The Enemy At Home (11 page)

Almost as disturbing as the suicide bombings and murderous attacks themselves are the celebrations and justifications offered by Islamic radicals. On September 11, 2001, Hamas issued an “Open Letter to America,” which ended, “We stand in line and beg Allah to give you to drink from the cup of humiliation—and behold, heaven has answered.” While terrorist actions like 9/11 inspire Muslim jubilation, few Muslims seem interested in publicly condemning suicide missions and the murder of innocents. Even the condemnations appear to assume a defensive mode. Listen to the words of Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent physician in Gaza who is generally liberal and pro-American in a part of the world where those qualities are a rarity: “Martyrs are at the level of prophets. They are untouchable. I can denounce suicide bombings, which I have many times, but not the martyrs themselves, because they are like saints. The martyr sacrifices himself for the nation. If you want to be a part of this culture, you have to understand this. I don’t believe in religion myself, but I cannot say that martyrs are wrong. If you do that, you will discredit yourself completely.”
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Some Western analysts, baffled and dismayed, have tried to interpret suicide bombings and murder attacks as the desperate actions of losers who can’t get a girl in this life and so strap bombs on their chest in the hope of getting seventy-two virgins in paradise.
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Or maybe the suicide bombers simply hope to cash in on the few thousand dollars that their sponsors typically contribute to the families of the martyrs. In one or two cases, such as the pathetic “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, this description rings true, but as a generalization it seems dubious. After all, there are plenty of losers in America: how many of them could be persuaded to blow themselves up for a little money and the prospect of six dozen virgins in heaven? Even losers are smart enough to say, “First show me the virgins.”

Moreover, it is not just the bombers we need to understand but the culture that produces large numbers of them. Even if many of the bombers are pathological or deluded, we need to figure out the system that finds such men and directs them to lethal political ends. In other words, we need to understand the motivation not merely of the compliant bombers but also of the powerful men who recruit them, train them, and then send them out to kill and be killed. Even more broadly, we require a better grasp of the tidal wave of resentment toward the United States that is coming from the Islamic world. This hatred is so strong that a 2005 Zogby survey showed Muslims would rather have China, instead of the United States, as the world’s superpower. The suicide bombers are only the most extreme expression of an anti-American animus that seems widely shared among Muslims.

AMERICAN LIBERALS HAVE
a confident explanation for suicide bombers and insurgents: they are striking back against America and Europe for the West’s long and continuing history of oppression, conquest, occupation, and exploitation. In understanding Islamic radicalism, many liberals focus on the sins of Western history and American foreign policy. It is illuminating to consider some of the main outlines of this analysis.

They’re very upset at us for the Crusades.
In an earlier chapter I quoted Bill Clinton’s argument that Muslims are still exchanging horror stories about the Crusades. Clinton’s view is passionately advocated in James Carroll’s recent book
Crusade,
which portrays the Crusades as a horrific act of Western aggression that still shapes the military thinking of America’s leaders and inspires outrage in the Muslim world. “The Crusades were a set of world historic crimes,” Carroll writes. “That trail of violence scars the earth and human memory even to this day—especially in the places where the crusaders wreaked their havoc.”
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President Bush himself seems unnerved by the term. Having once described the American response to Al Qaeda as a “Crusade,” Bush promptly apologized for using this scary word. The best thing going for Clinton’s and Carroll’s argument is that bin Laden frequently describes Americans and Europeans as “Crusaders.”

Is it reasonable to think that Muslims today are genuinely outraged about events that occurred a thousand years ago? It’s true that Muslims have a good general knowledge of their history. It’s possible that they have extremely long memories. But precisely for these reasons, we can be sure that the argument advanced by Clinton and Carroll is wrong. Let us remember that before the rise of Islam, the region we call the Middle East was predominantly Christian. There were Zoroastrians in Persia, polytheists in Arabia, and Jews in Palestine, but most of the people in what we now call Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt were Christian. The sacred places in Christianity—where Christ was born, lived, and died—are in that region. Inspired by Islam’s call to jihad, Muhammad’s armies conquered Jerusalem and the entire Middle East, then pushed south into Africa, east into Asia, and north into Europe. They conquered parts of Italy and most of Spain, invaded the Balkans, and were preparing for a final incursion that would bring all of Europe under the rule of Islam. So serious was the Islamic threat that Edward Gibbon speculated that if the West had not fought back, “Perhaps the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet.”
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More than two hundred years after Islamic armies conquered the Middle East and forced their way into Europe, the Christians finally did strike back. Rallied by the pope and the ruling dynasties of Europe, the Christians attempted in the eleventh century to recover the heartland of Christianity and to repel the irredentist forces of Islam. These efforts are now called “the Crusades.” (The term is an invention of modern scholarship; it was unknown to the Christians and Muslims who fought in those battles.) The First Crusade was a modest success. The Christians captured Jerusalem in 1099. Then the Muslims regrouped and routed the Crusaders, and Saladin re-conquered Jerusalem in 1187. Subsequent Crusades were failures, and Jerusalem remained under Muslim rule.

The Crusades were important to Europe because they represented a fight to capture Christianity’s holiest site and also because they were part of a battle for the survival of Europe. The Crusades are also seen as a precursor to Europe’s voyages of exploration and conquest, which inaugurated the modern era. By contrast, the Crusades have never been important to the Muslim world. Muslims were already in control of their own holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Not once did the Crusaders threaten the heartland of Islam. From the point of view of Muslim historians, those battles were seen as minor disruptions on the periphery of the Islamic empire. The Abbasid caliphs, based in Baghdad, were far more concerned with rival Islamic dynasties, such as the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt.

In summary, the Crusades were a belated, clumsy, and defensive reaction against a much longer, more relentless, and more successful Muslim assault against Christendom. Liberal scholars like Carroll view the Crusades as a clear example of the pointless and harmful effects of “holy war.” Christendom, in their view, was simply not worth defending in this way. The striking aspect of the liberal critique is that it stresses the horrors of the Crusades while virtually ignoring the Islamic jihad to which the Crusades were a response. Even if liberals detest the Crusades, however, there is no good reason for many of today’s Muslims to care about them, and there is no evidence that they think about the subject at all. So why does bin Laden still invoke the term? As we will see in later chapters, bin Laden uses the term “Crusaders” to mean something entirely different from the knights who rode with Richard the Lion Heart. Some liberals will continue to cite those medieval Christian campaigns to discredit the war against terrorism, but their argument that contemporary Islamic radicals are legitimately incensed about the Crusades is without merit.

They’re angry about colonialism.
Many on the cultural left, like Edward Said, attribute Muslim rage to the still-fresh wounds of Western conquest and subjugation. Said laments the plight of “the ravaged colonial peoples who for centuries endured summary injustice, unending economic oppression, distortion of their social and intimate lives, and a recourseless submission that was the function of unchanging European superiority.”
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But if the Islamic radicals are smoldering over Western colonialism, why would they launch their attacks now, a half century after colonialism ended and the Europeans went home? Let’s recall that European colonialism in the Middle East was relatively brief, and with the exception of the French in Algeria, the Europeans didn’t rule directly but through surrogates. After World War I, the British and the French established a series of protectorates and mandates in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, and the Sudan. The French effectively controlled Lebanon and Syria, and the British were the de facto rulers in Transjordan and Iraq. Naturally many Muslims disliked European dominance, but if today’s Muslims are so angry about their countries being ruled indirectly for decades, why aren’t the Asian Indians even more incensed about being ruled directly for centuries? Yet there is a lot of anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world and very little of it in India.

In addition, the radical Muslims know that Islam had its own empires. When the Muslims were strong they conquered other nations; when the Muslims became weak other nations dominated them. There are no grounds here for shock and outrage. Of course the Muslims fought to oust their colonial occupiers, and sometimes they were successful, as in Algeria. But even without wars of independence the Europeans gave the Muslims the rest of their countries back, while Islam has never voluntarily returned the territories that over the centuries it seized by force.

Moreover America—the focal point of the anger of radical Muslims—has virtually no history of colonialism in the Middle East. If the Filipinos or American Indians were launching suicide bombers in New York, their actions could perhaps be attributed to a reaction against colonial subjugation. But until the Bush administration ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, America had never occupied a Muslim country. This was not for lack of opportunity. After World War II, America could quite easily have colonized the entire Middle East, but never even considered doing so.

America’s record is one of opposing British and French colonial initiatives, and of encouraging the European colonial powers to withdraw from the Middle East. Liberal scholar Rashid Khalidi admits, “For many years after World War II the United States continued to be seen by people in the Middle East as a potential ally against the old colonial powers, and indeed played such a role in Libya in 1950–51, during the Suez War of 1956, and the Algerian War of Liberation from France in 1954–62.”
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So Muslim anti-Americanism has to be explained by factors other than colonial occupation in the Middle East, since prior to 9/11 America has no record of colonial occupation in the Middle East.

They’re resentful because America continues to support unelected dictators in the Middle East.
This is a very peculiar argument for liberals to make. How can Islamic radicals be upset that America supports tyrannical regimes in the Middle East when, except for Israel, there are no other kinds of regimes in the Middle East? True, America has historically supported despotic rulers like the shah of Iran, and even now America is allied with dictators in Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. If you read bin Laden’s statements, however, you see that his objection is not that America supports unelected rulers, but that America supports the
wrong kind
of unelected rulers. Bin Laden is not a democrat, and he could hardly fault America for ignoring principles of free elections and self-government that bin Laden himself does not believe in. Rather, bin Laden’s objection is that America supports the tyranny of the infidel while he himself supports the tyranny of the believers.

It is a staple of liberal commentary that America in the early 1950s overthrew the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and restored the hated shah, which supposedly set off a reverberating current of Islamic disillusionment. Actually Mossadegh was not elected by the Iranian people, but rather, chosen by the parliament and appointed by the shah. Shortly after assuming power Mossadegh clashed with the shah, and in the ensuing power struggle he dissolved parliament and suspended civil liberties. In this battle between two despots, the Eisenhower administration approved U.S. participation in a plan to oust Mossadegh and restore the shah to full power. It may have been a mistake for America to get involved, but the idea that Mossadegh was some kind of elected democrat is spurious. In any event, far from being perturbed at Mossadegh’s departure, the Muslim fundamentalists were delighted by it. The ayatollah Khomeini hated Mossadegh, whom he denounced as a socialist and an infidel. When Mossadegh fell, Khomeini preached a sermon thanking Allah for getting rid of an enemy of Islam. Iranian textbooks today portray Mossadegh as a betrayer of Muslims. The point is that America’s role in Mossadegh’s fall has nothing to do with why Islamic radicals today hate America.

There are unelected despots in the Middle East, and Muslim fundamentalists do oppose them. They are opposed, however, not because they are tyrannical or undemocratic but because they are perceived to be working against Islam. Liberal scholars often commit the ethnocentric fallacy of attributing to Muslims their own parochial complaints about American foreign policy.

They’re outraged because America’s foreign policy is based on selfishness and oil interests.
This argument reflects liberal ethnocentrism at its comic best. Only a liberal could denounce his country for pursuing its own interests. Elsewhere in the world, and emphatically in the Muslim world, nations are expected to act in their self-interest. Shortly after 9/11 the Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf was asked, “You used to support the Taliban. Now you are against them. Why?” His answer was brief. “Our national self-interest has changed.” Next question? Muslims, being realists, expect America to pursue its interests in the Middle East, including of course its interest in Middle Eastern oil. Islamic radicals who despise President Bush sometimes point out that American action is based not on high ideals but on economic and political interests. This criticism, however, is intended to unmask American self-righteousness and hypocrisy. It is not a denial that America has every right to pursue its interests, in the same manner that every other country in the world unhesitatingly does.