Chapter III
ISLAM AND THE WEST

THE WEST'S SEARCH FOR A NEW ENEMY

The demise of the Cold War involving the USA and the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s left military strategists in the West searching for a new enemy. To borrow Richard Conder, author of the Munchurian Candidate: "Now that the communists have been put to sleep, we are going to have to invent another terrible threat." Former US Secretary of Defence, McNamara, in his 1989 testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, stated that defense spending could safely be cut in half over five
years. For the Pentagon it was a simple choice: either find new enemies or cut defense spending. Topping the list of potential bogeymen were the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat to US economic  security emanating from the East Asia, and the so-called Green Peril (green representing Islam). The Pentagon selected "Islamic fundamentalism" and "rogue states" as the new bogeymen.

According to Jochen Hippler: the We st no longer has the Soviet Union or communism to serve as enemies justifying expensive and extensive military apparatuses. Now, given the loss of the old military opponent, instead of reducing the military apparatus in the West to a symbolic vestige or getting rid of it altogether and thinking about 'security' completely afresh, new threats are being invented to serve the old purpose. This is our main problem, not an Islamic fundamentalist threat which, in any case, could only be dealt with by political and economic means.1 It was in the mid-1980s at the very latest that the search began for new enemies to justify arms budgets and offensive military policies, at first as part of the communist threat and then in its place. First the 'War on Drugs', the somewhat absurd and naturally failed attempt to solve New York's drug problem by naval exercise off the coast of South America and military operations in Bolivia, then 'Terrorism', a term applied to real terrorists as well as to various unpleasant freedom movem ents in the Third World which (of course) demanded military responses, were two such attempts during the 1980s.2 And as with the 'Islamic (or fundamentalist) threat' today, then too there were enough good reasons to be against drug dealers and terrorists. Neither of these social evils was ever fought seriously at its roots. Instead, they were exploited for other purposes. At that time the aim was to legitimize the newly development doctrine of low-intensity warfare; today it is to justify high military expenditure when the traditional enemy has disappeared and we are objectively no longer threatened by conventional war. Fundamentalism, then, has not been invented by Western politicians but is being used by them.3

What is new, following the end of the Cold War, is the tendency in the West to build up Islam as the dangerous ideological successor to Marxism-Leninism. In an article the New York Times Magazine, Judith Miller points out with characteristic accuracy: "The west tends to regard the growing political popularity of Islam as dangerous, monolithic and novel ... The rise of militant Islam has triggered a fierce debate about what, if anything, the West can or should do about it. Some American officials and commentators have already designated militant Islam as the west's new enemy, to be 'contained' much the way communism was during the cold war."4 John Esposito summaries this perception of Islam as a threat: "According to many Western commentators, Islam and the West are on a collision course. Islam is a triple threat: political, demographic, and socio-religious ... Much as observers in the past retreated to polemics and stereotypes of Arabs, Turks or Muslims rather than addressing the specific causes of conflict and confrontation, today we are witnessing the perpetuation or creation of a new myth. The impending confrontation between Islam and the West is presented as part of a historical pattern of Muslim belligerency and aggression." 5

In short, having lost their chief enem y, the seasonal practitioners of cold war have decided that the new global enemy is Islam. They came up with the 'fundamentalist Muslims' of North Africa and the Middle East; a contemporary version of the Crusades pitting Christian knights against Muslim warriors in the new international conflict. Director of the U.S. Foreign Policy Research Institute, Daniel Pipes, in his article "Muslims are Coming," published in the National Review (Nov. 19, 1990), writes "and so it is that American, and Europeans as well, are turning in increasing number to a very traditional bogeymen.: The Muslims. The weekly Time published a cover story, "Who is afraid of Islam?" On the cover it showed a Kalashinkov being raised higher than a minaret of a mosque. In France, Jean Marie Le Pen, depicts Islam as a "religion of intolerance: and fears, an "invasion of Europe by a Muslim immigration." The Republicans in Germany share Le Pen's outlook and program.

While covering Islam and Muslims , the western media applies most negative images and chaterizations for Muslims. For example, at the level of mass media coverage of Islam land Muslims, on practically any day the alert reader or viewer can satiate her or himself with images and characterizations of the most negative and hurtful kind applied to Muslims. For example, "Islamic terrorists" or "fundamentalists" did this or that; "Shi'ite extremists" shout "Death to America"; the "militant Muslim cleric" Shaykh Omar Abdel Rahman; "I like belonging to Islamic Jihad because it is violent" (Boulder Daily Camera, July 16,1993);"Terrorism bas become Sheik" (caption for Jim Hoagland column published in Daily Times  Call, Longmont, Colorado July 16, 1993); "950 million Muslims occupy a world that seems, in the eyes of the West, alien and frightening" (Life, July 1993); "Violence, the Islamic Curse", title of an article in the Chicago Tribune, 1981); "The D ark Side of Islam" (title of Joseph Kraft syndicated column about Mohmet Ali Agca, serving a prison sentence for shooting the Pope; The Washington Post, May I 9,1981; "Sudan Becoming a Way Station for Islamic Militants" (San Francisco Chronicle, July 19, 1993), and so forth.

"Bombs in the name of Allah," "The dark side of Islam," "Global network provides financing and havens," "A new strain of terrorism" etc. These and the like are titles of articles flooding in the western print media focusing on shallow and obsessive references to Islam and slandering "Islamists" as well as the Muslim political activists throughout Islamic world. In a map showing, "base support" of the "International Islamic terrorism," carried out by the Washington Post, in its August 3, 1993 edition, a reference was made to Pakistan, among other Islamic countries, in these words "Evidence points to links between activities here and Manhattan bombing plotters." Terrorism is dealt with, in these articles, as an exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Subversive activities, no matter wherever they are launched, are abruptly linked with Islamic activists.

The US Vice President Dan Quayle at a 1990 conference in Washington listed Islam with Nazism and Communism as the challenges the Western civilization must undertake to meet collectively. Even more ominously, the NATO Secretary General, at a meeting with the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church on February 24, 1992, voiced concern at the possibility of Islamic fundamentalism engulfing the Muslim republics of Central Asia now that the Soviet Union was gone. National interests draped in the mantle of religion became a foreign policy concern. This interpretation of the post-Cold War period is given credence by the results of a Gallop Poll survey in Britain at the end of 1989 (i.e. before the Gulf War), which found that 37 per cent of those questioned thought an international conflict between Ch ristians and Muslims (i.e. between the North Atlantic region and the Middle East) to be 'likely' in the 1990s.6

The image of Muslim societies in the West is presented as that of an evil-looking, bearded figures in black robes. Edward Said, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, argues that the West cannot know the Orient (for him mainly the Muslim Orient) except as irrational, depraved and infantile. This perception is rooted in the power relationship between a dominating West and a subjugated Orient. It is in the interest of the West, therefore, to depict the Orient in negative stereotypes. The western attacks on Muslim extremists -- the fundamentalists of the popular press -- easily convert and carry over to an attack on the entire body of Muslims. Stereotyping Islam as aggressive fundamentalism "is part of the West's ideology of domination and control," says Dr. Chanra Muzaffar, director of Just World Trust, a non-government organization based in Penang, Malaysia. Th e historical antagonism to Islam is now being exploited by those who seek to demonize Islam in order to justify repression of Muslim reformers and militants by failed governments allied to the West.

 ISLAM AND COMMUNISM /ARAB NATIONALISM

It goes without saying that the West has used Islam as a weapon against communism. Islam was often considered a conservative ideology that could be used to resist revolutionary communist ideologies or even Arab nationalism.7 In the 1970s and 1980s, the perception of Islam or Islamism as hostile was softened by the joint opposition of the West and some Islamic countries towards the Soviet Union and communism. Islamism was either a 'lesser evil' or actually very useful. This has changed completely since the end of the Cold War. Our perception of Islam can no longer be moderated by the existence of an even worse ideological opponent. Neither communism nor Arab nationalism poses a serious threat to Western interests today. As a result, Is lam or Islamism is moving into the filing line, and in fact often replacing the old enemy. In conversation, a German lieutenant Colonel casually put it like this: 'Islam is the new communism.'8 As Hippler has said: In Washington and London and to a lesser extent in Paris, they have repeatedly tried to use Islam and even Islamic fundamentalism for their own purposes, usually against the Soviet Union and communism. If you wanted to fight Marixst-Leninist ideology, it was practical to oppose it with another all-encompassing ideology. Just as Protestant sects were used in the fight against Marxism and liberation theology in Central America, wherever possible Islam has been used to fight secular Arab nationalism/socialism and communism.9

From the 1970s till well into the 1980s the Israeli government fostered the Muslim Brotherhood (and its offshoot, Hamas) in the occupied territories -- the same group that was later considered to be especially dangerous. The American Magazine Newsweek expalined it thus: Fo r years the Arab fundamentalists seemed like dependable pawns in a series of high-states poxy battles. They bitterly opposed the West's main enemies - communism and its regional allies, left-wing Arab nationalists. Hostile to the Palestine Liberation Organization, they seemed perforct for an Israeli divide-and-conquer strategy. And they were theologically in tune with the West's key Arab ally and oil supplier, Saudi Arabia ... In the 1970s, [israel] began building up the Brotherhood as a counterbalance to the PLO - and continued even after Israeli troops began battling Shiite radical in Lebanon.10

 THE AFGHAN CONNECTION

During the cold war religion was seen as a bulwark against communism. Ecumenical movements to bring together the followers of Christianity, Islam and Judaism were launched, as part of the strategy to resist the ideological onslaught of Marxism. The most recent such example is Afghanistan, where various groups of Islamic-oriented Mujahideen put up the s toutest resistance to the Soviet occupation, and received generous support, mainly in the forms of arms and ammunition. No objections were raised
when representatives of militant Islamic groups from other countries joined the Afghan resistance groups in what was perceived as their heroic resistance to the Soviet occupation forces.

At the end of 1979, shortly after the Sovet army rolled into Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter and his advisers decided on a working alliance with political Islam.Secret directives, later amplified and expanded by the Reagan and Bush administrations and a US Congress which in the 1980s appropriated a war chest of billions of dollars, convered the recruiting, training and arming of one of the largest mercenary armies in American military history. The bulk of the recruits, including many Arab-Americans and some Muslim afro-Americans, were devout if not fanantical Muslims. Some were in for gain or adventure, but most utterly committed to the Jihad, or holy war, against comm unism and Russians.

With the help and money from a motely coalition of Muslim and Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and then President Anwar Sadat's enthusiastically pro-Western Egyptian government (an enthusiasm which contributed to Mr. Sadat's murder by Egyptian "Afghanis"), the CIA acted as manager. The Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations all delegated to Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, crucial controls over the anti-Soviet jihad. These included which fighting groups would get the cash, arms and preferred training.

The Mujahidin received approximately $3.5 billion in arms and other aid from the CIA, regardless of their political orentation or islamist zeal. In this way, the mostradical Islamic group - Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's party -- received two thirds of American aid over two years. Yet for a long time, it did not seem to worry the CțIA that Hematyar's party was openly not only anti-Soviet but also anti-American, and that it was res ponsible for massacres, torture and just about every conceivable human rights abuse,
quite apart from the fact that Hekmatyar was also trafficking in heroin on the side. If there is such a thing as the classic fundamentalist leader, straight out of Western stories, then it is Hekmatyar. Despite this Washington had no reservations, but only arms and money to offer. After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. of all the Afgha Mujahidin groups, his was the best organised and militarily most powerful -- the natural partner for an anti-Soviet campaign. It was only some time after the USSR had withdrawn from Afghanistan, in fact only when the USA and the Soviet Union cooperated closely in the run-up to the Gulf War of 1990-1 that the USA distanced itself from hekmatyar's party.11

Once the Soviet forces had withdrawn from Afghanistan, the traditional Western attitude of suspicion and hostility towards Islam reasserted itself. Indeed, a perception arose of Islam as being the successor to communism as the principal threat to the Western world.

At the end of the 1980s, when the Russian had withdrawn from Afghanistan amid the crack-up of the Soviet Union, the volunteer holy warriors did not go home to open bakeries of flower shops. Determined to destroy their own governments and Western-corrupted societies, as they saw them, they decided to attack and destabilize these institutions. There were estimated 5,000 trained Saudis, 3,000 Yemenis, 2,800 Algerians, 2,000 Egyptians and perhaps 2,000 Palestinians, Jordanians, Lebanese, iranians and others. This gives credence to the argument that much of today's Islamic fundamentalist activity is the work of groups funded for years not by Iran but by the united States, which kept a number of Islamic groups going throughout the Cold War era.