http://www.jordantimes.com/wed/opinion/opinion2.htm
Islam is not the enemy, terror is
Hasan Abu Nimah
There has been a growing misconception in the Western world over the
years linking Islam to violence. This was further strengthened after the
terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001,
whose perpetrators were all Muslim extremists linked to Osama Ben
Laden’s Al Qaeda.
What further magnified this myth is the overwhelming belief in the West
that Arab means only Muslim. Many find it quite surprising that there
is, and has always been, a sizeable and prosperous Christian Arab
community living all over the Arab and the Muslim worlds. Obviously, the
term “Arab” has an ethno-national connotation, and therefore there are
Christian and there are Muslim Arabs. And until Israel was created, the
Jews who lived in the Arab world, sharing the history and the tradition,
and who spoke the language as well, were also considered Arab Jews.
An already confused picture was further complicated by factors that by
no means have been innocent. The Arab Israeli century-old conflict has
been gradually, but steadily, aggravating relations between the
Arab-Muslim world, on one side, and the Israel-supporting Western world,
on the other.
Western media, either sympathetic to the Zionist programme or fully
committed to it, have caused enormous damage to the Arab and, further,
the Muslim image in the West, with the deliberate intention of placing
the blame in the historic conflict entirely on the Arab side, while
presenting the Jews as the victims of persecution, conspiracy and
injustice. That situation was maintained while the conflict and its
consequences remained contained in the region. But things changed, and
quite dramatically, when the effects of the conflict started to spill
over, reaching places hitherto considered remote and safe.
What was the “Question of Palestine” when the Zionist programme targeted
Palestine, supposedly as the national home for the Jews, became the
“Arab Israeli conflict” when Israel, in 1956 and again in 1967 and 1982,
attacked and occupied Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian
territories, well beyond the Palestinian perimeters. The failure of the
United Nations to resolve the conflict, until now, has created an
environment of frustration, radicalisation, hopelessness, desperation,
disbelief and bitterness, and the inevitable outcome of it all was
regular break out of wars, perpetual violence and outright senseless
terror, hitting indiscriminately in any available direction.
In that kind of environment, it was also impossible to build
democracies, healthy social institutions and sound economies, which
substantially added to the aggravation. And that environment became the
suitable home for extremist and weird ideologies to act and grow.
Continued injustice kept the perpetrators of terror and evil well
supplied with adequate amounts of recruits from the desperate millions
who had no future or direction.
When many credible voices in the West started to realise, and clearly
point out, that the main source of spreading trouble — mainly spreading
terror — is the Arab Israeli conflict, and that the conflict should be
resolved if the so-called war on terror is to be won, many others were
alarmed: they did not want any fingers pointing at Israel, or at any
Israeli role in the trouble. For them, such an implication would be
extremely dangerous and of far-reaching consequences.
To keep the entire blame where they want it to be, on the Arabs and
Muslims, they came up with the novel theory of “the clash of
civilisations”, first introduced by Bernard Lewis, then quickly picked
up and propagated by Samuel Huntington, whose name became tightly
associated with it. This theme is meant to distance any injustice or
political sequence of events in the Middle East, resulting from the
continued Israeli aggression and occupation, from the spreading terror,
attributing it instead to an inevitable clash between Islam and the
Western civilisation. In that light, Lewis interpreted the terrorist
attacks of September 11, describing them as the first volley in the last
battle Islam was waging on the West. In other words he presented the
perpetrators, and Ben Laden, as representatives of all Muslims and Islam.
This, with a major campaign of anti-Islam incitement, has succeeded in
fixing the impression that Islam is the new enemy after the collapse of
the communist danger. Consequently, it became difficult for the war on
terror not to become the war on Islam, irrespective of strong warnings
from highly wise and pioneer voices, such as that of Prince Hassan,
persistently advising against the dangers of self-serving agendas.
What has all along been axiomatic for us in the region needed time to
even show initial signs in the West, and only at a high cost… and only
after the war on terror has dramatically failed.
“Those who think that Muslim countries and pro-terrorist attitudes go
hand in hand might be shocked by new polling research,” wrote Kenneth
Ballen, founder and president of the prestigious “Terror Free Tomorrow”
(TFT) organisation (The Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 2007),
adding that “Americans are more approving of terrorist attacks against
civilians than any major Muslim country except for Nigeria.”
Ballen referred to a survey conducted in December 2006 by the University
of Maryland’s Programme of International Public Attitudes, which showed
that only 46 per cent of Americans think that bombing and other attacks
internationally aimed at civilians are “never justified” while 24 per
cent believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified”. In
comparing those figures with 2006 polling results made by Terror Free
Tomorrow in the world’s most populous Muslim countries — Indonesia,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria, one finds a stunning contrast. TFT
found out that 74 per cent of respondents in Indonesia agreed that
terrorist attacks were “never justified”; in Pakistan, that figure was
86 per cent, in Bangladesh 81 per cent, according to Ballen.
He further writes that “public opinion surveys in the United States and
Europe show that nearly half of the Westerners associate Islam with
violence and Muslim with terrorists”. The danger here, according to
Ballen, is that these stereotypes “affirmed by simplistic media coverage
and many radicals themselves, are not supported by the facts — and they
are detrimental to the war on terror”.
“When the West wrongly attributes radical views to all of the world’s
1.5 billion Muslims, it perpetuates a myth that has the very real effect
of marginalising critical allies in the war on terror.”
“In truth,” he concludes “the common enemy is violence and terrorism,
not Muslims any more than Christians or Jews.”
Wrong diagnosis leads to failed treatment. As long as there is
persistence that violence and terror are part of the nature of the Arabs
and Muslims, and not the result of bad politics, international
lawlessness and injustice, the war on terror will only increase terror
as the current state of affairs clearly shows. It will also turn the
myth of the clash of civilisation into a destructive reality.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
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