Updates from AIJAC

The Middle East, Islam and Terrorism

Today, some articles on the Middle Eastern roots of bin-Ladenism. Arab-American academic Fouad Ajami looks at the failures of the Arab world and how this has given rise to Islamism in a particularly beautifully written piece. Then American columnist Charles Krauthammer looks at the elements of nihilism in the Islamism of al-Qaeda. Mark Heller examines the elements of conspiratorial thinking which have come to dominate the Middle East and some of the reasons for it.

To illustrate Heller's piece, Updates includes a particularly ugly and example, both anti-semitic and conspiratorial, translated from an Egyptian website and involving an Egyptian cleric recently returned from New York. The cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Gamei'a, says the "Jews" carried out the Sept. 11 attacks to create hatred of Muslims, a view widespread in the Arab world. Moreover, just yesterday, the Syrian Defence Minister, Mustafa Tlass, made the same claim.

Following this, for the information of anyone interested is the Israeli government cabinet communique, setting out its demands of the Palestinian Authority following the assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi.

A THWARTED CIVILIZATION

Arabs Have Nobody to Blame But Themselves

Bin Laden heads a frustrated and failed generation.

BY FOUAD AJAMI

Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, October 16,

We should be under no illusions about our struggle against Osama bin Laden and the cultists and terrorists arrayed around him. Although we control the sea lanes and skies of that Arab-Muslim world, he appears to hold sway over the streets of a thwarted civilization, one that sees him as an avenger for the sad, cruel lot that has been its fate in recent years.

A terrible war was fought between rulers and Islamists; the regimes in Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt won, but the insurgents took to the road, and vowed to return as triumphant conquerors after the dynasties and the despots were sacked. Rich, famous, free and young, bin Laden taunts the rulers of a silent, frightened Arab world seething with resentments of every kind. He and his lieutenants cannot overthrow the Arab ruling order, so they have turned their resentments on us.

Consider the three men who taunted us in the video that came our way on Oct. 7, courtesy of the Qatari satellite channel, Al-Jazeera. In it, bin Laden is flanked by two lieutenants. The older one, a man of 50 years, is an Egyptian physician, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a sworn enemy of the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Twenty years ago, he had been picked up in the dragnet that followed the assassination of Anwar Sadat. He was tortured, and imprisoned for three years. He drifted to Pakistan, then made his way to the Sudan and Afghanistan, and took to the life of terror.

The younger man, spokesman for bin Laden, is a Kuwaiti theocratic activist by the name of Sleiman Abu Gheith, who hails from a quaint, stable principality, with generous welfare subsidies and an American trip-wire to protect it against a predatory Saddam. Abu Gheith had been an employee of the Kuwaiti state, an imam of a government-sponsored mosque, and a teacher of Islamic studies. Those who know him tell of a man who had become fanatical in his view of Islam's role in political and social life.

A foul wind had been blowing in Arab lands. The rulers had snuffed out endless rebellions and the populace had succumbed to a malignant, sullen silence. It prayed and waited for the rulers' demise. It dreamt of an avenger and a band of merciless followers who would do for it what it could not do for itself.

It is no mystery that reporters from Arab shores tell us of affluent men and women, some with years of education in American universities behind them, celebrating the cruel deed of Mohamed Atta and his hijackers. The cult of the bandit taunting the powerful has always been seductive in broken societies. Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Abu Gheith and Atta did not descend from the sky: They are the angry sons of a failed Arab generation. They are direct heirs of two generations of Arabs that have seen all the high dreams of Asr al Nahda (the era of enlightenment and secular nationalism) issue in sterility, dictatorship and misery. The secular fathers begot this strange breed of holy warriors.

A suffocating hate separates the ruler from the ruled in Arab lands. The former own those lands, they have closed up the universe, and their dominion stretches as far as the eye can see. Their scions stand at the ready to claim the good things of the earth. Imagine the way Arabs read the ascendancy of the sons of the dictators of Syria, Egypt and Iraq in public life; a trick has been played on them. Under their eyes, the republics have metamorphosed into monarchies in all but name. Alone, in God's broad lands, it seems to them, they are to be excluded from a share of today's democratic inheritance. The rulers can't deliver to us these sullen, resentful populations and--shrewd men--the rulers know it. They have ducked for cover as America blew in asking them to choose between the terrorists' world and ours.

We were "walk-ons" in this political and generational struggle playing out in Araby. America and Americans have a hard time coming to terms with those unfathomable furies of a distant, impenetrable world. In truth, Atta struck at us because he could not take down Mr. Mubarak's world, because in the burdened, crowded land of the Egyptian dictator there is very little offered younger Egyptians save for the steady narcotic of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. The attack on the North Tower of the World Trade Center was Atta's "rite of passage."

In the same vein, bin Laden and Abu Gheith can't sack the dynastic order of the Gulf. (Were they to do so, they would replace it with a cruel reign of terror that would make the yuppies of Jeddah who have been whispering sweet things in the ears of foreign reporters about bin Laden yearn for the days of Al Saud). So the avengers come our way. Our shadow, faint and mediated through hated rulers and middlemen, has fallen across their world. They struck at the shadow, but it is the order that reigns in their lands that fuels their righteousness. And it is the sense of approval they see in the eyes of ordinary men and women in their societies that tells them to press on.

The military campaign against bin Laden is prosecuted, and will surely be won, by the U.S. But the redemption of the Arab political condition, and the weaning of that world away from its ruinous habits and temptations, are matters for the Arabs themselves.

A darkness, a long winter, has descended on the Arabs. Nothing grows in the middle between an authoritarian political order and populations given to perennial flings with dictators, abandoned to their most malignant hatreds. Something is amiss in an Arab world that besieges American embassies for visas and at the same time celebrates America's calamities. Something has gone terribly wrong in a world where young men strap themselves with explosives, only to be hailed as "martyrs" and avengers. No military campaign by a foreign power can give modern-day Arabs a way out of the cruel, blind alley of their own history.

Mr. Ajami, author of "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" (Vintage, 1999), teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

THEY HATE CIVILIZATION

Charles Krauthammer

New York Post, October 16, 2001

Europe's great religious wars ended in 1648. Three and a half centuries is a long time, too long for us in the West to truly believe that people still slaughter others to vindicate the faith Thus in the face of radical Islamic terrorism that murders 6,000 innocents in a day, we find it almost impossible to accept at face value the reason offered by the murderers Yet Osama bin Laden could not be clearer. Jihad has been declared against the infidel, whose power and influence thwart the triumph of Islam, and whose success and example--indeed, whose very existence--are an affront to the true faith. As a leader of Hamas declared at a rally three days after the World Trade Center attack, "the only solution is for Bush to convert to Islam."

To Americans, who are taught religious tolerance from the cradle, who visit each other's churches for interdenominational succor and solidarity, this seems simply bizarre On September 25, bin Laden issues a warning to his people that Bush is coming "under the banner of the cross." Two weeks later, in his pre-taped post-attack video, he scorns Bush as "head of the infidels."

Can he be serious? This idea is so alien that our learned commentators, Western and secular, have gone rummaging through their ideological attics to find more familiar terms to explain why we were so savagely attacked: poverty and destitution in the Islamic world; grievances against the West, America, Israel; the "wretched of the earth" -- Frantz Fanon's 1960s apotheosis of anti-colonialism--rising against their oppressors.

Reading conventional notions of class struggle and anti-colonialism into bin Laden, the Taliban, and radical Islam is not just solipsistic. It is nonsense. If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism are animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the Taliban went to the Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human culture, two massive Buddhas carved out of a cliff. At first, Taliban soldiers tried artillery. The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban had to resort to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered 100 cows in atonement--for having taken so long to finish the job.

Buddhism is hardly a representative of the West. It is hardly a cause of poverty and destitution. It is hardly a symbol of colonialism. No. The statues represented two things: an alternative faith and a great work of civilisation. To the Taliban, the presence of both was intolerable.

The distinguished Indian writer and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who has chronicled the Islamic world in two books (Among the Believers and Beyond Belief), recently warned (in a public talk in Melbourne before the World Trade Center attack), "We are within reach of great nihilistic forces that have undone civilization."

In places like Afghanistan, "religion has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure. They are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down."

This kind of fury and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or political solution. "You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated."

This insight offers a needed window on the new enemy. It turns out that the enemy does have recognisable analogues in the Western experience He is, as President Bush averred in his address to the nation, heir to the malignant ideologies of the 20th century. In its nihilism, its will to power, its celebration of blood and death, its craving for the cleansing purity that comes only from eradicating life and culture, radical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilisation embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed.

This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalised Muslims shown in various poses of victimisation, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel--mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Throughout, the soundtrack endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood, with blood, with blood."

Bin Laden appears on the tape to counsel that "the love of this world is wrong. You should love the other world...die in the right cause and go to the other world."

In his October 9 taped message, al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith gloried in the "thousands of young people who look forward to death, like the Americans look forward to living."

Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is why the war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the life of civilisation itself.

Conspiracy theories are for losers

By Mark Heller

Jerusalem Post, October, 19 2001

(October 19) - If a Palestinian organization had not itself claimed credit for Wednesday's assassination of Rehavam Ze'evi, it is almost certain that Palestinian spokesmen or the Palestinian rumor mill would have attributed the killing to the Mossad or some other mysterious force.

After all, Ze'evi's murder only strengthens those in Israeli government and society intent on doing evil to the Palestinians, and since those forces stand to benefit from this development, it stands to reason that they must somehow share in the responsibility for it.

The logic of conspiracies was thwarted this time by the PFLP's claim of responsibility, but it has prevailed before and it will prevail again whenever something happens that does not serve some organizational or national interest. In this regard, it is sufficient to recall Yasser Arafat's public musings about the General Security Service plot to kill Yitzhak Rabin.

Conspiracy theories, however, are not a peculiarly Palestinian affliction. Apologists for Saddam Hussein have argued that the US misled him into thinking that it approved of an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait so that it would have a pretext to invade the Gulf and take control of Arab oil. In the politically correct historiography of the civil war in Lebanon, Lebanese portray themselves as innocent bystanders in a conflict provoked and waged by others.

In Egypt, any explanation for the crash of an Egyptair flight a year ago is entertained except the one implicating a suicidal Egyptair pilot. And the father of Muhammad Atta, one of the hijackers of the airplanes flown into the World Trade Center, utterly rejected that possibility that his son could have been involved and argued, instead, that the whole thing was orchestrated by the Mossad in order to embarrass Muslims and provoke the US into acting against them.

This alleged plot has gained much currency throughout the Muslim world, where it is widely believed that the Mossad (or the GSS) warned 4,000 American Jews the night before the attack to stay away from the World Trade Center the following day.

But it is only the latest in a long line of evil machinations attributed to Israel, including the alleged contamination of blood supplies with HIV virus and the distribution of chewing gum or candies that arouse insatiable sexual desires among young girls.

It is easy to explain why conventional reasoning does nothing to undermine the credibility of such theories: once they begin to circulate, the lack of any supporting evidence is only taken as proof of how cunning and sophisticated the conspiracies are.

It is harder to explain why they circulate so widely. But a hint may be found in the human instinct to blame failure on others. If failure is defined as the gap between what individuals or societies think they deserve and what they actually have, then it is natural that the popularity of conspiracy theories should correspond with the size of that gap.

Such a gap exists everywhere, which is why conspiracy nuts are found everywhere, even in pockets of the US, where survivalists are still waiting for the federal government or the UN to swoop down in black helicopters and take away their freedoms. But that gap appears to be widest in the Muslim world.

Fifty years after the end of the colonial era, Muslims are far less free, far less prosperous, and far less powerful, both individually and collectively, than are most of their neighbours in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Asia, and even Africa. More importantly, they are much less free, less prosperous, and less powerful than they think they should be, and the gap between what is and what should be has been growing in recent years.

There are a few courageous individuals who try to explain this gap by holding up a mirror to their own societies, believing that dysfunction must be acknowledged before it can be corrected. But far too many of them end up in exile, in jail, or dead, because they pose too great a threat to the power of their governments and too great a challenge to the self-esteem of their societies.

For the most part, it is more comforting for both the rulers and the ruled to externalize their dissatisfactions, to blame their lack of freedom, their lack or prosperity and their impotence on others.

And what could be more natural for the losers in the era of globalization than to focus their discontent on the incarnation of globalization, the US, or on its illegitimate Middle Eastern step-child, Israel?

MEMRI

Imam of New York's Islamic Center: The American attack against Afghanistan is terrorism... This war will be the end of America...

October 17, 2001

Al-Azhar University Representative in the U.S. and Imam of New York's Islamic Center: The American attack against Afghanistan is terrorism... This war will be the end of America... If the Americans knew that the Jews carried the September 11 attacks they would do to them what Hitler did

The Egyptian Sheikh Muhammad Al-Gamei'a, the Al-Azhar University representative in the U.S. and Imam of the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque of New York City, was interviewed for the website www.lilatalqadr.com, an unofficial Al-Azhar University site, on October 4, 2001. Sheikh Gamei'a returned to Egypt after September 11 because he was being harassed. Following are excerpts from the interview:

Q: "What was the situation of the Muslims before the incident (the September 11 attacks), and what are the negative ramifications for Muslims?"

Gamei'a: "Before the incident, the situation of Muslims was normal (in America). The federal government treated them normally... But after the incident, things deteriorated. All [commercial] activity with anyone found to be a Muslim or an Arab was immediately halted, and the federal bureaus stopped matters. Furthermore, he was thoroughly investigated, and asked: 'Why did you come to America? What is your connection to Osama bin Laden? What do you know about the [Islamic] Jihad, Hamas, and Hizbullah organizations?' Therefore, the Muslim feels imprisoned..."

"Following the incident, Muslims and Arabs stopped feeling that it was safe to leave [their homes]... They stopped feeling that it was safe to send their wives to the market or their children to the schools. Muslims do not feel safe even going to the hospitals, because some Jewish doctors in one of the hospitals poisoned sick Muslim children, who then died."

Q: "The media has reported firing on mosques and harassment of Muslim women, and the situation has gotten so bad that Arabs are murdered in the streets. What about harassment you and your family have suffered?"

Gamei'a: "It's true. The Muslims are being persecuted by the people and the federal government. This is the result of the bad image of Muslims created by the Zionist media, and of their presenting Islam as a religion of terrorism. That is why the Americans have linked the recent incidents to Islam. I personally have suffered; my home was attacked and my daughters were harassed."

Q: "What did you do about this harassment?"

Gamei'a: "When a group of people attacked my home, I went out to them and asked why they were doing this. They said that because we were Muslims we were linked to terrorism. I explained to them that what they were doing was uncivilized and was, in effect, a twofold crime, you let the criminals go free and attack innocents. This does not suit a modern state and a modern people, and is opposed to human values."

"During my conversations with this group, it became clear to me that they knew very well that the Jews were behind these ugly acts, while we, the Arabs, were innocent, and that someone from among their people was disseminating corruption in the land. Although the Americans suspect that the Zionists are behind the act, none has the courage to talk about it in public."

Q: "Why can't they talk about it? It's their country, and the Jews are a minority."

Gamei'a: "When I asked them whether they had the courage to talk about it openly, they said: 'We can't.' I asked why, and they said: 'You know very well that the Zionists control everything and that they also control political decision-making, the big media organizations, and the financial and economic institutions. Anyone daring to say a word is considered an anti-Semite.'"

Q: "Does this mean that the Jewish element played a role in igniting the flame of fitna (internal strife)?"

Gamei'a: "The Jewish element is as Allah described it when he said: 'They disseminate corruption in the land.' We know that they have always broken agreements, unjustly murdered the prophets, and betrayed the faith. Can they be expected to live up to their contracts with us? These people murdered the prophets; do you think they will stop spilling our blood? No."

"You see these people (i.e. the Jews) all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs. [Because of them] there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world."

"Now, they are riding on the back of the world powers. These people always seek out the superpower of the generation and develop coexistence with it. Before this, they rode on the back of England and on the back of the French empire. After that, they rode on the back of Germany. But Hitler annihilated them because they betrayed him and violated their contract with him."

"We saw these Zionists, just one hour after the event, broadcasting on the BBC, the biggest media channel, that the Arabs, and particularly the Palestinians, were celebrating and rejoicing over the American deaths. [To do this] they broadcast a video from 1991, [filmed] during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. But Allah thwarted them when a professor from a Brazilian university stated that the video was a forgery, because she had a copy of it. These people have a script prepared in advance, and they have the ability to fabricate events in their favour."

Q: "What was the reaction of the American people?"

Gamei'a: "Unfortunately, this incident made the American people hate everyone who is Muslim or Arab. What can you expect when you think, first off, that fifty thousand have died and the Arabs are celebrating? How would you feel as an American? Of course you'd want revenge. This is what the Jews plotted and planned. They used the Arabs to carry it out."

Q: "What proof could incriminate the Jews of involvement in this incident?"

Gamei'a: "All the signs indicate that the Jews have the most to gain from an explosion like that. They are the only ones capable of planning such acts. First of all, it was found that the automatic pilot was neutralized a few minutes before the flight, and the automatic pilot cannot be neutralized if you don't have command of the control tower. Second, the black boxes were found to contain no information; you cannot erase the information from these boxes if you do not plan it ahead of time on the plane. Third, America has the most powerful intelligence apparatuses, the FBI and the CIA... How did [the perpetrators] manage to infiltrate America without their knowledge? Fourth, Jews control decision-making in the airports and in the sensitive centres in the White House and the Pentagon. Fifth, to date America has presented no proof incriminating Osama bin Laden and Al-Qa'ida."

"If we take these things into account and look closely at the incident, we will find that only the Jews are capable of planning such an incident, because it was planned with great precision of which Osama bin Laden or any other Islamic organization or intelligence apparatus is incapable..."

"I told the American officials that the American people cannot, at this critical stage, know the real enemy who struck at its heart if it does not awaken from its slumber and stop blaming the Arabs and the Muslims..."

Q: "What about the American president's declarations that the war that the U.S. is waging is a crusade?"

Gamei'a: "Herein lies the danger. As President Bush said, this is a crusade against Islam and against Muslims, but the American people are innocent in this matter, because the war was planned falsely."

"This war will destroy everything. This is [the kind of] war that the American president tried to avoid, when he [tried] to take back what he said. He went to the Islamic center in Washington and took back his words, but he did this only after he incited the souls and revealed what happened behind the scenes of American policy."

"For this reason, I advise every Arab and every Muslim leader not to offer any aid whatsoever to the oppressing superpower [to help it] attack Muslims, because this is a betrayal of Allah and his Prophet..."

"On the news in the U.S. it was said that four thousand Jews did not come to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the incident, and that the police arrested a group of Jews rejoicing in the streets at the time of the incident... This news item was hushed up immediately after it was broadcast... The Jews who control the media acted to hush it up so that the American people would not know. If it became known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did!..."

Q: "Do you think that the American leadership will back down from the decision to go to war?"

Gamei'a: "An American attack on Afghanistan will constitute terrorism, as the U.S. did in Iraq and in Palestine... I think that this war will be the end of America the oppressor. I see America as the second 'Aad (in Islamic tradition, 'Aad and Thamud were two Arab tribes that were annihilated because they deviated from the path of Allah)... The U.S. has the same traits as the first 'Aad: it has skyscrapers and large factories. Allah will impose on the people of the second 'Aad (i.e. the Americans) what he imposed on the people of the first 'Aad, because they are a people who are arrogant in their power, but Allah will avenge himself on them."

Q: "What is the future of Muslims in America following these incidents?"

Gamei'a: "In every trouble there is some good. That's what I always say. This incident urges people to come to know Islam, now that it has been proven to the Americans that they were deceived by the Jews... Allah has foiled [the plot of] the Jews, who set a trap to try to distort the image of the Muslims, and has proved to the American people what the truth is. Therefore, I believe that the future of the Muslims in the U.S. will be glorious."(1)

Endnote: (1) www.lailatalqadr.com/stories/p5041001/shtml

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
E-Mail: memri@memri.org
www.memri.org

CABINET COMMUNIQUE after assassination of Tourism Minister

(Communicated by the Cabinet Secretariat)

Jerusalem Thursday, October 18, 2001

The Cabinet released the following statement late yesterday evening (Wednesday), 17.10.2001, following the assassination of Tourism Minister Rechavam Zeevy early yesterday morning:

1. The Government and people of Israel are shocked and outraged by the cold-blooded assassination of Minister Rehavam Ze'evi. Tonight, we mourn together with his family.

The murder of a member of the Israeli Cabinet and Knesset crosses all red lines. No democracy can tolerate such an attack on its elected officials. The responsibility lies squarely with Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.

2. The writing was on the wall. The Popular Front announced that it was planning terrorist attacks - but Chairman Arafat and the Palestinian Authority did nothing. Israel included Popular Front leaders on the list of terrorist fugitives submitted to Arafat - but, again, he did nothing. Israel began, this week, to withdraw its forces and ease restrictions - serving only to open the door for terrorists to slip through.

In the interest of creating calm and advancing the cause of peace, and at the urging of our friends in the international community, we held meetings with Chairman Arafat, roadblocks were removed, and Israeli forces withdrew from Hebron. But the Palestinians only reciprocated with violence and murder. Many promises were made, but only little steps were taken to prevent terror.

3. The time for words has ended, and the time for deeds has come. Israel demands the extradition of those responsible for today's assassination, and expects this to be carried out immediately. We also demand that the terrorist organizations operating in the Palestinian areas be disarmed and dismantled. Arafat must not shelter them any longer.

Failure to meet these demands, which are grounded in signed agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, will leave us with no choice but to view the Palestinian Authority as an entity supporting and sponsoring terror, and to act accordingly. Israel, meanwhile, will continue to take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of its citizens.

4. There can be no compromise with terror. It must be eradicated, without distinction between its perpetrators and those who harbor them. The terrorists and their sponsors, including Arafat, must be told, unequivocally, that their crimes will not be tolerated by the civilized world.

We demand that Arafat stop his double-talk, and take serious and concrete action against the terrorist factions operating freely in the Palestinian Authority.

5. Israel shares the commitment of the international community to peace and stability. And we want peace with the Palestinian people. But peace and stability will not be achieved without decisive action from Arafat to halt terror.