Updates from AIJAC

The Roots of Terror

October 4, 2001
Number 10/01 #02

Below are several articles dealing with the question of handling "the roots of terror" in the Middle East, a subject much discussed in the Opinion pages. First, Stanley Kurtz of the National Review takes on the subject of claims that terror can be traced back to US government policies. Next, David Makovsky looks at the need for Middle Eastern Muslim scholars to uproot terror by condemning it clearly. been forced into a Middle Eastern internal conflict between the wealthy and the dispossessed. Finally, Professor Bernard Lewis, dean of Western scholars of Islamic, provides some historical background on Jihad, the Crusades and other concepts being thrown around.

Can I also recommend that those of you interested in the roots of Muslim hatred of the US and the West look at a ten-year old classic piece on the subject by Prof. Bernard Lewis. It can be accessed at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/90sep/rage.htm.

Getting to the Root

What’s really behind the terrorism.

Stanley Kurtz

National Review, October 3, 2001

Why was the World Trade Center destroyed? The Left tells us that U.S. foreign policy is at fault – specifically, our support for Israel and our sanctions against Iraq. The reply is that mere changes in policy won't placate the terrorists. It's America itself that the terrorists envy and hate – our freedom, our power, our prosperity. That sobering fact leaves us little alternative beside the use of diplomacy, finance, and force to bring the terrorists and the nations that harbour them to heel.

This is the debate of the moment, and rightly so. But if it's a question of why the World Trade Center was destroyed, why not go to the terrorists who attacked it? The hijackers are dead, of course, and their sponsor, Osama Bin Laden, is currently unavailable for interviews. But there remains a way to speak with some of those who attacked the World Trade Center. I'm thinking of the terrorists who ignited a truckload of explosives in the World Trade Center parking lot in 1993, killing six people. Had the amount of explosives in that truck been just a little larger, and had the truck been only slightly differently placed, the World Trade Center would have been destroyed, with a likely loss of two hundred thousand lives (the approximate combined casualty toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) – 50,000 office workers, 50,000 visitors, and 100,000 workers in the surrounding buildings (a better-placed blast would have toppled one tower into the other, and both towers would have crashed onto the surrounding buildings).

As it happens, U. C. Santa Barbara professor of sociology, Mark Juergensmeyer, interviewed Mahmud Abouhalima, a ringleader of the original World Trade Center bombing plot, while researching his book, Terror in the Mind of God. We also know a good deal about Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the exiled leader of the Egypt's most radical Islamic movement, al Gamaa-Islamiya ("the Islamic group"), who authorized the first World Trade Center bombing, and who, like Abouhalima, is now imprisoned for his role in the plot. Both Abouhalima and Rahman seem to have had ties, if shadowy ones, to Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Obviously, Bin Laden's September 11 operation finished off what Rahman, Abouhalima, and their accomplices began in 1993. So an understanding of Rahman's and Abouhalima's motivations should tell us a lot about the underlying causes of the terror we face today.

Given what we know about Rahman and Abouhalima, what are we to make of the claim that America's support for Israel is the root cause of the bombing (and the accompanying implication that a slackening of our support for Israel will bring an end to the terror)? Before assessing that claim, the craven and self-defeating nature of this whole line of thinking deserves comment. Everyone knows, yet too many forget, that it is foolish to negotiate with terrorists – that giving in to terrorist blackmail leads only to greater violence. That, after all, is what happened at the World Trade Center. A series of U.S. retreats in the face of terrorist attacks on our embassies, ships, and military barracks emboldened the terrorists to believe that a massive domestic assault on the United States would drive us out of the Middle East altogether. So even if the recent attacks were inspired by our foreign policy, how would changing that policy under terrorist pressure leave us any better off? Wouldn't such a retreat simply be inviting terrorists everywhere to manipulate our foreign policy through a series of nightmarish domestic attacks?

For the sake of argument, however, let's consider the claim that America's foreign policy is the "root cause" of the disaster at the World Trade Center. It's certainly true that Sheik Rahman vigorously condemned the United States for its support of Israel. Does that mean we ought to get tough with Israel, reducing our military and economic support by, say, 50 percent, and forcing Israel to make some key concessions to the Palestinians? I'm afraid that won't be enough, since what Rahman objects to is not this or that policy, but Israel's very existence.

Sheik Rahman, after all, is the leader of the organization that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat for simply recognizing Israel's existence. So to bring this terrorism to a halt – to satisfy Sheik Rahman and his fundamentalist allies – we're going to have to repudiate Israel altogether.

Let it also be noted that when addressing his terrorist followers, Sheik Rahman inveighed against America for our role in the Persian Gulf war. So obviously, to extirpate the causes of terrorism at their root, we'll need to send out a signal to Saddam Hussein that Kuwait is his if he wants it. Surely that will put a stop to the violence.

While we're at it, let's consider that other "root cause" of the attacks on the World Trade Center, our support for Egypt's secular government. More than anything else, it is our support, not for Israel, but for the government of Egypt, that turned Sheik Rahman against us. Rahman's dream, after all, is to return to Egypt, Khomeini-like, to stand at the head of a fundamentalist Islamic state. To that end, Rahman authorized the murder, not only of Sadat, but also of the Speaker of Egypt's Parliament and of the respected writer Farag Foda, whose crime was to publish books advocating the separation of religion from politics. And although the assassination attempts were unsuccessful, Sheik Rahman also authorized the murder of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and, perhaps most infamously of all, the murder of Egypt's beloved national icon, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, whose neck was slashed, and who lost the use of his writing hand in the attack. Rahman's only regret was that Mahfouz had not been punished earlier, since Rahman is convinced that Salman Rushdie would never have had the courage to write The Satanic Verses had Mahfouz been assassinated first. So to stop the terror at its source, we will surely need to withdraw our support from the Mubarak government, and from other moderate secular governments throughout the Middle East.

Then there are those annoying Copts – all six million of them – the Christian minority in Egypt whose very presence seems to mock Rahman's plans for a fundamentalist Islamic state. Since the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, the Copts have lived in fear, victimized by persistent discrimination. Indeed on several occasions, Sheik Rahman has declared the wealth of the Copts to be forfeit and available to the (Islamic) faithful. So if we really want to get at the root causes of terrorism, maybe we ought to do something about those Copts. (For more on Rahman and Egyptian fundamentalism, see Fouad Ajami's superb study, The Dream Palace of the Arabs.)

But what of that other "root cause" of the terror – our sanctions against Iraq, supposedly responsible for the deaths of uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians? Peter Beinart of The New Republic laid that claim to rest last week when he showed that it is not our sanctions, but Saddam's own policy of selling badly needed food and supplies to support his military, that is responsible for the misery of the Iraqi people.

But the problem goes beyond the tendency of the Left to blame the United States for what is in fact Saddam's cruel irresponsibility, or the Left's failure to consider our sanctions in light of the fact that Saddam is even now manufacturing weapons of mass destruction meant to be used against America's cities. Several commentators have noted that the United States gets no credit for having intervened to save many thousands of Muslims from ethnic cleansing in both Bosnia and Kosovo. It's worse than that, however. The United States is actually excoriated throughout the Middle East for not having acted sooner to rescue the Bosnian Muslims or the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo.

There's certainly a case to be made that we ought to have intervened more quickly in Bosnia and Kosovo, but it is almost unheard of for a nation to stage such massive military action on almost exclusively humanitarian grounds. In the perspective of history, it's remarkable that the United States acted at all, and perhaps more remarkable still that so many in the Muslim world, after all the complaints about American imperialism, feel free to saddle us with imperial obligations, and then give us no credit when we shoulder them. And how is it that we are to tolerate collateral damage against Serbs in the course of an attempt to stop their ethnic cleansing of Muslims, but are not to tolerate collateral damage against Iraqis or Afghans in an attempt to prevent the mass murder of American citizens? And has it been remarked that, even before September 11, almost a quarter of Afghanistan's population was being kept from starvation by international food relief, the vast majority of which was supplied by the United States? In effect, the United States has been feeding the population of a country whose government has been harboring anti-American terrorists for years. Then there's the food aid delivered by the United States to literally hundreds of thousands of people suffering from drought in Syria and Jordan. Why is none of this included in the Left's careful cataloguing of American actions in the Middle East?

Of course, the real cause of terrorism is not United States foreign policy, but the ease with which America can be made to serve as a scapegoat for the profound social dilemmas of the Middle East. The life of Mahmoud Abouhalima, the terrorist who nearly murdered 200,000 Americans at the World Trade Center in 1993, stands as a sad testament to the weight of those problems.

Abouhalima fits the classic profile of the Islamic fundamentalist leadership – urbanized, college educated, with middle-class professional aspirations, but stymied by the weak economies of the Arab states. Quoted in a brief 1993 profile in the Los Angeles Times, Abouhalima's Egyptian friends say that he emigrated to Germany on a tourist visa after college, fearing that he would never be able to support a wife and family in Egypt. Abouhalima married a German woman to prevent deportation, then divorced her to marry another. Although maintaining a surface religiosity, Abouhalima's early years in Germany were a "life of corruption – girls, drugs, you name it." Eventually, however, both Abouhalima and his wife (who converted to Islam) adopted a rigorous observance of Islamic purity, and migrated to the United States.

In Abouhalima's view, having lived 17 years in the West, and having been tempted, and almost destroyed, by our dissolute secular values, he understands and can judge our society. "I lived their life [i.e. the Western life], he told Juergensmeyer, "but they didn't live my life, so they will never understand the way I live or the way I think."

Abouhalima's struggle is a magnified version of the difficulties faced by many young adults in the modernizing Middle East. The family networks and marriage arrangements so critical to Muslim social life depend upon the maintenance of a girl's virginity. Yet increasingly, young urbanized Muslim men and women mix in coeducational schools and professional settings, caught between the Western-influenced models of sexual freedom seen in television, movies, and magazines, and the rewards and requirements of the traditional family system. For these young people, there is no long apprenticeship in "dating" – no training in how to be "modern" – only an untutored giving in to temptation and chaos, or the alternative of a self-imposed return to traditions of purity and the veil.

Western social and sexual morality, along with America's political and economic power, are easily seized upon as scapegoats in such a setting. The accusation are distorted and contradictory, based not on "the West" as it really is, for all of its (many) faults, but on a simplistic and untutored caricature of our life. Yet the social problems that generate the accusations are real, and not at all unrelated to the encroachment of modernity and the ways of "the West" on these traditional societies. Nothing is more certain, however, than that neither tradition nor modernity will disappear anytime soon. Nor are they altogether irreconcilable, although the Islamic world, for complex reasons, has characteristically found the task of blending them a difficult one.

So we must balance the need to recognize and acknowledge the dignity, complexity – and anguish – of contemporary life in Arab and Muslim lands, with the need to swiftly crush the sad, but deadly and irredeemable product of that anguish – Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. There is no placating the Sheik Rahman's and the Mahmud Abouhalima's of the world. If we do not stop them with force, they will kill us. The Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression were root causes of the Holocaust, after all, but the Nazis were no less dangerous for that.

The last word goes to an Egyptian dentist, who has, with difficulty, rescued some small measure of prosperity from the poverty of his land. Of his old friend, the terrorist Mahmud Abouhalima, this dentist says, "I love him like my brother, but if he had any relationship with this accident (at the Trade Center), I hate him, believe me. I want to destroy him before you."

Mr. Kurtz is fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Mideast Clerics Speak Out

by David Makovsky

The Baltimore Sun - September 30, 2001

WASHINGTON -- America has come full circle. In 1983, the idea of jihad, or Muslim holy war, was introduced in the contemporary Middle East as 241 American servicemen were killed in Beirut.

The United States beat a hasty exit, and Islamic militants saw this as a vindication that suicide bombing was religiously sanctioned as well as being deadly effective. It took the terror strikes of Sept. 11, almost exactly 18 years later, to galvanize America to action, resolving it to the idea that such terrorism must be eradicated.

President Bush made clear that this campaign is not just about Osama bin Laden but confronting an ideology that justifies killing in the name of religion. While correctly praising Islam as a religion, Mr. Bush declared, "Those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying in effect to hijack Islam itself."

This is a battle that the United States cannot wage alone, nor should it. The Islamic militant challenge is not directed just at the United States. When confronted with such radicalism, Egypt stemmed the challenge and ultimately defeated these religious opponents in the 1990s.

Yet while Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria have sharply (and often ruthlessly) put down challenges from Islamicists, they have never laid a glove on Islamicism as an ideology so long as it was directed at others such as the United States. Thus the regimes deflected attention from their own failing economies.

It is wholly insufficient for Middle Eastern leaders and their clerics to denounce the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack. This is too easy. It's now time for them to do the hard part and discredit this revived ideology. If not, it only will be a matter of time before they once again face these militants. They need to make clear to their faithful that Islam does not sanction the wanton killing of innocents. Period. Terror attacks are utterly antithetical to Islam.

Dealing with the religious underpinning is at the core, and this must be addressed by Islamic clerics in the Middle East.

For the last decade, bin Laden has issued a number of religious rulings (fatwas) declaring that his goal was to uproot the United States from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Horn of Africa.

His group, Al Qaeda, says its goal is to "unite all Muslims and to establish a government which follows the rule of the caliphs." He has consistently invoked religion to justify his cause. In a 1998 fatwa, bin Laden appealed for attacks on Americans in order to drive the United States out of "the lands of Islam in the holiest of places," alluding to Saudi Arabia's holiest city of Mecca.

There is a fiery resentment among Islamic radicals of all that America represents as a military, cultural and economic power and its focus on the individual at the center of society. America is viewed by these radicals as a revolutionary power that is disruptive of traditional Islamic society.

Indeed, the state-appointed Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi of Cairo's Al-Azhar, Islam's oldest and most prominent religious institution, and the mufti of Saudi Arabia recently have been the exception among clerics in condemning terrorism.

Yet even in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrima al-Sabri, opposed the killings in New York and Washington but reaffirmed that suicide bombings against innocents are allowed so long as they are carried out to liberate Palestine. It must be made clear that terrorism in any form is unacceptable, whether it is perpetrated against children at a Jerusalem pizzeria or a bond trader in lower Manhattan.

Dealing with Islamic clerics in halting violence is as important as dealing with them in attaining peace. Americans don't fully grasp the political sway religious leaders often hold in the Middle East, possibly because the United States separates church and state.

An international political coalition against terrorism must be matched by a religious coalition inside the Middle East of mainstream Islamic clerics who disavow a twisted ideology that claims to speak in the name of Islam.

David Makovsky is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report.

US News and World Report, Commentary 10/8/01

BY FOUAD AJAMI

The mirage of a coalition

It is "invariably the case in the East," George Orwell once wrote, that a "story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of the events the vaguer it becomes." America is off on an Eastern campaign, and we should not be surprised if we find ourselves almost alone. It is a big non-American world where we must track the trail of terror that has tormented us for a good part of a difficult decade. We shall carry our gear and our desire for justice to hardened lands, places that may not yield the "smoking gun" that the skeptics will demand to see. Few friends, we may find, can endure the fury of anti-American mobs and the burden of walking with us in broad daylight.

There are leaders out there, and a watchful crowd, pleased that we have been humbled. We should not be surprised if by the lights of that vast region we never get it right, if in Karachi and Cairo and Ramallah, we shall be second-guessed at every turn. We shall seem squeamish to the hard of heart. Others will tell us that we could have been spared this great pain had we listened to local laments, had we only been there-or, conversely, had we let them be, had our shadow not lain across their world. When the missiles are fired into Afghanistan, we should be ready for the wrath of the city crowds and for the sudden interest in Afghan welfare that men and women in Arab and Muslim lands will come to express. The Arabs tell us all would have been well, and our presence in their world would have yielded a sweeter harvest, had we cast Israel adrift, had we known where our "true" interests lay. But nothing could be further from the truth. A deeper anti-Americanism grips Arab and Muslim lands. It has been America's fate to be caught in the crossfire of a war over Islam itself, a war between privilege and wrath, between the secular powers in the saddle and a nativist-pious opposition from below.

Perpetual differences.

The rage of our nemesis of today, the Saudi-born financier Osama bin Laden, is directed at our presence in the Persian Gulf. Our writ reaches into Arabia. To bin Laden and his likes, Americans defile its sacred earth. We won a swift war in the desert, some of our forces stayed in his homeland to monitor the Iraqi dictator we had vanquished but left in place. A new agitation emerged over the American presence in Arabia. Bin Laden could not topple the ruling order in his land. His war against the American "crusaders" issued out of that animus. We could betray our friends, cut them loose, and walk away from our Persian Gulf primacy, but we shall never come to an accommodation with our enemies in those Arab and Muslim lands. Throughout the 1990s, there was an American-sponsored "peace process" that catered to the Palestinians. The anti-American terror paid it no heed. The claim that Arab regimes can't take part in a U.S.-led coalition unless American power gives them an Israeli-Palestinian settlement on Palestinian terms must be seen for what it is: a pretext for dodging a choice between international radicalism and terror on the one side and order on the other.

No country better illustrates America's dilemma in Arab and Muslim lands than does Egypt. For all its American treasure-a quarter century of aid and solicitude-there is an unmistakable sense of Egyptian glee that America has been bloodied. A rumor has taken hold in Egypt that the attacks were the work of Israel's secret service, that 4,000 American Jews were tipped off in advance and stayed away from their World Trade Center desks, that Jewish investors dumped their stocks in the days preceding the terror. A country that gives credence to this paranoia can hardly associate itself with America's campaign. To hear the Egyptian ruler and the tight circle around him, Egypt will keep its distance from this campaign against terror. The country's highest religious authority has determined that Egypt cannot be party to a coalition against another Muslim state, that only coalitions "championing the oppressed" can be joined. Ten years ago, during Desert Storm, the religious jurists gave the state the sanction it needed for what turned out to be a good, easy ride with an American-led coalition.

It is a more hostile region that awaits us now, and a more frustrating expedition. In a fairer world, today's Muslim states would have vanquished the radicals thrown up by the chaos of their lands. But the new cult is clever. It journeyed westward and found homes in countless places. An American-led expedition now goes into far-off domains to do what the world of Islam has not been willing to do for itself.

LEARNING THE LINGO

Jihad vs. Crusade
A historian's guide to the new war.

BY BERNARD LEWIS

Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001

President Bush's use of the term "crusade" in calling for a powerful joint effort against terrorism was unfortunate, but excusable. In Western usage, this word has long since lost its original meaning of "a war for the cross," and many are probably unaware that this is the derivation of the name. At present, "crusade" almost always means simply a vigorous campaign for a good cause. This cause may be political or military, though this is rare; more commonly, it is social, moral or environmental. In modern Western usage it is rarely if ever religious.

Yet "crusade" still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism--aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad--a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.

At the time of the Crusades, when the Holy Land and some adjoining regions in Syria were conquered and for a while ruled by invaders from Europe, there seems to have been little awareness among Muslims of the nature of the movement that had brought the Europeans to the region. The crusaders established principalities in the Levant, which soon fitted into the pattern of Levantine regional politics. Even the crusader capture of Jerusalem aroused little attention at the time, and appeals for help to various Muslim capitals brought no response.

The real counter-crusade began when the crusaders--very foolishly--began to harry and attack the Muslim holy lands, namely the Hijaz in Arabia, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina where Mohammed was born, carried out his mission, and died. In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period, there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called "Franks" or "infidels." The words "Crusade" and "crusader" simply do not occur.

They begin to occur with increasing frequency in the 19th century, among modernized Arabic writers, as they became aware of Western historiography in Western languages. By now they are in common use. It is surely significant that Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of jihad against the United States, refers to the Americans as "crusaders" and lists their presence in Arabia as their first and primary offense. Their second offense is their use of Arabia as a base for their attack on Iraq. The issue of Jerusalem and support for "the petty state of the Jews" come third.

The literal meaning of the Arabic word "jihad" is striving, and its common use derives from the Koranic phrase "striving in the path of God." Some Muslims, particularly in modern times, have interpreted the duty of jihad in a spiritual and moral sense. The more common interpretation, and that of the overwhelming majority of the classical jurists and commentators, presents jihad as armed struggle for Islam against infidels and apostates. Unlike "crusade," it has retained its religious and military connotation into modern times.

Being a religious obligation, jihad is elaborately regulated in sharia law, which discusses in minute detail such matters as the opening, conduct, interruption and cessation of hostilities, the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants, the use of weapons, etc. In an offensive war, jihad is a collective obligation of the entire community, and may therefore be discharged by volunteers and professionals. In a defensive war, it is an individual obligation of every able-bodied Muslim.

In his declaration of 1998, Osama bin Laden specifically invokes this rule: "For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples." In view of this, "to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who can, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque and the Haram mosque are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim."

Mohammed himself led the first jihad, in the wars of the Muslims against the pagans in Arabia. The jihad continued under his successors, with a series of wars that brought the Middle East, including the Holy Land, under Arab Muslim rule and then continued eastward into Asia, westward into Africa, and three times into Europe--the Moors in Spain, the Tatars in Russia, the Turks in the Balkans. The Crusade was part of the European counterattack. The Christian re-conquest succeeded in Spain, Russia and eventually the Balkans; it failed to recover the Holy Land of Christendom.

In Islamic usage the term martyrdom is normally interpreted to mean death in a jihad, and the reward is eternal bliss, described in some detail in early religious texts. Suicide is another matter.

Classical Islam in all its different forms and versions has never permitted suicide. This is seen as a mortal sin, and brings eternal punishment in the form of the unending repetition of the act by which the suicide killed himself. The classical jurists, in discussing the laws of war, distinguish clearly between a soldier who faces certain death at the hands of the enemy, and one who kills himself by his own hand. The first goes to heaven, the other to hell. In recent years, some jurists and scholars have blurred this distinction, and promised the joys of paradise to the suicide bomber. Others retain the more traditional view that suicide in any form is totally forbidden.

Similarly, the laws of jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm non-combatants, women and children, "unless they attack you first." Even such questions as missile and chemical warfare are addressed, the first in relation to mangonels and catapults, the other to the use of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies. Here the jurists differ--some permit, some restrict, some forbid these forms of warfare. A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce.

What the classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered is the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations that we saw in New York two weeks ago. For this there is no precedent and no authority in Islam. Indeed it is difficult to find precedents even in the rich annals of human wickedness.

Mr. Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His most recent book is "A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History" (Random House, 2000).