8/1/18 Arnold Isaacs on Fake Islamophobia in America

by | Aug 2, 2018 | Interviews

Arnold Isaacs talks “Islamophobia”, and whether the alarmists who claim Muslim operatives are scheming to take over the country have legitimate cause for concern. He explains that most of this talk is nothing more than conspiracy, and that Muslim activists generally conduct their advocacy in the open. Not to mention that for the most part they are strong proponents of personal freedoms—in fact, the real extremists know better than to agitate for Sharia Law, because that could out them as such. So why is so-called “Islamophobia” (a dubious term) so widespread?

Discussed on the show:

Arnold Isaacs is a writer, educator, and the author of From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans and Afghan Americans in post 9/11 America. His website is ArnoldIsaacs.net, and you can read his work at antiwar.com and tomdispatch.com.

This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Zen CashThe War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.comRoberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; LibertyStickers.comExpandDesigns.com/Scott; and Kesslyn Runs, by Charles Featherstone.

Check out Scott’s Patreon page.

Play

Alright you guys, Tom Woods has been trying to get me to do this forever on Facebook, but I hate Facebook.
But now I'm going to do it on Reddit instead.
Anyone who donates a monthly subscription donation at PayPal.com or at Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show will get a ticket to join up my new private Reddit group at r slash Scott Horton Show.
Just email me and I'll get you set up.
Any single PayPal donation of $50 will get you a signed copy of my book Fool's Errand Time to End the War in Afghanistan and $100 donation will get you either a QR code silver commodity disc or a lifetime subscription to listen and think audiobooks.
Of course, I accept all kinds of digital currencies.
As well.
You can find out all this stuff at Scott Horton org slash donate.
And of course, don't forget to shop amazon.com by way of my link and give me a review on iTunes, Stitcher or Amazon if you read the book and liked it.
Thanks.
Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the White's Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing Arnold R. Isaacs.
He is a journalist and a writer based in Maryland and is the author of From Troubled Lands, listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in post 9-11 America and two books on Vietnam as well.
His website is ArnoldIsaacs.net and he writes regularly at TomDispatch.com.
And of course, we reprint just about everything that Tom publishes at Antiwar.com as well.
This one's running today.
American Islamophobia's Fake Facts.
Welcome to the show.
How's it going?
Okay.
Thanks for inviting me.
Very happy to have you here and well, very happy to talk with anybody who writes about this very important subject.
There are, as you put it, a couple of main exhibits explaining or backing up, supposedly, as the foundation for the American Islamophobia industry's jihad against Muslims here.
And the first one is a document which you say is falsely called the Muslim Brotherhood's Master Plan to Take Over and Establish Muslim Dominance in the United States.
Aha.
But you admit that it's a legitimate document.
It's not a forgery.
It was written by a Muslim Brotherhood guy and they're all out to get us.
So what's the deal?
Well, it was written by a Muslim Brotherhood member, that's true, almost 30 years ago, 1991.
But it was this one individual.
It's not a document stating any official policy.
There is no evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood organizational leadership ever saw it, let alone adopted it.
Well, I think you even say in the article there's evidence that they didn't see it.
What?
Sorry?
I think you say in the article there's evidence that they didn't see it or even discuss it.
Well, there's no record that they did.
There's no correspondence.
There's no documentation.
This was written proposing to the Brotherhood that they consider these policy proposals, which are not mostly what the Islamophobes say they are, anyway.
But it specifically asked for this proposal, which is a long list of concrete measures that this one man advocated.
And he wanted it considered at the 1991 meeting.
The thing was written in the spring of 1991, and later that year there was a meeting of the Brotherhood Shura Council.
A kind of consultative council is what that means.
And those records, the records of that meeting, experts at Georgetown University have gone through them and found no reference, not only no reference to this document, but none of those proposals, none of its language, nothing that suggests that anyone involved in that meeting had ever seen the thing.
So that's the sense in which it's full.
Well, but maybe they all read it, but it was so important and secret that they never, you know, documented its existence or wrote about it to each other, but they whispered to each other in the middle of the night about this is their master plan to make us all their slaves, to behead our sons and convert our daughters.
You can imagine anything you want.
All I said was that there is absolutely zero evidence of any of that.
Yeah.
I'm obviously playing around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I understand that.
And now, so what does it say?
What are they going to do to us?
Assuming the truth, assuming the premise that this is their master plan, what's the master plan?
Well, the actual document has one line about, in 18 pages of text, one sentence that talks about destroying Western civilization from within.
Oh, that's pretty bad.
And so that God's religion, that is Islam, will be victorious over all other religions.
But as I say, that's the one sentence, that's the only sentence that most of the time that the Islamophobes ever speak about.
That's the only such reference in the whole thing.
Most of it is a long list of proposals, not for secretly infiltrating and subverting American institutions, but for creating Muslim institutions openly, not secretly.
Art institutions, cultural, educational institutions, legal institutions, becoming political activists, forming a Muslim political party, and all this openly.
And then converting the American public, getting, establishing Islam, through a process of evangelizing.
Nothing, there's no word in there about secrecy, there's nothing else, no indication at all about boring from within, or going underground, or doing anything clandestine.
It's almost all about openly organizing.
And, well, I mean, if anybody's familiar with the numbers, there's, what, 330 million Americans, something like that, about two or three million of them?
Exactly.
Muslims.
One percent of the population.
And, you know, this is the thing, it seems like if anybody wants to think critical about this kind of thing at all for a minute, there are enough Muslims in America that if they were all at war against the rest of us, we would have some serious arson fires, and some mass shootings, and things like that, all over the place.
The evidence of that would be everywhere, and yet at the same time, it would be absolutely a hopeless task on their part to try to force a, what, 65 percent self-identified Christian population, and then plus all the others who are not Muslims as well, to convert somehow.
Well, of course, I mean, the idea and the way the Islamophobes present this so-called secret plan is not bombing and shooting people.
It's secretly infiltrating the legal system, and political system, and the government system, and sort of boring from within.
They're very unspecific about how any of this could possibly happen, and from a common-sense point of view, it's ridiculous.
But they call it stealth jihad, as opposed to violent uprising.
So, in other words, they would just take over the state legislatures, and then pass laws saying that we all have to pray five times a day toward Mecca, that kind of thing.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
And there's a Muslim lawyer named Wajahat Ali.
He's a Pakistani American who said to me, and I think he's written this in several articles, he said, you know, as you say, 65-70 percent of the American population identifies as Christian, and within that 65-70 percent, you have maybe a third of them who would consider themselves evangelical Christians, very strong Christians motivated to make this a Christian country.
And they've been trying for 50 years, or 40 years, I guess it is, to reverse Roe versus Wade.
They've been trying to get prayer back in schools.
They're trying to roll back the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, and they haven't managed to do it.
And if 20 percent of the population, belonging to the majority religion, and with considerable political influence, haven't been able to get their ideas adopted, how in the world would you think that there's a real threat that one percent of the population belonging to an identifiably minority religion would be able to sneak around and put us all under Sharia law?
It's preposterous.
Yeah.
And on the whole thing about Sharia law, it seems like such a great PR stunt on the part of the people pushing this, where they pass these laws in the state legislatures banning Sharia and this kind of thing.
It just sort of implies, it begs the question in the actual sense of that term, that there's a mounting Sharia crisis that must be confronted.
When nobody ever tried to institute Sharia law in Texas or Arizona or Montana anyway, and yet here they race to ban it.
Right.
I mean, that's another similar example.
There's no... they've never presented any evidence whatsoever of that this is a danger, or that anybody's even trying to do it, that any such conspiracy even exists.
And the Muslims know better.
Of the terrorists that have been studied, and there's been quite a bit of research on terrorists, there's a fellow named Peter Bergen at New America, formerly New America Foundation, who wrote a book, case studies of 330 U.S.-based terrorists, sort of homegrown terrorists.
One of those guys made one comment about banning alcohol in the United States.
And that's the only sentence in a, I forget how many, 300-page book that indicates any goal, that even by any stretch of the imagination is talking about establishing Islam or Islamic law in the United States.
The motivations are, they believe that Americans are at war with them, with their religion, and they're defending themselves, U.S. policy in Israel, and Israel versus Palestine.
You know, the terrorism, the violence that has been practiced by extremist, fundamentalist jihadis, it has not been... there's no evidence whatsoever that any of it was caused because they want to take over the United States, and Islamize the United States.
And the Islamophobes have never presented any evidence.
I'm talking negatives here, you know, and it's hard to prove a negative.
But the best proof is, they're negative.
They have no cases, they have no evidence.
This conspiracy has been going on for 20, 30 years, or this document was written in 1991, and nobody's found a single conspirator infiltrating a single institution.
If they had, they'd certainly be telling you about it.
Well, and of course, of all the different Muslims in America, the vast majority of them are Asian, not Arab.
And I don't know what the percentage is between Sunni and Shia, but then it would even be a smaller percentage of the Sunnis who would have any even... never mind, you know, actual affiliation, but would even favor the Muslim Brotherhood necessarily at all, right?
Well, that... the Brotherhood is such a complicated phenomenon that it's a little hard to speak in generalities about it.
And they do have Shia connections as well as Sunni connections.
But you're right.
I mean, the huge, not just the overwhelming majority in all, but an infinitesimal number are not only not associated, affiliated with, or believing in this kind of extremist version of their religion, but they're a minority.
They're a religious minority.
They're under some threat and have been victims of hate crimes.
The Muslims that I've spoken to, this is not a scientific sample, but I've spoken to quite a few, they're a lot stronger on religious freedom and religious tolerance than... and they have more reason to be than the average American, because they're sort of dealing with it every day of their lives in a way that the majority folks are not.
Right.
Yeah.
They just want to be treated fairly.
They never dreamed of seizing power over the rest of us.
It wouldn't make sense for them to, obviously.
But now, so there is a little something to this Sharia thing though, right?
Because...
They're not going to win a religious war in the United States, even if the Islamophobes don't believe that.
Yeah.
Well now, but so there are, you know, the American courts in civil procedures, they recognize Jewish law and, say, Catholic law when it comes to divorces and adoptions and different things like that.
And so Muslims have their religious customs that the courts will enforce to a certain degree when it comes to divorces and things like that, right?
In the same way that they do with Catholics and Jews?
You know, I haven't looked this up, and so I don't want to go into too much detail, because I haven't checked back on it lately.
There was one case in New Jersey where a judge deferred, I think, a protection order on the basis of referring it to a religious court and not taking jurisdiction in the civil court.
And that's the one case that you do sometimes read about.
That ruling was reversed.
And sort of like this document, it's the only example that anybody's ever found.
And it was reversed.
It was upheld.
It was not upheld.
All right, Shaul, here's who sponsors this show.
Mike Swanson, author of The War State, The Rise of the Military-Industrial Complex in America After World War II.
It's just great.
And also he gives investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
Subscribe there.
And when you do, you'll want to follow his advice and buy some precious metals for your savings.
You go to robertsandrobertsbrokerageinc.com.
And tell them Scott sent you.
Read No Dev, No Ops, No IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
How to run your IT business like a libertarian.
Zencash at zencash.com or zensystem.io.
And thebumpersticker.com.
Stickers for your band or your business or whatever you need.
Thebumpersticker.com.
And if you want a new 2018 model website and you want to save some money, go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott, and you'll save $500.
All right, now, so Exhibit B in your article here is the Holy Land Foundation Prosecution and a document submitted by the federal prosecutors in that case, which named the Council for American-Islamic Relations Care, proving, according to Frank Gaffney, and we'll get back to him, but Gaffney and his people, that the Council for American-Islamic Relations as a whole is part of this Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to take over the United States.
Well, the Holy Land Foundation case, the Holy Land Foundation was a charity, an Islamic charity in Texas, and they were investigated for and then prosecuted for giving aid, actually not to Hamas, which is a designated terrorist organization, but to charitable organizations that are connected to, in the Middle East, that are connected to Hamas.
And eventually five of the leaders of the foundation individually were convicted and given prison sentences.
And, but, you know, there was no, this was, nobody connected them with any violent act or even directly with Hamas.
It was all this sort of secondhand, indirect connection.
So that, what the relationship of those convictions are to an actual terrorist danger, or terror, danger of violence is ambiguous, to put it, to say the least.
The list that you're talking about was a list, there are actually more than 200 names of individuals and some dozens of organizations on this list were unindicted co-conspirators.
And this was introduced into the, in a pre-trial brief by the prosecution.
And it was introduced strictly for, not because they had any evidence against any of these so-called co-conspirators, but because naming somebody as a co-conspirator means you can introduce hearsay testimony, which otherwise they wouldn't have been able to use at the trial.
It was a tactical ploy by the prosecution.
And various judges have looked at this case because CARE and several other big national U.S. Muslim organizations tried to get the list, or tried to get the names removed from the list, which they didn't succeed in doing.
But the judges have found there was no basis in fact, there was no conspiratorial act, there was nothing connecting any of the people named on the list, or at least any of those organizations, to any terrorist organization, nothing at all, zero.
Justice Department went through the list to see if there was anybody they should investigate for criminal violations, and they found there was no, you know, nothing.
There was no issue that warranted a criminal investigation.
So the Islamophobes claim that this means that CARE and the North American Islamic Trust and other organizations, Islamic Society of North America, are secretly controlled by Hamas, or the Muslim Brotherhood, is also completely unsupported by any facts at all.
And they've never shown any examples of those either.
They've never connected any of those organizations, including CARE or any of the others, to any terrorist act in the United States.
Yeah, not that Hamas has ever targeted Americans in their entire history.
Has there ever been a Hamas attack in the United States of any kind, connected to any of these groups or otherwise?
I'm not sure that, I mean, I don't think I've looked for that specifically, but none comes to mind, and I don't think so.
And I should add that, you know, there's been a lot of cries or calls over the years to list the Brotherhood is not designated a terrorist organization in the United States.
It's not on the list.
Even Trump has declined to add them to the list, right?
Even the Trump administration has declined to add them to the terrorist list?
So far.
I mean, there are people in the Trump administration who are for this.
And early on, there was a kind of a movement.
There have been bills in Congress, by sort of conservative, right-wing members of Congress, calling on the Justice Department, it's Justice and Treasury, I think, that maintain this list.
But those haven't passed.
And so far, anyway, I mean, I don't know whether that proposal is still kicking around, but it's not been adopted.
And that tells you something, too.
The Trump administration is hardly soft on possible Muslim terrorists.
Well, and I think the most violent, as far as I know, the most violent and radical faction of the Muslim Brotherhood in the world is in Syria, where the CIA backed them for the last five years and war there.
So the rest of them, I mean, in Qatar, they sit in the Parliament, right?
Yeah.
In most places, the Brotherhood has functioned.
Brotherhood has existed for 70 years.
It started off with, it was created in Egypt.
By the MI6.
By the MI6.
I beg your pardon?
By the MI6.
Well, that I don't know.
Oh, you got to read Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfus.
It's so great.
Well, and you know more about that history than I do, but it goes back to the 1920s.
And then it has, you know, it sort of expanded and has different branches and different chapters.
It's a very loose federation.
There's not really a sort of a central controlling body that governs every colon and semicolon and comma that anybody speaks around the world.
Some of those chapters have, in certain places, I believe in the Emirates, they've been connected to some violent acts.
In Egypt, they were, for the most part, as an organization, they functioned as an open, above-ground political organization, often facing considerable repression from the government.
And constantly denounced by Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Egyptian factions of Al-Qaeda for being a bunch of conservative, rich old sellouts.
That's right.
The Brotherhood, sort of the ideology of the Brotherhood is a quite conservative, although not fanatical, interpretation of the religion.
And they do certainly believe that their mission, that the mission of Muslims is to go out and convert the unbelievers and bring the world into the true faith, but as missionaries, not as terrorists or secret operators.
Well, and people say, well, but look at all the lands conquered by Islam.
But yeah, that was all a long time ago.
You could say the same thing about all the lands conquered by Christianity, and yet people don't pretend to believe that the Christians are out converting by force, or that they mean to.
That's centuries ago.
Christians convert with persuasion now.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, they certainly have, I think that the history of forcible Christianization is at least as voluminous as the history of forcible Islamization.
That's true.
And as old, as out of date, even.
Yeah.
So you don't mention this in your article, but it seems like an important point.
And I wonder if you know about how this somehow connects or supposedly obviously connects to Grover Norquist, the great tax opponent up there in Washington, D.C.
He's married to a Muslim woman.
And so he's been accused of being part of this conspiracy somehow?
Well, yes.
Before the Trump administration, you mentioned Frank Gaffney's name and then other sort of prominent voices in the Islamophobia choir, Pamela Geller, people like that, were kind of shut out of traditional mainstream conservative U.S. politics.
They were not invited to speak at the conservative political action conference.
And that was largely, Norquist was, I don't think the only one, but he was one of the ones who kept them at arm's length and sort of distanced the political conservative movement from this Islamophobia fringe.
But now that has all sort of disappeared.
And Gaffney and Geller, I believe, also spoke at the last CPAC, conservative political action conference.
They are quite close to people who were in the administration, notably Steve Bannon, was a big buddy of Gaffney and Geller.
He had them on his radio show and publicly embraced them many, many, many times.
And they're now kind of a recognized constituent of the right in American politics.
And so that's where Norquist, whatever influence he still has, he wasn't able to keep them outside the door as he and others were for quite some time.
Well, and they accused him of being in on it, right?
That's the only reason he would try to stop them is not because of what kooks they are.
It's because of what a guilty traitor he is, right?
Well, that's the usual conspiracy theorist explanation.
And they also always, if anybody denies it, then they're covering up the conspiracy.
You know, one thing that seems troubling to me about this, and I mean, it ain't your fault, I don't know if there's anything we can do about it or anything, but this suffix phobes, you know, and, and we see this all the time with, you know, homophobia, for example, people aren't afraid of gay people, they hate them for whatever reason, but it's not really fear.
And it's the same kind of thing here, right?
Nobody thinks that Frank Gaffney is really afraid of Muslims.
He hates them, and he wants other people to hate them.
And so he spreads these lies about them.
And so, but it almost makes it sound like, well, gee, he means well, but he's just confused.
The poor guy, he's afraid he has a phobia.
That's a really good point.
And I also, you know, we have a noun for haters in other spheres, you know, the anti-Semite.
But there isn't a noun that goes with anti-Muslim.
I struggled with this whenever I write about it, because I agree with you.
I think Islamophobes, A, it doesn't exactly say what they are.
And B, it's a kind of, you know, $2 word that should be shorter, you know, should be more sort of to the point, more pointed.
And I, yeah, I don't know if you can come up with anti-Islamist, anti-Islamist, but that's not, that's too gentle, too.
I got one.
The Israel Lobby.
Because that's what Frank Gaffney and Michelle, Pamela Geller, and Rabbi Yerushalmi, he doesn't get mentioned in here, but Rabbi Yerushalmi from New York is one of the guys who's been pushing for these anti-Sharia law, you know, resolutions in the state houses.
And it's clear that they just want Americans to hate and fear Muslims because that's who Israel is persecuting and confiscating land from on a daily basis.
And they want Americans to conflate Israel's victims with their terrorist enemies.
And so the more that they can do to spread hatred of Muslims in the United States, the better it is for Israel.
There is evidence that for this particular right wing, not official, sort of, but in the private sector, right-wing Israeli organizations are quite active in funding and supporting and promoting these American organizations.
There's something called the Clarion Fund, which is, I believe, mostly financed by sort of a right-wing Israeli movement.
As far as the official Israeli support, I'm not aware that anybody's found any evidence of that.
They're probably not unhappy about this stuff, I would think, or at least the current leadership in Israel and the Netanyahu government.
They probably don't mind if American opinion is manipulated against Muslims in general.
They may think it's helpful to Israel, but I don't know that there's any basis.
I'm not saying it's not possible, but I don't know that there's any basis to think that Israel is officially in any way behind this stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Well, but of course, Israel is not officially behind the Israel lobby at all in America, right?
I'm sorry?
Israel's not officially behind the Israel lobby at all in America.
Well, or even AIPAC.
And, you know, Israel, supporters of Israel, and the kind of the marriage of the Israel lobby, and you didn't mention this, but the evangelical Christian movement in the United States, which has become a big mainstay for AIPAC and the so-called Israel lobby.
That's one piece of this story.
I don't think it's anywhere near the whole story.
Hey, I'll check it out.
I got a great new sponsor, too.
It's Kesslin Runs, a novel by Charles H.
Featherstone.
He's previously been a great guest on this show, and he wrote this dystopian novel about the very near future.
You're really going to love it.
It's available now on Amazon and Kindle or paperback.
Kesslin Runs.
Well, and of course, you know, anything, especially when it comes to conservative Christians, anything to deny that their policies in the Middle East are what created our terrorism problem.
You know, it's always easier to blame their religion or their ethnicity or, you know, whatever their crazy conspiracy theories that those wacky Muslims believe about us or anything but what George Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama have done to people over there to motivate them to want to attack the United States or anything like that.
Well, there again, I mean, you know, there's plenty of blame on both sides.
I don't disagree that U.S. policy in the Middle East, including its support for Israeli policies and especially the policies of the present government in Israel are a big part of this.
But that doesn't mean that the Palestinian side is blameless or that they've conducted themselves.
Well, but of course, the Palestinians never attacked the U.S., but al-Qaeda attacked us because of American support for Israel against the Palestinians, you know, avenging in their name, but...
Well, it doesn't make it right.
No, of course not.
I'm not saying it makes it right.
I'm just saying it makes it something that American right-wingers don't want to hear because these are the policies that they've supported.
And so it's easier to simply blame the others.
It has nothing to do with justification, just, you know, the reasoning behind it.
As you said from the Peter Bergen study, these guys don't say, you know, I wanted to shoot up the place because I wanted to convert everyone to my religion.
They said it was revenge every time.
Or self-defense.
That's the other piece of it.
And this, you know, it includes Israel-Palestine, but also the sort of the whole colonialist history of the region.
And I haven't read that book by Bergen, but it's interesting that, you know, you mentioned that there's hundreds of them in there.
Well, that must include the 200-something FBI entrapments.
And we know that every single time the FBI says to their dupes, don't you hate American foreign policy?
They never say, don't you hate freedom?
Don't you hate girls in miniskirts voting in primary elections?
They don't say that.
They say, don't you hate American foreign policy?
And then here, say you love Osama into this tape recorder, idiot.
And then there they go with their next terrorism case.
Well, I don't pretend to know what the FBI informants have said to all the people that they've dealt with, but you're right.
A lot of the terrorism, so-called terrorist cases have originated not with any secret Muslim Brotherhood organization, but with entrapment schemes by the bureau or local law enforcement.
Yeah.
There's a great book about this called The Terror Factory by Trevor Aronson.
Yeah, I've read in that.
I don't think I read the whole book.
And in all the coverage of all of these cases, I don't think a single time the undercover informant ever said, don't you hate freedom and liberty?
And don't you want to get revenge on the Americans for having too much of both?
Because that wouldn't work, would it?
Well, I mean, if they'd said it, that's not what they would testify in court, I suppose.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show.
I think this is a really important piece.
I'm going to pass it around.
And I mean, it's on antiwar.com today, but do my best to share it, because I think this is so important.
This narrative that says that, you know, I mean, you know, I guess I think of it like this, Arnold, is in the days of the Soviet Union, the idea was, well, you know, the Russian government that controls the USSR there, that they're hell-bent.
They have this ideology of communism that makes them hell-bent to dominate the whole world and this and that.
And yet, at the end of the day, communism is just a completely ridiculous and bankrupt political and economic philosophy that it couldn't survive the 20th century.
Right?
And yet, Islam isn't going anywhere.
And so if our permanent enemy out there everywhere is people who believe in Islam, in the same kind of fashion as the enemy was communism and people who believe in communism in the previous century, then we could be in for a really long haul here.
And it's already been a hell of a, you know, almost two decades of terror war here.
And it seems like it could just keep getting worse and worse and worse until we kind of, you know, your side and my side kind of wins this argument here, that this is not a conspiracy of those who believe in Islam against the rest of us.
Because if people really do believe that, and especially if more and more people believe that all the time, I mean, we could be looking at, well, some real problems that make our current problems look like child's play.
Well, I agree with that.
And an additional point is that even if there were such a division, or a sort of a conflict between two major forces in the world, the Islamic world does not pose the same kind of threat that the Soviet Union did.
They're not sitting there with hundreds and thousands of missiles and nuclear warheads that could obliterate the United States.
I mean, the Soviet threat was not imaginary.
The interpretation of how that, you know, whether how imminent it was, or how serious the probability was that it would be employed, you know, there's a lot of argument that was all through.
But the threat was real.
And this threat, the threat that...
I found a comment on Amazon once on some book, one of these books, and some reader wrote in and commented that saying, if we don't do anything, my grandchildren will live under Sharia law.
Well, I mean, you know, if people really feel that way, that's completely irrational.
Right.
Yeah, we'd all be speaking North Korean right now, if it wasn't for Harry Truman, too, I guess.
But yeah, no, I mean, you're right.
The USSR actually was a thing.
But there's no united Islamic State out there from Morocco to the Philippines.
You have, what, at least dozens or a dozen, more than a dozen separate societies and nations and political and power factions who have all wide and varied interests and beliefs and their own problems.
If you'll let me sort of raise one more point.
Sure.
They're the ones who are going to defeat the extremists.
We can't.
You know, if this is really a battle within the Muslim world between this kind of extreme violent ideology, which certainly exists and has plenty of followers and is, you know, they can't destroy the United States, but they can do a lot of damage and even considerably more damage in other places around the world.
But they're not going to be defeated by the Americans.
They're going to be defeated by the quite large majority of the Muslim population in the Muslim world that doesn't go with, doesn't believe in that ideology and doesn't want to live under that system.
And if we conduct ourselves in ways that rejects all Muslims and that pushes them away from us and lessens their ability to or their will to cooperate and join with us and our ability to make use of them or to support them against the extremists, then it's going to be more dangerous than it was.
Yeah.
You might even say we've been doing the exact wrong thing the entire 21st century long here now and before.
Well, when there was a wrong thing to do, we certainly made that choice a lot of times, that's for sure.
And by the way, I said it before, but I just want to mention for you and for the audience to everyone, please read Devil's Game, how the US helped to unleash fundamentalist Islam.
And it's about how this was really a British project in the first place.
And then the CIA picked it up from them, you know, after in the post-World War II era to build up the Muslim Brotherhood, to be an opponent of Egyptian nationalism and socialism primarily.
And then, you know, of course, have spread it all through.
We all, everybody's familiar with Carter and Reagan's support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and all these other things.
But the backstory there is really great.
And Bob Dreyfuss is the best.
So it's a really great book.
I like recommending it.
But anyway, thank you very much.
I want to read your book too, From Troubled Lands, Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in Post-911 America.
That sounds really great.
Yeah, it's online.
It's not a book, but it's an online report.
Okay, great.
Well, then I'll click on that link right now.
Open in new tab.
And this great article is running today at antiwar.com.
It's also at Tom Englehart's site, tomdispatch.com.
American Islamophobia's fake facts.
Their proof, quote unquote, is not what they say.
Thank you very much for your time, Arnold.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
All right, y'all.
That's it for the show.
Check me out at libertarianinstitute.org, scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, twitter.com slash scotthortonshow.
Appreciate it.
And buy my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan.

Listen to The Scott Horton Show