Storm Track Disinformation: Muslim Rage is Not New

I’m getting sick and tied of hearing that Muslim rage is a non-Muslim problem and that they were living so peacefully with non-Muslims until we over-reacted to their fundamentalist brethren’s attacks.

The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so?

That piece of garbage thinking aside, a recent commentary at the Guardian again wants to make non-Muslims feel that all Muslim problems stem from us. Take the recent violent take over by Hamas in Gaza.

With the severe restrictions imposed on them by their western-backed governments and the evaporation of American promises of reform and democratisation, this "democratic Islam" currently finds itself in the grip of a crisis.

Democratic Islam? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Oh, plaeeeze! As long as Islam is believed by both moderate and radical Muslims alike that Islam is both a religion and political system, any form of real democracy – and not just the right to vote for your favorite tyranny – will never happen.

Arabs have watched with horror as Palestinians have been severely punished for their electoral choices, isolated, starved, and propelled towards the bottomless pit of internecine feuding. The message from Washington and London seemed to be: don't bother with the ballot box - only through bombings and violence is change possible.

According to the apologists it’s damn if you do and damn if you don’t. Elder of Zion explains.

The argument boils down to this: if Muslims do anything evil, it is because the West has forced them to do it. Muslims who don't want to do anything evil are helpless in the face of overwhelming Western pressure to force those other Muslims to do evil things.

In other words, Muslim terror must be blamed on anyone but Muslims. Muslims are helpless subhumans, with no ability to take care of themselves, no ability to vote for progress, no ability to stand up to extremists - essentially, Muslims are babies who need to be coddled and spoiled by the adults of the West, and there will be deadly temper tantrums if the adults don't do exactly what the infantile Muslims want them to do.

"In an article titled "How the Arabs Explain the Terror Phenomenon" in the Qatari daily Al-Raya, Al-Ansari criticized the ways in which the Arab world denies and ignores the phenomenon of terrorism, and refuted the political and socio-economic arguments justifying it.

"Why has the terrorist violence increased? And why has it reached a level of such madness and barbarism? Why aren't we managing to deal with it and handle it? Why is there a rise in terror operations targeting innocents?

"In my view, the [answer] lies in our inability to explain the phenomenon of terrorism, and to break it down into its structural internal causes and into the environmental elements that support its existence. [This inability] emanates from the following three main causes that are common in the Arab arena as explanations for terrorism:

"The first is the discourse of denial... that is, exonerating Muslims from [any] accusation of [perpetrating] terror operations, and [instead] accusing their enemies - usually the Mossad and U.S. intelligence. An extensive sector of prominent clerics, intellectual elites, and the masses are still convinced that 9/11 was a Mossad or U.S. intelligence operation...

"The second cause is the discourse of defensiveness, as manifested in repeated statements that terrorism has no religion, homeland or nationality, but is a transient virus that is alien [to the Arab world] - or that Islam is innocent [of terrorism].

"The third cause is the discourse of justification, which is extremely common in the religious and media outlets. This discourse tries to link terrorism with political factors, international conflicts or internal socio-economic factors - saying that terrorism is the outcome of political repression by some regimes that strangle freedoms and are hostile to democracy or that terrorism is a response to American and Western injustices, to the policy of discrimination [against Muslims], to the blind pro-Israel bias, and to the global conspiracy against the Muslims…

But none of this is new. In fact Muslim rage has been around long before it hit the headlines after the Cold War. 23 years before the Iranian Revolution and 55 years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a section (pages 24-34) of the very first of the intelligence reviews published by the Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. War Department identified Islam as a threat to world stability. In fact here’s a little known view of Islam in 1946.

It would be interesting to know how many of the higher-ups in our intelligence agencies and Defense Department were even aware of this report when the hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania ground. According to its authors, Islamic countries were “full of discontent and frustration” and were aware of their “inferiority.” These feelings manifested themselves in “killings and terrorism,” which were reported in “daily news accounts.” The analysts knew about the feud between the Sunnis and Shi’a. They also knew about Wahabism and the Muslim Brotherhood.

I won’t reproduce in its entirety the section of the report entitled “Islam: A Threat to World Peace”. You can read it all in the report. But here’s something from the last page.

Two basic urges meet head-on in this area, and conflict is inherent in this collision of interests. These urges reveal themselves in daily news accounts of killings and terrorism, of pressure groups in opposition, and of raw nationalism and naked expansionism masquerading as diplomatic maneuvers. The urges tie together the tangled threads of power politics which—snarled in the lap of the United Nations Assembly—lead back to the centers of Islamic pressure and to the capitals of the world’s biggest nations.

That last entry could be written today.

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