Smith College professor Suleiman A. Mourad writes:
With the fall of the USSR and its constellation of Communist governments, US elites no longer had a ready rationale to maintain the country’s war machine....The US brags about its commitment to democracy. But its interventions have yielded death and despotism for the Middle East.
The anti-American views of Mourad are commonplace among leftist academics. Indeed, they are obsessed with their anti-Americanism, and absolve Muslims past and present of all responsibility for the Islam world’s historic human rights abuses, barbarism, hatred of the infidel, and state-sanctioned atrocities in Sharia-adherent countries. Mourad makes no mention of the fact that in Saudi Arabia, a powerful Sharia-adherent Islamic country, his Smith College students would all need permission from their male guardians to seek an education. But Mourad takes the easy way out: he blames all of Islam’s woes on America.
Mourad also states:
American society — already shot through with militarism, the product of endless military interventions since World War II — has seen a noxious new element added to its violent brew: Islamophobia.
Mourad adds:
Muslims, in their majority, have pushed for the separation of state and religion...They established liberal democratic constitutions. They liberated women from many old religious customs (including the veil) and brought them into schools and universities and the workforce.
Mourad also paints a wretched picture of Muslims. He gives the impression that they are an inferior people, unable to escape the powerful influence of the U.S., and inclined to barbarism, perpetrating violence and oppression against their own as a matter of course. In contrast to Mourad’s exaggerated claims about the Muslim reaction to supposed American misdeeds, the genuine suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis and Muslim Arab nationalists during the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the ongoing genocide against Christians in the Middle East have not led those victimized groups to begin abusing their women, beheading their own and outsiders, stoning those accused of adultery, murdering their own for apostasy, and seeking perpetual revenge and conquest against the infidel.
The Jacobin magazine website, which features Mourad’s article, states that “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.” Unfortunately, leftists and socialists, still afflicted by white guilt, refuse to realize that a foreign force is overtaking them; that the West and Israel are the victimized ones; and that Islamic supremacists have historically regarded infidels as inferiors. Nor do they recognize how they are being used and manipulated by people such as Mourad, who so skillfully uses their own intellectual constructs against them without their even realizing what is happening.
“How the US Creates Terrorism”, by Suleiman A. Mourad, Jacobin, May 4, 2017:
In February, writing in the pages of the Nation, the Middle East historian Juan Cole ruminated on how the US could defeat ISIS. The answer, he argued, is to forge an alliance with Iran and its network of militias.
Cole has a short historical memory.
The genealogy of ISIS can, no doubt, be traced a good way back in Islamic history. But it includes a very prominent and recent pedigree: the Sunni jihadists that the US sponsored and armed to fight its then-ideological enemy, the USSR, in the 1980s and 1990s. Cole would have the US attack ISIS at all costs, even if his preferred strategy plunged the Muslim world into a state of deeper violence and chaos, and birthed a fiercer enemy in the future.
Unfortunately, the prominent scholar isn’t alone in his amnesia.
The belief that Islamic terrorism represents an existential threat and that all strategies, regardless of their consequences, should be used to fight it has militarized American society in very dangerous ways while obscuring the actual roots of Islamic terrorism.
Violent trends in Islam — as in Christianity and other religions — always existed, but historically, Muslims largely mustered enough social and political will to contain them. So why is this no longer the case, and what are the circumstances that turned the ideology of Islamic terrorism into an attractive one for some today? Who, in short, created the conditions that gave rise to groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and many others?
Clashing Civilizations
Since 9/11, the US has pursued policies largely inspired by Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” in which the Muslim world stands as an inveterate enemy of “the West.” With the fall of the USSR and its constellation of Communist governments, US elites no longer had a ready rationale to maintain the country’s war machine. Huntington’s theory provided them one.
After al-Qaeda struck on 9/11, the Bush administration launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeking to eradicate networks of Islamic terror, whatever the price to Muslim civilians. Although antiwar voices in the US grew quite loud at times, and managed to elect Barack Obama as president, a new normal had been established. Obama not only prosecuted the same wars but launched new (albeit undeclared) ones in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. As a result, the Middle East is in even direr straits than when Bush departed (apologetics of Obama boosters notwithstanding).
Back at home, American society — already shot through with militarism, the product of endless military interventions since World War II — has seen a noxious new element added to its violent brew: Islamophobia. Trump’s anti-Muslim executive orders — which, despite some backlash, received higher approval ratings than his overall performance as president — were just the latest indication of how profoundly recent US wars have changed American society, and how domestically successful the campaign against Islam has been.
Deepening militarization has empowered religious fanatics and imperialist ideologues in the US, who use any pretext to march the country down the path of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” Indeed, ultra-conservative Christianity in the US doesn’t express itself primarily through violence at home. It uses its political muscle to inflict violence abroad through US wars.
Autocracy in the Middle East
If the Middle East is mired in dictatorship, it has more to do with US meddling than any innate Muslim affinity for despotism. When Syrian autocrat Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, President Bill Clinton dispatched Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to fête his son, Bashar al-Assad, as the British-educated reformer. Assad ruled with an iron first from the beginning — and the US raised no objections.
In 2009, Obama travelled to Turkey and Egypt to announce a new US posture toward the Muslim world. Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad — all were slated for removal, to make way for a new breed of dictators cloned in the image of the ruler who was then the darling of the US and Europe: Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But Obama’s meddling weakened an already fragile civil society, multiplying recruits to ISIS and al-Qaeda. And the region’s autocrats and others knew exactly how to play the game. They used the threat of ISIS to justify their draconian clampdown on political freedom, and as scarecrows to frighten the US and Europe into guaranteeing their survival. How else could they be “key partners” in the war against terror?
When Erdoğan came to power, the US (the EU on its heels) steered all kinds of investment and political support his way. Erdoğan was the model of the new “moderate Muslim.” Today he is dismantling a civil society that took decades to build, and anyone who dares to criticize him is labeled a terrorist. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Mubarak’s successor, is turning Egypt into a time bomb by filling his prisons with thousands of alleged terrorists. Assad finished off fifteen thousand supposed terrorists in a single prison, and his barbarity has fueled a civil war that’s left more than five hundred thousand dead and caused five million to flee the country. The Iraqi government employs Iranian-backed militias that are no less murderous than ISIS. Saudi Arabia’s ongoing, US-backed bombing campaign has leveled Yemen.
ISIS, al-Qaeda, and their ilk have often depended on the protection and support of other US allies. Pakistan nurtured terrorist organizations to use against India, and the Saudis did the same to undercut Assad’s government and Iranian influence in Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere. Erdoğan used ISIS as a weapon against the Kurds, and Assad did the same to cause trouble for the US in Iraq (and later the Syrian opposition).
What Muslim world are we expecting these actors to build after ISIS is gone?
No More Allies
Since the 1950s, US foreign policy has systematically worked to undermine democracy in the Muslim world. It’s labored to undercut all the optimism and reform that secularists and religious progressives advocated for and institutionalized since the nineteenth century.
Muslims, in their majority, have pushed for the separation of state and religion (shunning Sharia and reducing its application to a small realm, including marriage, inheritance, and pure religious practice). They established liberal democratic constitutions. They liberated women from many old religious customs (including the veil) and brought them into schools and universities and the workforce....
