Luton is an unlikely place for revolution. Most Americans have never heard of it. English people know it mainly as the home of an average soccer team and the nearest town to London’s third airport. Yet it was from neat and tidy semi-detached houses on quiet suburban streets in this prosperous part of southern England, that four young British men, Muslims all, went to die in Afghanistan, fighting for the Taliban. And it is on the shopping streets of this same town that more angry young Muslim men harangued passers-by with talk of jihad, pledging to give their lives for Islam in its fight against western oppression. Clad in designer denims, and speaking with English regional accents, youths no more than 16 years old spoke approvingly of a martyr’s death on the soil of a far-off foreign country.
Moderate Muslims from the nearby mosque rushed to deny the angry rhetoric of the young radicals and disputed their right to speak for Islam, but the disturbing message was clear on TV all over Britain and the world, wherever the BBC was broadcast. It’s one thing to see bearded and turbaned revolutionaries on video, sitting in a foreign desert speaking words of hate for western nations. It’s quite another to watch middle-class English youths saying the same things, with every appearance of sincerity, on the sidewalks outside the neighborhood grocery store.
The depth of this alarming antipathy should provoke us to examine its causes. In this regard, it’s remarkable that I find myself in at least partial agreement with, of all people, Pat Buchanan, one of the loudest spokesmen of the far right wing of American politics.
In a recent article in the Philadelphia Enquirer, Buchanan summed up several reasons why America is the particular focus of so much ill will from the Islamic world:
– America props up “puppet regimes of parasite princes” who squander the oil wealth of Arabia in the “fleshpots” of the West.
– US presence on Saudi soil “defiles” the land that contains the holy places of Mecca and Medina.
– We “pollute” Islam by the products of our popular culture that “captivate and corrupt” Muslim youth.
– We “starve Iraqi children with sanctions” because Saddam Hussein defies UN resolutions, but we “give Israel the weapons to defy UN resolutions, persecute Palestinians and deny them the liberty we champion.”
This much is accurate, but Buchanan goes on to describe American culture as comprising “drugs, alcohol, abortions, filthy magazines, dirty movies and hellish music,” giving a fundamentalist Christian slant that diminishes his argument. Buchanan makes no mention of great American art, music and literature, or noble efforts like the Peace Corps, selflessly serving the international community. But stripped of this transparent bias, his analysis of the facts still retains some merit.
Almost as disquieting as the hatred spewing from Islamic extremists is the resentment towards the West evident in the feelings of moderate, well-educated Muslims. This isn’t a function of culture, but of misconceived foreign policy on the part of Western powers. A recent article by Holger Jensen, distributed through the Scripps Howard News Service, documented the opinions of a US-educated Pakistani woman in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
“We love America. . .” said the woman. “But we feel a sense of betrayal. . .because you use people, then cast them aside when they’re no longer useful to you. As long as (America) needed Pakistan (in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan), you couldn’t do enough for us. As soon as the Soviets left Afghanistan, you abandoned us, leaving us with a refugee problem, an economic problem, and an Islamic fundamentalist problem.”
It was, of course, that precise amalgam of refugees, poverty and fundamentalism that fermented the current incarnation of Islamic militancy towards America.
But the cynical use of Islamic countries for the political and economic gain of the West is hardly new. In the aftermath of the First World War, Britain and France carved up the Middle East for their own purposes. Britain created a large “protectorate” from large parts of modern-day Israel, Jordan and Iraq to connect its North African territories with Imperial India. Within this sphere of influence London meddled in and directed Middle East politics for more than two decades, while in neighboring Iran the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, controlled by the British government (and the forerunner of today’s BP), controlled the political economy of that nation.
A vivid example of this economic imperialism was the 1953 coup in Iran — instigated by Britain’s MI6 with the active support of the CIA — which overthrew the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadegh. Iran’s leader intended to nationalize that country’s oil supplies, taking them back from British control so that the wealth of Iran’s natural resources could directly benefit the country’s population rather than boost the profits of a foreign corporation.
Britain embroiled the American government in their scheme, falsely accusing Mossadegh of being a pro-communist demagogue, and playing cynically into McCarthyism and the anti-communist hysteria of the period. Together, the two western powers engineered a military coup to imprison Mossadegh, nullifying the democratic wishes of the Iranian people. This wasn’t like the Gulf War, where the tyrannical Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. This was the British and American governments removing a democratically elected leader of a sovereign foreign nation simply because they didn’t like his policies. Cynical actions such as these give the lie to every tenet of democratic freedom espoused by both governments. This history disgraces us, and helps us understand why our words carry so little weight in that part of the world while our actions are remembered.
Buchanan included specific references to Israel in his analysis, and this raises tricky issues. It is very hard to offer legitimate, objective criticism of Israeli policy in America without being accused of anti-Semitism. As Britain isn’t locked into support for Israel to the same extent as American foreign policy, such commentary is more forthcoming in that country.
In the late 1940s, Palestine remained under British mandate as a result of Britain’s attempt to maintain control in the Arab world. In this context, the terrorists were Jews, bombing and killing British troops and Arabs in a well-coordinated campaign of murder and mayhem. In the shock and horror of a post-Holocaust world, the creation of a Jewish state enjoyed tremendous international support, but it was achieved on the ground largely by bombs and bullets aimed at British troops. In 1946, Jewish Irgun terrorists bombed the King David Hotel, the British headquarters in Jerusalem, killing 91 soldiers and civilians, an attack similar in concept to those carried out by Osama bin Laden against the US embassies in Africa. Two years later, as documented in the British documentary End of Empire, the Irgun, in association with Hagannah Jewish commandos, slaughtered 250 Arab women and children in a village outside Jerusalem.
Leading terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view) such as David Ben Gurion and Menachem Begin went on to become respected politicians, and with determined American pressure, the political landscape was changed for future generations. But three-quarters of a million Palestinians living in the former British protectorate suddenly found themselves without a country, dispossessed within their own land, and abandoned by the British when the going got tough. Britain reneged on promises to support Palestine under pressure from President Truman, who threatened to cut off financial aid to post-war Britain unless the London government allowed the formation of a Jewish state at the expense of the Palestinians.
Recent decades have not improved the record of the western nations. A double standard is evident to many Muslims concerning the West’s dealings with Arabs and Jews: we mouth the words of democracy while we support monarchies in the Middle East that suppress these same ideals, and we allow Israel to occupy lands far in excess of putative international agreements.
Buchanan defended himself against Americans who say it’s unpatriotic to think this way. Again, I find myself in agreement with his argument that it’s sensible (I would add necessary) to review this history honestly. Patriotism doesn’t mean suppressing unpleasant truths about your past. Buchanan quoted the Chinese sage Sun Tzu, who wrote: “Know thy enemy. Know thyself.”
If America and Britain are to fight Islamic extremists “for the rest of our lives,” as Buchanan expressed the dilemma, then “we should know why they hate us, and we delude ourselves if we believe the slaughters of September 11 came about because we are ‘good.'”
This doesn’t mean that America “deserved” the terrorist attacks. Such talk is nonsensical and inhuman. But it does mean that we must understand and acknowledge how our actions, often selfish and arrogant, have created hostility among the peoples of many nations.
Those of us who believe, as I do, that we are right to pursue carefully calibrated military action against bin Laden and the Taliban, must recognize that the easy euphemisms emanating from the Pentagon disguise the enormity of the task facing us.
Are the four dead Taliban warriors from Luton martyrs who died for their faith? Or are they tragically deluded young men who betrayed their country? It all depends on your point of view, and the gulf between these two irreconcilable positions illustrates the magnitude of the problem for Britain and America. It’s not primarily a public relations and propaganda problem; it’s a problem of history.
We may wish that Muslims would believe us when we say we’re only after the terrorists. But why should they believe us now, when we’re telling the truth, while they remember all the cynical lies we’ve told in the past? *
This article appears in Nov 10-16, 2001.
