IASPS - News Behind the News

November 20, 2001

Terror in One Nation or Islam and Marxism:
Part I I
By David Yerushalmi

In the first of this two-part essay, two myths were singled out.  The first myth is "Islam is peaceful but has been captured and held hostage by the bin Ladens of the world." We should know this is false (see Part I).  The second myth is that the contrary evidence before us daily  -- that average Moslems identify passionately with bin Laden and the murder and mayhem he inflicts on America -- are not really the products of Islam at all.  
 
If not Islam, what then?  It's the corrupt, despotic Islamic regimes that drive Arabs and Islamists to murder Jews, Christians and Americans. The poor Muslims are mad and international terrorism is their legitimate "protest vote." This is myth 2. But it is not promulgated by Arabs, but by American liberal (often Jewish) multiculturalists.
 
Consider The New York Times'  foreign affairs commentator and Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman.  Friedman starts with an agenda and a problem. The problem is Arab/Islamic terror and how to explain it.
 
So if the explanation of Arab/Islamic terror is Friedman's problem, what is his agenda?
 
Friedman's agenda is liberalism. He is using the Islamic terrorist phenomenon to pump for multiculturalism, in America and in the West. And the aim? It's the old liberal view that nation-states are at odds with man's nature and that if we could but get beyond this primitivism we would join hands across the globe, share resources with the less fortunate, cease industrialization and pollution, eliminate nationalistic and religious wars, and embrace the universal "globalized" state: "The End of History,"  would be at hand. Just Imagine. 
 
In Friedman's world, one need not necessarily eliminate national borders, at least not right away.  In his mind, there is a process at work that is "globalizing" the planet.  Modernity. Science. Instant communications. The Internet. The mobile phone. Satellite dishes beaming C.N.N. to every corner of the desert sands.  The hand-held computer.  As these tools make their way into a society, the grass roots will demand even greater access to these fruits of modern western liberal democracy and before you know it, nationalistic, chauvanistic, and religous impetuses for militarism, imperialism, and colonialism will disappear. In his language, Friedman sees the third world, mainly the Islamic one, moving from "olive trees" to the "Lexus" almost as if it were destiny. 
 
If this is his agenda, what's the connection to his problem? His problem is explaining terrorism along cyrpto-Marxist lines -- Arabs and Moslems are poor and despotically ruled and therefore they kill people -- fitting the Marxist aim of an end of nations quite remarkably.
 
But the problem is that Friedman's explanation of Arab/Islamic terrorism is false. Poor, uneducated Arabs and the more affluent, educated ones overwhelmingly reject the "tools" of modernity and its politics the world over and cling to religious fundamentalism, hatred of all things western, most notably America, Israel and the Jews . The Arabs and Moslems supposed to be suffering under Islamic despots hate Americans, the West, Jews, Christians. Maybe this is a psychological problem? Projection? 
 
Friedman, undaunted, plows ahead. There are Arab despots out there causing Arabs to become terrorists and kill 5,000 innocent people in the WTC. He can point to things like Arafat's refusal to take the Clinton-Barak give-away at Camp David 2000 . What really motivated Arafat's refusal was his effort to generate a diversion for the Arab masses he oppresses. He would have done the deal at Camp David but it was more important to keep the disgruntled masses at war with Israel, the Jews, and even America, so as to distract them from the misery and anomie they experience at home.   And there's always Arafat's reliance upon the stiff-necked Jews greedy for Arab land. Thus, Friedman frequently attacks Israel for deepening Arafat's tyranny over the Arab masses. The Jews' settlement policy is part and parcel of Arafat's oppression, he opines. (For a rebuttal to this historically and factually mangled argument, see the NBN "Anthony Lewis, Thomas Friedman and the New York Times: Jews in Need of a Panacea.")
 
But, Friedman and the others who share his analytic bent go further. They want to argue that the ugly, viscious violence the world experiences almost daily at the hands of Arab/Islamic terrorists in one locale or another, is really a sociological cry for help from the poor, downtrodden victims of too many olive trees and one too few Lexus luxury sedans.   This argument would explain everything in the world once it explained why terror flows equally from varying regimes including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, the PA, the Phillipines, Nigeria, the Sudan, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Algeria, and Libya . The only covering generalization that fits these widely different places is terrorism by Arabs and Moslems.  To Friedman's retort that these are all despotic regimes (save possibly the Phillipines), one might ask Friedman to explain why terror isn't bred by the other despotic regimes around the world.
 
Even the pro-capitalist free trade types, who see in the "globalization" of markets a ready answer to poverty, despair and terror (see, e.g., a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, "Globalization under seige," by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge [Nov. 9]), would like to suggest that there is nothing inherent about Islam that breeds despotism, "illiberal economic policies" (i.e., statism), and terror. Indeed, if these Arab regimes would liberalize, it is suggested, potential despots and terrorists would be so busy enjoying the fruits of modernity that they'd have no time for murder and mayhem.
 
Whether espoused by capitalists, communists, global villagers, or Islamic apologists, the theory that despotism, tyranny and statism breeds world-wide anti-Western terror is so patently false as to be laughable.  If this theory were even partially true, wouldn't one expect the more than 1.2 billion Chinese to have unleashed a terror network at least as horrific as the Islamic version?  Instead, the Chinese that escape China merge quietly and successfully into Western democracies and those that remain behind the Great Barrier Wall attempt to bring democracy by lying down in front of communist tanks.
 
Moreover, are all of these Islamic malcontents so stupid as not to see the writing on the wall?  Are they all so easily fooled, both the illiterate and the college educated, that all of their domestic troubles would disappear if only they could wipe out a few thousand more Americans in the landmark of choice?  Or, is there something specific about Islam, as there was about Marxism, that justifies the purposeful murder of innocent civilians? 
 
Or, viewed from the other angle, why do so many of the Moslems living in the lap of luxury and freedom in the West voice support for bin Laden? Indeed, we learn from recent surveys that 61 percent of Moslems in Great Britain say U.S. efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden are not justified, and that fully 40 percent believe his war against the United States is justifiable.  These Moslems have plenty of luxury car sedans.  And, as we know, most of those involved in the September 11th operation were also fully articulated members of the middle- and upper-classes in their respective countries and had the option and privelege to study in the best schools in Europe and the U.S.
 
Something is clearly driving Moslem hatred of America and the West, even as a substantial number of Moslems live and enjoy the benefits of the free world.  How does a Moslem wake up early in London, sipping his tea, reading the London Times and checking his stock portfolio while justifying the murder of thousands of American men, women and children in cold blood?  This question escapes Friedman.  His answer is olive trees and Lexus sedans.
 
But, as Part I to this essay pointed out, understanding Islam and its drive for the One Universal State as the flip side of the Leftist coin stamped with the Marxist rhetoric of universal egalitarianism is the starting point of any serious inquiry.