“Muslim Angst Vs. American Anxiety”

Muslim Angst Vs. American Anxiety By Sam Oglesby (Copyright � 2009 The Bulletin)

“The Muslim world and the West, led by the U.S.A., are at a stand-off.  Terrorism,  intolerance and the specter of uncontrolled immigration rattle non-Muslims; perceptions of neo-imperialism, disrespect and discrimination roil Mohammed’s followers. These mutually negative feelings are not vague generalizations. Reliable polls have shown that a majority of the  British and American public admit to being prejudiced against Muslims, doubt their loyalty, fear terrorist attacks, don’t want them as neighbors, perceive Muslims as not wanting to fully integrate into Western society and generally feel threatened by Islam. A majority of Muslims are dismayed by what they see  as Western  cultural and social decadence and the feeling that the West is not committed to better relations with them.

Riz Khan Part1:

Engaging the Muslim World by Juan Cole (Palgrave Macmillan, 282 pages, $26.95) examines the myths and realities that provoke Islam Anxiety in the West  as well as the grounds, legitimate and illegitimate,  for America Anxiety in the  Muslim world. The West’s anxiety is caused primarily by its fear that the Middle East is developing a stranglehold on  increasingly scarce oil and gas resources and its confusion of legitimate, democratically based political Islam  that does not always agree with the West, with the radical Islam of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in such troubled areas as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mr. Cole makes it clear from the outset that he favors engagement and diplomacy with almost all spectrums of Islam, demoting pre-emptive military action from what has become a  favored  tool of the United States  to a policy of last resort.

Riz Khan Part2:
 

America’s focus on the Muslim world as a policy issue is relatively recent. During the Cold War,  the U.S. imported relatively little petroleum from the Middle East. Rather, the U.S. was primarily concerned that Gulf oil should flow freely to Japan and Western Europe who greatly  depended on imported oil  — 80 percent and 90 percent respectively — and that the Soviet Union should not be influential in the Middle East. To ensure this stability, the U.S. did not hesitate to  engineer the overthrow of democratically elected governments — Syria in 1949, Iran in 1953 and Iraq in 1963. Beginning in the 1960s, U.S. policy in the Middle East was preoccupied by a search for a proxy power to fill the  vacuum left by Britain,  who served for nearly 200 years as the Great Power guarantor and protector  of small, oil-rich principalities. Iran and the Shah were groomed for this role, building up Iran as policeman of the Gulf with the added benefit Iran would buy huge amounts of weaponry from the U.S., recycling its petro dollars to American business.

 The collapse of the Shah sent Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad in 1980 to explore an alliance with Saddam Hussein that lasted from 1984 to 1990 with Iraq as the container of radical Iran.  In 1991 with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. fell into the difficult position of having to contain both Iran and Iraq. This policy of “dual containment” thrust the U.S. into the role of Great Power Guarantor in the Middle East. Author Cole  marshals considerable evidence to demonstrate that the U.S. tendency to meddle in the Middle East,  fomenting coups  or manipulating elections cannot be successful in the long run.  U.S. actions have turned Iraq from an irreligious police state into what will probably become  a Muslim theocracy. While U.S. policy, until recently, has seen the Iraq War  and the U.S. as  promoters  of democracy and stability, the Arab street, given the choice between an autocratic but autonomous government not bound to the Christian capitalist West, and a democratic state under the sway of foreign governments, would choose the former.

Mr.  Cole sends a warning that Saudi Arabia is reaching a dangerous point where a  restless, educated, but unemployed urban population is  beginning to threaten the country’s stability. Monarchies in Libya, Iraq and Iran were overthrown by these same elements in their countries. With 11 percent of the world’s petroleum, the fate of the world  depends to a significant extent on the fate of Saudi Arabia.

Turning to the most troublesome  current foreign policy dilemma,  Mr. Cole feels that U.S. policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan is mistaken. Most of the billions in foreign aid have  benefited the military and the elites and not the ordinary people so that Afghanistan now has a “jihad economy” subsisting on money given to the militias and flowing from narco revenues. The big U.S./NATO military footprint and “collateral” civilian deaths may actually be creating the threat it ostensibly seeks to stamp out: the reconstitution of Al Qaeda and the revival of the 1980s holy war that proved deadly to the Soviet Union.

Juan Cole on Engaging the Muslim World-1/3: 
Engaging the Muslim World addresses a number of realities that seem unknown in the U.S. The so-called threat posed by Iran seems to evaporate when we learn that Iran’s military budget is $6 billion per year, the same as Norway or Sweden and less than Singapore or Greece. The dilemma of continued Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory is put in perspective: Continuing  the status  quo in the West Bank and Gaza is  not viable since it would end up with Israel being compelled to offer the Palestinians Israeli citizenship and before long they would constitute a majority of Israel’s population. The only way to retain a Jewish majority is for Israel to withdraw to its 1949 boundaries. Brokering a two-state solution between Israel and  the Palestinians is the most important foreign policy priority for the Obama administration. This step would resolve 90 percent of American’s problems with the Muslim world.”
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Excerpt from NYT Review of Cole’s book

“In October 2005, with the war in Iraq headed off the rails and his own visions of a democratizing Middle East crumbling, George W. Bush tried to rally the nation with a call against a new global enemy: “Islamofascism.” In a series of speeches, he described America’s disparate enemies as a united force, bound together by a common vision. Unless America rose to the challenge, he argued, jihadists would realize their ambition to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.”

Juan Cole on Engaging the Muslim World-2/3:

Bush’s effort to equate America’s amalgam of new enemies to the Axis powers of World War II quickly fizzled. Even some in the White House admitted privately to embarrassment, and the word “Islamofascism” was stricken from presidential speeches. Evil? Yes. But not an organized force — and Bush’s speeches quickly came to be regarded as a huge mistake because they inflated the power of America’s enemies rather than dividing them by playing off their longstanding rivalries. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that the Iraqis and the Iranians were fighting a bitter war. And Bush was lumping Osama bin Laden’s Sunni extremists with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s vision of a nuclear-capable Persia.

Juan Cole’s “Engaging the Muslim World” maps those fault lines, and one can only wish Bush had mulled over such material (in fact, much of it was contained in his briefing papers) before the misadventures of the post-9/11 era began. Like Lawrence Wright’s remarkable “Looming Tower,” published almost three years ago, this field guide to the politics of modern Islam traces the history of the different movements, whose violent offshoots are still morphing into new forms. Along the way, Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, explores what he sees as the twin dynamic of “Islam Anxiety” in the United States and “American Anxiety” in the Arab world.

Juan Cole on Engaging the Muslim World-3/3:

Cole is at his most effective in making the case that Western politicians who talk of Islamofascists not only insult an entire religion, they also misidentify the enemy. The terror groups we face are trying to hijack a religion. Cole argues that it makes no more sense to describe them in religious terms than to have called the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin a “Judaic terrorist” or Francisco Franco a “Christofascist.”

GRITtv: Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World – 1/2:

The Arab societies that fascinate us the most are the ones — like Egypt — where “Desperate Housewives” is a hit, enjoyed by the same television viewers who denounce the encroachment of Western values into their culture. Like all of us, they want to have it both ways, indulging guilty pleasures and still hoping to prevent “libertinism — casual sex, drugs and violence — from invading their neighborhoods.”

GRITtv: Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World – 2/2:

One of those upscale neighborhoods is Giza, the home of the father of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11. A Cairo attorney, the elder Mohamed Atta had initially denied that his son was involved. Four years later, he went on CNN to express approval that the young man had started a 50-year-long religious war, setting up cells that were like a “nuclear bomb that has now been activated and is ticking.”

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Excerpt from Islamophobia By John L. Esposito (Complete article at http://cmcu.georgetown.edu/68792.html)

“Like the quest for the moderate Muslim, another emerging term both reflecting and strengthening Islamophobia is “Islamofascism.” After 9/11, President George W. Bush drew a sharp distinction between the Muslim majority’s religion of Islam and a minority of Muslim extremists. However, his more recent use of new terms to recast the global “war on terror” as a war against fascism blurs this distinction and implies that Islam, not just its misuse by extremists, is the root cause of the problem.President Bush, joined by members of his cabinet and congress as well as neo-conservative political commentators, is using Islamic fascism or Islamofascism to strengthen waning support for their international policies.

After the August 10, 2006 transatlantic bomb plot was foiled by British police in London, Bush emphasized that the plotters “try to spread their jihadist message—a message I call, it’s totalitarian in nature—Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, they try to spread it as well by taking the attack to those of us who love freedom.” “It is the great challenge of this century… As young democracies flourish, terrorists try to stop their progress…. This is the beginning of a long struggle against an ideology that is real and profound. It’s Islamo-fascism. It comes in different forms. They share the same tactics, which is to destroy people and things in order to create chaos in the hopes that their vision of the world become predominant in the Middle East.”

Members of Congress have followed suit. Senator Rick Santorum “We’re at war with Islamic fascism…These people are after us not because we’ve oppressed them, not because of the state of Israel…It’s because we stand for everything they hate.” [7]) Neo-conservative columnists and talk show hosts (Daniel Pipes, Stephen Schwartz, Michael Savage, and Christopher Hitchens) and bloggers have used and promoted the use of Islamofascism. At the same time, conservative Republican Patrick Buchanan has charged that “neoconservatives, whose roots are in the Trotskyist-Social Democratic Left, are promoting use of the term. Their goal is to have Bush stuff al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran into an “Islamofascist” kill box, then let SAC do the rest.

Does Islamofascism Clarify?

Webster’s American Dictionary definition defines fascism as “a totalitarian government system led by a dictator, used historically for the totalitarian ideology of Mussolini and Hitler.” Neither Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda nor much of global terrorism fits this definition. Moreover, the use of the term “fascism” is so fluid, has been used in so many diverse ways and contexts by former President Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, or by the liberal left that the word has lost any meaning or use other than a denunciation. ”

 

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Also check out the discussion in the comment section of Paleo-Talibothra Found!! at Chapati Mystery.

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Related:The Clash of Civilizations?, “Clash” Euphemisms I: Political Islam and the West, Political Islam and Democracy, Political Islam and Dictatorships, Dehumanizing the Other – I: Orientalism,  Dehumanizing the Other – II: Reel Bad Arabs ,TV-dinner wars, Dehumanizing the Other III: “Preachers of Hate”, “Preachers of Hate” III: ‘Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week’, Muslim Public Opinion Polls, Interfaith Dialog