the new war on terrorism in the light of previous great wars that the West has fought. As we saw in an earlier chapter, conservatives commonly refer to the Islamic radicals and fundamentalists as “Islamofascists” or robed Bolsheviks, and some even try and explain their philosophy as a variation of fascism or Nazism. While there is an ideological kinship between fascism and the secular Baath movements in Syria and Iraq, there is no connection—there is not even a similarity—between twentieth-century Western fascism and contemporary Islamic fundamentalism.

Nor can Islamic radicalism and fundamentalism be helpfully understood by invoking the analogy of the Cold War. Norman Podhoretz and others have dubbed the contemporary conflict “World War IV,” and there is no harm in this, if you want to place the great wars of our time in historical sequence or to highlight the global scope of the conflict. But if the Cold War constituted World War III, it represented a very different kind of battle from the one against Islamic radicalism. The Soviets had a mammoth arsenal of nuclear weapons and could threaten nuclear Armageddon. The Muslim radicals are undoubtedly trying to get their hands on a nuclear bomb, but clearly they are not even close to posing a doomsday threat.

Even so, the Islamic radicals have something that the Soviet communists, particularly toward the end, did not have—true believers. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, the only place to find true-believing Marxists was in the humanities and social science departments of elite universities in the United States, Canada, and Europe. There seemed to be scarcely any left in the Soviet Union. By contrast, Islam today is teeming with true-believing radicals who are willing to give their lives to destroy America and the West. Moreover, Nazism and communism were movements within Western civilization that could easily be understood in Western terms. Their language was familiar, and their goals fully understandable within the Western conceptual framework. One might not agree with Marxist goals such as state ownership of property, the rule of the working class, or the global proletarian revolution, but there was little doubt about what such concepts meant. Marx was, after all, a “dead white male” who was educated in the Western intellectual canon.

By contrast, we need to move outside the familiar orbit of Western civilization in order to understand Islamic radicalism. Recall that for all the fanaticism produced by the Nazis and the communists, neither movement produced a single suicide bomber. The Japanese during World War II produced suicide bombers—the kamikazes—but the kamikazes were combat soldiers, military men. The Japanese never sought to persuade civilians, such as students and immigrants and mothers of two, to destroy themselves in murderous attacks against civilian targets. Clearly something new is going on. And while suicide attacks and murder missions are not restricted to the Muslim world, most of them either occur in the Muslim world or are perpetrated by Muslims.

The common element between Nazism and communism is that both were ideologies rooted in atheism. Significantly, many in the West spoke of “godless communism.” The distinguishing feature of Islamic radicalism is that it is Islamic. This is easily overlooked in the West for a reason given by historian Bernard Lewis: “Most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.”
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Consequently the danger of ethnocentric blinders is particularly severe when Western observers—especially secular Western observers—seek to understand a religious culture such as that of Islam. The intense religiosity of that culture, not simply at its point of historical origin but even today, generates surprise and even incomprehension among many Americans and Europeans. Even when Muslims insist they are acting out of religious conviction, these Westerners refuse to believe it, and attribute Muslim behavior to some other “genuine” motive.

At the sentencing trial of Ramzi Yusuf, who was convicted of conspiring in 1993 to blow up the World Trade Center, Judge Kevin Duffy declared that the defendant “cared little or nothing for Islam.” Addressing Yusuf, Duffy informed him, “Your God is not Allah. Your god is death.”
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For all his self-assurance, Duffy was speaking the purest nonsense. Unfortunately, proclamations of this sort are quite common and are issued not only by indignant judges but also by scholars and policy makers.

My broader point is that no real understanding of Islamic culture is possible that refuses to take Islam seriously. The reason is that even now across the Muslim world, many centuries after the death of Muhammad, Islam retains the force of its original revelation. In that world, unity based on shared religious identity is expected in the sphere of international relations. Despite their differences, Muslim governments throughout the Middle East have constructed a complex apparatus of consultation, cooperation, and common action. They routinely articulate a “Muslim position” on various policy questions. To see how odd this is, imagine if someone suggested that the Protestant nations of Germany, Holland, and the United States unite as a “Protestant coalition,” or that the Catholic countries of southern Europe and South America form a “Catholic league,” or that the Buddhist countries of Eastern and Southern Asia unify as a “Buddhist bloc.” The nations in question would regard such suggestions as absurd. Yet Muslim countries find such joint action to be not only sensible but in some sense religiously mandated.

Moreover, Islamic identity is even stronger in domestic than in international issues. Lewis writes, “In no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders command the degree of religious belief and the extent of religious participation by their followers that are usual in Muslim lands. Christian leaders do not exercise or even claim the kind of political role that in Muslim lands is not only common but is widely accepted as proper.” Unlike many Christians, who have multiple identities only one of which is that they happen to be Christian, Muslims typically regard their religion as central to both private and public identity, and consider all other affiliations as secondary or derivative. As we will see, Islamic radicalism draws from these deep wells of piety. Lewis writes that even today, across an entire civilization, “Islam is the most powerful rallying-cry, and it is for Islam, more than for any other cause, that men are willing to kill and be killed.”
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This point is borne out by the very names of the organizations of radical Islam. The term “Al Qaeda” means “the foundation” or “the base,” which in this case refers to the foundation of a worldwide Islamic resistance. The largest group of radical Islam, with chapters throughout the Middle East, is called the Muslim Brotherhood; one of its famous slogans is “The Koran is our constitution.” Hezbollah, the Iran-supported group that launched the 2006 rocket attacks against Israel from Lebanon, has a name that means “Party of God.” Its motto is taken directly from the Koran. The Palestinian terror group Hamas gets its name from an Arabic acronym for “Islamic resistance movement”; the word itself means “enthusiasm” or “zeal.” Muslim radicals in Algeria, who almost took over the government in the 1990s, called themselves the Islamic Salvation Front.