Is Islam to Blame?
Silvio Berlusconi has supporters in surprising places.

Summary
There's a rash of articles in the liberal press suggesting that the conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan due not to the West but deep flaws in Islam. This is essentially racist rubbish and it doesn't fit the facts. Beware of big picture intellectuals
 

It's only natural since September 11 that there should be a flurry of big picture analysis hitting the broadsheets. Everyone has their own big picture, from the just nukem heard in the states, to the imperialism-is-to-blame persuasively put by John Pilger to the clash of civilisations associated with Samuel Huntingdon. (For my personal big picture see www.coffee/crisis/overview)
How ironic that in last Sunday's Observer, Huntingdon comes over as wise liberal emphasising not the inferiority of Islam but the dangers of over-rapid globalisation while Zia Sardar (`muslims in denial`) smears Islam with a fantasy that could have been scripted by Ariel Sharon.
The whole point of the big picture is that it is simple, it explains everything. But big picture intellectuals can be very dangerous for your health. The problem is that when he, and it usually is he, fails to explain everything the protagonist of the big picture will often do his best to make things fit anyway. This can be by twisting or supressing facts when they are mere observers. If they have power and if the facts are people, the people can end up dead, as happened to a whole class in Stalin's Russia, the anti-communist peasantry, the Kulaks.
Or they can end up bombed back to the stone age and poisoned by agent orange like the victims of the Domino Theory in Vietnam, a theory propagated by nice guy democrats with over-clear thought patterns like Pentagon chief Robert Macnamara, who incidentally went on lead the World Bank...
The liberal bombers have been evolving a new big picture theory, it's coming from a range of intellectuals, but it comes most persuasively from intellectuals like Zia Sardar, people who should be the first to admit that outrageous injustices have been meted out to the Islamic world by the West, from Palestine to Kashmir, from Iraq to Indonesia, indeed the standard article (it really gets to feel like this) starts by listing these.
However, the article goes on, no-one should deny that there is something wrong with Islam itself. The sickness of the Moslem world is all due to America and the west. Everyone has grievances, said Americans on Newsnight this week, why is it only the Moslems who strike back? Moslems are obsessed with the idea they are under attack by the west, but they are taking the wroiong approach (subtext: because the West isn't going to change). Moslems are in fact under attack by Islam itself, a religion that has never had a reformation, that puts God above the state.
Why else, is Islamic terrorism so prevalent across the world? From Algeria to Pakistan, from Afghanistan to Indonesia, terrorism is virtually a Moslem phenomenon in today's world.
This last claim is clearly preposterous nonsense. Was Timothy McVeigh a moslem, are the IRA moslems, is ETA, are the militant Hindus who terrorised Bombay and assassinated Mahatma Ghandi moslems, are the Sikhs who killed Indira Ghandi moslems, are the Tamil Tigers? And this is without any mention of state terrorism, of Ruanda, of Sharon, of Pinochet, of Savimbi, of Stalin, of Hitler, of imperial Japan, of the Belgian Congo. Clearly all the world's religions are urgently due for a second reformation on this thesis.
Let us remember that state terrorism is wholesale terrorism, mass terrorism. If we're going to be objective about it, and many of the anti-Islamic writers would certainly claim to be objective, then state terrorism is the true problem, and the big picture analysis would have to conclude that state terrorism is usually a Christian phenomenon. The most prolonged and perhaps the greatest ever crime against humanity, the slave trade, was pursued mainly by Christians, aided and abetted by Moslems, after, not before, the reformation.
How they screamed from the moral high ground in New York (or more often Washington) when anyone suggested there might be a cause of the atrocity on September 11. How dare anyone blame the victim. This is blaming the victim big time, the victims of Israel, the victims of US-installed Saddam Hussein, the victims of US-trained Bin Laden the victims of Wahabi fundamentalism bankrolled but not practiced by the US-backed Saudi elite.
Of course not all suffering can be laid at the door of western governments. The causes of terrorism are manifold. Population explosion, connived at at UN level by an unholy alliance of the Pope and the Imams, poverty, climate change, and the social disasters spreading across the globe as a result of neoliberal financial tyranny would be high on most sensible people's list.
Yes, and cultural traditions of violence, as in Afghanistan, but also as in Corsica, as in the wild west. Was it in Islam that a middle aged housewife blew someone away recently for walking up to their car on a public road? It was in Texas. A nutter? No, she had widespread support on the talk shows, you can't trust anyone nowadays, you see.
Terrorism usually arises when a group of people cannot get their way by other means, sometimes their cause is just, sometimes it isn't, their methods never are. Religious fundamentalism is useful for terrorist bosses because it provides recruits whose thinking can be manipulated, who are more prepared to take risks with their own lives, and more likely to devalue other people's lives in the belief that God gives us all a second chance in heaven.
OK, so terroism isn't always Islamic. But the anti-Islamic liberals believe they have a trump card. How come there are no democratic governments in any Islamic country. They can't all be western set-ups can they? What about Syria, what about Algeria?
The flaw here is that democracy is not a utopia that you do or don't have. The cold war made it seem like that because a powerful bloc was obviously not democratic in any way, while Europe and America in contrast were much more so. Nowadays most people are wiser. After the Supreme court republicans imposeed loser Bush on America, does anyone seriously suggest the US is anything but a highly flawed democracy?
The old communists found it easy to rig the ballots, rigging voter turnout is a more difficult proposition and no-one has tried. Even in the UK Tony Blair's most ardent supporters have to admit that he lost nearly a fifth of his voters in four years. In the US the figures are disastrous. When you consider that only registered voters are even counted as voters at all, the number of adults who voted for Bush are approaching the same percentage of adults who vote in Eastern Germany for the reformed communist party, around 20%. In a landslide it goes up to around 25%.
But they certainly rig everything else they can in the US, the information is controlled by a corporate cartel which describes illegal settlements as Jewish neighbourhoods. Anti-capitalist parties like the Wobblies in the twenties and the Black Panthers in the seventies were destroyed by campaigns of murderous state organised violence. Nowadays the financial hurdles to anyone without corporate finance are virtually insurmountable. It might look democracy from the offices of the Washington Times, but it doesn't from the street.
Other countries prefer to come out front with their guided democracy. Countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Turkey, and lately Indonesia and Algeria all have elections, a fairly free press and multiple parties. Do any of them have Sharia law? One, Iran, and its on its way out with no help from the democratic missionaries from the West. True democracy this isn't, but it's hardly a fundamentalist wasteland either. The moslem world probably has about the same proportion of vile tyrannies as most other regions.
Is there really any difference between the anti-Islamic liberals and Silvio Berlusconi's view that our civilisation is superior? Isn't it reminiscent of the cold war liberals, fighting for dmocracy, who took fifteen years to notice that South Vietnam was a dictatorship. Isn't it basically the same nasty cul-de-sac racism serving the interests of the Washington-Israel all-arabs-are-terrorists lobby and justifying inaction in Palestine, in Kashmir and in Chechenia?
In case we forget, there are some optimistic facts. Palestinians have never had a decent future since 1948, suppose they did now? The Palestinians were cheering Bill Clinton from the rooftops only two years ago, fundamentalist terrorists disappeared if only for a day or two. Basket case South America lost virtually every military dictatorship (most of them catholic fundmentalist) in the space of less than ten years in the eighties. Cable tv station Al Jazera has opened up debate as never before in even the most repressive arab states.
Of course terrorism needs to be condemned, as does political fundamentalism, as does the tyranny of neoliberalism which values human lives not acording to human rights but acording to their earning power. But it would be a good idea to put criticisms of Islam in the Islamic press, burgeoning under the influence of Al Jazera, where they might do some good rather than in the western press where an often badly informed audience is likely to be seriously misled.
Here's a benign domino theory, a big picture that offers hope. Israel pulls out of all the settlements, complying with UN resolutions at last, Jerusalem goes under UN sovereignty. Palestinians recover their true identity as one of the most secular, liberal and yes multi-religious communities in the Middle East. Fundamentalist demagogues turn their attention, as the Pope has already done, to the IMF and the WTO, joining the healthy democratic debate that so many in Washington really fear. The guided democracies liberalise further, the despots see the writing on the wall and do likewise, those who don't become isolated politically and fall, terrorists too become isolated and ultimately impotent as their support base dries up, as happened to the Baader Meinhof and Red Brigades in Europe.
A dream? It's a lot more real than some of the crap you read in the papers.

Dear Sir,

There has been a spate of suggestions recently that the Islamic world is at fault in the present crisis for variously not having had its own reformation, not being prepared to condemn its extremists etc. These are not only factually untrue but a pernicious attempt to blame the victim.
The battle against fundamentalist bigots has been going on since the beginning of history. It is fought mainly in quiet discussions invisible to `big picture` ideologists of all persuasions, it is fought by reason (which did not first appear in the Enlightenment or even the Christian reformation) and appeal to evidence. It is fought by love and its enemies are lies, fear and hate.
So far, against all the odds, this battle is being won in the Islamic world. The vast majority of Moslems have not allowed their justified rage at the behaviour of West to stampede them into support for the neo-fascism of Bin Laden's militants.
Has it occurred to self appointed western judges of Islam that the Reformation they arrogantly prescribe for it is in fact happening right now?
Meanwhile, Israel's ongoing terrorism and nuclear blackmaiil is funded by an alliance of Jewish and christian fundamentalists in the US congress, and rational critics of US policy such as Noam Chomsky are effectively censored in the `home of freedom`.
Perhaps the airheads could turn their attention to how this can happen in our post reformation society, after all it's the one they should understand best.

Ian Henshall
 

(Chair, INK personal capacity)

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