Orientalist posturing
Many pundits, including liberals, have argued that the Middle East, North Africa and Muslim-majority parts of South Asia are presently going through their parallel to the West’s Dark Age, a bloody period of religious extremism. They blame the rise of extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida on Islam itself, or on the Middle East’s supposedly “backward” culture, yet conveniently gloss over their own countries’ sordid histories and policies.
There is much more than a tinge of racism in this orientalist idea that, for some reason, Muslims in the Middle East are centuries behind the englightened Christian West. This ludicrous claim does not stand up to even the most superficial historical scrutiny.
For one, never mentioned is the fact that, only decades ago, most Middle Eastern countries were Western colonies. Their civilian populations were terrorized and brutalized by Western colonial powers.
And, again, what were the most secular and modern governments in the history of the Middle East? It was almost always the Soviet-aligned or non-aligned leftist governments that were either enemies of the West or non-allies in the Cold War.
Regardless of the critiques of these governments’ many problems, which is a separate issue, the reality is the Middle East was significantly more progressive and secular during the height of the Cold War than it is today. That’s not a coincidence. The U.S. and its allies destroyed secularism as part of their larger Cold War strategy.
The Cold War bites back
This Cold War strategy continues to bite back today, and hard. Because of this policy, we have now ended up with capitalist dystopias like those in Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the UAE — filthy rich
oil states where businessmen are drowning in money while the migrant
modern-day slaves upon which
their economies are built die in droves, and theocratic monarchies
imprison or even behead anyone who challenges the regime.
The Gulf states remain some of the most reactionary and extremist countries on the planet, and they happen to be close Western allies. Saudi Arabia, in particular, is
the fountainhead of militant Sunni Islamism — and yet the Obama administration has done more than $100 billion in arms deals with the Saudi monarchy in just five years. In fact, less than three days after the Paris attacks, the U.S.
sold another $1.3 billion of bombs to Saudi Arabia — bombs it will likely use to drop on Yemen, where human rights organizations say it is
committing egregious war crimes, and where the chaos created by the Saudi-led coalition is helping al-Qaida and ISIS expand into Yemen.
Former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham has
observed that modern Sunni extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida are “a product of Saudi ideals, Saudi money, and Saudi organizational support.” Government
cables leaked by WikiLeaks demonstrate that the U.S. is well aware that al-Qaida and other Salafi groups are supported by rich Saudis.
Let us not forget that Osama bin Laden was a millionaire businessman from a fabulously wealthy and prominent Saudi family with close ties to the kingdom’s royalty. He used that wealth to finance an international network of Islamic extremists that coalesced into al-Qaida.
This doesn’t mean that the Saudi monarchy is pulling the strings above ISIS — which is now its enemy — but rather that its global proselytizing and funding of Wahhabi groups and institutions made these once fringe extremist groups much stronger and more mainstream.
Ideologies are not devoid from material reality. Yes, there are extremists in every religion, but why do they not have the same power in other faiths? There is no such thing as an ideology independent of the material conditions and social forces that assert that ideology materially — that is to say, politically — in reality. Islamic extremism was violently imposed upon the Middle East through a mixture of imperial machinations and individual radicalization under tyranny and extreme poverty.
Creating your enemies
Western imperialism has a tendency to create its own enemies.
Up until the 1990 Gulf War, throughout the Iran-Iraq War that consumed the 1980s, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein — the very same dictator it would violently depose in 2003.
Declassified CIA files show how the U.S. government helped Hussein when he was unleashing chemical weapons on Iranian civilians. The U.K. government allowed Hussein’s regime to create chemical weapons using
agents that were sold to Iraq by British corporations. These Western-provided weapons were also used in Hussein’s campaign of genocide against the Kurds.
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Fast-forwarding two decades later, it is now
widely acknowledged that the illegal U.S.-led war in Iraq — a catastrophic occupation that led to the deaths of at least 1 million people — destabilized the entire Middle East, creating the extreme conditions in which militant groups like al-Qaida spread like wildfire, eventually leading to the emergence of ISIS. The former head of intelligence for the U.S. Central Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn,
agrees. U.S. policies in Iraq “absolutely” strengthened Salafi militant groups like al-Qaida, Lt. Gen. Flynn conceded. “We definitely put fuel on a fire,” he lamented.
New York Rep.
Chuck Schumer remarked in 1991 that Saddam Hussein was “created in the White House laboratory with a collection of government programs, banks, and private companies.”
Saddam Hussein was the first Frankenstein’s monster U.S. policy created in Iraq, al-Qaida was the second, and now ISIS is the third.
Blaming Islam is projection
The pundits in the West blaming Islam for the rise of extremism are projecting their own countries’ crimes onto the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
The kinds of people who blame Islam and Muslims for the spread of extremism are the kinds of people who have utmost faith in Western empire. Even if they admit that it “sometimes” engages in problematic behavior, they, deep-down, believe Western empire to be fundamentally rooted in good will, in humanitarianism, in progress, in the proselytizing of civilization.
This is the same logic that justified genocidal European colonialism, Western expansionism and Manifest Destiny, and the White Man’s Burden. And it is this same logic that
promotes militarist policies and anti-Muslim and anti-refugee bigotries in response to Islamist militants’ attacks — only serving to further fuel the fire of extremism.
These same pundits, the ones who blame Islam for the rise of ISIS and who have utmost faith in the putative good will of Western empire, would have wholeheartedly supported Osama bin Laden in the 1980s; these same pundits would have dubbed the father of al-Qaida a “freedom fighter” in his heroic battle against the evil Soviet Union.
In the aforementioned speech, Ahmad articulated five kinds of terrorism. He lamented, however, that of these types, the focus in the media and the political system is almost always on just one: “political terror of the private group, oppositional terror” — which he points out is “the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property.” “The highest cost is state terror,” Ahmad explained. He roughly estimated that the ratio of people killed by state terror versus those killed by individual acts of terror is, conservatively, 100,000 to one.
If we truly want to end the abominable acts of violence perpetrated by extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, we should take to heart the simple yet profound
counsel of Noam Chomsky, another modern-day Cassandra: “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
Watch Muslims around the world react to the portrayal of Muslims in the media:
