Muslim Rage is Not New

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.