Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Munson: Beers, Goldenberg and Barry are right to say that the term “Islamofascism” is often used in ways that obscure fundamental differences. They are wrong, however, to suggest that conservatives are generally unaware of this. The truth is that conservatives like Andrew Bacevich and Leon Hadar have been among the most insightful critics of the neoconservative tendency to obscure the very different goals of different Islamist movements.

The Myth of “Islamofascism” | National Security Network, November 14, 2007

The Myth of “Islamofascism”

By Rand Beers, Ilan Goldenberg and Patrick Barry

“Violent, radical jihadists want to replace all the governments of the moderate Islamic states, replace them with a caliphate. And to do that, they also want to bring down the West, in particular us. And they’ve come together as Shi’a and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda with that intent.” – Mitt Romney, 5/15/07

“The first step toward a realistic peace is to be realistic about our enemies. They follow a violent ideology: radical Islamic fascism, which uses the mask of religion to further totalitarian goals and aims to destroy the existing international system.” – Rudy Giuliani 10/07.

“Islamic fascism has declared war on us and the Western world. Their intent is to bring down Western civilization,” – Fred Thompson 10/30/07

Since 9/11 conservatives have continually lumped various groups and countries together including Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran into one threat that they term “Islamofascism.” The reality is much complicated. These various groups and countries have different intentions and capabilities, often work at cross purposes and are in some cases ideologically opposed to each other. In fact, Shi’a-Sunni tension across the Middle East is at an all time high, only further reinforcing the fact that these groups are different.

The simplistic term “Islamofascism” undermines America’s national security. By confusing these various threats, conservatives make it impossible to pursue effective policies. This ideological approach has caused the United States to miss numerous opportunities, where it could have played these groups off of each other to America’s benefit. Moreover, the term “Islamofascism” creates the perception that the United States is fighting a religious war against Islam, thus alienating moderate voices in the region who would be willing to work with America towards common goals. Dividing these groups and dealing with them separately is a far better policy than lumping them together.

Female suicide bomber hits Sri Lankan capital | csmonitor.com, Nov. 29, 2007

A female suicide bomber struck Wednesday in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, killing herself and one other person, but not the government minister who was the intended target. Authorities blamed the attack on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), or Tamil Tigers, whose long-running separatist war flared up last year after the collapse of a Norwegian-brokered 2002 cease-fire.

The suicide bombing came one day after Sri Lanka warplanes bombed a LTTE radio station to stop the broadcast of an annual speech by rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. The group separately accused the military of planting a roadside bomb that killed 13 people, mostly students. In his speech, which was carried by other rebel media, Mr. Prabhakaran said it was impossible to make peace with the ethnic Sinhalese majority. For its part, the Sinhalese-dominated government has said it can defeat the LTTE in its northern stronghold and vowed Monday to kill Prabhakaran.

The suicide bombing took place near the office of Welfare Minister Douglas Devananda, reports Reuters. The minister’s personal secretary died and two other people were wounded in the blast, according to hospital officials. An officer of the elite police Special Task Force told Reuters that it was a suicide mission….

The LTTE has fought since 1983 for an independent Tamil homeland in northern Sri Lanka, in a war that has killed around 70,000 people. Tamils make up 11.9 percent of the island’s 20 million people, and almost 74 percent are Sinhalese, reports Bloomberg.

In July, Sri Lanka’s Army flushed the LTTE out of the island’s multiethnic east. Earlier this month, President Mahinda Rajapakse vowed in parliament to “eradicate” terrorism from the country and said that the LTTE had “demonstrated that they will never be ready to surrender arms and agree to a democratic political settlement.”

Unsurprisingly, the renewed conflict has driven away foreign tourists, reports Agence France-Presse. Arrivals fell 20 percent in the first 10 months of the year to 387,790. Tourism is the island fourth-biggest industry.

In an analysis last month in Asia Times Online, security consultant James Voortman said that having taken back the eastern region Sri Lanka now has the upper hand over the LTTE. But the cost of a military victory, if attainable, could be prohibitive.

Defense analysts are divided on whether or not the military can drive the Tigers from their northern stronghold. The proponents of an assault argue that the Tigers are currently weak. There is an element of truth in this, as is seen with the loss of the east and subsequent battles on the northern fringes…However, other defense analysts see this lack of activity as exactly what makes the Tigers even more dangerous. This theory claims that the rebel leadership has dedicated all of its manpower to defending the north. With the Tigers stronghold being heavily fortified, it will not fall easily, and the military is likely to suffer high casualties.

Political Leader of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers Killed in an Airstrike - New York Times, November 3, 2007

NEW DELHI, Nov. 2 — The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan separatist group known for suicide attacks on political and military targets, lost their most prominent international representative on Friday when the head of their political wing was killed in an airstrike by the Sri Lankan military, according to the guerrilla group.

The Tamil Tigers announced the death of the leader, S. P. Tamilselvan, along with those of five associates, in a news release issued early in the afternoon Sri Lanka time. The Sri Lankan military said he had been killed in air force strikes on an area called Thirivearu, near the rebel garrison of Kilinochchi, where the military said senior rebel leaders had gathered for a meeting. There was no independent verification available of exactly when he was killed, or where.

The killing further ratcheted up the stakes in Sri Lanka’s renewed quarter-century-long ethnic conflict between the majority ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government and the rebels, also known as the L.T.T.E. For more than a year, a series of open military attacks and counterattacks, suicide bombings and mysterious abductions has left no pretense that a 2002 cease-fire agreement, which Mr. Tamilselvan had helped draft, still holds.

Krugman, Fearing Fear Itself, New York Times, November 2, 2007

Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.”

Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s.

Sri Lanka Admits More Damage by Rebel Raid - New York Times, October 25, 2007

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Oct. 24 — A rebel attack on a Sri Lankan air base this week caused far more damage than previously acknowledged, destroying eight aircraft, including a vital surveillance plane, Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake said Wednesday.

The admission, in a statement to Parliament, came amid growing accusations from the opposition that officials had lied about the destruction from Monday’s predawn attack on the Anuradhapura air base.

…the prime minister announced that three helicopters, four training planes and a Beechcraft surveillance plane had been destroyed in the attack, essentially confirming the Tamil reports of the damage. He did not explain the discrepancy.

Peter Bergen, How Osama Bin Laden Beat George W. Bush, TNR, October 15, 2007

The removal of Saddam Hussein would prove to be a boon to Al Qaeda–creating a base for the terrorist organization where none had existed before, energizing jihadists around the word, and confirming for many Muslims bin Laden’s contention that the United States was at war with Islam….

As the administration’s own 2006 National Intelligence Estimate explains, “[T]he Iraq War has become the [`]cause celebre’ for jihadists … and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

David Ignatius - The Dignity Agenda - washingtonpost.com, October 14, 2007

After I mentioned Brzezinski’s ideas about dignity in a previous column, a reader sent me a 1961 essay by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, which made essentially the same point. A deeply skeptical man who resisted the “isms” of partisan thought, Berlin was trying to understand the surge of nationalism despite two world wars. “Nationalism springs, as often as not, from a wounded or outraged sense of human dignity, the desire for recognition,” he wrote.

“The craving for recognition has grown to be more powerful than any other force abroad today,” Berlin continued. “It is no longer economic insecurity or political impotence that oppresses the imaginations of many young people in the West today, but a sense of the ambivalence of their social status — doubts about where they belong, and where they wish or deserve to belong.”

A final item on my dignity reading list is “Violent Politics,” a new book by the iconoclastic historian William R. Polk. He examines 10 insurgencies through history — from the American Revolution to the Irish struggle for independence to the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation — to make a stunningly simple point, which we managed to forget in Iraq: People don’t like to be told what to do by outsiders. “The very presence of foreigners, indeed, stimulates the sense first of apartness and ultimately of group cohesion.” Foreign intervention offends people’s dignity, Polk reminds us. That’s why insurgencies are so hard to defeat.

Uri Avnery, The Mother of all Pretexts - Gush Shalom, October 13, 2007

The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the “Clash of Civilizations”. And so we found the mother of all pretexts.

THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.

Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, “Muslim” and “terrorist” are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

Jalal Ghazi, War on Iraq: Evolution of the Suicide Attacker, Alternet, October 9, 2007

The war in Iraq has enabled insurgent groups to develop the relatively modern innovation of suicide bombs into a strategic weapon.

Suicide operations, the signature weapon of the Iraqi insurgency, have evolved into a tactical method of warfare used by insurgents around the world. These “moving and thinking bombs” are more effective, numerous, adaptable and sophisticated — able to carry out both mass killings and targeted political assassinations — and are harder to counter since women and children are being used to carry them.

A study by the Gulf Research Center, a Middle East think tank, analyzes these operations from a technical perspective. The report, “Security and Terrorism: Suicide Bombing Operations,” published in Arabic and English, focuses on suicide operations in Iraq, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Israel.

Although the study does not provide evidence of direct relations between insurgent groups operating in different countries, their similar tactics strongly suggest that they are learning from each other. The Iraq war has served as a suicide operations school for insurgent groups around the world, Dr. Mustafa Alani, director of Security and Terrorism Studies at the Gulf Research Center, told the Dubai-based Al Arabiya television network.

Suicide bombings in Afghanistan increased from one attack in 2001 to 118 in 2006, according to Hekmat Karzai, director of the Center for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul. Half of all operations carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan are now suicide operations.

Tony Judt, From Military Disaster to Moral High Ground - New York Times, October 7, 2007

In a democracy, war should always be the last resort - no matter how good the cause. “To jaw-jaw,” as Churchill reminded Eisenhower, “is always better than to war-war.” So the next time someone waxes lyrical for armed overseas intervention in the name of liberal ideals or “defining struggles,” remember what Albert Camus had to say about his fellow intellectuals’ propensity for encouraging violence to others at a safe distance from themselves. Albert Camus had to say about his fellow intellectuals’ propensity for encouraging violence to others at a safe distance from themselves. “Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed,” he wrote, “but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.”

Peter Galbraith, The Victor?, TomDispatch, 9/18/2007, and NYRB, Oct. 11, 2007

In his continuing effort to bolster support for the Iraq war, President Bush traveled to Reno, Nevada, on August 28 to speak to the annual convention of the American Legion. He emphatically warned of the Iranian threat should the United States withdraw from Iraq. Said the President, “For all those who ask whether the fight in Iraq is worth it, imagine an Iraq where militia groups backed by Iran control large parts of the country.”

On the same day, in the southern Iraqi city of Karbala, the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, battled government security forces around the shrine of Imam Hussein, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest places. A million pilgrims were in the city and fifty-one died.

The U.S. did not directly intervene, but American jets flew overhead in support of the government security forces. As elsewhere in the south, those Iraqi forces are dominated by the Badr Organization, a militia founded, trained, armed, and financed by Iran. When U.S. forces ousted Saddam’s regime from the south in early April 2003, the Badr Organization infiltrated from Iran to fill the void left by the Bush administration’s failure to plan for security and governance in post-invasion Iraq.

5 Myths About Terrorism - washingtonpost.com, September 16, 2007

In fact, terrorists are typically motivated by geopolitical grievances, not blind hatred. The agendas of individual terrorist groups vary, but their tactical goal is always more or less the same: to sow fear and confusion by deliberately targeting civilians in order to intimidate a country into changing its policies and ways….

Jitka Maleckova of the Russell Sage Foundation and I found that members of the military wing of the radical Shiite group Hezbollah who were killed in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were better educated and less likely to be poor than their Lebanese countrymen….

Every major religious faith has had followers involved in terrorism. (Sri Lanka, for instance, has grappled for decades with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group that pioneered suicide bombing as a terrorist tactic and hopes to create a homeland for the country’s mostly Tamil minority, who are largely Hindu.)

Poll: Bin Laden tops Musharraf in Pakistan - CNN.com, September 11, 2007

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf — a key U.S. ally — is less popular in his own country than al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to a poll of Pakistanis conducted last month by an anti-terrorism organization….

According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating. Musharraf’s support is 38 percent. U.S. President George W. Bush’s approval: 9 percent.

Asked their opinion on the real purpose of the U.S.-led war on terror, 66 percent of poll respondents said they believe the United States is acting against Islam or has anti-Muslim motivation.

Dans le chaudron des kamikazes, Libération, 6 Septembre, 2007

Un peu moins de quatre ans après la fameuse nuit du 16 mai 2003, au cours de laquelle une dizaine de kamikazes issus du même quartier de Sidi Moumen firent quelque 50 morts à Casablanca, le cauchemar se répète. Cette immense banlieue est devenue synonyme du cocktail explosif formé par la misère et le terrorisme. En fait, avec ses 350 000 habitants (sur les 5 millions que compte Casablanca), Sidi Moumen est une ville dans la ville. Même chez les pauvres, il y a des beaux quartiers et des bidonvilles. Le cybercafé se trouve dans un quartier «en dur». Il faut encore rouler un quart d’heure avant d’atteindre Douar Sekouila, le quartier où habitait Abdelfettah Raydi. Une pièce unique de moins de 10 m2 qu’il partageait avec sa mère et ses six frères et sœurs. Il n’y a ni eau courante ni électricité. Les vaches paissent dans les ordures. Khoudri n’habitait pas loin. Une fois le soleil couché, plus personne, pas même la police, ne s’aventure dans ces venelles sans éclairage. Les gosses sniffent de la colle avant 8 ans. Depuis tout petits, Raydi comme Khoudri gagnaient leur vie en vendant des jus de fruits aux abords des mosquées, seules institutions de ces quartiers à l’abandon.

Le bien, le mal et le « terrorisme », par Eric Rouleau (Le Monde diplomatique)
Il n’y a pas si longtemps, aux Etats-Unis, un conférencier devait éviter d’analyser les causes politiques et sociales de la violence, de crainte d’être soupçonné de justifier le terrorisme. L’oukase officiel exigeait que l’on considère la planète comme menacée par la haine irrationnelle de la démocratie. Politologues et journalistes évitaient prudemment de s’engager à contre-courant. Cependant, la vague de contestation qui déferle, à la suite des scandales qui éclaboussent l’administration Bush, balaye progressivement les tabous et les idées reçues, comme en témoignent plusieurs œuvres parues récemment. Elles ne justifient pas le terrorisme, elles analysent ses causes et suggèrent des remèdes.