14/04/2010 | The Really Really Long War
John Feffer
Let's imagine that the Cold War was a detour. The entire 20th century, in fact, was a detour. Since conflicts among the 20th-century ideologies (liberalism, communism, fascism) cost humanity so dearly, it's hard to conceive of World War II and the clashes that followed as sideshows. And yet many people have begun to do just that.
They view the period we find ourselves in right now - the
so-called post-Cold War era - as a return to a much earlier time and a much
earlier confrontation. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aren't discrete battles
against a tyrant (Saddam Hussein) or a tyrannical group (the Taliban). They fit
together with Turkey's resurgence, the swell of Muslim immigration to Europe,
and Israel's settlement policy to form part of a much larger struggle.
Welcome to
Crusade 2.0.
For those who
see Islam as a civilizational threat, the key dates aren't 1945 or 1989 but
rather 1683, 1492, 1099, and 732. The very mention of these watershed years
stirs the blood of the modern-day crusader. In 1683, thanks to the intercession
of the Polish cavalry, Christian forces beat back Ottoman Turks at the Battle
of Vienna, preventing Islam from spreading to Western Europe. In 1492,
Christian armies recovered all of Spain from Muslim rulers. In 1099, during the
first Crusade, the European army seized Jerusalem. And in 732, Charles Martel
led the Franks in a victory over the forces of the Ummayad Caliphate, ensuring
that Islam would not spread beyond its conquests in Spain.
Today, many
Europeans are enlisting in a modern crusade. They see the threat of 732, with
Islamic immigrants coming in from North Africa and bringing their culture and
customs - like the mosque and the veil - to secular France and multicultural
Switzerland. They see the threat of 1683, with Turkey planning to join and then
take over the European Union. And they stand with Israel to protect Jerusalem
from the demands of Palestinians and their supporters in the Arab world.
In defense of
their crusade, they point to acts of terrorism committed by Islamic
fundamentalists (the 2004 Madrid bombings, the 2005 London bombings),
occasional acts of violence (the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, a
rash of honor killings), the fatwa
against novelist Salman Rushdie, and so on. These incidents, they argue, add up
to a pattern: an attempt to destroy the Judeo-Christian world, reestablish the
caliphate dismantled by Ataturk in 1924, impose sharia law, and turn the world into a version
of Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Although
Muslims represent only 3-4 percent of Europe's population, today's crusaders
see the outlines of Eurabia emerging, a Muslim takeover of the continent
through shrewd politics and inexorable birthrates. A "civilization of
dhimmitude," Bat Ye'or calls
the endpoint of this strategy, in which "subjugated, non-Muslim
individuals or peoples…accept the restrictive and humiliating subordination to
an ascendant Islamic power to avoid enslavement or death." Muslims will
conquer "Europe's cities, street by street," the Weekly Standard's
Christopher Caldwell argues
in Reflections on the
Revolution in Europe.
This isn't just
the opinion of a few intemperate pundits. A surprisingly large number of
Europeans simply don't like Muslims. More than 50 percent of Germans and
Spaniards "rate Muslims unfavorably," the Pew Global Attitudes
Project diplomatically reported. The recent
Swiss referendum banning future construction of minarets has proved quite
popular among those polled in other European countries, writes Foreign Policy
In Focus contributor Jeanne Kay.
"The
populist right doesn't hold a monopoly on the clash-of-civilization narrative
in Europe," she continues in Europe's
Islamophobia. "Parties of the moderate right have jumped on the
Islamophobia bandwagon to gain political capital from the sordid national
identity debate. They are sometimes even joined by social democrats under the
banner of liberal values. Mainstream politicians most often invoke
'Enlightenment' values to stigmatize features of Islam. In the Netherlands, the
alleged incompatibility of Islam with the country's historic gay-positive
culture is a critical argument in anti-Islamic rhetoric. But co-opting
liberalism is particularly prominent in the debate over the veil in public
spaces, a hot issue across Western Europe."
Islamophobia
isn't even a dirty word in Europe. Novelist Martin Amis displayed a prejudice
worthy of his father Kingsley's infamous anti-Semitism when he declared
in 2006 that "the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its
house in order. Not letting them travel. Deportation further down the road.
Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the
Middle East or Pakistan." Even before September 11, Guardian columnist Polly
Toynbee proudly declared,
"I am an Islamophobe." As journalist Peter Osborne wrote,
"Anti-Semitism is recognized as an evil, noxious creed, and its adherents
are barred from mainstream society and respectable organs of opinion. Not so
Islamophobia."
Islamic
extremists have certainly committed crimes. So have extremists of other faiths.
But no one, as far as I know, has recommended the deportation of Christians and
the strip-searching of people who look like they're from Iowa simply because of
the Oklahoma City bombing or the killing of abortion providers.
The question
here is whether Islam as a religion poses a threat to Europe or to the United
States. Outspoken atheists like Christopher Hitchens have argued
that all religions pose a threat to humanity. But the arguments of atheists
aside, Islam isn't a threat unless you adopt the crusader mentality. Put
simply, intolerance and bigotry lie at the root of Islamophobia - that and a
thousand years of protracted conflict and bloodshed.
Here in the
United States, fear of Islam ranks considerably lower than in Europe, according
to the aforementioned Pew poll: 23 percent of Americans view Muslims
unfavorably. But fear of an Islamic planet has clearly trumped fear of a black
planet: we elected Barack Obama, but only after he made strenuous efforts to
ensure the electorate that he was a good, church-going Christian. Remember what
John McCain said
during the presidential campaign when a member of his audience accused Obama of
being an Arab: "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man." Excuse me? I
didn't realize that "decent family man" was the opposite of Arab.
"As a
young American Muslim raised in this country, I'm not sure whether America is
willing to truly incorporate Muslims or merely assimilate us," writes FPIF
contributor M. Junaid Levesque-Alam in Muslims
in America, "whether the nation views us as a potential pillar or a
probable fifth column. Fine phrases about freedom cannot, after all, gild the
discrimination, suspicion, and occasional outright hostility we have faced here
amid the sustained neoconservative assault of the past decade."
It wasn't long
ago that American Jews asked themselves the same questions. In the Pew survey,
anti-Semitism was very low in the United States (only 7 percent of Americans
had unfavorable views of Jews). In Europe, however, anti-Semitism has gone hand
in hand with Islamophobia (46 percent of Spaniards and 36 percent of Poles
viewed Jews negatively). For Europe, at least, the two intolerances have often
intersected. In the First Crusade, for instance, Christian forces engaged in a
wave of attacks against Jews on their way through Germany and in the retaking
of Jerusalem. Later, the re-conquest of Spain in 1492 coincided with the
expulsion and forced conversion of Jews, both events meriting more attention at
the time than the travels of Columbus.
The seven
crusades that lasted from 1096 to 1291 weren't just about Christians versus
Muslims. In the Fourth Crusade, for instance, Christian forces attacked fellow
Christians during the sack of Constantinople in 1204. "For three days and
nights, the Crusaders murdered, raped, looted, or destroyed everyone and
everything they could get their hands on. Untold thousands perished; many more
were brutalized, maimed, left homeless," writes Colin Wells in Sailing
from Byzantium. "In the great church of Hagia
Sophia…looters stripped the silken wall hangings, smashed the icons, tore apart
the gold and silver furnishings, and then brought mules inside to load with
booty. Some of the mules slipped and fell, unable to regain their footing on
the blood-slicked marble floor."
Today's
crusaders, in their attacks on Islam, would have a hard time rivaling the murderous
destruction of their predecessors. But they can still do serious damage - and
not just to Muslims. In trying to "save" Western civilization, they
will end up, like the looting crusaders in the Hagia Sophia, fouling the
wellsprings of their own tradition and making a mockery of their professed
values.
Blowback
In the days
after September 11, George W. Bush said
"this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." The
crusade language, after a barrage of criticism, quickly disappeared. And now,
with the Obama administration, the "war on terrorism" has largely
slipped out of the language, replaced by "overseas contingency operations."
But however much the language has changed, Washington continues to make the
same bone-headed mistakes in the global campaign against al-Qaeda and its
supporters.
Consider the
operation in Yemen. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is pursuing policies
in the name of counter-terrorism that just end up swelling the ranks of
al-Qaeda. "Obama's pledge to 'strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni
government' shouldn't lead to a Western embrace of President Ali Abdullah
Saleh's government," explain FPIF contributors Peter Bouckaert and
Christoph Wilcke in The
Problems of Partnering with Yemen. "The United States and other
outside powers also need to address Saleh's terrible human rights abuses,
which help fuel al-Qaeda recruitment. In southern Yemen, for instance, the
government has responded to massive and largely peaceful protests in favor of
secession with unprovoked deadly gunfire on numerous occasions.
Al-Qaeda has openly tried to capitalize on southerners' growing anger
by declaring its support for their struggle against the 'infidel' government.
In Afghanistan,
meanwhile, our much-hyped surge has not done much to improve relations with
Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul. "The Obama administration recently
demanded that the Karzai government reinstate an independent electoral
commission and end corruption - in particular, by dumping the president's
larcenous half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, who runs Kandahar like a feudal
fiefdom," writes FPIF columnist Conn Hallinan in Behind
the Afghan Fraud. "Karzai responded by flying off to Tehran to embrace
the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and meet with Iran's supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Given that the United States is trying to isolate Iran
in the region, Karzai's Iran visit wasn't a happy moment for those on the
Potomac."
Bibi
and Drilling
Speaking
of questionable allies, at top of the list these days is Bibi, a.k.a.
Congressman Benjamin Netanyahu (R-Israel). In No
Tea Parties for Bibi, Leon Hadar discusses Bibi's recent visit to
Washington and the current downturn in U.S.-Israeli relations precipitated by
Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
"The
dispute over the settlements, however, did not reach a crisis point until Vice
President Biden's visit to Israel in early March, when the Israeli government
made an ill-timed announcement about the construction in Seikh Jarrah,"
Hadar writes. "Thus was ignited the most dramatic crisis in U.S.-Israeli
relations since 1991, when President George H. W. Bush threatened to punish
Israel unless it stopped settlement expansion in the occupied territories. In
addition to being an Israeli diplomatic slap, the announcement jeopardized U.S.
plans for 'proximity' talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Obama
and his aides decided that unless they responded with a tough message,
Washington could end up losing its credibility - or what's left of it - in the
Arab world."
Hadar's
analysis comes from Right
Web, which has recently moved over from Political Research Associates to us
here at the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS would like to thank Political
Research Associates for its successful stewardship of the project over the last
three years, and we look forward to working with the staff of Right Web to
build on the impressive record of scholarship and advocacy the project has
become known for.
Finally, we've
partnered with TripleCrisis
to bring you Frank Ackerman's analysis of Obama's decision to pursue offshore
drilling. "This administration is full of people who are way too smart to
believe that offshore drilling will supply any noticeable part of our long-term
energy needs," he writes in Why
Is Obama Drilling? "In the overly clever mode of partisan
triangulation - is there any other mode in Washington? - it smells like a
concession designed to get a few Republican votes for a climate change bill.
Oddly enough, our national policy is now to increase fossil fuel production in
the hopes of winning support for reducing fossil fuel consumption."
Foreign Policy (Estados Unidos)
Otras Notas Relacionadas... ( Records 11 to 20 of 165 )
Otras Notas del Autor
fecha |
Título |
24/03/2018| |
|
17/02/2017| |
|
07/05/2016| |
|
25/03/2016| |
|
29/02/2016| |
|
25/09/2015| |
|
24/10/2014| |
|
31/07/2014| |
|
26/07/2014| |
|
19/07/2014| |
|
10/07/2014| |
|
24/03/2014| |
|
21/05/2012| |
|
02/02/2011| |
|
20/01/2011| |
|
ver + notas
|